You're right, Joyce. In today's PC world using the correct term can be
confusing. As an American educated back in the pre-PC era, 1950's or so,
I grew up with 'he' as the gender neutral and am quite content with it.
However, I am not a woman (I seem to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
somewhere in the background singing the "Hallelujah" chorus, but that
could just be my imagination), so it doesn't strike me as being
deliberately unfair. Notice I say deliberately; it strikes me as being
the result of common usage rather than some evil plot to disenfranchise
women.

I don't think I've ever heard a sentence using 'he' as the gender
neutral form that confused me as to the sex of whoever was being
referred to. It seems to me that it is similar to the British habit of
saying 'one,' as in "One mustn't be too hasty, must one?" I have heard
'they' used to refer to one man when his gender was not in doubt. That
not only sounded contrived, it sounded ignorant.

To me it's a non issue, something some people have dragged out by the
short hairs and held up as an example of how men want to hog everything,
etc. It's a Cause; people pay it lip service to show they are Aware. Of
The Cause. People who are Aware of The Cause make me tired. 'He/she' is
awkward, 'they' (for the singular) sounds ignorant. 'He,' for all the
negative connotations PC people claim for it, is the correct term.
Everything else sounds contrived.

That said, I'll admit that whenever possible I cast a sentence in such a
way as to avoid that usage. When I was still teaching I taught my
students and even some of my fellow English professors to do it that
way. For example, the sentence, "If a student comes to class late, he'll
just have to take whatever seat is available," becomes "Any student who
come in late will have to take whatever seat is available." It's a
grammatically correct usage without offending anyone, except maybe late
arrivals. :-)

I sometimes think it's unfair the way people pick on English for this
usage, when most foreign languages are even worse. For example, in
Spanish the correct third person plural for a group of women is 'ellas.'
But if even one man intrudes on two million females, then the correct
term is 'ellos,' the masculine form, even though there may be only one
of him. Personally, I would take to my heels and advance smartly in the
other direction. The same is true in most Latinate languages, as well as
Hebrew, where 'aten' becomes 'atem.'

wrote:
David Yehudah wrote:

Check your dictionary. :-)

Oh, I know. "He" is definitely the official neutral pronoun in the
English language, just as the word "man" means "human". But I'm
talking connotations here. When most people hear the words "he" or
"man", they think male, regardless of what the dictionary says. And
I think that's problematic. So do a lot of people, not just feminists.
Kids, for example, have a natural tendency to use the word "they" as
a singluar pronoun when they don't know the gender of the person
they're referring to. I certainly did as a kid - it just didn't make
sense to my child's logic to say "he" when the person in question
could be a she... Not that kids always have the best logic, but you
can't deny that it's natural.

Joyce