The All-purpose Pronoun

he-she-they.jpgIf a writer wants to use a gender-neutral pronoun to write a sentence, what should he/she/they use? Despite its many virtues, the English language doesn’t have a good solution to this problem.

It’s complicated, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. The New York Times On Language column tackled this recently, and the story behind why we traditionally use he might surprise you…