Roderick Ramage wonders whether lawyers should take the lead in promoting a new gender-neutral pronoun
Have the pupils at middle school and high school in Baltimore solved our linguistic dilemma? What does this sentence, in the rule book of a care home, mean?
“Where a complainant notifies the other residents of a complaint, they must lodge a section 12 notice within 14 days.”
You can tell that it was written by a sociologist or social worker because of the politically correct “they”. A journalist would be just as likely to have used “they” instead of thinking what he or she means to say, but is unlikely to have been commissioned to write a care home rule book. According to the New Scientist: “The lack of a gender neutral personal pronoun in English has bothered people for at least two centuries.” A strict grammarian, parsing that sentence, would have no difficulty in ascertaining what it says. The operative words are “they must lodge a…notice”, the word “they” is plural and, as the only other plural in the sentence is “the other residents”,
