Well spoken, grammatically correct, gender equal... zombies?

[spacekadette]

I sort of inadvertently started a discussion about proper language and gender equality in zombie_survival. I wasn't trying to, but what can I say? Vodka's a hell of a drug.

It started with the hypothetical question by a poster as to whom would be our ideal President, in the event of a zombie outbreak. In the post he used the line, "We'll assume he had nothing to do with the failure that brought us to this point. And to make things fun lets say it can be any one dead or alive but not fictional."

My first reply was, "He?"

To this the original author replied "Yep" and "But if you want to say Sarah Palin I understand. :)"

I replied:

Fuck NO!

But if you think that's the only option then we are done here.

"And to make things fun lets say it can be any one dead or alive but not fictional."

Evidently, you find all females to be fictional. I think I'm starting to understand you.

From there it got friendlier as I did realize I'd overreacted in my acerbic reply and apologized for such. I needed to lighten up a bit, as this was obviously still an amicable conversation. After a little banter though, a bit more discussion did occur.

Another commenter posted a little history about the origins of the word 'man', and how prefixes originally assigned gender to gender-neutral pronouns. The same commenter also stated, "English used to have gender neutral pronouns, but doesn't any more."

I agreed to this sentence, and replied:

In modern language "he" refers to males, exclusively.

'He/she' is proper when not intending to define a specific gender, and even better is the use of 'one'. Or one can choose to restate the subject such as, "We'll assume [this person] had nothing to do with the failure that brought us to this point." (to quote the original post).

To this another commenter replied, "He/she creates a gender dichotomy not everyone subscribes to," and when I inquired about a better option another commenter stated "'They' has become a common and generally acceptable way. Not everyone likes it but it has slipped into common usage none the less."

...........................................

So, please forgive the long backstory included in this post but I thought that this might make for a rather interesting discussion among my f-list given the language-philes, gender equalists, editors, writers, academics, and other highly opinionated and intellegent people I have the pleasure of calling my f-list. :)

'They' still isn't correct, is it? It doesn't seem correct. However I do understand that 'he/she' could be seen as dualistically limiting in terms of gender. 'One' doesn't work in all sentence structure, and continually restating the subject of a sentence can sound awkward (although I'm still leaning towards this as seeming the most correct).

ragan, smyley, and everyone else... help?