But “Ms.” is superficial, a title that you can click on when buying an airline ticket. Pronouns are deeply embedded in the language, and all these imposed schemes are doomed: the more logical they are, the more absurd the idea of putting them into practice. Rather than solve anything by blending in, the invented pronouns stand up and wave their arms around just when they should be disappearing.
Leaving aside invented or typographical solutions that look like Martian or borrow from the Chinese, Fowler sees three makeshift solutions for this deficiency in our language: We can use the so-called masculine rule, in which “he” is understood to stand for either the masculine or the feminine pronoun; we can use some form of “he or she, himself or herself,” etc., however awkward; or we can resort to the non-gender-specific plural “their,” which bends the number rule while finessing the gender. The first solution is the time-honored one. Male prescriptivists agree that “where the matter of sex is not conspicuous or important the masculine form shall be allowed to represent a person instead of a man, to say a man (homo) instead of a man (vir).” “Man” does have a dictionary definition that includes all humans, and it is just possible that the feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humor. It happens. Homo and vir are, of course, Latin, but even an ignoramus can infer their meanings from other English words: homo refers to the species (Homo sapiens); the meaning of vir is embodied in “virile”—capable of procreation, or (loosely) manly. But as Elaine Showalter, in that class on women in literature, pointed out, the rigid use of the masculine rule in, say, an article about menstruation or childbirth is absurd.
Despite its clunkiness, the second makeshift—the usage “he and she” in all its glorious declensions—has become commonplace, so much so that this typo appeared in the New York Times, in a review by Dwight Garner of a book about aspiring writers: “The aspirant can then sink back into her or her individual slough of despond.” One might view this as a victory for feminists, except that the context is so depressing, implying that women writers have a monopoly on the slough of despond. However widely the compound singular is adopted, to always have to write “he or she,” “him or her,” “his or hers” is pretty cumbersome.
Mostly, people have already thrown in their his-and-hers towels and turned to the third makeshift: the popular solution is to adopt the plural “their.” The prescriptivists don’t like it: Fowler calls it “the horrible their,” and Bryan Garner sounds resigned as he writes, “Though the masculine singular personal pronoun may survive awhile longer as a generic term, it will probably be ultimately displaced by they, which is coming to be used alternatively as singular or plural.” The descriptivists come at it with a more upbeat attitude, citing the OED’s documentation of “their” in the Authorized Version of the Bible, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Thackeray: “A person can’t help their birth,” for example. As the easygoing David Marsh, of the Guardian, says, “If they can do it, so can you. English, after all, used to have a singular version of ‘you’—thee, thou and thy—and it is still heard in some dialects. . . . ‘You’ gradually squeezed these words out to become standard for singular as well as plural, and no great anguish seems to have been caused.” A sneaky way to justify the lack of concord between the plural “they” and a singular antecedent is simply to relabel “they” as singular. What such commentators do not mention is that in almost every instance it’s not the writer who is talking but a character—it’s dialogue, mostly in fiction, where anything can happen. The Thackeray is Rosalind in Vanity Fair, talking about Becky Thatcher: “ ‘A person can’t help their birth,’ Rosalind replied with great liberality.”