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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 5280136" data-attributes="member: 30936">As has been pointed out, sometimes ambiguity is a good thing, because what you're dealing with is ambiguous. All pronouns can increase ambiguity. Abandoning thou for the singular you can increase ambiguity. It certainly led to the hilarious use of thou as a respectful and formal form of address.I gave you an example. It helps because it doesn't annoy people like pawsplay who feel the generic masculine is offensive or off putting. It doesn't offend... well I don't think anyone's admitted to being annoyed at using she as a generic pronoun in this thread but it won't annoy them. It doesn't annoy people like me by using clumsy constructions, avoiding pronouns, or (worst of all) alternating between he and she as the generic pronoun (seriously people, pick one, run with it, and take your lumps).It only seems to ignore a tiny group of people, like yourself, who insist it's wrong on purely proscriptive grounds despite common usage since the fourteenth century. Again, in a living language common use is the primary determiner of correctness or (since you moved the goal posts) goodness.As an extreme case, a trans-gender person who does not identify as either male or female, or (even more extreme) identifies as non-gendered. Anther would be a corporate person.As a less extreme case when talking about a generic individual of indeterminate sex or in some cases gender, although I'm not sure if gendered pronouns in things like medical advice and products relating to sex specific items annoy trans-gendered people or not. "When the candidate is finished with the written exam, they should be directed to the physical examination room." You don't know the gender (presumably) of the candidate and because, logically, the sentence means "For all candidates, the candidate was directed to the physical examination room upon finishing the candidate's written exam.".Now one for you. 'Fix' this:Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.As for the other thing, that's pawsplay's beef not mine. Unlike pawsplay (making what I feel is a safe assumption here) I am not really a fan of gender-neutral English since in my personal experience it's often either a tool and justification to belittle others (Hello Professor Smithwicke! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) or (more typically) is stirring up annoyance over small things instead of addressing large issues. That said, if you are attempting to be unbiased in language you have two choices when you need a gender neutral pronoun. They or one stolen from another language. While English has a reputation for muggling other languages for vocabulary, it never really seems to take when it's intentionally done for this sort of thing. Mu hasn't caught on, for instance. However, I think you read pawsplay wrong. The interrogative responses showed bias. It would, barring knowledge not presented in the example, have been more correct and unbiased to use the epicene they in them because the interrogator (or interrogatrix) doesn't know the gender of the subject.As an aside, I think we need more gender specific titles. Words ending in -rix are fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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