zlacker

> Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne

Then you've bought into the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites to try to pretend that English is some strange constructed Latinate language and not, well, English.

And you should give up.

OTOH, if you really need to refer to a gender neutral abstract person in English, and really can't bring yourself to use "they", learn to use "one" properly. This can require restructuring sentence and not just dropping a different pronoun in, e.g., this:

  the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it.

might become:

  one should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to oneself.

>>dragon+(OP)
> the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites

I'd be curious to see this perspective detailed at greater length.

>>throwa+d
Singular "they" is attested back to the 14th century. (Note that this would actually be Middle English!) It met a lot of resistance in the 19th century by various prescriptive grammar books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Trend_to_prescri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

>>dragon+(OP)
Wider usage of "one" -- in German, man -- is something I miss from studying German. It's a pretty elegant solution when it can be used.

Of course, the German version catches flak for being too close to "man" (Mann), and is sometimes replaced with frau (Frau meaning "woman"). So it goes.