On Thursday, June 03, 2010 22:26:49 Eric Blake wrote: > On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Eric Blake <[email protected]> writes: > >> Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly languages > >> where the pronoun "his" can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, > >> and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are trying > >> to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that > >> "his" looks better than "his/hers", as long as you understand that the > >> usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. > > > > The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular "their," > > > > as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence as: > > "The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a > > Makefile" > > A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are > correct that it is in common enough usage that "their package" doesn't > grate as badly on my nerves as "his/her package".
his/her is indeed garbage -mike
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