Brent Howlett replied to:
> > (s)he
with:
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I dislike written constructions that cannot be read
in standard English. How about simply changing the tense:
The A.R. delayed raising the flag until having seen that the
offside-positioned player was actively involved in the play.
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You forget that the underlying "problem" is that "standard English"
lacks suitable gender-neutral constructions, which is why there is a
felt among many to craft something new here that seems most effortless
and least kludgy. Your proposal, while grammatically correct,
nevertheless would seem to many to be at least as uncomfortably
awkward a piece of diction as the neologism you criticize. That's why
most people are naturally inclined to say "The A.R. delayed raising
the flag until HE SAW the offside-positioned-player....", but whups
there we go getting sexist again.
To a great many people, the fact that some see the lack of available
gender-neutral ways to express things is a dubious P.C. "problem" in
the first place, and people should get over it and get on to more
important things. Any visible effort toward gender-neutrality of
language is going to stand out as awkward in their eyes, including
using less-natural sounding sentence constructions as a way around
using pronouns in the first place. (There's a reason people like to
use pronouns - they're convenient).
So, I was simply throwing out the idea of using "(s)he" as something
less awkward and difficult than trying to balance the number of "his"s
and "her"s in a document - as the original situation was posed, the
author got tripped up trying to do it, until he (there we go again,
but the original poster was a he ;=) had to apply a great deal of
sweat in redrafting it.
