I am personally sick unto nausea with all of the gyrations and language murdering we resort to while trying to avoid offending the dreaded "someone."
"No Each user has his own login name and password.
"No Each user has their own login name and password.
"Yes Each user has a personal login name and password.
"The middle option is both gender-neutral and sensible, to all but hidebound prescriptivists."
I guess I'm a hidebound prescriptivist, but the "middle option" is totally unacceptable to me. Why in the name of all that's holy is it sensible when it makes a significant portion of the readers want to throw up on their shoes?
We go so far for this stupid PC bullshit that we are in danger of destroying the beauty of the English language by having internal disagreements in sentences.
Does not the visceral reaction of the critical reader count the same as the visceral reaction of the woman who feels that she has been de-gendered by having what some consider a masculine pronoun applied to her? Do I NOT BLEED?????
The correct sentence is none of the above. It is one of these:
Each user has his own login name.
Each user has her own login name.
Each user has his or her own login name.
Each user has a unique login name.
All users have a unique login name.
There is no way of knowing whether users have unique passwords so it's best not to even go there.
My personal preference in the above list of five sentences is the fourth, but I have frequently used constructions similar to all five of them. Part of it depends on the cadence of the sentence itself, while the rest depends on the overall context.
