>It’s one of those words that, to me, does not specifically imply that the person was male, like the word mailman does.
>>boy(!), howdy -- that's an awfully narrow and sharp (not to say cheesy) distinction.
Well, I kind of understand the reasoning - this is where you come down to the crux of the matter. I mean, I personally don't think too much of gender neutral language if it ends up as clunky 'he/she' formations and no matter what people say about the plural pronouns being fine it does *not sound better than just using the singular male to me.
At least in this case too, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way around the problem. In other cases, I've heard of mixing pronouns, but it isn't very popular; certainly not in technical texts! I also read a book which used male phrasing throughout but commented in the introduction that this was in no way meant to discriminate against the other sex, but rather was chosen simply becuase it was simple. That approach worked in that case, I think. Be that as it may, anyone involved in writing publicised English texts has to grapple with genders whether they like it or not. I do wonder how things are managed in other languages. English certainly seems to be an exception in its thoroughness as far as I can tell, and a little hyper-PC compared to other languages, is it not?
