This is from a blog post at Language Log, where Mark Liberman quotes the abstract for a course that his colleague, Geoff Pullum, was (in 2004, unfortunately) about to teach:

Try to imagine biological education being in a state where students are taught that whales are fish because that is judged easier for them to grasp; where teachers disapprove of tomatoes and teach that they are poisonous (and evidence about their nutritional value is dismissed as irrelevant); where educated people accuse biologists of "lowering standards" if they don’t go along with popular beliefs. This is a rough analog of where English grammar finds itself today. The state of relations between the subject as taught by the public and the subject as understood by specialists is nothing short of disastrous. The fact is that almost everything most educated Americans believe about English grammar is wrong. In part this is because of misconceptions concerning the facts. In part it is because hopeless descriptive classifications and antiquated theoretical assumptions doom all discussion to failure. Amazingly, almost nothing has changed in over a hundred years. The 20th century came and went without affecting the presentation of grammar in popular books or the teaching (what little there is of it) that goes on in schools. Today’s grammar books differ in content only trivially from early 19th-century books. In this lecture I name and shame some of those on the long dishonor roll of myth-creators and fear-mongers (John Dryden, Henry Fowler, Ambrose Bierce, William Strunk, E. B. White, George Orwell, Louis Menand, Stanley Fish), and I sketch a view of what could and should be taught in a course on the grammar of Standard English in the 21st century.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000750.html (emphasis added)

(Note that both Professor Pullum and Professor Liberman would seem to be in position to know what they’re talking about, with regard to grammar and linguistics.)

I suppose, given this sad state of affairs, that it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that so many writers and would-be writers continue to defend such zombie rules as “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction,” and “Never split an infinitive verb.”

I should be able to simply ignore the fact that these same people rail against the passive voice while not even being able to name it correctly, much less identify it. Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with any putative “passive verbs.” Dr Pullum again: “Nor does ‘passive construction’ [make any sense as a term] if you define it, as Webster’s does, as a type of expression ‘containing a passive verb form’. That would be far too vague even if English had passive verb forms; but in fact it doesn’t have any such thing.” (emphasis added)

I should be able to simply ignore their war on adverbs (be sure to read the comments – quite amusing).

Instead, I find myself amassing research to mount an assault in the form of a) the longest blog post you’ll ever teal deer, b) a series of blog posts, most of which will be read only by the choir, or c) my first-and-probably-last nonfiction book (although I’ve made a good start on a book on character voice, points of view, etc).

So we don’t really know why women aren’t more prominent, but whatever the reason, it’s concerning. It’s an ethical concern, and it’s also potentially a pragmatic concern – a community dominated by a particular type of people may not be so good at reaching out to others on issues like science funding or climate change.

We have no idea why this is so, and yet it’s concerning? There are no conceivable reasons at all why women might not be blogging about science as much as men that aren’t reasons for concern? In any fair and just world, this ration would approach 1:1, and since it does not, we’re in trouble? Moving on without addressing that issue or stating any of his assumptions, the writer goes on to his next leap: men who blog about science are a "particular type of people." And then to leap three: women who would blog about science (if only they would) would not be a "particular type of people."

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it until the day I die: The day they stopped teaching logic in junior high was the day society died.

(And to all of you who just said “Oh, they never taught logic in junior high,” let me just say “Oh, yes they did!” I had set theory and truth tables and syllogisms and the classical fallacies and what to do about them from sixth grade through the end of my high school career. And yes, that was a very long time ago, and while I’m fairly certain there are still schools that do that, I know for a fact that most public schools no longer even teach grammar, much less logic. RIP, society.)

Question one: What’s this?

Question two: What’s this?

The moral of the story? It’s not all about the words.

You know what the top picture is, what it means, where you might encounter it, and what to do with it. The second picture is a lot less meaningful, and yet what is it lacking, exactly? The text is identical. Each and every letter in each case is exactly the same as the corresponding letter in the other example. It’s the rest of the presentation that’s missing. The look and feel, if you will.

Some time ago, I took down the handful of works I had published in various ebook formats on Smashwords. There were several reasons for this, including the fact that the site was repeatedly telling me that the works weren’t properly formatted while not telling me why, but the primary reason, and the reason I haven’t made any further forays into epublishing, is that I’m gravely concerned about the direction ebooks are taking us.

Open up a phone book, and look at a page. Now open up a King James Bible, a dictionary, a math textbook, a “literary fiction” novel, a “commercial fiction” novel. They aren’t all the same. The book itself is an object, and the words in it are not the only characteristics it has, nor are they the only ones that are used (or at least, should be used) by the author. The shape of the text block on the page, the weight and nature of the typeface, the embellishments and decorations are all there to speak to the reader. They all do speak to the reader, and what they are saying should be as carefully controlled by the author as what the words themselves are saying. Even the pages themselves, the starts and stops and turnings, the hiding and revealing, are all part of the book’s voice.

And I am very deeply concerned that the headlong rush to digitalize everything will take these aspects of book design away from us. In our haste, we will simply discard anything about book design that might be a little hard to do now, rather than wait and do it right. We will end up a world of tone-deaf readers, floundering in a sea of toneless books, each one sounding as unique as the sound of two rocks clacking together.

Given time, the process of evolution will bring out the capabilities we need in epublishing software, but for now, I just don’t think it’s there yet. The ability to change typefaces to suit the whims of the reader is seen as a good thing, as is the ability to flow text to new page sizes and shapes. We even rely on automatic thingies to translate our books from one language to another. What about vocabulary? Will it be a good thing when the reader can select G, PG, PG13, etc, and simply have the book alter its vocabulary to match the whims of the reader? Will we be able to turn the heat up and down on the sex scenes as easily as we turn the volume up and down on the radio?

It is often said that art should be transparent. I’m not really sure what that means. If it means when you read my book, you shouldn’t be seeing (as I do when I read yours, or that guy over there’s, or Dick Francis’s) the actual nuts and bolts of diction and syntax, then fine. If it means your shouldn’t see how I affected you by my choice of typeface, then fine. But if it means that the choice itself is simply irrelevant, that any typeface will do as well, that diction and syntax are irrelevant, that the story is all about the words, and not the formatting, then I say horseradish.

It’s not about the words. It’s about the story. All of it.

There are so many ways in which this book stinks that it’s difficult to know where to begin, so I’ll just jump in.

1. Dated research.
   
   There were so many references to the 1992 US presidential election, and to fashions and fads of the time, that I honestly thought the author was writing in his own past, and was striving (too hard) to establish the timeframe. But, no, the copyright date is 1993, and the book very likely was written during the election season.

2. “As you know, Bob…”

   If there’s anything that drives me nuts, it’s having the characters explain things to each other solely so that the readers can keep up.

3. Excessive character descriptions.

   Every time a new character comes on stage, we get two or three paragraphs of physical description, life story, political attitudes, and so forth.

4. Shallow characters.
   
   In spite of all that backstory. Perhaps he should simply have shut up and let the characters speak for themselves?

5. Plot twists that exist solely to let Deus ex machina reach down into the diorama and mess with things.

   The biker and the Mexican steal some cargo in a very opportunistic manner, but when it becomes handier for it to have been planned, well, then, that’s what it was. Don’t go back and fix it, just declare it planned.

6. Secrets. As in, hide stuff from the reader, as in:
   

   “Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of US Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

   After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

   Could we maybe be told what Rojas told her? No. Too much to ask.

7. Poorly written dialogue, part A: Bad dialect.
   
   One of the main characters is a Mexican citizen, but he speaks normal, idiomatic American English, with a normal American vocabulary and cadence. Replacing all of his “i” sounds with “ee,” and writing “joo” instead of “you,” doesn’t make him sound Mexican, it just makes him hard to read. I’ve read dialogue written by masters of understatement, where you can hear the music and rhythm of the voice, without any misspelled words. Here, the words are misspelled, but the voice still sounds like American English.

   Another main character is a biker/thug dude. (I did mention shallow characters, right? Yeah, there’s also a 45-year-old male failing actor/failing cop and a 40-year-old female failing cop worried about her age, and a peppy little high-school-cheerleader type with a blond bob and a big Colt .45 and a dapper white-collar-crime-boss and… It’s about as real as the characters in the Village People.) Anyway, the biker/thug dude reads his lines like he never quite found his motivation, and the director just said “Ok, well, throw in a cuss word now and then, and that will be good enough.”

8. But the absolute worst part, bar none, was “Poorly written dialogue, part B: Bad diction.”

   Every single time, throughout the book, that someone should say “should have,” “would have,” “want to,” “going to,” etc, we get “shoulda,” “woulda,” “wanna,” “gonna,” etc!

   Every single time. Yes, people sometimes speak like that, and yes, we sometimes need to write that, but not every time. Even if you were to argue that no one ever really enunciates properly, nonetheless, we should write as though they do in situations where we want the reader to assume the enunciation was normal (define normal as you will). Reserve shoulda coulda woulda spellings for when you want to say the the character is not enunciating. And lest you think I’m simply misreading, let me point out that the young peppy cheerleader chickie is a Navy (oh, by the way, “Navy,” referring to the United States Navy, is seldom capitalized in this book) petty officer, whose “over-formality” is pointed out to us several times, who habitually uses “sir” and “ma’am,” and she can’t say “would have” or “want to”?

   At one point, the petty officer and the aging cop/actor are getting drunk. We’re told repeatedly that they’re stumbling, that their chins are slipping off their palms and their elbows off the table. We’re told that they lose enough inhibitions that the petty officer is sitting in a man’s lap and being bounced “like a child,” yet their speech never changes!

And, what, you ask, does any of this have to do with self-publishing?

I suppose you’re sitting there thinking to yourself “So what? So that one author should have gotten that one book edited. So what does that have to do with me?”

Well, speaking of hiding things from the reader, I was being a little facetious with my title, because in fact, this book is “traditionally” published!

This book, Finnegan’s Week, was written by Joseph Wambaugh, published by William Morrow and Company, and presumably was edited by someone.

So there you go. That’s the famous gatekeeping value of the corporate bulwarks of publishing, keeping the poorly-written stuff off the market in order to protect the value of all that machinery they sit on, that we need access to so badly in order to publish our little attempts that we’re willing to jumps through the irrelevant hoops of the query/conform/requery pablum-grinding process in order to get our chance at fifteen seconds in the sun.

At least it was free, from Michael’s Books.

• They are a couple.
• It is a retreat for couples.

In others, you cannot:

• I will list a couple of examples here.
• She has a couple of books in her house.

Here’s the key: replace couple with pair, and see if you need of:

• They are a pair.
• NOT: They are a pair of.
• It is a retreat for pairs.
• NOT: It is a retreat for pairs of.
• I will list a pair of examples here.
• NOT: I will list a pair examples here.
• She has a pair of books in her house.
• NOT: She has a pair books in her house. (We’ll disregard the fact that “couple” in this usage was probably not meant to be literal.)

End o’ the rant. Please carry on.

To the first, I say that if teh is a perfectly valid way to spell the, then so is xdz. If there is no “correct” spelling, then how can any spelling possibly be incorrect? If there is no “correct” syntax (the branch of grammar dealing with the construction of sentences), then “He threw the ball to her” and “He threw her to the ball” obviously mean exactly the same thing. Yes, language changes. Words are made up, every single one of them, and there is nothing in life that says we’re done doing that. Words will be made up every day in every language, words will change meanings, words will change spellings. But unless and until a new spelling or meaning ceases to be seen as sub-standard, then if you use it, your writing will be seen, by extension, as sub-standard. If that’s what you want, that’s fine by me.

To the second group, the ones asking what diction is, I say this:

Diction (as in dictionary) is word choice.

Stories are made up of words (and words inherently tell, they do not show, but that’s a different rant). Word choice may very well be the single most important tool an author has available. One of the most memorable assignments from all of the creative writing classes I ever took (all of which were in high school – all my post-secondary education is in industrial design and manufacturing technology) was this:

• Pick a story from today’s news. Pick one for which you can see a “pro” side and a “con” side, such as a report of an alleged crime, in which you can assume guilt or innocence.
• Get out your trusty thesaurus and change the article. You’re going to do this twice, once making the article strongly “pro,” and once making it strongly “con.”
• You’re going to do this solely by replacing words with different words, words listed as synonyms of the word you’re changing.

Do not add or subtract anything, do not use any scare quotes (the “alleged” suspect, etc), don’t use any antonyms. Replace every word you think needs to be changed, but only with a synonym. You might be amazed at how differently you look at words (and at the news stories you read) after trying this a few times.

The word you’re looking for isn’t just different.

It’s the right word. There is one perfect word for the use you have in mind. There are a bunch more that are close enough and will work, and there are a bunch of choices that are just plain wrong, synonym or not. You can’t just change words because they seem too simple, or too common, or too over-used. Pick a register of diction and use it, at least for that one character, or that particular encounter, or whatever. When a character says “Put on your trousers,” we get an entirely different resonance than if the character says “Put on your pants.” The words themselves carry different denotations and different connotational clouds, and the use of a particular word also says something about the character.

So watch your diction!

Further reading:

How to Write Badly Well, 11 Jan 2010

There’s No Such Thing as a Synonym

Maybe not so nicely this time.

When your friend approaches you with a manuscript, hot off the printer and dripping ink, and your friend says to you “Hey, you! (says your friend to you) Tell me what you think of the choices I’ve (that would be your friend again) made in this thing. Choices like voice and diction and pacing and so forth (says your friend). Tell me what you think,” says your friend, that you’ve known all your life, when that happens, then answer the question. Did I mention that this is when a friend approaches you, someone you know in real life? You know, meatspace? Where the meat lives? Where we can see faces and hear tones and all that stuff? Did I mention that this is a friend? I think I did.

Most of the things we can do “right” or “wrong” in fiction are choices.

You choose to write in first-person present tense or third-person past tense or third-person future tense (oh, yes you can). You choose to write in a soft dreamy tone that’s supposed to mean your character is stoned. You choose to say “dollars” in one sentence and “money” in the next (yeah, guess where I’ve been), as in “I have three dollars. How much money do you have?” You choose all of the things that make your voice your voice, and your story your story. You choose diction, and syntax, and grammar, and tone, and pacing. You choose whether to include Character X’s viewpoint or not. You choose which infinitives to boldly split.

The fact that your choices were not the ones I would have made do not make you wrong. They make you a different writer than me. Maybe better, maybe worse, maybe just different, but different. If we all made the same choices, we’d all write the same story, and the art of fiction would have stopped right after Oodge told his story about the saber-tooth. Fortunately, time split right about then, and we all took the other branch. Oodge and his buddies are still sitting around that same fire, waiting for someone to make up a new fable.

Point is, you can discuss the finer points of choices with friends, but only in the light of making choices. You can’t simply say things like “Caftan is a strange word. Say ‘tunic’.” It was a choice! There is nothing “wrong” with it! Say “Caftan. That’s an odd word, isn’t it?” and I’ll tell you why I used it, and we can go from there, but don’t simply assume that you’re right and I’m wrong.

And it only gets worse when you try to “correct” total strangers.

People you’ve never heard of, never talked to. You have no idea why they might have said what they did, but you know they’re wrong? Come on.

Time out to go breathe.

Ok, back again. Calm, I’m calm.

“I have three dollars, how many dollars do you have?” John asked Jane.

Bet you didn’t know that’s better than the first quote about money, given above, did you? See, the thing is, you apparently can’t use “dollars” once and then use “money” the next time. Maybe it was supposed to be like this:

“I have three money, how many money do you have?” John asked Jane.

Whatever.

Writing is composed of matters of choice at least as much as matters of “right” or “wrong.”

And you can’t even begin to discuss whether a choice was right or wrong until you know the goals of the person who made the choice. If the goal is to show a woman in a long, drapey, open-bottomed garment that can be seen into from below, then “tunic” is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And if the goal is to establish a certain sense of foreignness, then using the “foreign” name for money is the right choice. Having established that, the use of the word “money” is then the better choice. Establish what the writer wanted to do, then talk about choices. In other words, the only rightness or wrongness for choices is in relation to their success.

When someone presents a piece of writing online, and that piece of writing is clear, concise, and well-written, with a strong voice and a powerful presence, if there was a choice made that was different than the choice you would have made, here are your options:

• Examine the piece carefully, see why the choice was made, and see what you can learn from it. Ask questions if you must, but ask them nicely, from a position of respect. Otherwise, shut up.
• Don’t examine the piece. Don’t learn anything. But shut up.

Rant over.

Nor is it an acronym or an initialization. It is simply a Latin word. Originally, it was almost invariably used in the phrase “in re,” meaning “in regard to.” From Wikipedia:

In re, Latin for "in the matter [of]", is a legal term used to indicate that a judicial proceeding may not have formally designated adverse parties or is otherwise uncontested. The term is commonly used in case citations of probate proceedings, for example, In re Marriage Cases; it is also used in juvenile courts, as, for instance, In re Gault.

For hints on the usages of a word, it can be handy to consult a thesaurus. From define.com:

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
31 Moby Thesaurus words for "re": about, anent, apropos of, as, as for, as regards, as respects, as to, concerning, in connection with, in point of, in re, in reference to, in regard to, in relation to, in relation with, in respect to, of, on, pertaining to, pertinent to, referring to, regarding, relating to, relative to, respecting, speaking of, touching, upon, with regard to, with respect to

Notice that in none of the usages shown is there a colon after re.

With the surge in microblogging sites such as Twitter, and their requirement for brevity, it is becoming increasingly common to see things like this:

I need to read up re: my city.

Or even worse, like this:

I need to read up RE: my city.

If you would do this, then you should also do this:

I need food, shelter, etc: in order to survive.

Only use a colon after “re” if the sentence structure requires it.

If you would use a colon there if the word were “regarding,” then go ahead and use it, but in the middle of a sentence, where there is no grammatical construction requiring it, leave it out!

I need to read up re my city.

You’re trying to save characters, right?

He’s studied the Rules extensively, not so that he’ll know what to do and what not to do, but so that he’ll know what to do openly and what to sneak around at.

–The Bumbler’s Apprentice, Other Loves

“The Rules of Drafting,” the teacher writes across the top of the board, in large squeaky letters. Underneath, he writes “1” like he’s starting a list. He circles it, but he doesn’t actually list anything for “1.” Instead, he turns to the class and asks us to guess.

Well, it’s a first-year drafting class. There aren’t many guesses. Twenty students, all boys. The girls are all in home-ec. Yeah, I know, but this is many, many years ago. To give you an idea how long ago it was: you had to have a slide rule to take the class. What? Yes, I’ll wait while you go google “slide rule.”

Oh, good – you’re back. You know what a slide rule is now? Cool. My chosen career path being what it was (industrial design), I thought “Well, I’d better get a good one. I’ll need it all my life.” So I blew about four week’s pay from a part-time job on a used fourteen-inch, 32 scale, K&E Log Log Duplex Decitrig. Several years older than myself, it was made of laminated bamboo, with ivory faces (yeah, the elephant stuff – this was a long time ago), and a rock crystal cursor with an adjustable hairline made from a single strand of a horse’s tail. By the time my high school career was over, it wasn’t worth five bucks, shot as dead as any crippled horse by a smart-aleck upstart called the HP-35.

Back to the drafting class. There were three of us who had taken similar classes before, and we offered our guesses as to the “First Rule of Drafting.”

“Always use the alphabet of lines?” asked the boy on my left.

“Not it,” said the teacher.

“Use the proper tolerances on your dimensions,” said the boy to my right.

“Not it,” said the teacher, but he hiked one eyebrow up above his scalp a foot or so, which we were to learn meant he was impressed.

“In the beginning was the centerline,” I said, cribbing from last year’s teacher, three thousand miles away.

He just points at me for a good five seconds, his eyebrow hovering up there like magic.

“No,” he says finally. “But that’s a good one. I’ll make that number two.” He turns to the board and writes “Anytime anything can be gained in clarity by breaking any of the rules of drafting, including this one, break it, but only when there is a gain in clarity.”

Drafting, he explained, is communication. You are creating a set of instructions and directions. In all communications, clarity is paramount. The rules exist to provide clarity, and nine times out of ten, clarity will be best served by obeying them. But when the rules stand in the way of clarity, go around them.

My career path turned out to have a good many more speed bumps and u-turns in it than I had expected, but it did eventually come back around to drafting and industrial design, and I never forgot the “First Rule of Drafting.” Somewhere along the way, I lost my slide rule and gained a scary understanding of such new things as personal computers, MS-DOS, and linear track drafting machines. Then another upstart called AutoCad killed off the linear track. I acquired some advancements to my education, and I ended up in charge of a network of some pretty high-powered machines, but I never forgot that rule and that floating eyebrow.

Through the processes of interviewing and hiring, I discovered that the truly excellent drafter always looks like he’s obeying the rules, even when he isn’t, because the rare violations are so necessary and the need so obvious that the violation becomes its own kind of obedience, obedience to the higher goal, clarity. This philosophy carries over into other aspects of the drafter’s professional life, including résumé writing.

I never had to advertise an opening. In a typical week, I might get twenty résumés, of which I’d toss at least nineteen. I’d scan them in seconds, looking for mistakes. I didn’t care about schooling, or work experience, or references. Not first. You want me to hire you, you want me to sit you down in front of my computer, and give you the big bucks to crank out communication documents for my bosses, but you can’t take communication seriously enough to see to it that your own résumé is correct?!

So what’s my point, you ask.

Why am I dragging in all this stuff about drafting? Because drafting is communication. And so is writing. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, it has to begin with you. Take yourself seriously enough to learn the craft, and to hone it every chance you get. Learn the rules, and learn when to obey them and when breaking them will better serve your purpose.

There are any number of good reference books. Many of them can be read online, and all of them can be purchased with a mouse click and a piece of plastic. Failing that, ask someone. Ask someone, if you need to know whether to say its or it’s, who’s or whose. Ask someone, if you need to know where the apostrophe goes (or if it goes) in a given contraction or possessive. Ask about grammar, syntax, spelling, diction, anything. If you’re embarrassed about asking your friends, then email me. I’ll keep your secret, and I’ll help you become a better writer. And if I don’t know, then I’ll ask someone, and I’ll pretend it’s just for me.

Every piece you ever write, online or off, story or post, comment or novel, is your résumé. Every single time you fail to capitalize, every single wrong word, every error of grammar, is another reader lost.

Fiction’s forgiving. You can do all kinds of things and get away with it. You can always claim it’s character voicing, at the very least. But you see, you have to look good doing it. If your writings look like the scribblings of someone who doesn’t know the rules, or who doesn’t care about them, then you can’t expect respect.

Here’s a hint, a general rule of thumb: if you’re not reading at least a couple of hours a day, you’re probably not taking your craft seriously enough. Just from where I sit, without even moving, I can see two dictionaries, the best thesaurus ever published, seven books on writing, four novels, and a book of short stories. That’s just the stuff that’s piled up in here since the last time my wife got after me about getting my stuff off the kitchen table! Each and every one of these is a way for me to learn, a place to see rules being followed and rules being broken, a place to hone my craft on the mistakes and successes of others. Build your own pile, and plow it assiduously, and you can’t help but improve your writing.

Read. Write. Repeat.

I have to say that it has bothered me for some time that people use “they” as a singular pronoun. But it has bothered me even more that it’s so easy to do.

My newest dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Ed, (2005) says:

Sentences such as ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.

–usage note at “They”

The widespread use of “they” in this fashion has bothered me partially because I have felt that a perfectly good construction (the use of he/him/his as a neuter case) has been abandoned in favor of a grammatically unsound construction, and partly because, paradoxically, in order to avoid the perception of a lack of gender neutrality while still remaining grammatically correct, we have been forced to become very gender-specific. Think about it: for zillions of years, English speakers knew that he/him/his didn’t mean male, and yet because of the perceptions of a vocal minority over a course of merely a couple of decades, we were all forced to start saying “he or she,” “s/he,” etc, which are all VERY gender-specific constructions! We were even expected, in extreme cases, to properly alternate the genders so as to not show any preference or bias.

(Ok, off-topic, but I have to stick this in here: March, 1978. Walking north on Railroad Avenue, Bellingham, Washington. Walking along behind two persons, one male and one female. Overheard (I swear to you I am not making this up. This is, to the best of my ability, a straight transcription):

Him: “So, there was this guy-”
Her: “Person.”
Him: “What?”
Her: “You said ‘guy.’ Say ‘person.’ Unnecessary gender reference is offensive.”
Him: (confused) “But — it was a man. The joke doesn’t work unless it’s a man.”
Her: “Then I don’t want to hear it. It’s not a joke, it’s part of the subjugation of females, and I don’t want to hear it.”

So “he/him/his” is a male-chauvinist sexist pig thing, right?

Well, no. Turns out it was basically invented by a feminist grammarian, Anne Fisher. Quoting from The New York Times, "On Language; All-Purpose Pronoun":

Paradoxically, the female grammarian who introduced this he business was a feminist if ever there was one. Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

But here’s the best part (and something I really wish I’d known a long time ago):

What was the older way to refer to a genderless “anybody”? They. Quoting again, from the same source:

This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

So that’s it. I officially hereby adopt “they” as my new universal pronoun, and do solemnly swear to uphold its use as such before any and all challengers.