The author of Winnie-the-Pooh thought ‘he or she’ should be replaced by ‘heesh’, but there’s nothing wrong with singular ‘they’

As long ago as 1911, the American writer Ambrose Bierce, in his satirical The Devil’s Dictionary, objected to Miss – “a title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market” – and proposed that for consistency there should be a title for the unmarried man: “I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviate to Mh.” We may have to wait a while longer for “Mh”, but Ms, which I recall being greeted with ridicule when it started to catch on in the 1960s and 70s, is now well established. The assumption that women’s marital status, but not men’s, should be included in the formal way they are identified is rightly becoming a thing of the past.

Some men just do not have the grace to admit they are beaten. The fact that the deputy leader of one of our main political parties is female and has the word “man” in her name is an endless source of amusement to the kind of person who thinks it witty to call her “Harriet Harperson”. Well, it saves them having to engage with the issues such as the Church of England’s refusal to tolerate female bishops. One columnist wrote in the Daily Mail: “What next? Perhaps, as she plots her own takeover of the Labour party leadership, Harman is even now planning legislation that at least one contender for the next Archbishop of Canterbury will have to wear a skirt.”

Such drivel is, sadly, churned out by all too many men (and, inexplicably, some women). Why would anyone want to subject herself to this? No wonder fewer than one in three Labour MPs, one in six Tories and one in eight Liberal Democrats are female. The Conservative party, of course, has had two female “chairmen” in recent years, which is up to them. Many organisations favour “chair” although “chairwoman” sounds fine to me, as does “spokeswoman” as an equivalent to “spokesman”. I’d save “person” for cases where you don’t know the person’s sex: chairperson and spokesperson have a touch of jargon about them, although both are still far preferable to treating women as an afterthought.

Within not much more than a couple of decades, policemen and woman police constables have become police officers, firemen are now firefighters, male nurses are nurses, postmen are postal workers, air hostesses have become cabin crew. In all these cases, language reflects the fact that jobs once largely the preserve of one sex are now increasingly filled by either. “Career girls” is outdated, as well as offensive, when career women outnumber career men. Opponents of such modest but significant changes respond with feeble jokes about non-existent proposals to “person the barricades” and the like. It’s not so long ago that female doctors were rare enough to be given the description “lady doctor”. Sexist habits persist in using “woman” as an adjective in such phrases as “woman bishop” and “women MPs”, with their pejorative echo of “women drivers”. You don’t hear anyone described as a “man MP” but then that’s what most MPs always have been.

AA Milne wrote: “If the English language had been properly organised … there would be a word which meant both ‘he’ and ‘she’, and I could write: ‘If John or May comes, heesh will want to play tennis,’ which would save a lot of trouble.”

What the American author Bryan A Garner has described as the single biggest problem in sexist language is the generic masculine pronoun. The language simply lacks an “epicene” (gender-neutral) equivalent of he and she. The traditional remedy, still advocated by many armchair grammarians, has been to treat everyone as if they were male, and use “he” to cover both, or resort to clumsy constructions such as “he or she” or “his/her”. But wait …

“If everybody minded their own business,” said The Duchess in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Note that Carroll, writing in 1865, did not write “his own business” or “his or her own business”.

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me./As if I were their well-acquainted friend.

(Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors)

If ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses …

(Authorised Version, Matthew 18:35)

A person can’t help their birth.

(Thackeray, Vanity Fair)

If they can do it, so can you. English, after all, used to have a singular version of “you” – thee, thou, and thy – and it is still heard in some dialects (at the football in Sheffield, you are quite likely to hear someone shouting “tha [thou] needs tha [thy] glasses, ref!”). “You” gradually squeezed these words out to become standard for singular as well as plural, and no great anguish seems to have been caused, even in Yorkshire. There is no reason why something similar should not happen to “they”. Singular “they” is much less clumsy than “he or she”, and does not consign half the human race to subservience by calling women “he”.

Most sexist and racist language arises from the presumption that everyone is male and white. If you can just remember that this is not, in fact, the case, it’s easy to avoid. Anyone can do it – if they try.

This is an edited extract from For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection, by David Marsh, published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy for £8.99 (RRP £12.99) visit theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

David Marsh is teaching a grammar Masterclass at the Guardian’s London office on Monday 25 November. Learn more and book.

Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/oct/18/mind-your-language-sexism