Boyung.com

Just a short post today, since I've got to go play Ultimate in a little bit.  Continuing what has apparently become a short series on the English language, I'd like to talk about one thing that I don't like about the language: the lack of gender-neutral pronouns.  When writing, especially anything technical, I run into this problem a lot.  If I am writing a design document for an application, and I want to refer to the user, I only have two valid options: either using "the user" or "he or she."  The former is okay in small doses, but I have never been able to tolerate the latter.  The problem is, if I use "the user" repeatedly in a document, it starts to sound really repetitive and boring.  This is really a problem when writing documents like that, because the topic matter isn't really that exciting to begin with.

Even though I know it is grammatically incorrect, I have been prone to use the various plural pronouns (they, their, them) when referring to a person in this manner.  I don't know how it started, but I've been doing this as long as I can remember, and I have rarely, if ever, been corrected.  It seems that I am not the only one that has thought this way, because I hear other people using these words the same way quite often as well. 

I really don't understand how the English language has been able to go along for as long as it has without gender-neutral pronouns.  If you know something that I don't, and these words do exist, I'd love to hear about it.