While We Wait for Singular ‘They,’ How About ‘She or He’?

David Foster Wallace

The discussion around English’s lack of a gender-neutral (or epicene) singular pronoun — the blanks to be filled in a sentence like “Anyone who wants to succeed can do so if __ puts __ mind to it” — has been widely covered in Lingua Franca, most recently here. The history and outlines of the issue are by now familiar: the traditional and sexist use of he (and him and his), its replacement by the admittedly slightly clunky he or she, the sensible strategy of rewriting the se...