What if she watches it?
However -- while I have heard plenty of suggestions for resolving the issue from college english professors, none of them have managed to convince the Central Board of Oppressive English to accept their proposal, and so we might just be stuck with non gender-neutral pronouns and awkward she/he constructions for the time being.
'They' might emerge as a ambiguously plural/singular gender-neutral pronoun, but in the meantime I won't berate anyone for sticking to the accepted standard.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in the strict male/female binary or in universal identity, and I don't know if a woman inherently writes different from a man. But I do think that language's assumptions shape the way we think, and therefore the laws we make. That is enough for me to seek a more neutral and equitable way of speaking.
Generic singular "he" is an older usage that is slowly phasing out as society changes. When I find myself using "he" for this, I always notice that it doesn't quite feel right anymore. Of course most people who favor this usage point to its "standard" correctness (cf. this thread), but that's pointing to the past. What's interesting is that we're in a pluralistic stage where there are many competing alternatives -- generic "he", alternating "he" and "she", "he or she", singular "they" -- none of which quite feels right.
This is untenable in the long run because it forces you to think about which one to use. That's way too much runtime overhead, and it's not how language works. Vernacular is a don't-make-me-think thing. That's the real problem with sprout's suggestion in the GP, i.e. rewording to drop the generic singular altogether. It's a viable alternative, and I do it all the time, but it's also the most expensive.
There's no way this gap won't get filled. The only reason we haven't seen it yet is that fundamental language shifts are slow relative to a human lifespan.
The option I find most annoying is the "sometimes use 'he' and sometimes use 'she'" one, which is like solving a design problem in a function by offloading it entirely to the caller. Not only do you have to think about which one to use, you also have to reference-count to keep the two in balance over time. No way is that one going to survive. (I also find that people who do this tend to be annoying tsk-tsk types, though maybe that's a prejudice.) My money's on singular "they", because it's the simplest, it's truly generic, and -- amusingly contrary to all the pseudo-grammarians who freak out about it -- it has a long history in English. Great examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they.
Of course, I also hold a disdain for "proper quoting".
What do you mean here? When talking about "proper quoting", I much prefer what I just did to what you're supposed to do (in American English) for "proper quoting."
I feel like when you quote things they become a unit together with the quotes, and the punctuation should then treat the whole composition as a single object. You wouldn't stick punctuation in the middle of the word at the end of a claus,e so why would you do that with quote?s
By any chance is this one of those quirks of American grammar usage that I've not come across before. The only times where I've seen disapproval of the use of 'they' in that fashion was on the Internet... By any chance is this another Ame
For instance: "if such a person existed, they were very quiet about their existence". Note that it's not "they was", which is grammatically incorrect.