A small linguistic note
One of the worrywart tribe has taken to the pages of The Guardian to tell us all that we have to talk about indeterminate masculine pronouns.
When I set about revising Plain Words, the guide to English usage by my great-grandfather, Ernest Gowers, I soon realised that applying the book's own principles to the job would require me to eliminate from its pages all uses of the indeterminate masculine pronoun. I was under orders to preserve the vintage charm of the original; but a writing guide must demonstrate what it is attempting to explain, and the most famous maxim in Plain Words is "be short, be simple, be human". In the 21st century, "he" used to mean "he or she" is annoying to so many people that it no longer qualifies as "human"– or charming.
I can't say that the use of "he" to mean "he or she" causes me any great anguish. But then as an ageing and privileged white guy I would say that, wouldn't I? However, I would point out that while people are whining about this the very same people are whining that we must move from gender speific job descriptions to indeterminate mascluine job descriptions. I have, for example, been seeing Scarlett Johansson being described as an actor. Which, to an ageing white guy like me seems a little unlikely given the curves she possesses. Similarly, we are urged to use police officer, or police something or other, rather than policeman or woman. The old distinction between chef and cook has gone, to be replaced with the indeterminately masculine chef as the description of one who knows how to season and cook remains as the verb.
Which leads me to my first observation, that some parts of society are schizophrenic (apologies, challenged in their mental stability) on certain matters. How can the same people be arguing that we must not use the indeterminate masculine at the same time as all job descriptions must become said indeterminate masculine?
As it happens I found out something about the Czech language last night (in the pub of course, one of the similarities with the English, and joys, of the Czech culture is that all of the interesting things happen in pubs). Which is that they have the same group of worrywarts over the use of the indeterminate masculine as we do. Except that their answer is entirely the other way around. In order to reduce, fight against, gender discrimination in language it is necessary to use fully masculine or fully feminine job descriptions. Thus Doktor and Doktorka, (leaving aside diacriticals etc), Ingenier and Igenierka, Economist and Economistka*, all the way through all job descriptions. Many of these distinctions are not in common use but the argument is that they ought to be. On the grounds that we can only fight gender discrimination by pointing out that women can indeed do any job in the economy and we should deliberately identify those who do so.
Which leads me to my second observation. This political correctness over gender in language is as with the methods of eating asparagus. It doesn't matter, in any real sense, how one eats asparagus, with knife and fork, with fingers, with catapults vaulting them into open mouths, it matters only that you understand the social class denoted by each method and approvingly sneer at all who do not use the method appropriate to your own. So it is with these worrywarts over the indeterminate masculine. Not only are they schizophrenic in our own language but that the same groups doing the worrying in other languages come to the diametrically opposed solution means that it's all just a method of identifying your tribe and doing so by what you express concern over.
In short we can continue to pay them no mind as I've been doing these past 50 years (umm, 51 by the time you read this).
*I don't claim that my Czech is good enough to have got those job descriptions correct, only that the "ka" denotes a women doing that job.