QUOTE OF THE DAY. Professor Ray is not happy with the circumlocutions so-called "inclusive" language imposes:

English has only "he" and "she" for reflexive personal pronouns. We once said, "Everyone has his own opinion." The reflexive pronoun case must agree with the subject. "Everyone" is singular. The predicate nominative must also be singular. Therefore, "his" was always understood to stand for both male and female nominatives. But `80's feminists wouldn't stand for it, so it became a politically correct mandate to say "Everyone has his or her opinion." That's now three words, to be politically correct, instead of one.

Human nature being lazy, the extra weight was soon dropped. The whole sentence became truncated, I should say, corrupted, into "Everyone has their own opinion." "Everyone," which is singular, is followed by "their," which is plural. This is a grammatical catastrophe, committed daily by English speaking writers, journalists, and reporters alike. These former guardians of the language have fallen slaves to the legally protected enterprise of political correctness. The people follow. It all happens because saying "his or her" all the time is awkward, and seems entirely unnecessary. Political correct talk is so pretentious and tedious that it has caused grammatical errors to become a permanent part of the English language. (Try using correct grammar on your own computer. You'll be erroneously `corrected.')"

Perhaps something like "ter" or "est" will emerge ... there were people playing with the former in the early 1970s.