If you set out deliberately to write a column which would be so obviously laughable a decade or three on that it already is laughable, to put together a sad rant about how everything is going to the dogs, you couldn't do much better than the piece I've just read by David Gelernter. It's an 'end of civilization as we know it' lament, and the particular thing that's at stake for him is our language. Why so? Well, it's because there are ideologues who now use words like 'chairperson' and 'humankind'; but mainly it's because - oh, prepare yourself for the horror of horrors - such people use 'he or she' where they could just use 'he', and they sometimes use 'they' as a gender-neutral singular, and they sometimes use 'she' on its own, where from the context it is clear that the subject isn't necessarily female.
If you can recover from the feeling of outrage this may have induced in you and from the sense of a terrifying threat to acceptable English at which you will have trembled, you should be able to discern in Gelernter's argument the absence of even a single reason explaining why the effects of tradition that turned the usage he approves of - 'he' - into a standard one should not do the same for the alternatives to it that he deplores.
