everyone has their grammar nitpick

[Peter Ahlstrom]

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s546929.htm

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I think that everyone has the right to their own opinion, even if his or her opinion is wrong.

[Pink Bunkadoo]

But we wouldn't have this problem in Esperanto.  Errr...would we?

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Sadly, Esperanto is even more obviously intrinsically sexist. There are a couple proposals people have made for fixing this, but they haven't really gone anywhere.

BUT actually in this specific case, "everyone" is plural in Esperanto, so it takes a plural referring pronoun with no problem.

[stacer]

Earlier, I never read all the way down to figure out what the article was about. Now that I've read more, I'll just say--right on! All this time as I've developed myself as an editor, I've been beating the "they" habit out of myself. Now I can live FREE!

Really, that's one thing we've talked about in editing classes, and usually the explanation is that the language is evolving. Interesting to find out that it's been common usage for over 200 years.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Well. What the article does NOT say is whether the famous sources cited also did NOT use the "everyone...his" paradigm. (Unless I missed it.) That would be useful. Otherwise, if the examples they cite are in fact in the vast minority of the usages by those particular authors, it's not a very convincing argument.