Their Business

A person does not have to be a pedant to finds reason to notice some of the lousy ways English is being used in public discourse these days. All he has to do is watch TV or read articles at web sites – including those of large media companies. There is a  lot of bad, awkward, ungrammatical, and sometimes hard to understand stuff coming from people with jobs and  titles that would make a person think they should know better.

One of the worst and most common examples  is  the use of  “their” as singular when the sex  is not specified as  in “an employee is expected to wash their hands  before returning from the restroom”.  (Whose hands would that be, and would the employee have to wait until they showed up in the restroom before going back to work?) There is nothing wrong (though nothing imperative  either) in abandoning the old custom of usually using the masculine term when the sex is indeterminate or where the statement applies to people of both sexes.  There are some acceptable replacements for it.  One can use “he or she” and “his or her”.  One can follow the simple convention of male authors using “he” and “his”  and female authors using “she” and “her”.  One often can finesse things by making everything  plural as with “employees are expected to wash their hands before returning from the restroom”.  Such usages may be awkward at times, but they are better than "their" as singular.