Greetings,

The reason I write may sound trivial, but I don't find it to be so. Let me start on a positive note: Your books are some of the best out there. I own several and have never been disappointed by their layout, content, or accuracy. Most work well as a reference or tutorial. Quality stuff.

I'd like to request you make a change in policy, that policy being the use (in some of your books) of the feminine to the exclusion of the masculine. Presumably the reason for moving away from the masculine (he, him, his) was it tended to exclude, or felt exclusionary to females. I completely understand this. Pairing the two would be acceptable to me, as in he/she and her/him. What I take exception with is the exclusive use of the feminine: she, her. How is it exactly that this differs from the use of the male versions? It doesn't. Another alternative would be the use of she and he mixed. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. This may sound trivial to you. It shouldn't. I value truth and fairness.

It may sound sexist to say this, but I am less troubled by the exclusive use of the masculine words. At least then I can delude myself into thinking that it's possible the author is simply not enlightened with regard to how it may be received. With the exclusive use of feminine words, no such oversight is possible.

The O'Reilly book I'm looking at presently is ASP in a Nutshell. I ordered it online and it has proven most useful. Compliments to the author. However, in the future, I will not buy books that practice what I see in this one, namely the use of a single sex, and if purchased online I'll return them. I'm just one person, though . . . . Or am I?

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thank you for expressing your concerns. This topic is oft-debated in the computer book publishing industry with cogent arguments being made on all sides.

O'Reilly respects its authors tremendously and therefore tries to give them a reasonable amount of leeway. The O'Reilly Style Guide advises alternating between "he" and "she" periodically, as you suggest. Authors often stick with one gender during an example or throughout a chapter to avoid unnecessary confusion. Some authors use the masculine pronouns in even-numbered chapters and the feminine pronouns in odd-numbered chapters, which may lead to an uneven distribution in some cases.

A. Keyton Weissinger, the author of ASP in a Nutshell, used only feminine pronouns, and never masculine. The book's editor changed one or two occurrences of "she" to "he" and "her" to "his" when he found them potentially troublesome (as I recall, there was an example in which he got the impression that secretaries were necessarily female), but he left the rest. And I suspect that the copyeditor was thrown for a loop by the use of the feminine rather than the more conventional masculine, and so left all the references intact. But I would agree that using "she" and "her" exclusively instead of "he" and "him" is not a good idea.

The use of "he/she" and "her/him," with the forward slash, is considered awkward and clumsy. "They" and "their" are considered grammatically incorrect in English, although other languages offer singular neuter pronouns. Here's what Fowler writes about "they, them, their" in Fowler's Modern English Usage, 2nd Edition (now available as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Edition):

In colloquial usage the inconvenience of having no common-sex personal pronoun in the singular has proved stronger than respect for the grammarians, and the one that is available in the plural is made to serve for the singular too. But in prose their disfavour is not treated so lightly; few good modern writers would flout them so conspicuously as Fielding and Thackeray did . . . . (p. 635)

But also:

There are three makeshifts: first, as anybody can see for himself or herself; second, as anybody can see for themselves; and third, as anybody can see for himself. No one who can help it chooses the first; it is correct, and is sometimes necessary, but it is so clumsy as to be ridiculous except when explicitness is urgent, and it usually sounds like a bit of pedantic humour. The second is the popular solution; it sets the literary man's teeth on edge, and he exerts himself to give the same meaning in some entirely different way if he is not prepared to risk the third, which is here recommended. It involves the convention (statutory in the interpretation of documents) that where the matter of sex is not conspicuous or important the masculine form shall be allowed to represent a person instead of a man . . . . Whether that convention, with himself or herself in the background for especial exactitudes, and paraphrase always possible in dubious cases, is an arrogant demand on the part of male England, everyone must decide for himself (or for himself or herself, or for themselves). (p. 404)

Alas, it's at times like this that we will always think of Frank Willison with longing, since he would turn this conundrum, faced by every writer even more painfully than in Fowler's day, into the subject for a memorable witticism. The fact is that there is no good solution in English now that we all feel so much greater discomfort with substituting the male for the missing common-sex pronoun. The usual O'Reilly solution of alternating "he" and "she" in generic examples was not dreamed of by Fowler; neither was the solution in the offending O'Reilly book, which always used "she." But a review of the works of grammarians shows no easy answers. What Yeats said of love (in "Brown Penny") might also be applied to grammar:

Oh, love is the crooked thing.
There is nobody wise enough
to find out all that is in it,
For he should be thinking of love
Till the stars had gone away
and the shadows eaten the moon.

Thanks for your letter. I wish I had a better answer. I'd guess that eventually, colloquial spoken usage of "them/their" as singular, generic pronouns will formally take over in written usage as well; but until then, the grammatically punctilious among us will be tossing in our beds debating the merits of several unsatisfactory alternatives.

Tim