Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum admits to partaking in the murder of the English language and commits the sin of mixing his Star Trek/Star Wars metaphors. Here's Drum:
I now routinely use they and them as gender-neutral singular pronouns. ... What other options are there? None.
This is foolishness born of ideology. There's a perfectly acceptable option: Just use "he" as the generic pronoun, as is grammatically correct. "Oh, but that ignores women!" the ideologically minded will wail. The technical term for that complaint is "horseshit." Yale's David Gelernter handled this special bit of claptrap quite persuasively in 2008:
When the style-smashers first announced, decades ago, that the neutral "he" meant "male" and excluded "female," they were lying and knew it. After all, when a critic like Mary Lascelles writes (in her classic 1939 study of Jane Austen) that "no reader can vouch for more than his own experience," one can hardly accuse her of envisioning male readers only. In feminist minds ideology excused the lie, and the goal of interchangeable sexes was a far greater good than decent English. Even today's English professors have heard (I suppose) of Eudora Welty, who wrote in her 1984 memoirs--just as the feminist anti-English campaign was nearing total victory--that every story writer imagines himself inside his characters; "it is his first step, and his last too." Was the author demonstrating her inability to write proper English? Or merely letting us know that there is no such thing as a female writer?
Gelernter's piece is brilliant throughout and you should read the whole thing.
Drum's other, possibly greater, sin is to have mixed his Star Trek and Star Wars allusions. You'll notice that Drum's piece is titled "I Have Gone Over to the Dark Side." What is his concluding line? "I don't think I have the will to resist anymore. I have been assimilated"—a clear reference to the Borg, the deadly menace from the Star Trek universe. For shame.
I'm not saying Mother Jones should fire him for this. But a two week suspension is probably merited.