On college campuses and in workplaces, across social media and in deference to non-binary people, gender-neutral pronouns are more than just a new wave of political correctness.
They’re the focus of debate that stretches back hundreds of years.
Early word coiners were usually more concerned with grammatical correctness over a keen commitment to inclusivity in avoiding the generic “he” and singular “they” as a replacement, said professor Dennis Baron, who specializes in the history of the English language at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
But as the women’s rights movement grew in the late . . .
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