Grammar question No. 1: Is the following sentence correct? “Everybody does their own thing.”
     Wrroonnng. As my English teacher would say, “You mustn’t mix singulars with plurals.”

     The word “everybody,” even though it connotes lots of people, is really singular, referring to just one. “Their” refers to more than one, and therefore, we ought to be saying, “Everybody does his (or her) own thing.” But that’s over-qualified. More on that later.
     In my years of teaching, I don’t remember coming across the “their own thing” usage until the start of the women’s movement in the early seventies. The scenario probably went something like this:
     A man at a meeting may have said, “We need lots of manpower for this project, and everyone has roll up his sleeves and do his share.” “Waaaiiittt a minute,” some woman must have answered. “Why isn’t it ‘womanpower,’ and ‘her sleeves’ and ‘her share'”?
     That, I believe is how the language got changed forever. Fearful of injecting ANY purely masculine words into the language, people started over-qualifying things, making it “his or her.” And when that got too cumbersome, humanity (and huwomanity as well) opted to be ungrammatical and sanctioned “everybody does their own thing,” even if Highlands English faculty were to have a fit.
     Around that time, a young member of the church we attend gave an impassioned speech on “inclusive” language, that which gives women their due. Interesting point. She argued that we need to eschew words like “mankind,” “chairman,” “master,” “policeman” and “manpower” in favor of more neutral terms like “chairperson” and “police officer.” Similarly, she admonished us, we shouldn’t use terms that specifically identify females, such as “airline stewardess.” Now they’re “flight attendants.”
     We don’t have waiters and waitresses anymore; rather they’re waitpersons It’s that wretched “-person” suffix that makes English so awkward and unattractive. Once, at Highlands, when we were opening up a search for someone to lead our department, my boss warned me that I had better not sign my name on the advertisement with “chairman of the search committee.” “That would be sexist,” the boss said. “Better use ‘chairperson.'”
     My defense, although futile, was that I am a man and I am therefore the chairMAN of the committee. I argued further, “Since we’re searching for someone to chair our department and we don’t know whether the lucky person will be a man or a woman, we should use “chair” or, reluctantly, “chairperson.” But since I am a man, I wanna call myself a chairman. I lost that round.
     People will ask, “What’s wrong with just leaving out “person” and advertising for a “head” or a “chair”? That might work if you’ve lost your head, or are window-shopping in deep Africa. Or if you’re at Price’s Home Furnishings, you can get all the chairs you want. But to attribute those words to a person . . . ?
     Long before the woman’s movement, I’ve believed that language reflects what people think; it doesn’t determine it. So if I refer to “all you guys,” I mean girls too. If we say, “The results of the election are enough to make a grown man cry,” we mean grown women too.
     There’s even a state writing journal whose guidelines for submissions clearly explain that to use personal pronouns, the writer must forgo “he” and “she” and use “s/he” instead.
     Some church hymnals, which used to contain “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” simply omit the entire hymn for lack of a substitute for “Gentlemen,” but in most cases, “men” becomes “friends” or even “ones.”
     To carry this argument farther, Newsweek reported on a southern Protestant church which had de-sexed the deity. Therefore, references to Christ child were non-sexual, as in “babe born of a virgin.” But even “virgin” was neutered and we can only ASSUME the parent was female. (I’m not making this up.)
     Finally, it took some adjustment not to wince on hearing people referring to their GENDER as male or female. Gender used to mean distinctions between parts of speech, such as nouns and pronouns. “He” is masculine, “she” is feminine. Nouns as well can have gender.
     Sex, unless you’re watching “Friends” reruns, has been drummed out of common usage. Sex used to mean what people are: male or female. Gender used to refer to classes of words.
     Now, dictionaries define gender as a social classification, as in “gender roles,” or as in “Women entered graduate schools and encountered gender discrimination when they applied for academic positions.”
     Nowadays, application forms favor using “gender” to learn whether the applicant is a male or a female. It’s becoming difficult to find the word “sex.”
     Before gender replaced sex in forms people fill out, I used to enjoy it when youngsters were applying for admission to Highlands would write, along the word “sex,” “no” or “not yet.”
     Some people who really believe that “man” is sexist, have used their computer word-search features to determine the frequency of “man” in words, and to propose a substitution.
     We shouldn’t get carried away, as humankind would really struggle with some of the following: personatee, persondate, personacle, persongle and personiac.
     I personally — oops — womanally, or even manally ought not fret too much about it.