‘If you dial 1471,’ writes Dr Roger James, a reader, naturally, ‘you are likely to be told by a recorded female voice that “The caller withheld their number.” This is an example of the difficulties that our language gets into because it lacks a word that means “his” or “her”. Years ago, she would have said, “The caller withheld his number,” but political correctness has taboo’d that way out. What should the recorded operator say?’
What, indeed? I think I prefer ‘The caller withheld their number’ to ‘The number you have dialled knows you are waiting’, which is not true literally or figuratively.
The loss of he as a sexually neutral pronoun is certainly a nuisance, more often awkward than the loss of man in the sense ‘anthropos’ or ‘homo’. The deranged people who rewrite the Bible and the liturgy get round it by recasting sentences to make them plural instead of singular (‘Foolish people say in their hearts there is no God’).
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