"gender neutral pronouns"

[William Ryan]

Look around though and you may be surprised - just try googling "her 
interests" or "her borders":

        Protecting family & country: America can best protect her own
    people and their freedoms by embracing the noninterventionist
    foreign policy our Founding Fathers envisioned [title of article,
    New American,  April 14, 2008]

        We are friends; and we want to continue to be the friends of the
    United States. We safeguard her interests, and all we ask is that
    the United States should not support Israeli expansionism and
    aggression. We do not call on the United States to throw Israel into
    the sea or even to break her special relations with the State of
    Israel. Let America give Israel whatever she wants, provided she
    remains content with her borders. This will never affect our
    relationship with the United States in any way. We, as her friends,
    care about her interests. [Time, 30 March 1978]

        Such a future, in which America - her laws, her culture, her
    borders and her economic base - has ceased to exist, is closer to
    reality than most Americans would dare to imagine.[New American,
    Sept 6, 2004]

        "I believe there ought to be a Palestinian state, the boundaries
    of which will be negotiated by the parties, so long as the
    Palestinian state recognizes the right of Israel to exist and will
    treat Israel with respect, and will be peaceful on her borders" 
    [George W. Bush, Press Conference 11 Oct 2001].

I also found several published legal documents in which individual US 
states are referred to as 'she'.

Just a quick trawl, but it seems 'her' with country names is very much 
alive, in both American and British English, in literary, legal and 
journalistic English and in colloquial blogs, without any 'affected, 
quaint or poetic' associations (adjectives which neither his friends nor 
his foes would normally apply to George W. Bush). The internet is a 
wonderful playground for linguists.

Will Ryan



Emily Saunders wrote:
>  There have been several very interesting points made on this issue.
>  But I would hesitate before calling the desk editors "tone-deaf."
>  When I mentioned the debate to my husband (both of us are in our
>  30's) this morning, his first assumption at my rather rough
>  explanation was that the "her" was the debatable point and not the
>  "its."  I suspect that this is more of a question of age and of the
>  language habits that go with them.  To younger ears the "her" sounds
>  (as has been mentioned) potentially quaint and affected when
>  referring to countries, with perhaps poetic connotations (which, it
>  could be argued, might be appropriate in a piece having to do with
>  Russia's most beloved poet).  But in our 30-something standard
>  English "its" would be the default (and not an error) and "her" the
>  one with particular connotations (and potentially inappropriate).
>  This strikes me as being neither more nor less than an example of
>  natural language change, the study of which gives linguists such good
>  employment -- but, I might add, generally irreversible in its force
>  and direction.
>
>  As a sort of footnote, I expect that the use of "an" in front of the
>  words with pronounced "h's" (an historian vs. a historian) is going
>  to disappear by the next generation or so.  The present perfect, it
>  seems to me, has already undergone a fairly fundamental shift in
>  standard usage where "did you eat?" is as acceptable as "have you
>  eaten," in ascertaining whether or not someone is, at this moment,
>  still hungry.
>
>  Respectfully,
>
>  Emily Saunders



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