"gender neutral pronouns"

[Emily Saunders]

Your many examples, I would posit, further confirm my two points:  1)   
that several of the uses are emotionally and rhetorically charged  
(references to Founding Fathers and "we...call on the United States")  
and 2) the fact that George W. Bush is over 40.  If I may dare to put  
forth an unproven hypothesis that a good number of the examples you've  
given were written by people who were born before 1970.  It is also  
possible that Robert Chandler's editors are closer to my generation  
than to his own.  Precedent and grammatical rules will have an effect,  
certainly, for those who are aware of them.  But I would argue that  
habits of speech in a younger generation will ultimately, with time,  
have an effect on written norms.  There seem to be enough postings on  
this topic that refer to younger people having a different attitude  
towards the debate.  I would say that both points of view have  
validity within the differing norms of speech:  "its" sounds fine to  
me and my husband (and even, dare I say, preferable), "her" sounds  
better to others.  Determining the relative age or speech norms of the  
target audience may be more relevant than anything.

Regards,

Emily

On Sep 5, 2008, at 8:37 AM, William Ryan wrote:

> 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

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