Hoping for a workable alternative to using ‘he or she, him or her’? Dennis Baron says wordsmiths have long been coining gender-neutral pronouns — to no avail. “Despite the almost universal condemnation of the coordinate ‘he or she’ by supporters of gender-neutral pronouns, the rule books now opt for ‘he or she’ and not an invented word to replace the generic ‘he’. Those writers who question the rule, who realize that multiple ‘he-or-she’s’ just don’t make for readable prose, won’t seek out a new gender-neutral pronoun…they’ll recast some sentences as plural, and for the rest they’ll just take their chances with singular ‘they.'”