HER [HER INSTEAD OF THEY]

A word to replace their and them and they in grammatically incorrect sentences. | http://www.bartleby.com/64/5.html | http://owlcroft.com/english/they.html Example: Dorkasaurus: Someone who is so intensely dorky, the word 'dork' alone will not do them justice. Them was used in the preceding sentence to be politically correct, but is not grammatically correct. Someone is singular and them is plural. A singular antecedent calls for a singular pronoun, so we have an error. Fifty years ago, him was the accepted English usage when a singular pronoun referred to a gender-neutral antecedent. In the first sentence of this paragraph, him would have been used instead of or them. However, him is now viewed as politically incorrect. What we need is a new accepted (correct for the prescriptivists, standard for the descriptivists) English usage. My modest proposal: use her instead of him for such a situation. Her maintains conventional English pronoun-antecedent agreement and, at the same time, avoids the political incorrectness of him. Thus, Dorkasaurus: Someone who is so intensely dorky, the word 'dork' alone will not do her justice. Nota bene: It is especially important that this new standard be used for negative examples. Some may object that the antecedent someone is gender-neutral, while the pronoun her is not. NOW, I maintain that her is still politically correct, a slight discrepancy in gender agreement notwithstanding. Using the masculine form has been avoided--that's the main objective of political correctness, is it not?