Other: Code, Grammar, Gender Politics, and Gender-Neutral Singular Pronouns

Not only do I obsess about software engineering and gadgets, but I'm a grammar geek as well. Furthermore, I'm very big into gender equality.  Which is why I had a minor struggle at work recently when I had to figure out what to write for a gender-netural singular pronoun in a code comment.

It was something like:

    // Give the user the option to disengage so that he or she or it can rejoin later
    foo.allowDisengage();

Because I'm writing professional code that could possibly be read by thousands of people, it was different from, say, a blog post, where one can write whatever he wants.  ;)  Writing code also means there is a limit to how many characters I can put on a line, and in this case I had 100 characters, which includes tabbing.  So what does one do when faced with this dilemma?

A lot of people would just write "they", as in "so that they can rejoin later", but that's grammatically incorrect and also physically painful to me.  Just using "he" is arguably sexist, and so the same could be argued for "she".  Switching between the two to give equal time to both genders (as I have done in college essays) isn't an option in such short documentation.  Using "he or she" is awkward and feels like a waste of letters when facing 100-character limits.

I'm a big fan of Spivak pronouns, which are words that were made up for the sole purpose of giving English some gender-neutral singular pronouns.  Instead of "she", "her" and "hers", you might right "ey", "em", and "eirs".  But I'd get a considerable number of questions in my code review if I used "ey".

Grammar Girl--a blog that everyone needs to bookmark--suggests you rewrite your sentences to avoid the problem, which is what I did.  Something like "Give the user the option to disengage so that rejoining later is possible".  The Grammar Girl also says that "they" is the future of generic singular pronouns, but I hope not.  I am a huge fan of not changing the definition of the English words so that, thousands of years from now, English speakers will be able to read current texts with no trouble.  Adding new words (like Spivak pronouns) is fine.  And there's no way to tell if a pronoun is referring to a single entity or multiple when you use "they".

A friend also suggested using "s/he", which probably would've served my purposes just as well.

Update: Everyone should just use singular "they".