Politically Correct language goes overboard:

[Sirotnikov]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3027/a_politically_correct_lexicon

GLBT: Shorthand for GLBTQ2IA.

GLBTQ2IA: The acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Allies. “This is coming from the youth movement, the college campuses, it has not seeped into the whole community at this point,” says Baim, who at the Windy City Times uses GLBT, an acronym the New York Times has not yet seen fit to print.

Hir (hirs): Gender neutral for him and her. At Wesleyan University, incoming freshmen are instructed to use gender-neutral pronouns in campus correspondence. As one person wrote on the university’s online Anonymous Confession Board, “I am usually attracted only to people of hir original gender, rather than hir intended gender. As such, I’m afraid that I’m, like, viewing hir wrong, or not respecting hir wishes or something.”

Ze: Gender neutral for he or she. As Mary Boenke writes on the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Web site: “When talking with Leslie Feinberg, noted transgender author, I asked Leslie which pronouns to use. Ze shrugged hir shoulders and said ze didn’t care.”

Stupid inventions.

[ZEE]

WTF?!?

[Bkeela]

Maybe it would be best if global warming destroys civilization.

[Provost Harrison]

Ze shrugged hir shoulders and said ze didn’t care.”

Sounds like a bad German accent

[BeBMan]

I thought that too

[Provost Harrison]

Could even be a line from Arnie in "Terminator"...could be a soupcon Austrian

[Ari Rahikkala]

Gender-neutral pronouns might sound silly to you, but if you're actually used to speaking a language that has them (and moreover if you're a geek with a fondness for precise expression anyway), not having them in English is a PITA sometimes. It's not about political correctness, it's about being able to succinctly say what you mean. To me, "he" is male and "she" is female. If I am, say, talking about a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, I find it awfully inconvenient to use "he or she" and simply wrong (not wrong in a moral way but wrong since it's not what I mean) to just use one of the pronouns.

[Provost Harrison]

You can get around it, rather than "What is she doing?" you could use "What is x doing?"...

[ZEE]

what is IT doing?
umm.... sorry

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Sounds like a bad German accent

Are the Germans trying to take over the English language?

[Q Classic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hir#Neologisms

[Elok]

The gender-neutral nouns are probably a pain in the rear for the French, Spanish, etc., too, but we ain't gonna change 'em. Inanimate objects have no gender. People do. Deal with it. Grr.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
You can get around it, rather than "What is she doing?" you could use "What is x doing?"...

Sure. You can work around it. You can use "x", you can use "one", you can use "they", you can use "it", you can use "he or she". You can reword your sentences to avoid or lessen the impact of these workarounds - inappropriate tone, confusion about number, interference with other pronouns, wrong gender, etc. In short, it's not an impossible problem to work around...

... it's just that you could solve it once and for all by using gender-neutral pronouns. Maybe it's Sapir-Whorf at work – to me it seems obvious that you need them, and I'm easily annoyed when I can't use them.

[Nubclear]

Hir (hirs): Gender neutral for him and her

This is not gender neutral.

[Last Conformist]

Y'know, one could follow a few centuries of English usage and use "they" as the epicene 3rd sg pronoun.