Patrick Elliott wrote:
> In article <47ae4a7c$1@news.povray.org>, aut### [at] runevisioncom 
> says...
>> Warp wrote:
>>> Rune wrote:
>>>> Conversely, I
>>>> think the sentence below with "he" sounds very weird:
>>>> "Readers of women's magazines are not known to be very loyal. If a reader
>>>> finds that his favourite magazine have gotten pricier than it used to be, 
>>>> he
>>>> will often tend to buy a different one instead."
>>>  I can honestly say that the use of "he" did not sound odd or out-of-place
>>> to me at all in that sentence. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using 
>>> "he"
>>> as the neutral pronoun.
>> Hmm. Okay.
>>
>> Rune
>>
> Actually, where it bugs me is in customer service. You never use he/she, 
> but you use sir, mam, miss, mrs, etc., and its too damn easy when tired 
> and/or distracted to mess that up. Something like "ker" which was used 
> in C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series as a kind of general honorific would be 
> a whole hell of a lot less a) embarassing, b) insulting to people that 
> are offended easy, and c) likely to be misused. So, yeah, I would vote 
> for some set of gender neutral words too.
> 

I never get called sir when I call customer support, but if I show up in
a store I get either sir or ma'am split about 50/50. You create a
general honorific, and you ruin half the fun I have of actually shopping
in stores instead of online!

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