Despite having known many, many, many of them, I still find it hard to believe that people's thinking can be so atrophied that they can't tell when "man" and "he" have a masculine reference and when they have a general human reference.

Up until about 1970 nobody thought much about it, including nobodies like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.

One of the first things you learn in a class in linguistics is that words have no built-in, essential, exclusive meaning. Their meaning comes as much from context as from anything memorized.

If people with no sense of English style want to insist that using a word like "mankind" (instead of, say, "humankind") is sexist and disgusting (because others are presumably too stupid to know what's meant), nobody can stop them. Or that the concise monosyllable "he" must always be expanded to the clumsy and very often redundant "he or she." Or, for that matter, that the equally concise "they" can never be used as a singular.

Their claims, however, are based on ignorance - and, in some cases, self-promotion. Unfortunately they've found plenty of followers -including influential editors who should know better. Maybe the die is cast. It wouldn't be the first time that language has changed in an irrational way with little cost to civilization.

But I can't think of any woman whose salary has been raised or whose abusive partner has desisted because of the introduction of new stylistic "rules." Sexism is real, but English usage is not the enemy.