[ZDP] BackTalk to Document The Zope Book (2.6 Edition)/Introducing Zope

[webmaster at zope.org]

A comment to the paragraph below was recently added via http://zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/IntroducingZope.stx#2-5

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    This becomes a lot of work very quickly.  As you can imagine, with
    any more than a few pages to update every day, this can become
    pretty dull.  The webmaster also understandably makes mistakes
    (he's human, after all), and forgets to update or remove critical
    pages.

      % Anonymous User - May 12, 2004 2:45 pm:
       (he OR she is human)

      % Anonymous User - May 28, 2004 11:04 am:
       In the english language, gender-ambiguous pronouns default to the masculine.

      % daragh - June 5, 2004 3:52 am:
       can I suggest "they're human"...

      % Anonymous User - June 10, 2004 11:10 am:
       The word in question, "webmaster," is singular, so the plural pronoun/verb pairing, "they're," would not fit.
       When reading the sentence, I presumed that the author was referring to all possible persons who fall into the
       webmaster category, regardless of gender. The fact that many modern authors prefer to use the
       gender-ambiguous feminine pronoun (she) should allow other authors choose to use the masuline one if they
       wish without the coaxing to be more politically correct. Unless the author blatantly states that he or she
       expects and/or believes that all webmasters/programmers/Zope users (or the readers) to be all male or all
       female, one should not jump to the conclusion that this resource is gender-biased. Any further discussion on
       the matter is unnecessary.