a new gender-neutral term

It's no coincidence that the great strides females have made in recent centuries are mainly because of a conversation that's been happening in English. English is one of the few Indo-European languages not hampered by gender at every turn. People coming to it late in life say things like, "This language, she is so hard!"

Even so, English has its boy-girl difficulties, one being indefinite pronouns. People have gone into fits about it. Generally, most folks prefer to keep their pronouns sexed and sexist: "Whoever threw this thing away didn't know what he was doing." Academics go to acrobatic lengths to avoid it: "Whoever, uh, re-opportunized this thing didn't know what s/h(e) was doing." Smoother academics know how to avoid the whole issue altogether: "Whoever discarded this thing was uninformed."

If you are involved in any nonacademic organization, though, you wind up getting a good amount of entertainment from people who understand that they have to be nonsexist, but are a bit clumsy in the doing. Hence, this last Sunday, a minister, trying to direct the ceremony that would follow, ut tered a word I'd never heard: "Each deacon will then take communion themselve."