For instance, "A politician must be able to think quickly on the spot. He or she must also have no qualms about lying."  I know some people who use "they", but as that both sounds and is ungrammatical, I'm wondering if there is any other concise and non-awkward alternative.  Edit:  Apparently many do consider "they" as correct. This surprised me, because I know someone who actually wrote a grammar book, who told me in no uncertain terms that "they" could not be used (in fact, I'd asked them - ha! - this question before I posted it here). And a quick look online found legitimate sources advocating both positions. I suppose it's one of those issues, such as whether the previous sentence was incorrect for beginning with a conjunction, where it really just depends who you ask. Regardless, to me personally, "they" in the above example sounds clunky at best and incorrect at worst. So I suppose my question can be rephrased as, 'is there any alternative to 'he or she', other than 'they'?"  Secondly, to whoever tagged this as "politically-correct": acknowledging the existence of genderqueer or transgender people isn't a political issue at all, until those made uncomfortable by people unlike them make it one. Trying to avoid excluding and thus unconsciously discriminating against a group of people in your writing isn't born out of a need to be 'politically correct' - it's born out of basic human decency.  Finally, yes, in the example above, I could use a comma and avoid the need for a pronoun at all - but the question I'm asking applies to instances where one may not want to do so (i.e. the sentences are long and stringy enough as it is).
I recently had somebody tell me that a mutual friend of ours who is  prefers that people refer to him/her using the gender-indefinite pronoun they.   In some cases, this almost seems okay:   Kris left their umbrella at our house.  On the other hand, if Kris is sitting right next to you, it feels very odd to say       They (meaning just Kris) would like more cake.   Or even odder,      Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they/them?"   Are these usages grammatically correct? Are they in the process of becoming grammatically correct? Are there more correct alternatives?
Why does the question's closed status disappear when clicking to load a new edit? Punctuation of direct speech, edge cases I recently learned that I have developed a consistent, but entirely wrong approach to punctuating direct speech in fiction. I am in the unenviable position of trying to relearn.  Previously I wrote such things as:     "I'm done." She said.   when the quoted speech was definitely, absolutely the end of a sentence. So now I know I need.     "I'm done," she said.   This follows the rule that a period is only allowed when the end of the spoken sentence is also the end of the sentence in the narrative. For example:     "I'm done." She slammed the door on the way out.   So, it now looks odd to me when there are multiple sentences in the speech:     "I can't take her. I'm done," she said.   Can you reassure me that is correct, or give the correct form? Please don't suggest rewriting the sentence to put 'she said' in the middle - I'm aware of that: I'm specifically asking about the punctuation rules.  The other odd case is speech ending with an ellipsis. Do sentence terminating ellipses (four periods normally) become:     "I can't take her. You know, ...," she said, nodding towards Jane.   If so, are non-terminating ellipses dealt with the same way?     "I can't take ...," she nodded towards Jane, "any more!"   or can non-terminating ellipses be used unadorned?     "I can't take ..." she nodded towards Jane, "any more!"   I'd be very grateful if you could point me at references as well as answers. For the record I am a British writer writing for both British and US publication, so any variation is also interesting to me! Constructing a continuous distribution to match $m$ moments Autokey (autokey-qt) freezes and won't insert text When comments get too chatty the move-to-chat feature asks if you'd like to move it out. But this often happens after the fact and thus doesn't prevent it.   I propose that:   Move-to-chat be provided as a button along side so that a user who knows their question or conversation may become drawn out may elect to preempt and take the conversation "off-line" Which spells or abilities are affected by things that care about targeting? Note: this is intended to be a canonical question about whether or not a spell or ability targets so there are multiple sub-questions.   Can Hexproof or Shroud save my creature from ? What about a  that was cast for it's Overload cost? Does shroud prevent me from using the Monstrosity ability of a creature, or from giving it more counters with Proliferate? Can I cast an Aura Enchantment on one of my creatures with Shroud, or an opponent's creature with Hexproof? Or can I use the Equip ability to attach an equipment to one of my creatures with Shroud? Will 's ability trigger when my opponent plays ? And will I have to sacrifice my  if my opponent casts ? Will Shroud or Hexproof prevent an opponent from choosing me with 's ability? Will Hexproof keep one of my creatures from being affected by ? If an Aura or Equipment is attached to a creature with Hexproof, does the Hexproof protect the attached permanent? How to Regex search/replace only first occurrence in a string in .NET? It seems the .NET Regex.Replace method automatically replaces all matching occurrences.  I could provide a MatchEvaluator delegate that returns the matched string after the first replacement, rendering no change, but that sounds very inefficient to me.  What is the most efficient way to stop after the first replacement? How did Harry become a Horcrux? To make a Horcrux, certainly murder can't be the only requirement. It is obvious a proper spell is needed for completing a Horcrux. Voldemort could have made a thousand Horcruxes, as he had already murdered a thousand people. But, how on earth did Harry become a Horcrux, with Voldemort murdering his mom and not using the Horcrux-making spell? Certainly Avada Kedavra is not the spell used for making a Horcrux. I have some HTML I am trying to parse.  There are cases where the html attributes alone are not going to help me identify the row type (header versus data).  Fortunately, if my row is a data row then it should have some values that can be converted to integers.  I have figured out how to convert the unicode to an integer for those cases that it is possible to make the conversion.  I am struggling to write the logic to move past the cells that the conversion will not work because the cell has content that must be treated as text.  for example if rowColumn[1][3] can be converted to an integer I can do so by   int(rowColumn[1][3].replace(',','').strip('$'))   but I get an error if rowColumn[1][3] has text content. Shapefile layer no longer editable (toggle edit option greyed out) in QGIS I am using QGIS 2.16 / Windows 10.  I have a point shapefile which I have been using for a little while that has always been editable.  Today I was editing the layer, saved my edits and left my computer for a few hours. When I came back I was not able to toggle the editing button on the toolbar and when I right click on the layer it longer has toggle editing as an option.  I have googled the problem every way I can think of and have not been able to find an answer to why the layer is suddenly un-editable or how to fix this. Explanation behind Second Derivative of a Parametric Equation Formula Quantum teleportation - the alternative to destroying atoms Can't you just disassemble, not destroy our atoms and transport them to another teleporter via networking or telecoms?  This is my thinking of how to keep the same person, not an exact copy of him/her, alive when teleporting.  Please answer to tell me if it's possible or not. Equivalence of definitions of prime ideal in commutative ring Why is the light in an airplane turned off during take off and landing? I have meticulously read through similar questions, answers and their comments but I still do not understand how the deletion is done. From what I understand I email the customer service and then they do what exactly?     1) They disable my account so that I can no longer use it?      2) They reassign all of my questions and answers to some other   account? To which one?      3) They delete all my questions and answers so that they go away from   public view?   What is the flexibility (if it exists) of the deletion procedure? Is it possible to erase the traces of my former association with the site. Can I request any of the following be done?     4) All of my questions and answers be deleted from public view?      5) Some of my questions and answers be deleted? If yes what criteria?      6) Can I have all of my contributions be assigned to some other   account which runs as sort of a "collective account" and already has   tons of content so that it doesn't happen like my contributions just   move to some other url but still stay grouped under that location and   therefore that location can be discovered as representing my account?      7) Can I have my contributions dispersed through several "collective   accounts?      8) Can my current public name be removed from any comments to my posts   so that my posts cannot be identified later as once belonging to me?   Please be polite with me. I wouldn't have asked if I have found the answer in the other questions. The other questions are also old and it is not clear what the situation is as per 05/2012.  UPDATE (for those interested):  I asked the Stackoverflow team about the procedure. Apparently none of the points 2-8 I asked above are possible, only 1 will take place. The link to my user page from my contributions is going to be removed and replaced with non-clickable text of an anonymized user name like "user1234". Whether this number is the same as my current user_id is not clear. That's all the information I got.  I'm going now to rename myself to "Anonymous" then request the account deletion. Those interested in the procedure will witness the exact result on this page.  Farewell. How to show that a set of discontinuous points of an increasing function is at most countable I would like to prove the following:       Let $g$ be a monotone increasing function on $[0,1]$. Then the set of points where $g$ is not continuous is at most countable.     My attempt:    Let $g(x^-)~,g(x^+)$ denote the left and right hand limits of $g$ respectively. Let $A$ be the set of points where $g$ is not continuous. Then for any $x\in A$, there is a rational, say, $f(x)$ such that $g(x^-)\lt f(x)\lt g(x^+)$. For $x_1\lt x_2$, we have that $g(x_1^+)\leq g(x_2^-)$. Thus $f(x_1)\neq f(x_2)$ if $x_1\neq x_2$. This shows an injection between $A$ and a subset of the rationals. Since the rationals are countable, $A$ is countable, being a subset of a countable set.    Is my work okay? Are there better/cleaner ways of approaching it? How can I find the codes related to a function in GAP? When I use "??" in front of the name of function there is no help, so I want to find the code of function among packages. How did the Community user earn the Civic Duty badge? Apparently, .  How the heck did that happen? I have several entries in my list of references that include of the order of 40 authors. Is there a way to make bibtex automatically reduce these lists to e.g. the first name + "et al."?  I don't want to edit the BibTeX entries manually and I cannot use biblatex. If at all possible I would also make as little changes as possible to the bibliography style.  There are similar questions, but none of those had a concise answer:       natbib e.g. seems to change only the reference within the text, but not the entry in the bibliography.  EDIT: I am using \bibliographystyle{unsrt} as style definition. How do I delete totem's history? How do I delete totem's history displayed in it's main menu in Natty? For example if I don't want anyone to know I'm watching... ehem Simpsons a lot?  I've tried  but this doesnt work for Totem.