“How’s the writing going, Sasha? You haven’t said much about it for a while.”

“Funny you should ask, Denis. I’ve been doing a bit of pondering about and researching into how folk are addressed as regards titles, honorifics and pronouns. Most of you are aware that I regard most of the plethora of so called preferred pronouns to be complete bullshit that I simply won’t engage with. In my view folk are entitled to call themselves whatever they like, but they are not entitled to demand that I belittle myself by using bastardised, substandard English. However, I recently came across for the first time the Mx honorific or title whose history seems to date back to nineteen sixty-five. It’s pronounced mix or mux. The latter sounds derogatory to me, but I can go with mix. It’s a non gendered version of Mr, Mrs, Ms and even Miss. Mx makes far more sense than anything else I’ve ever come across in this context.

“Slightly differently, other than you which in standard usage has become both singular and plural, although like everyone did once the shepherds still use the older thee forms as singulars and you as a plural only, the use of a plural is grammatically unacceptable in the place of a singular pronoun. Such usage is a solecism in the true sense of the word. I’ve always considered English needs non gendered third person singular pronouns when referring to an individual of unknown sex. It has become the practice, unacceptable to users of quality English, to use them when they don’t know whether to use him or her. Since it is neither really suitable nor acceptable for a human being perhaps hem would work. His, hers and its present similar problems and theirs is not good, another solecism, so maybe hets would do. He, she and it again are problematic and they is yet another solecism, so maybe xhe? I’m really open to suggestions on that last one.”

“Why do you care, Sasha?” asked a puzzled Alf.

“I don’t give interviews, so what I say doesn’t matter because there’s no record of it. However, I do write rather a lot of fiction some of which which gets printed and even more gets posted online on various sites. Once either is done there is a permanent record out there of what I have written, so I do my damnedest to write work of as high a standard as I can, and I just can’t make myself refer to an individual of unknown sex as them. As things stand it has to be him or her. Whenever appropriate I use the English language default which is him, but it’s not always appropriate. Like I said it is not acceptable, but no appropriate non gendered words exist. As a result I end up doing a lot of rewriting to work around the problem. It would be good if appropriate words existed. That’s all.