A note on Personal Pronouns

More Mathematics and Language

When mathematicians need a new concept they simply assign new symbols like i, e, -, pi, 0 etcetera.

So why do linguists have such problems refining personal pronouns? I'm helping to revise the Bylaws for a technical society and to be politically correct we have to replace each occurrence of the old chauvinistic "he" with "he/she". Why can't we just invent a new genderless pronoun like "shesh" or even "heshe"? This hardly takes genius, but we've been arguing about it for decades.

And why do I have to be referred to as a "Chair"? A chair is an inanimate item you sit on. Are we that short of words? What's wrong with Chairperson or President or any one of a bunch of other synonyms?