1526 and All That.

1526 isn't really all that significant except for one thing. Oh well, of course if you google 1526 you can find at least seventeen significant things that happened that year, although the first English translation of the Bible seems fairly top of the list.

No, here's the thing. According to last week's New Scientist, 'they' has been used as a singular pronoun to avoid specifying gender, since 1526.
The reason this struck me as more interesting than what the Higgs Boson was doing this week (moonlighting as an inflaton it seems) is that I was having a discussion with a German person a couple of weeks ago. He claimed to have been taught in school that it was a rule of correct English to use 'he' where gender is not specified.
'Nonsense!' I said (though not out loud), 'using 'he' is a function of attitude, not grammar, besides which, we were always taught to use 'they' as a singular pronoun.'
I have always felt an aversion to stating the bloody obvious, thus didn't add,
'...and by the way I AM English.'

Kevin's macbook has died again, this time seemingly to do with the logic board. I'm thinking we should send in the Higgs Boson to sort it out. On Voyager, as a last resort, it always seemed an option to do a baryon sweep. This might be what is needed. I'm not sure how it works since baryons are particles that appear to travel backwards in time, however it always worked for Captain Janeway.

Ignorance is bliss and thus, some blissful part of the United States has pictures of Hillary in a red circle with a line across her and the words, 'Stay out of my village bitch.'
Perhaps it's still 1526 there.
We must hope that Osama bin Barrak never has to come across any racial abuse of this ilk. And in fact he won't because that would be rightly deemed to fuel racial hatred. Hatred of women is, of course, irrelevant.
In the UK, the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill seeks to ban extreme forms of porn such as necrophilia and bestiality - oh and SOME snuff - but not sexual violence against women. There is a well-written and in-depth analysis of this here, there's nothing I can add.