The Epicene Pronouns

The who? The huh? Epicene means 'gender-neutral' - so it describes the pronoun you want, which English doesn't have, when you want to refer to a person of either gender instead of saying 'he or she' in full, or calling a person 'it'.

Here's a list compiled by Dennis Baron of all the proposals that have been made over the last hundred years or so for a pronoun to serve this purpose. You'll notice none of them have caught on. (My favourite is h'orsh'it.)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm

Between you and me, the answer to this conundrum is undoubtedly to say 'they', which everyone does anyway. If anyone tells you this is hard to understand or leads to terrible ambiguity, point out that no-one has had trouble with the plural/singular 'you' since 'thou' died out.