I am not fond of using — or writers using — ’she’ in place of a pronoun that is inclusive of both genders. (English doesn’t have one, ‘he’ serves the purpose pretty well.) Call me old-fashioned, but this is tokenism. Where does it stop? Since ‘women’ is obviously derivative of ‘men’, should we now change it to womyn? Oh, wait…. But now, either the NYTimes‘ style guide or the Pope has caught on, and is busily turning the (don’t you wish it was so) asexual Catholic Church into something rather more feminine, along the lines of Mother Nature, probably.

“If you love Jesus, love the church,” the Pope said during a homily at an outdoor Mass here this morning that was attended by hundreds of thousands of Catholics, many of them teenagers. “Do not be discouraged by the sins and failings of some of her members.

Typo? Sure hope so. I mean, I would hate to find out that there was a secret worldwide conspiracy by language-tool software vendors to reinvent the English language in hugger-mugger.