"For more than 200 years, writers have sought this missing English word. English has no pronoun that refers to 'either a man or a woman,' no word to use when gender is unknown, or irrelevant, or when it needs to be hidden... [T]here's no singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun. None. Which seems strange, because there are so many times when we need one."

I had no idea that people had been searching for, inventing, and arguing over pronouns for so long. The author successfully presents 40 years of research in this book, diving deep into the history of generic 'he,' singular 'they,' 'his or her,' generic 'she,' 'it,' 'one,' and even new pronouns. (Did you know that over 200 words have been invented in the hopes of filling this language void? I sure didn't.) The author eventually makes the argument that the "missing" word isn't missing at all; it's singular 'they,' which has been used (to grammarians' dismay) for hundreds of years.

Being a research piece, the book is a little dry and occasionally repetitive. But for a word nerd like me, it was fascinating to see the history of language politics, proving that words indeed matter.