DURING the past several decades, a sometimes raucous but generally silent revolution has been taking place within the English language. This revolution — call it an induced evolution, if you may — is the much welcome shift of English toward nondiscriminatory grammar, structure and form. Fanned by the civil libertarian and feminist movements in the major English-speaking countries, this movement has substantially freed the inherently sexist, chauvinist language of Chaucer and Shakespeare from some of its most vexing linguistic biases. For the first time in its over 1,500-year history, and well in keeping with its role as today's global language, English is now consciously nondiscriminatory in its more formal forms. Informally, of course, it still has to find ways of cleaning up some more of the intractable semantic vestiges that prevent it from expressing total equality and respect for all individuals.
