Gillian Burlingham writes to say that her partner Sariya has figured out why dinosaurs went extinct: they were all “he” and “him” . Just read any kids book or watch any kids’ video on dinos and you’ll see, Gillian says.
(I know, I know, if you asked the writers they would probably say that using forms of HE — he, him, his — in such cases is just treating HE as the 3sg generic human pronoun. But that’s a usage practice that has been very hard to justify for many decades, especially in children’s books, where the readers will take HE to denote males.)
So the dinosaurs in the world of children’s fiction endured their celibacy or enjoyed their same-sex revels (discreetly out of view of the kids, of course; think of the children!), but just as anti-gay groups warn about same-sex partnerships in real human beings, the dinosaurs had no way of reproducing, so the species died out.
So sad, and so unnecessary.
