ABSTRACT
Today, homosexual will appear in most legal texts and some academic texts but almost never in popular fiction or nonfiction writing. The difficulty would arise if there were any widespread popularity of academic texts deploying this construction, necessitating translation into other languages. In French, Spanish, Italian, and many other related European languages, adjectives and verbs in a sentence are required to agree with the sex of the associated noun and are spelled differently to do so. An example would be the correspondence sent home from primary schools alerting parents to the imminent immunization of their children. The letters are mass produced and sent without distinction to the parents of both boys and girls and currently deploy “they” instead of “he or she.” The English language, in the world of academic writing and speaking, follows the same frustrating pattern as English language spoken by ordinary folk—which is to say that it evolves upwards from the ground not downwards from ivory towers.
