> I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and

> I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it's illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager. Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use "he" in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness. But for the ambiguous case, if it's talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don't know, it'd still be very weird to not use "they".