Over the past few days I've noticed a number of instances in which a British person has referred to a child (whose sex is unknown) with the pronoun "it", as in the following:

The smaller child has its eyes closed, and the bigger one its eyes open. (celebrity "news" story, LINK. Actually referring to one boy and one girl, but the writer does not appear to know which is which)

each child has its moment of glory as it goes up to collect a certificate proving its status as a "Young Egyptologist" (Swansea University, LINK).

To me the singular pronoun "it" sounds very strange when used to refer to a human, especially in the latter case where "it" is used multiple times; my initial feeling is that the use of "it" implies nonhuman characteristics (the only regular use I can think of hearing is offensive disparaging reference to someone of ambiguous gender). Oddly I don't have any such problem with singular "they" which seems like perhaps a more common (US English) way to avoid the "he/she" dilemma.  Indeed, google search for this use (e.g. ..."child has its"...) seems to give an abundance of UK sites once other kinds of cases are discarded (like "Parenting any exceptional child has its challenges", or reference to "child" that is not human, such as node/hierarchical structures).

So it's probably just that "it" is more acceptable to refer to a child in UK English. A quick scan of some other options suggests that this may not be true of adults. For example, "person has its" doesn't seem to give the same kind of results (most of the "neutral references" tend to be from non-English-speaking countries, or referring to a legal "person" which may or may not be human).  Nor does "human", and interestingly "teenager" doesn't seem to do it either. So maybe this use of "it" is only OK before a child hits puberty. But it's OK to use "it" to refer to it before then.

I'm a huge fan of local newspapers, and in my part of London I have a good half dozen or more weekly papers to choose from.  But they do not always present their news in the clearest and most sensible manner.  For example, check out the following from Ham & High (i.e. Hampstead and Highgate) March 20, 2008 exactly as it appeared in the paper:




I don't care how incompetent the donkey was at preventing crime, surely it doesn't deserve to be crucified!  And as usual for London it appears that a large mob has turned out for the public execution.


Of course this is actually just a classic example of silly layout, as you can see by the wider angle:

Previous / Next

Now and then (i.e. "all the time") I read blogs or other web content that has a handy navigation tool at the bottom of some pages, like the broken version illustrated above. But there's some maddening inconsistency about the way these things are used. Sometimes older content is referred to by "Previous" (because after all, it was written earlier, and therefore previous in time) and other times by "Next" (because in many cases one starts reading at the present, and therefore earlier posts have now become later in the reading sequence). Coupled with this is the problem of browser-based navigation which uses forward or back (sensibly mapped onto "Next" and "Previous" respectively) regardless of the sort of link one may have used to get there.

Sometimes you get sensible labels like "Older" or "Newer", or numbered entries (a system that doesn't work all that well for regularly updated push-down sorts of content, I suppose), but a lot of the time you don't. It's especially messy when the individual doing the browsing has many pages open at once, likes to navigate using multiple methods, and is totally scatterbrained.