THE footballer person of the year

[Greystache]

There are some people who object to the word person because it has the word, you guessed it, 'son' in it which gives it a masculine overtone. They prefer perbody.

I've seen that in junior cricket. They can't call the kids batsmen anymore, so it became batsperson, but some people have claimed it's unconsciously sexist, so they have to use the neutral batters. What's even better is when they refer to the craft of batting it's referred to as battersship.

Rather than turning the English language into non-sensical gibberish to placate the vain permanently outraged, we may as well start a new language that only has a few hundred words to avoid offence.