When I was a young lad, my mother - apparently in some kind of attempt to dissuade me from using the third person singular female pronoun - would tell me, "'she' is the cat's mother!"
She (oh, whoops) didn't succeed very well. She (whoops again) has also made it quite difficult to take the Charles Aznavour song, or indeed the Elvis Costello version as used on one of my all-time favourite films Notting Hill, remotely seriously. After all, I now have alternative lyrics, for the first six syllables at least...
