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GrammarTalk 13 - 21 May 2008 - Main.AdamGold
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Eben made many corrections on students' papers involving number-agreement. For example, "Why does everyone ignore their passions?," as opposed to, say, "Why does everyone ignore (his) / (her) / (his or her) passions?" | | | Andrew, I'm not sure I understand the takeaway, but I do appreciate the point about various occupations and characteristics being gendered one way or the other, not all of them male. But I submit that many occupations which are currently split 50-50 by gender in real life (college students, for example, where females make up slightly more than 50% of the pool) retain a default male connotation. So, the sentence "The college student did his taxes on time" is easier to process than "The college student did her taxes on time." Now, of course, this is nothing more than my intuition. However, it could be tested experimentally, and I suspect that one would be able to show that cognitive processing of the first version is easier than the second. If true, this would be an interesting result, given that America today is roughly equally split between male and female college students.
-- MichaelBerkovits - 20 May 2008 | |
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I am with Eben et al on this one as well. I do not think that we can make any generalizations about what is or is not incorporated into vernacular, especially given the inherent regional nature of "vernacular."
More importantly, our profession is one of precision and, especially after learning the estates and future interests unit in property, it is delightful (for grammar nerds like me) to see how much comma placement is the name of the game.
ralph wiggum said it best --> me fail english? thats unpossible.
-- AdamGold? - 21 May 2008 | | | |
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| Revision 13 | r13 - 21 May 2008 - 06:01:58 - AdamGold? |
| Revision 12 | r12 - 20 May 2008 - 23:11:10 - MichaelBerkovits |
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