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GrammarTalk 4 - 19 May 2008 - Main.ClaireOSullivan
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< | | | | Eben made many corrections, in 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?"
I was curious what Eben and others had to say about this construction. Unlike a mere typo, this construction comes out in people's papers because it's common in colloquial speech. But more than that, I would say that it has now achieved a status of sounding correct to native American English ears. And I would even go so far as to say that it is close to having achieved a "correct" status in written English prose, if it is not there already. Eben clearly disagrees with this proposition. My questions are: | | | I happen to alternate between the male and female neuter in my own writing, because I understand that number-disagreement is unacceptable to many readers, including most of the important ones (e.g., judges, lawyers, professors). But I'm trying to suggest not that we should have number-disagreement in our writing (because that's distracting), but rather that the pronoun "they" is steadily gaining a secondary grammatical identity in which its grammatical number is one, in constructions like those we've been discussing. Writing lags behind oral linguistic innovation, as you say, but in this case the oral innovation happened long ago and my impression is that it is close to becoming acceptable in writing, as well. This is what I was soliciting agreement or disagreement on (to appropriately end this post with a sentence ending in a preposition).
-- MichaelBerkovits - 19 May 2008 | |
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I hope your prediction turns out to be correct, Mike, and "their" and "they" take on second meanings as singular gender-neutral pronouns. While I know it is incorrect to use "their" or "they" as singular pronouns in formal writing (and I do try to catch myself, though often unsuccessfully) in casual writing and speech I use them that way all the time. It definitely sounds awkward to me to use "one," "someone" or "a person" and then get stuck with the "he or she." I also tend to use "she" as a neuter or flip back and forth between "he" and "she," but I agree that it reads a bit unnaturally as well.
As a sidenote, in trying to write this post my shaky grasp of grammatical rules has become painfully clear. It's interesting (and disconcerting) that I've learned the grammatical rules of the other languages I've studied, but always just played it by ear in English.
-- ClaireOSullivan - 19 May 2008 | | | |
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