Re: Another stupid singular "their"

Stephen Calder <calder9@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dontbother wrote:

But there is no shame in making judgments about the quality of
usages. We all do it all the time. Some draw the line at
ungrammaticality, others at non-idiomaticity, still others at
infrequency of use. Those of us who choose to draw the line elsewhere
are not unaware of how ready some are ready to accept stupidity and
cacaphony as normal and even good usage. But that is of no moment. We
just like to bitch about things we know we can change when we use
language, but we don't really care whether anyone else changes the
way they use language. It's all a matter of taste above the
substratum of the grammar one learned at one's mother's knee.

As a prescriptivist I pick my battles; I would rather spend energy on
those that appear to be winnable. Examples: would of, loose for lose,
lead instead of led.

You're an optimist, I see. I don't think any of these battles are winnable.
Gresham's Law operates in different guises. In one way, that's what the
English Next report "Why global English may mean the end of 'English as a
Foreign Language'" demonstrates when it talks about English as Lingua
Franca.

Singular "their" makes your toes curl but it actually provides a
natural solution to an otherwise intractable problem in English. This
battle, like that about "hopefully", is lost.

I wonder what the ratio of entertainment creators to entertainment
consumers is. In primitive societies it's probably no higher than 1:2, but
in the most technologically advanced societies, it's probably more on the
order of 1:20,000. In my EFL classes, I have usually had a group of
interested and already motivated students of about 10-20% of the class, on
average. I always thought that was very high.

No, but they do induce spitting at the speaker's shoes and on the
writer's page. Stupidity is still stupidity, even when millions
accept it as the new normalcy.

Canute.

I didn't get to read much about King Canute, so I don't understand the
allusion.



--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
Native speaker of American English, posting from Taiwan
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
.

Relevant Pages

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