On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Benjamin Caplan <celestialcognit...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> I endorse murphy and goethe if ey agree. >> >> "they". Spivak doesn't change plurals, for the simple reason that >> there's a perfectly adequate word for it already. > > I read this as meaning "For each of murphy and goethe, I endorse em if e > agrees". By contrast, if e had written "I endorse murphy and goethe if > they agree", then that would mean "I endorse both murphy and goethe if > they both agree".
Way too ambiguous to work. In particular, the sentence is only grammatically correct if "ey" is interpreted as "they".
