Canada and the US: two countries separated by a common language. - -teD - Original Message From: J O Skip Robinson Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 14:21 To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Reply To: IBM Mainframe Discussion List Subject: Re: OT STCK question
My head is about to explode. In US English grammar, 'everyone' is and always has been singular; 'they' is and always has been plural. I'm not talking about 'logical reference', just grammatical construction. There's a big difference. In UK English, it's common to say 'the committee are'. In US English, we say 'the committee is' even though there are multiple people involved. In US we adhere to grammatical agreement; in UK, logical agreement may prevail. I don't know about Canadian English. I have no problem with 'they/them' as genderless generic pronouns. But failure of number agreement is linguistic cacophony. . . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 626-302-7535 Office 323-715-0595 Mobile jo.skip.robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Robert A. Rosenberg Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 7:37 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: OT STCK question At 11:19 -0500 on 06/11/2015, Paul Gilmartin wrote about Re: OT STCK question: >On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 10:47:39 -0500, Mike Schwab wrote: > >>I use they all the time as the genderless pronoun. A supervisor >>suggested he, I changed it to (s)he. >> >Of course, like all pronouns, it should assimilate its number, >singular, from its antecedent. A form both politically and gramatically >correct is: > > Everyone thinks they is being politically correct. Shouldn't that be "Everyone thinks they ARE being politically correct"? Everyone and they (?) are plural while "is" is singular - Thus the change to plural "are". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
