Brad Beyenhof wrote: > On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Wed, March 5, 2008 7:39 pm, Ralph Shumaker wrote >> > But then again, [sigh], if it catches on enough, it will become normal, >> > and once normal, then correct. [sigh] >> >> NEVER!!! >> >> But you're right. My 4th Grade teacher (Eisenhower administration) was >> still fighting the good fight, insisting that "everyone," "anyone," >> someone," and "none" (being a contraction of "no one") were singular. The >> problem with that is, with gender pronouns, you end up offending women >> with "everyone should bring his raincoat," and performing a cumbersome >> abomination with "everyone should bring his or her raincoat." "Their" >> spares you the embarrassment of gender, so most say "... bring _their_ >> raincoat" which is plural. > > I was under the impression (don't know if I ever heard it in an > educational setting) that "their" had become the gender-neutral > singular pronoun... kind of like how "sie" in German can be "she," > "you," or "they" depending on context and capitalization. So it's not > that "everyone" is treated as plural, it's that "their" is treated as > singular. > >> Another ugly trend is the loss of the plural forms of to be. I can't tell >> you how many times I hear supposedly edicated people say: > > "educated," maybe? :-D > >> There's three reasons we shouldn't do that. >> >> Of course, this should be: >> There are three reasons ... > > I think that the main reason for this is just laziness in speech. I > tend to be the type that composes sentences in my head before saying > them out loud (which I suppose is why I often say little), but a lot > of people these days start talking before they have a thought fully > formed. People start off a sentence with "there's," not yet having > considered the multi-item list they're about to come up with > on-the-fly. >
In a grammatical pinch, maybe you could defend the construction as using an understood ellipsis "a number, namely". Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
