Hi, Thursday, December 9, 2004, 12:33:42 AM, Paul wrote:
> I'm surprised that the Brits are more willing to bend the rules of > grammar than are the Americans in regard to use of the plural pronoun > "their" with a singular antecedent. I would guess that this is only > true of informal communication. I wouldn't be surprised if the London > Times subscribes to the same policy as the NY Times. Nothing about The Times would surprise me. It is a Murdoch paper, after all. In the last 10-15 years I've only read it once - about 2 weeks ago when I bought it by accident. It didn't seem much like a guardian of traditional grammatical values. > In American > academic writing, addressing the reader as "you" is eschewed. Instead, > the pronoun "one" is preferred: As usual it's a question of register and of what is appropriate for the situation. I'm not American or academic enough to know much about it, but in general one eschews both 'one' and 'eschew' in British English these days. It sounds rather pompous, unnatural and old-fashioned. -- Cheers, Bob
