{"id":3783,"date":"2014-09-17T07:09:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T13:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=3783"},"modified":"2014-09-18T20:34:24","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T02:34:24","slug":"from-the-outpost-on-questions-of-grammar-to-each-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/09\/from-the-outpost-on-questions-of-grammar-to-each-their-own\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Outpost: On questions of grammar, to each their own?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

We appear to be stumbling into another war in the Middle East. Pro football is buckling under the weight of its own violence. In Montana politics, the only issue appears to be whether Steve Daines wants to destroy the country overnight by gutting environmental laws or whether he is willing to wait a few decades for global warming to do the job.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s talk about grammar.<\/p>\n

In Darrell Ehrlick\u2019s column in the\u00a0Sunday\u00a0Billings Gazette, he wrote this paragraph: \u201cThat\u2019s because everyone has an opinion. And everyone thinks theirs is correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure whether Mr. Ehrlick was following a trend or merely being sloppy, but he violated a grammar rule that has been around for a couple of hundred years. The rule is both logical and pedantically appealing: If a noun takes a singular verb, it must also take a singular pronoun. Writers can\u2019t refer to the singular \u201ceveryone\u201d with the plural pronoun \u201ctheir.\u201d<\/p>\n

My freshmen composition students wrestle with such problems every semester. When one of my colleagues came into my classroom last week during a harangue on apostrophes, he warned my students that journalists can\u2019t resist grammatical nagging.<\/p>\n

Guilty as charged. Newspaper editors and English teachers may be the last line of defense against slovenly language. When the language goes, civilization goes with it.<\/p>\n

That lesson hit home when Kevin Drum, a respected, if liberal, blogger for Mother Jones, announced last week that he was giving up the pronoun fight.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have gone over to the dark side,\u201d Drum wrote. \u201cI’ve been on the edge for a while, playing passive-aggressive games with my copy editor, but I guess I might as well just fess up. I now routinely use \u2018they\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 as gender-neutral singular pronouns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drum\u2019s post immediately drew a huffy response from Sonny Bunch at the Washington Free Beacon, who wrote, \u201cThis is foolishness born of ideology. There\u2019s a perfectly acceptable option: Just use \u2018he\u2019 as the generic pronoun, as is grammatically correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

That point is more debatable than he may realize. The use of \u201che\u201d as a generic pronoun goes back at least to the 18th century, but the use of \u201cthey\u201d and \u201ctheir\u201d as singular pronouns goes back even further. Scholars have found it as early as the 15th century, and it shows up in Chaucer, Shakespeare and Thackeray.<\/p>\n

The issue came to a head in the 1970s, or thereabouts, when feminists determined that the generic \u201che\u201d was sexist. English professors struggled for alternatives such as \u201che or she,\u201d \u201cs\/he\u201d and even \u201cze.\u201d When I was in college in the 1970s, I had one textbook that alternated \u201che\u201d and \u201cshe\u201d as the gender-neutral pronoun in each chapter.<\/p>\n

An informal and often violated truce broke out with the tacit agreement that \u201cEveryone thinks theirs is correct\u201d is OK in casual conversation and informal writing but should be avoided in formal work. Stylebooks still often recommend this path. The much-respected usage expert Bryan Garner warns that reckless use of pronouns could cause some people to doubt your literacy.

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n

The truce broke down with the invention of the Internet, when copy editors began losing their jobs by the thousands, and the distinction between formal and informal writing was stretched beyond recognition.<\/p>\n

So I tell my students that when they are confronted with a sentence like \u201cEverybody has ______ book,\u201d they have three options: Use \u201ctheir\u201d and risk getting dinged by traditionalists (like me), use \u201chis\u201d and risk getting labeled as sexist and old-fashioned, or use \u201chis or her\u201d and risk getting nailed as pedantic and wordy.<\/p>\n

So much confusion results that we wind up with badly baked sentences like this one, which appeared opposite Ehrlick\u2019s column in\u00a0Sunday\u2019s\u00a0\u201cVoice of the Reader\u201d: \u201cIf a candidate \u2018approves this message\u2019 and it\u2019s a slam on his\/her opponent, consider why they didn\u2019t use that air time and money to offer an idea of their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or you get headlines like this from last week\u2019s Huffington Post: \u201cThis is the Second Week in a Row that an American Teacher Accidentally Shot Themselves at School.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, is this a fight worth having? When even the language pros on public radio\u2019s \u201cA Way with Words\u201d argue that \u201cthey\u201d is a perfectly acceptable singular pronoun, I draw a deep breath and wonder whether I should devote my energies to more pressing issues, such as comma splices.<\/p>\n

\u201cComma splice\u201d is a grammatical term for what happens when a writer uses a lonely comma to join two sentences that could easily stand on their own. It\u2019s like trying to splice two lengths of lead pipe with a stick of chewing gum: A comma just isn\u2019t strong enough to do the job.<\/p>\n

The result is sentences like this: \u201cHe also won\u2019t be able to give specific legal advice, that\u2019s a job for another attorney.\u201d<\/p>\n

I regret to report that this sentence also came from Ehrlick\u2019s\u00a0Sunday column.<\/p>\n

We are doomed.<\/p>\n

David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We appear to be stumbling into another war in the Middle East. Pro football is buckling under the weight of its own violence. In Montana politics, the only issue appears to be whether Steve Daines wants to destroy the country overnight by gutting environmental laws or whether he is willing to wait a few decades […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[60,306,114,1339,1340,1341],"class_list":["post-3783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","tag-billings-gazette","tag-darrell-ehrlick","tag-david-crisp","tag-grammar","tag-kevin-drum","tag-sonny-bunch","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}