Tech Dogg's Dox Tox

Posted in Work at 12:40:48 PM on 31 July 2007  |  Comments: 3

Does this sound bad to you: Someone started all this, and I'm gonna find them.

How about this: If anybody heard this story, they'd probably say it was untrue.

Or how about this: Every dentist and doctor in the city will be asked to donate some of their time to the free clinic.

More often, I'm hearing a plural pronoun used with a singular antecedent. Strictly speaking, or according to strict grammarians anyway, the three preceding sentences should read:

Someone started all this, and I'm gonna find him.

If anybody heard this story, he'd probably say it was untrue.

Every dentist and doctor in the city will be asked to donate some of his time to the free clinic.

You can guess why everyone is using a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent: they don't want to sound politically incorrect, or worse, they don't want to sound pedantic, or even worse, they don't want to sound pedantic and they're just plain lazy.

If you "correctly" use "him" only, you sound politically incorrect (or lazy), as in, every dentist and doctor in the city will be asked to donate some of his time to the free clinic. That's the custom anyway. Right or wrong.

If you use "him or her", you sound stuffy, pedantic, as in every dentist and doctor in the city will be asked to donate some of his or her time to the free clinic.

If you use "her" only, as in every dentist and doctor in the city will be asked to donate some of her time to the free clinic, you sound like Betty Friedan or maybe Divine.

What we're all trying to do is come up with a neutral pronoun that doesn't carry a lot of unintended social or political baggage. Short of creating a whole new pronoun, we appear to be bestowing the plural pronoun here with some verbal heft. If the trend continues, and I think it will, linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists might find themselves slamming into each other on the same verbal track sometime soon.

Comments: 3