Re: He/She/?

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Dec 1999, Fabian wrote:
>
> > > It's already happened, despite my best efforts to tstop it among my
> > > students:
> > >
> > > he= masculine
> > > she= feminine
> > > they= neutral
> >
> > Why stop it? It was normal until the 18th century, when prescriptivists
> > decided that a single grammar ought to work for both English and Latin, and
> > so tried telling everyone that singular 'they' was wrong. I like to think of
> > it as teh original English langauge re-asserting itself.
>
> I don't mind it in spoken English, but if they're going to pretend to be
> business men and business women they're going to ahve to learn to sound
> educated, and in this century (and maybe for a bit of the next) that means
> knowing where to put the fricking apostrophes, how to conjugate strong
> verbs, and remembering that "they" refers to more than one person.
That, of course, begs the question:  what is "sounding educated"?  Does
that mean adherance to some preconceived standard for the language?
Does that mean having gone through so many years of schooling?  I mean,
it's not a clear question.  In as much as there isn't a single person who speaks
the official standard language (and never has been), I think we can be a little
lenient on those who often and consistently use the so-called singular "they".

In other words, you can't say "sounding educated" is someone who makes a
perfect score on an arbitrary list of grammatical usages (would splitting infinitives
be on the list, a phenomenon which has *always* been normal English usage?).

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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