Thursday, October 26, 2006
No surrender
Pam Nelson has a note on her blog lamenting the cave-in by James Kilpatrick on the sloppy use of plural pronouns with singular nouns. Mr. Kilpatrick has given up the fight against using “they” and “their” as pronouns for “everyone.”
But Pam Nelson isn’t ready to surrender. She writes: “As long as we use a singular verb for "everyone," we should use also a singular pronoun.”
I’m with you, Ms. Nelson. We ought not to let sloppy writers win on this.
Yes, usage changes, and yes, this error is widespread. But so are many errors. Sometimes it appears that half the writers in the nation’s papers don’t know when to use “lay” instead of “laid” or why “give the report to Jim and I” is bad grammar.
It’s the job of editors—people who do know grammar, or should—to correct such atrocities, not to accept them because “everybody does it.”
Pardon me if this sounds elitist, but standards of usage and grammar ought to be set and maintained by people who are knowledgeable and competent, not by the lazy, the ignorant and the incompetent.
