Someone did this and then They did that.....?

[Joe Guy]

If I ever see my high school English teacher again I'm gonna smack them!!

[Big RR]

Of course, the OED is based on British usage, and if we followed that we'd say "The crowd are angry", "The committee meet tomorrow" and "Germany are winners of the prize", instead of using the singular form of the verb for the collective noun, not to mention some of the pronunciation differences. That being said, I'm in agreement with Scooter; except in formal writing, the rules can be relaxed so long as the meaning would be clear to the person hearing/reading it.

Joe--what more would you need from the OED writers beyond "now widely accepted both in speech and in writing"? The writers of the OED have no authority to declare something right or wrong, only to acknowledge that it's accepted (acceptable) usage. Indeed, I'm not aware that the English language has any authority that can declare anything correct or incorrect (some other languages, such as French and Spanish have academies that can act as such authorities, but English does not); everything is based on acceptance.

[Joe Guy]

Joe--what more would you need from the OED writers beyond "now widely accepted both in speech and in writing"? The writers of the OED have no authority to declare something right or wrong, only to acknowledge that it's accepted (acceptable) usage. Indeed, I'm not aware that the English language has any authority that can declare anything correct or incorrect (some other languages, such as French and Spanish have academies that can act as such authorities, but English does not); everything is based on acceptance.

I guess I was wrong. I thought there were rules of grammar and acceptance of incorrect grammar doesn't mean that the rules have changed.

I didn't think them Oxford people had the final word. In order to be consistent, if a person from Oxford read this paragraph, they would have to accept them too.

[Big RR]

Well, I would think there are generally accepted rules of grammar, and grammatical usages that would generally be considered unacceptable. But I am not aware of any body that can promulgate such rules or declare them "changed" (are you?); they change when people accept that they have changed.

[Joe Guy]

I've decided to accept the following explanation from this link...

Sticklers have to face reality, though. For example, noted grammarian Bryan Garner has this to say about writers' tendencies to use their to refer to these singular pronouns: “Disturbing though these developments may be to purists, they’re irreversible. And nothing that a grammarian says will change them

[Lord Jim]

Well, let's see what the folks at Merriam-Webster have to say:

The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts. This gives you the option of using the plural pronouns where you think they sound best, and of using the singular pronouns (as he, she, he or she, and their inflected forms) where you think they sound best.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they

Looks like they pretty much agree with the white wig types at OED...

Well, I would think there are generally accepted rules of grammar, and grammatical usages that would generally be considered unacceptable. But I am not aware of any body that can promulgate such rules or declare them "changed"

I agree Big RR; we have no single such source for grammatical usages. My point in citing some well known and generally respected sources on this topic is to demonstrate that those who have been claiming the substitution of "they" for "he or she" is "incorrect" or "unacceptable" are what I like to call, "wrong"....

This usage is not just widely used, it is viewed as perfectly acceptable and correct usage.

[Sue U]

I am not aware of any body that can promulgate such rules or declare them "changed" (are you?); they change when people accept that they have changed.

Oh, I think there are probably several organizations and publications and reference guides that may beg to differ, as they are widely recognized as arbiters of correct (American) English grammar and usage (see also this other dude).

Nevertheless, we might consider the view of no less a linguist than Geoffrey Nunberg, who notes:

Linguists, of course, have been arguing for a long time that the rules of traditional grammar have no scientific or logical justification, and that the only reason grammarians consider certain usages "correct" is that they happen to have been adopted by the privileged classes in the past. As the linguists Anthony Kroch and Cathy Small put it in a recent article, "prescriptivism [that is, traditional grammar] is simply the ideology by which the guardians of the standard language impose their linguistic norms on people who have perfectly serviceable norms of their own." We will see that this view is not entirely justified. Nonetheless, the linguists have won over a large part of the educational establishment, so that "correct English" has come to mean no more than "standard English," the English spoken by the educated middle class. A few radicals have gone on to argue that traditional grammar, as an instrument of racism and class oppression, has no place in the school curriculum. But more often educators counsel an enlightened hypocrisy: standard English should be taught because there are still benighted employers who take stock in such things. This position is put concisely by Jim Quinn, whose American Tongue and Cheek is a lively and informative popularization of the linguists' views.

The fact remains that there is a way of writing that is necessary to success,
just as there are rules about which fork to use at an expensive restaurant.
And preparing children for success means preparing them to manipulate those
rules, just as they have to be taught to manipulate the salad fork and demitasse
spoon.

But if the rules of grammar are given no more justification than are the niceties of table manners, perhaps we should leave the teaching of them to finishing schools, especially since students know very well that imperfect grammar is not much of a stumbling block, even on the road to high office. Certainly instruction in grammar by modern methods does not lead to any deeper understanding of how to resolve the problems that arise incessantly when we struggle to put thoughts into words.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... unberg.htm

In that same 30-year-old essay, Nunberg takes a thoughtful approach to the problem presented in the OP, using it as an illustration of the evolution and frank politicization of grammar:

To see the state to which things have fallen, one need only compare Fowler with a modern composition text and a modern prescriptive grammarian on a vexed point of grammar -- the problem of which pronoun to use with an antecedent like each or anyone. Here is Fowler:

Each & the rest are all singular; that is undisputed; in a perfect language
there would exist pronouns & possessives that were of as doubtful gender
as they & yet were, like them, singular; i.e., it would have words meaning
him-or-her, himself-or-herself, his-or-her. But just as French lacks our power
of distinguishing (without additional words) between his, her, and its, so we
lack the French power of saying in one word his-or-her. There are three
makeshifts: -- A, as anybody can see for himself or herself; B}, as anybody
can see for themselves; & C, as anybody can see for himself. No-one who
can help it chooses A; it is correct, & is sometimes necessary, but it is so
clumsy as to be ridiculous except when explicitness is urgent. . . . B is the
popular solution; it sets the literary man's teeth on edge & he exerts himself
to give the same meaning in some entirely different way if he is not prepared,
as he usually is, to risk C; but it should be recorded that the OED . . . refrains
from any word of condemnation. C is here recommended. It involves the
convention that where the matter of sex is not conspicuous or important he
and his shall be allowed to represent a person instead of a man, or say a
man (homo) instead of a man (vir). Whether that . . . is an arrogant demand
on the part of male England, everyone must decide for himself (or for himself
or herself, or for themselves).

Fowler's article is a model of the traditional grammatical method. He begins by acknowledging the problem, and then addresses it with arguments from precedent and analogy, being careful to distinguish between the grammatical questions that lie within his brief and the political questions that lie outside it. As in all good homilies, it is the method, not the text, that matters; read Fowler on this and you will have an idea of how he might come at a wholly different problem.

Now contrast the approach to the problem taken by the Harbrace College Handbook, a standard text in college composition classes since its publication, in 1941. Its great virtue is that it is ideally organized to meet the needs of a teacher who may have to correct two or three hundred pages of student writing every week. Inside the back cover of the book is a table in which grammatical errors are classified into family, genus, and species, and are assigned code numbers. The point at issue is listed as: "6b(1) Agreement: Pronoun and Antecedent: Man, each, etc. as antecedent." Whenever a student makes an anyone . . . they sort of error, the instructor need only write "6b(1)" in the margin, and the student is referred to the corresponding section of the text, in which this point of usage is explained. There he can read (I quote from the seventh edition and omit some example sentences):

In formal English, use a singular pronoun to refer to such antecedents as
man, woman, kind . . . anyone, someone, and nobody. In informal English,
plural pronouns are occasionally used to refer to such words.

Caution: Avoid illogical sentences that may result from strict adherence to this rule.

ILLOGICAL Since every one of the patients seemed discouraged, I told a joke to cheer him up.

BETTER Since all the patients seemed discouraged, I told a joke to cheer them up.

These bare instructions give no reason at all for choosing the singular pronoun. In fact, there is no mention of an error in the use of the plural, which is labeled not "incorrect" or "illogical" but merely "formal," as if the difference between plural and singular were on a level with the difference between cop and policeman, or horse and steed.

The entry does touch on a point that is quite interesting to theoretical linguists, to the effect that English grammar does not generally allow the singular pronoun with an antecedent like everyone when that antecedent is not in the same clause. But the Handbook says only that the sentence is "illogical," giving no indication of what point of logic is violated. What is the student to make of that, especially since the Handbook has not explained the use of the singular as being "logical" in the first place? The student who finds "6b(1)" cropping up on his compositions may learn to rectify the error, but only in the way he learns to rectify his misspellings: by rote, learning nothing else in the process.

The linguists are at least forthright in their rejection of linguistic morality. Their opponents, the defenders of traditional values, are more deceptive. They talk a great deal about morality, but in millenarian tones, as if the rules of grammar were matters of revealed truth rather than the tentative conclusions of thoughtful argument. Here is John Simon on the same point of grammar:

The fact that some people are too thickheaded to grasp, for example, that
"anyone" is singular, as the "one" in it plainly denotes, does not oblige those
who know better to tolerate "anyone can do as they please." The correct form
is, of course, "anyone may do as he pleases," but in America, in informal usage,
"can" has pretty much replaced "may" in this sense, and there is nothing more
to be done about it; but we cannot and must not let "one" become plural. That
way madness lies.

And don't let fanatical feminists convince you that it must be "as he or she
pleases," which is clumsy and usually serves no other purpose than that of
placating the kind of extremist who does not deserve to be placated. The
impersonal "he" covers both sexes.

For Simon, the whole matter is cut and dried, exactly as it is for the Harbrace College Handbook, except that his world is divided into the "thickheaded" and "those who know better." That last phrase is particularly telling, not just in its appeal to a reader's smug self-satisfaction but also because it shows that for Simon grammar really is a matter of knowing the rules, not of working them out. Indeed, he has written elsewhere: "There is, I believe, a morality of language: an obligation to preserve and nurture the niceties, the fine distinctions, that have been handed down to us." That is the credo of a czarist emigre, not an English grammarian. Johnson and Fowler did not regard themselves as mere keepers of the sacred flame.

Simon's shots at feminists are also instructive. For him, a commitment to correct grammar is naturally associated with a conservative ideology. Like William Safire and William Buckley, he seems to see good grammar as bathed in the same rosy glow that surrounds the other traditional institutions that liberal America has forsaken. This indicates a shift of some importance. For most of its history the English grammatical tradition has been associated with classical liberalism. Its earlier defenders, from Johnson to Auden and Orwell, would probably be distressed to learn that their standard had been taken up by the right. But, then, the ideal of grammar that the conservatives champion is much changed from what the earlier grammarians had in mind.

Simon is particularly shrill, but other writers on the state of the language are equally dogmatic. Edwin Newman and Richard Mitchell (the "Underground Grammarian") write books about the language that rarely, if ever, cite a dictionary or a standard grammar; evidently one just knows these things. William Safire is a different story. Affable and self-effacing ("I may not know much about grammar, but . . ."), he brings out of the woodwork readers who are less frequently snobs than enthusiasts, who exchange with him schoolmarm maxims and scraps of linguistic folklore. These are word-lovers who live to catch out the mighty in a misused whom ; though their zeal is commendable, their authority is suspect.

The point of traditional grammar was to demonstrate a way of thinking about grammatical problems that encouraged thoughtful attention to language, not to canonize a set of arbitrary rules and strictures. And in the absence of an academy, our authorities traditionally were chosen by the consensus of a public that recognized questions of grammar as worthy of constant consideration and revision. But the new attitudes toward grammar -- as evidenced by the ossification of the rules and the partisan tone of the discussion -- have put the whole matter on a different footing. Prescriptive grammar has passed out of the realm of criticism, where it sat for two hundred years, to become instead a branch of cultural heraldry. Here and there, people do write about the problems with wit and learning. I think of the linguists Dwight Bolinger and Edward Finegan. (Finegan's Attitudes Toward English Usage is a wonderfully fair-minded history of the English grammatical tradition.) And critics like Joseph Epstein, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and the late Dwight Macdonald have leavened their heat with a good deal of light. But these people have tiny constituencies compared with the educational apparatchiks who write the handbooks, or the pop grammarians, like Simon and Newman, who play to the galleries.

There's a lot more about the battles for language and usage generally; it's an interesting read.

[Big RR]

as they are widely recognized as arbiters of correct (American) English grammar and usage

and that's my point Sue, it's the recognition of the organizations, guides, whatever that makes them worthy of that claim; there is just no organization which can dictate rules applicable to the English language (American or British) the way academies of other languages (French, Italian, or Spanish, e.g.). There are clearly linguists and other scholars who will be given more credibility than others, but it's this recognition and the usage which governs, not the rules of some ordained academy.

[Gob]

correct (American) English grammar and usage

A contradiction in terms there.

[Big RR]

This from a country where the monarch refers to himself (or herself) as more than one person, "we" not "I".

[Gob]

Of course, the "majestic plural".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

[Sue U]

correct (American) English grammar and usage

A contradiction in terms there.

You speak your language, we'll speak ours.

[Big RR]

So it's been used by kings/queens, lower ranking nobility (even earls?) popes, and Margaret Thatcher. Seems like American English at least got one thing right.

edited to add:

re Thatcher,
- Why is Margaret Thatcher like a pound coin?
- Because she is thick, brassy and thinks she's a sovereign.

[Gob]

Lol!!

[rubato]

Of course, the "majestic plural".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'
Mark Twain

Someone who used the language to better effect than all English monarchs together.


yrs,
rubato

[Gob]

Someone who used the language to better effect than all English monarchs together.

You really are quite clueless aren't you?

[rubato]

You've never read Samuel Clemens. Apparently.


Worth a look.


"An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
Mark Twain

If you're up to it.



Yrs,
Rubato

[Econoline]

Language is a tool, a means to an end. In all of the "bad" examples given by Joe and by Meade, the intended meaning is quite clear: the tool has been used effectively, the end is achieved. Arguably, the substitution of the technically correct pronoun "he" would have resulted in less rather than more clarity. The use of "they" to refer back to to a singular antecedent is useful, well-established, and clear. What more can you ask of language?

I thought there were rules of grammar and acceptance of incorrect grammar doesn't mean that the rules have changed.

But who establishes the rules (your high school English teacher?), who enforces them, and what is the "correct" procedure for changing them?

You have to admit that the rules have changed over the centuries...how can that possibly have happened if there is no procedure to change the rules and nobody with the authority to change the rules? Yet it has happened, and continues to happen. A profound mystery? No, that's just how language works.

[MajGenl.Meade]

"In all of the "bad" examples given by Joe and by Meade, the intended meaning is quite clear: the tool has been used effectively, the end is achieved"

Unfortunately settling for the "intended" meaning so often endorses the sloppiest of thought and conversation. I understand perfectly well what ignoramuses mean when they say "relator" instead of "realtor". I do not for one moment imagine they are referring to one who tells a story, atlhough such a one may perhaps sell more than one storey. None of us uses English 'perfectly' and it is indeed debatable that such 'perfection' can be validly said to exist.

The point as it appears to me is that in the examples, neither "he" ("she") nor "they" is satisfactory solely on the grounds of common usage. Being wrong is being wrong no matter what the majority may accept and comprehend. (See "relator" above)

[oldr_n_wsr]

When in doubt, consult Strunk and White.