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GrammarTalk 15 - 21 May 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Eben made many corrections on students' papers involving number-agreement. For example, "Why does everyone ignore their passions?," as opposed to, say, "Why does everyone ignore (his) / (her) / (his or her) passions?" | | | Caesar: "No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed." / Cleopatra: "But they do get killed". —
Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) | |
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- Not a good example. Caesar makes a statement: no particular indefinite soldier ever goes into battle intending to be killed. Cleopatra points out that notwithstanding this fact, soldiers die in great numbers. The shift from singular to plural is intentional, grammatical, and effective.
| | | I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
(I will admit that I myself find the Austen sentence awkward, but not the Shaw sentence.) (I also am fully aware that dialogue in novels is not a good guide to how to write correctly, as its goal is to capture how people speak, not reflect how people write.) | |
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- This example is worse than the other, because we are not likely to model our writing on the diction of the early 19th century. Miss Crawford is also the speaker who says, a moment earlier, "If your Miss Bertrams do not like to have their hearts broke, let them avoid Henry," which is wrong as to modern sequence of tenses (we use the past perfect "broken" in that place), and stilted. I want to emphasize again that the issue is what your writing should be like, not what examples can be found in the OED. You should know the difference between "shall" and "will," regardless of the absence of a remaining understanding on that point among the bulk of even literate American English speakers, and you should be aware that conditions contrary to fact in English require the subjunctive not matter what you may hear from the floor of the United States Senate.
| | | 2) Some prescriptive grammatical authorities find the usage acceptable, but most don't. For example, 82% of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language usage panel rejected the usage (though that means 18% did not).
3) Wonder of wonders, there has been a study very much on point. I very much encourage anyone interested to read it. But I've summarized some of the key findings (hopefully accurately) below. |
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