No- one understood that word, did they?

[makki.knotch]

No- one understood that word, did they? Is that sentence properly conctructed? Take into consideration that the subject, no one, is being used with a plural pronoun. I think it would be more appropriate to ask; they did not understand that word, did they? Comments please.

[Yankee]

Hi MK

No one understood that word, did they? ==> This sentence is just fine. When you add a tag question referring back to words such as everybody, nobody, anybody, etc. it is quite normal to use “they”.
.

[Prezbucky]

BUT “they” is plural while no one/everyone/everybody/someone/somebody/anyone/anybody are all singular.

We require agreement in other things (subject/verb, pronoun/verb, etc.), so doesn’t it logically follow that pronouns and the nouns to which they’re linked should agree also?

Amy, you da bomb, amiga, but I cannot let this one go… even after all these years!

hehe

[Daemon99]

We require agreement in other things (subject/verb, pronoun/verb, etc.), so doesn’t it logically follow that pronouns and the nouns to which they’re linked should agree also?

Who said English follows logic?

[Torsten]

@Prezbucky

BUT “they” is plural while no one/everyone/everybody/someone/somebody/anyone/anybody are all singular.

We require agreement in other things (subject/verb, pronoun/verb, etc.), so doesn’t it logically follow that pronouns and the nouns to which they’re linked should agree also?

Amy, you da bomb, amiga, but I cannot let this one go… even after all these years!

hehe

Hi Tom,

You’ve brought up an interesting question which I remember discussing in everyone third person singular? (Incidentally, we had that discussion almost exactly two years ago.)

I think it somehow makes sense to treat everyone/everyone/everybody as a plural entity to avoid the gender trap. As for the pronoun ‘one’ I would avoid that all together as it sounds rather stilted and out fashioned. What about you? By the way, how are your grammar story and movie coming along?

Regards,
TD[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, talks: Newspaper advertising rep is leaving phone message for prospective customer[YSaerTTEW443543]

[Prezbucky]

TD
The English language needs a unisex singular pronoun and singular possessive pronoun. It would solve the conundrum caused by:

A) Not wanting to be grammatically wrong (putting he/she/everyone/anyone etc. with they – singular with plural)

and

B) not wanting to offend anyone (choosing he or she to go with the arbitrary person, place or thing)

and

C) not wanting to make people barf by using the he/she thing… which is grammatically correct but not cool.

Everybody and its ilk are singular… there is no doubt. Consider the verb conjugations:

Everybody eats (3rd-person singular)
Everybody lives
Everybody sleeps
Everybody is (not “are”!)

If it were plural, we’d say (not using the command f(x) here either, so don’t be confused)

Everybody eat
Everybody live
Everybody sleep
Everybody are

So how about it?! Let’s fix this dilemma between grammar and manners.

Singular third-person pronoun: kronk

Singular third-person possessive pronoun: kronks

hehe

But seriously, English is found wanting of a singular unisex pronoun.

[Prezbucky]

TD

“The Grammar King” is on hold for now. I’m still on lucky page 13 and I don’t know how I want the story to end. Myriad possibilities await Geoffrey Chase-Pempertonshire (or whatever his name is. hehe), the Pedant Superior of the whole of Northern Wisconsin.

As for the film thing, we’re finishing our second short film (as a group). Our friend is showing his potentially HIGHLY controversial documentary to the movie networks and motion picture distributors. If this documentary hits, half the people in the Western World will know our friend’s name… it deals with a subject from the 80s which we thought we understood. His documentary features the forefront scientists and administrators related to this topic and basically blows up their assumed truths.

It will be huge. I’ve seen it and I’m not playing… if one of the distributors has the chutzpah to put the doc in front of people, it’s going to create a giant stir.

And he’ll be mobbed by critics and haters and will be hugely famous as the one who opened Pandora’s Box on This Particular Global Issue Affecting Millions. He’ll get death threats and be black-balled by some very powerful people… for basically making the medical, pharmaceutical, disease control and scientific communities look like propaganda-driven lackeys. And he uses their interviews to do it.

And our writer/director is his college roommate and (still) friend.

So we’re basically cheering for him to make it and introduce us to people and/or fund the feature-length film.

[Alan]

Hi Tom,

Just come across your objection to ‘they’. Everyone knows that, don’t they? Ask anyone in high street anywhere and they’d all accept ‘they’,wouldn’t they? I am shocked to the core that you resist! No one can object to ‘they’, can they -can he? can she? can it?

Come on, you know it makes sense, don’t you? Everyone else does, don’t they?

Alan

[Prezbucky]

Let’s try that with the new pronoun:

Everyone else does, doesn’t kronk?

That might take a while to catch on. LOL

[Yankee]

Hi Tom
Here is what the AHD has to say about “they”:

@The American Heritage Dictionary

The use of the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested as early as 1300, and many admired writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each. W.M. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, “A person can’t help their birth,” and more recent writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction, in sentences such as “To do a person in means to kill them,” and “When you love someone you do not love them all the time.” The practice is widespread and can be found in such mainstream publications as the Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and the Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed.
•However, despite the convenience of third-person plural forms as substitutes for generic he and for structurally awkward coordinate forms like his/her, many people avoid using they to refer to a singular antecedent out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement. Most of the Usage Panelists reject the use of they with singular antecedents. Eighty-two percent find the sentence The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work unacceptable. Thus, the writer who chooses to use they in similar contexts in writing should do so only if assured that the usage will be read as a conscious choice rather than an error.
•Interestingly, Panel members do seem to distinguish between singular nouns, such as the typical student, and pronouns that are grammatically singular but semantically plural, such as anyone and everyone. Sixty-four percent of panel members accept the sentence No one is willing to work for those wages anymore, are they? in informal speech.

(I’d venture a guess that 100% of the Usage Panelists currently reject “kronk”. If you really work on spreading the word, though, maybe by the year 2947 we might begin to see some usage…) :mrgreen: :lol:

WORD HISTORY:

Incredible as it may seem, the English pronoun they is not really an English pronoun. They comes from Old Norse and is a classic example of the profound impact of that language on English: because pronouns are among the most basic elements of a language, it is rare for them to be replaced by borrowings from foreign sources. The Old Norse pronouns their, theira, theim worked their way south from the Danelaw, the region governed by the Old Norse-speaking invaders of England, and first appeared in English about 1200, gradually replacing the Old English words hie, him, hiora. The nominative or subject case (modern English they) seems to have spread first. William Caxton, who brought the printing press to England, uses they, hir, hem in his earlier printed works (after 1475) and thei, their, theim in his later ones. This is clear evidence of the spread of these Norse forms southward, since Caxton did not speak northern English natively (he was born in Westminster). The native English objective case of the third plural, him or hem, may well survive, at least colloquially, in modern English ’em, as in “Give ’em back!”

[Prezbucky]

My darling Amy,

Kronk and Kronks (I’m avoiding quotations because I’m on the iPhone) need to be used by marketed poets and other mainstream writers to quickly fill the space of this need… the unisex singular pronoun and possessive pronoun.

I’m a fan of El Sr. Heinlein, crazy as he was, for introducing “grok” to our lexicon. “Kronk(s)” follow in his blazed trail.

I hate disagreeing with people I like (you, Alan the Conqueror and Torsten the Great), so I’d love for us to fix this.

Ask any fellow pedant and kronk will agree!

(See how that fixes it?)