‘Circling the Wagons’

What I’d like to know is how someone can enforce a rule in their *listening*. Is ‘Mary’ selectively deaf to speakers who violate her rules? Does she mentally correct every perceived error? Does she have a Strunk-and-White babelfish in her ear?

Also, “Mary” should work on her mastery of the demonstrative pronoun. “This” should have been “that” when referring to a previous sentence or concept, if for no other reason than it respects the perspective of the reader rather than reinforces the narcissism of the writer.

Too bad this article about pronoun agreement has a grammatical error in the first sentence:  “. . . who I will call Mary” should be “whom I will call Mary”. Even the lead-in had a similar error: “Who are you supposed to trust on grammar if you can’t trust a native-speaking grammarian’s own considered usage? Geoff Pullum wonders. ” Shame on you, New York Times and Geoffrey Pullum.

In [3], if the antecedent were “no one” instead of “nobody,” would it still take “they” as its pronoun?

Is nobody going to mention that “they” in this context is just a convenient way to avoid having to write “he or she?” In this case, does “they” become magically singular?

And in the sentence “It is hard to teach things like this,” isn’t “like” misused?  Shouldn’t ”like” be changed to “such as?”

I find Mr. Pullum considerably more arrogant than “Mary.”  His readers are expected to accept, on the basis of his thoroughgoing exposition of his own credentials, that he is the authority on this issue, whereas “nearly all published grammars” are wrong.  Mary, at least, didn’t claim that she was the single possessor of the truth on this matter — only that she planned to hold to a rule she had been taught.  And it’s really not such a bad rule. 

I accept that “they” is sometimes used when “there really isn’t any number to agree with,” but I have strong doubts as to whether that’s the case with “nobody.”  As another person commented on this post, “no one” would have made the author’s case harder to prove; it carries a much stronger singular sense, and many people would insist on its singular number.  To me, the word “nobody” strikes the ear as meaning “not one body” — also strongly singular rhetorically, even if not (strictly speaking) grammatically.   To say that “nobody doesn’t refer to a person or a group of people” is only apparently accurate, since the sense of his example sentence is exactly what Mr. Pullum provides as an example of a bound variable in logic:  “for no person x does it ever hold that x thinks traffic congestion problems are x‘s fault.”  Readers will notice that “x” cannot be substituted with a plural here.  Only a singular will do, which is why, when we arrive at “x’s” we would need a singular pronoun; the referent is definitely singular, and thus does not fall under the rubric articulated above, i.e., that “they” may be used when “there really isn’t any number to agree with.”

The larger problem here, of course, is that grammar “rules” follow usage, and usage on this point is split.  Some people, having been taught that negatives like “nobody” and non-specific references like “somebody” are grammatically singular, and who had always used “his” or “him” as a pronoun, were then taught the political and ideological importance of using “his or her” or “(to) her or him.”  This is the structure to which most grammar in the academic world adheres.  Such persons have sometimes been happy to dispense with this construction, so we have witnessed an increasing use of “they/their” in such circumstances, regardless of rhetorical context.  But this is not a universal phenomenon.  Other users seem to like the idea of the grammatically singular nature of “nobody” and “somebody,” and they use singular pronouns to refer to .  And since Mr. Pullum is so excited about things that are “true,” he should note that it is *not* true that “everyone . . . who uses English normally” would write his example sentence [3], unless he cleverly defines “normal” as “the way that I would do it.” 

I am looking forward to the reply, in which Mr. Pullum will perhaps tell us why he is correct to use “who” rather than “whom” in his first sentence; that nearly all published grammars on this topic are wrong; that I am arrogant for thinking that he is wrong in his usage; that “normal” users of English are perfectly correct to use the nominative case when grammar calls for the accusative; and that he can prove his case by pointing to a nineteenth-century play, preferably one that employs a style of English that practically no one uses today.  He will then “assign” us that play as “homework” — in complete humility, of course.

While we’re at it, “Here’s me” is as fragile a construction as the one “jnorton”(love these pseudonyms!)  objects to. Turn it around to expose the absurdity and you have dialect. The real problem isn’t lack of awareness on Mary’s part of bound variables (unless one is a cantankerous logician) or lack of clear semantic distinctions, but a gap in English syntax that doesn’t exist in other, related languages such as German (Mann), French (on), or other languages that simply use reflexive verbs for impersonal constructions. I used to hold fiercely to Mary’s position, but I’m coming round, not for Pullum’s reasons – rather, because the polymorphous, unisex “they”/”their” has been smuggled aboard the language via conversational usage by all speakers at most times. Mary and I were on Swift’s floating island.

I spent 20 years as an editor inserting he/she, and his/her in editorial copy(or reshaping phrases to avoid ambiguity), until I got tired. It’s all nonsense. Singular “they” is idiomatic English; there are cites to back that up, going back centuries. One last point: Does it do the job?

What pronoun would you use in a tag-question such as “No one/nobody in class handed in __ homework, did __? Or, in, say, “everyone in class handed in __ homework, didn’t __? I seriously doubt anyone would say, “no one handed in his homework, did *he*? (Obviously, some speakers would say “his” but I doubt they would use a singular form in the tag question). In this context, it’s debatable that “no one” is semantically, as opposed to syntactically, singular. I’m obviously referring to more than one person.

The first OED citation to an “ungrammatical” use of “who” is the 14th century, and of course it can be found in Shakespeare as well.

Pullum is exaggerating a bit about all grammar books being wrong. (hyperbole is obviously lost on some people). I doubt there is an academic book on English grammar written in the last 50 years that wouldn’t say the same thing.

We all try. We all fail.
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/June05Eye.pdf

As Charles Lamb might have said, there are two kinds of people: those who understand that “rules” of grammar are ultimately based in usage and are this flexible to accomodate needs (such as for a common pronoun to avoid the awkwarness of “his and her” every time one could simply say “their”) and those who enjoy memorizing rules and always saying “his or her” in order to try to impress everyone else with their supposedly superior command of the language. 

Pullum does sound a tad arrogant, but I understand his frustration.  I’ve had a professional lifetime as an English professor trying to explain to the A+ students of Ms. Grundy that there are more significant aspects of language than being able to have the eight parts of speech come tripping lightly off my tongue as I diagram yet another compound (or is that complex?) sentence.

The unfortunate thing about the Grundyites is their tendency to be members of the grammar police in order to punish, with ridicule–and, when possible, bad grades–those miscreants who, no matter their other linguistic abiltiies, run afoul of whatever rigid set of rules were contained in the text (now gospel) which they used in high school or freshman composition.  Grammar, like other aspects of language, should be a tool to enhance communication, not a weapon with which to bludgeon people.   

Mary is correct. You are wrong. And you were also wrong to write “a woman I have never met, who I will call Mary…” Can you see why?

Just picking a nit: the German indefinite pronoun is man: shorter and lowercased.

The mistake is in pigeonholing “they,” “them,” “their,” “theirs” as exclusively plural. Reference to the OED and numerous other sources will tell you they’ve been used as indefinite third-person singular pronouns for centuries. The notion that there’s anything new about this is a superstition.

Can you accept any of the arguments for using the plural second-person forms for singular, or are you still using “thou,” “thee,” “thy,” and “thine” when addressing one person?

My badly expressed point was that if I say, “No one in class did __ homework, did __?” I ‘m basically saying something like “all students in the class have the property of not doing their homework, right?” The homework is the individual student’s, not zero person’s. And it may be significant here that you use the plural persons.

If you are serious about your position, why not say “everyone think,” using a plural verb with “their”? I’m with “Mary” on this one. 

I’m guessing that I wouldn’t use words like “nobody,” “no one,” or “everyone” in a sentence such as the one you propose, precisely because of the strong pull that I feel to treat these words as grammatically singular (for reasons described elsewhere in this thread).  All in all, I think I’d prefer to use the expletive-laden form suggested by another post below — a post which gave me a hearty laugh and provided some needed levity in this conversation.

As for hyperbole being lost on some people — I suppose I plead guilty, but really, if the actual number of grammars in the last half-century that are “wrong” on this subject is “zero”, and Mr. Pullum’s inflates this to “nearly all,” is that really a case of hyperbole?  Or does he, to use his own phrase, simply “have it wrong”?

Just for the record:  even when “thou” and its relatives were still in common use, “you” and its relatives were not strictly plural forms.  “You” (formerly “ye”), as well as “your” and “yours” were used as singulars in more formal settings, whereas “thou” usually implied familiarity or intimacy, like the tu/vous distinction in French or the Sie/du distinction in German.  So the adoption of “you” as a singular was not the adoption of a formerly plural form as the singular; it was the adoption of a formerly “formal” form for all second-person singular circumstances. 

Are you serious? Who on earth these days ever avoids splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions? I don’t believe this. You teach your students to avoid splitting infinitives or ending sentence with prepositions? Please find an example of a published book that doesn’t do both. If someone sends me an email or a manuscript that avoids ending clauses or sentences (I doubt that you even fully understand the rule) with prepositions I’d tear it up. Such writing would sound ridiculous to most people.

Forget the arrogance of accusing Prof Pullum of not knowing his own grammar: after all, as he said, he is merely a native speaker with a Ph.D. in syntax, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, head of a large department of linguistics and English Language. The true arrogance is ignoring the evidence of usage of the best writers through the ages. As I have said elsewhere: when faced with a choice between the judgment of the Marys of this world and the example set by writers whose names will be remembered and whose work will be read long after I am gone, I choose the writers.

Your point is a false one.  Plenty of competent (yes, competent) English speakers could comfortably continue your examples thus: “Somebody is going to pay for this when I find them.”  “Is anybody listening, ’cause they sure should.”  ” Nobody’s home, or else they’re hiding from us.” 

When you use pronouns to refer to unknown antecedents, English forces you to violate something — either agreement or semantics.  It’s obligatory.  You can’t speak English without it.  If you don’t know who did something, and you stick conventionally with the grammatically singular indefinite pronouns, you have to falsely claim you know the sex of the antecedent, since English singular pronouns are gendered.  You may also be falsely claiming knowledge that they acted alone (and for that matter that they’re human).  This mess is why Pullum shows Sentence 2.  Consider the acrobatics you’d need
to pronoun up a sentence where you know the identity, but not the sex,
of the singular antecedent.  If you flip to plurals, you falsely claim more antecedents than are actually involved, but you no longer falsely absolve one sex of its potential antecedency.  So speakers naturally flip back and forth, sometimes staying conventional, sometimes emphasizing the indefinitude at hand. 

Of course you’re right about rhetoric trumping grammar.  Which is why Pullum takes the trouble to ridicule the Grundies’ grammatical INcompetence in this Chronicle blog, and why he has to detail his expertise up front.  He’s not just bragging; his background and scholarship give him standing as a true authority, even if his blog shows him a crusty one.  When petty martinets claim to correct him, it’s a bit like a high school football coach telling Stephen Hawking there’s no such thing as space-time because time is measured in minutes and space in feet and inches.  Pullum knows the history of normative school grammars, the justified variety of usages they ignored in “formalizing” their rules, and the puny effect those rules had on the alleged misusages, which continue since they are actually needed, specifically because rhetoric trumps grammar.  Pullum (with others: cf. e.g. Pinker vs. language mavens, the folks at Language Log) fights the good fight against ignorant pettifoggers who believe they are standing up for language standards but are in fact using false criteria to enforce a false conformity to a false linguistic uniformity that never was and can never be.

So I’ve been teaching my students via a couple demos that many normative rules are bogus and language is much richer and more fun than that, but that learning which rules are bogus how is for specialists and the obsessed, with minimal payoff in daily life.  Students should think of such rules as the conventional little white lies of language, and should use them to write defensively, because Grundyism, like smoking, is a minor character flaw they sometimes have to put up with in others, but that they shouldn’t never inflict on nobody else and needn’t suffer their own selves.

Thank you.  I wish I could “like” your post with a thousand glittery stars.

Just for the record, take a look at the record.

The parallel with German is not exact, since German retains the plural second person, ihr, euch, euch, euer, along with the singular du, dich, dir, dein. The formal Sie, Sie, Ihnen, Ihr is simply the third-person plural, written with initial cap, used for second-person, both singular and plural.

It’s archaic these days, but as recently as forty years ago, in rural parts of Germany one could hear Ihr used in addressing one person, as a sort of politer than the familiar but not so distant as the formal form. (I was the single person being so addressed.) That was more usual once upon a time; see e.g. Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, in which a master says “du” to his servant, and the servant says “Ihr” to his master.

And btw “ye” was the subjective; “you” was the objective. The objective took over the role of the subjective, similarly to toddlers’ “Me want” and the, er, casual “Him and me went home.”

But why does [1] seem so much better than [3]? 

 John, I’m afraid everybody is out of step except you here. “Whom” is dead. Nobody uses it, Geoff is right not to use it. You’re wrong to insist that a “rule” followed by almost no one in the English-speaking world is “correct” Can you see why? And the same goes for singular “they”.

Can we ever agree to let the goal of clarity in communication guide
us rather than argue incessantly over rules?  Let’s be arrogant about demanding clarity.

“WHOM” IS NOT DEAD!!

…let’s just not be arrogant.

I hope that you spend an additional 100 years in purgatory for your cowardly substitution of he/she instead of the long accepted he. The argument that a word or phrase is idiomatic and therefore acceptable in professional writing is stupid. So is “F**k you”, idiomatic, but not acceptible, no matter how aptly it may apply.

“Grammar, like other aspects of language, should be a tool to enhance communication, not a weapon with which to bludgeon people.” Marvelous. Sad that if I want to quote you, I only have “11182967″ as the author’s name…