On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Timothy Pederick<pederick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
2010/1/30 David Davis<feline1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Using "their" here is a fairly commonplace phrasing.
One way to rationalise it is that imagine the sentence with a person's
name instead:
you would write ".but you sense that John is trapped within. You can
almost hear their desperate cries for release."
But by choosing "John" as your noun, you're implicitly favouring "someone".
If instead we use "a dog", then "their" sounds silly, and "its" would be
correct. :)
And if we use both -- "you sense that John or a dog is trapped within" --
we're back where we started; do you use "their" or "its" as the pronoun?
I actually kind of think "its" works better... IMHO, YMMV, etc.
How about we chalk it up to being gender/ungendered neutral and leave
it as it is? :)
