[lit-ideas] Re: The Serpent's Club
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 13 Mar 2004 20:27:09 PST
>But then Garner is a descriptivist so perhaps Prof. Paul finds himself
more in sympathy with Fowler, a prescriptivist curmudgeon?<
Indeed he do. I thank Phil for the report from the so-called 'Dictionary of
American Usage.' It's interesting that Garner believes that more teeth are set
on edge in the US than in the UK by 'A person who...will find that their...' and
related constructions. I'd have guessed it was the other way about, given
Americans' hard-wired indifference to most questions of grammar and style.
(Style?) What bothers this particular curmudgeon is that the same people who
write 'If someone...then...they...' will not hesitate to write 'If a woman
(man)...then...she (he)...' It's only when the introductory pronoun is
genderless that 'they' and 'their' are used to do the subsequent referential
work. (At least this is my sense of how things are.)
It may be that Garner is remarking on a tendency as if it were unrelated to the
question of which gendered pronoun should be the pronoun of choice, and perhaps
it is--now. My intuition is that it wasn't initially, but fell out of a
rebellion against using 'he' to follow 'someone,' and 'a man' as the person of
choice in examples, e.g. 'a man who...,' 'When a man is tired of London...,'
etc. If this is not the case, then I find the illogical substitution of 'they'
for 'someone' even more alarming. (No doubt Grice addresses this issue in his
Nachlass.)
Robert Paul
Easily alarmed,
somewhere south of Reed College
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