Grammar that makes you cringe

[T42]

That one's so conventional now that reading older texts with the once equally conventional "Can anyone call himself... " can be slightly jarring if you're not expecting it.

T'other day I looked for a synonym for miscreant in an on-line thesaurus. One of the answers it came up with was inside person. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

That one had me puzzled for a minute. Is it some obscure anatomical meaning? No, is it a reference to insider trading? No, it's inside man, which could have various meanings without context to clarify. I suppose if you really wanted to use that phrase without 'man', you could say inside contact, but this is probably one of those phrases where updating just doesn't work, as translation sometimes doesn't.

[T42]

Or you could speak of the crime or whatever as an inside job and avoid talking about people at all.

God, all this pussyfooting* makes me sick.

* oops.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Yep, inside job would be the best option there.

[T42]

Now then: in the film The Inside Man it is in fact a man who gets himself walled up in the basement of a bank*. For 2020 values of should, should the producers have titled it The Inside Person/Job?  I think not.

* having broken into a sewer that nobody smells for a week, but that's by the by.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Imdb reveals that 2006 values of should would be more appropriate. This probably doesn't change the answer.

[Kim]

BBC news website headline

Can anyone call themself a therapist or a counsellor?

 

The "gender neutral" personal pronoun. 

What's wrong with that?  There's an obvious need for gender-neutral pronouns, and it seems reasonable to use the ones that are familiar through hundreds of years of use rather than more clunky alternatives.

[Thor]

BBC news website headline

Can anyone call themself a therapist or a counsellor?

 

The "gender neutral" personal pronoun. 

What's wrong with that?  There's an obvious need for gender-neutral pronouns, and it seems reasonable to use the ones that are familiar through hundreds of years of use rather than more clunky alternatives.

While the traditionally correct grammar may be sexist, the word "themself" is made up and also unsuitable, since "them" is plural, while "anyone" and indeed "self" are singular.

[Kim]

All words are made up.  'themself' is at least 600 years old.  *shrug*

Thinking about it a bit more, unlike the BBC headline writer, I'd probably use 'themselves' for referring to a non-specific person or group and 'themself' for a known person who uses they/them pronouns.

[Cudzoziemiec]

All words are made up.  'themself' is at least 600 years old.  *shrug*

Thinking about it a bit more, unlike the BBC headline writer, I'd probably use 'themselves' for referring to a non-specific person or group and 'themself' for a known person who uses they/them pronouns.

I  think that's Thor's point; that plural 'them' should not be joined with singular 'self'. But 'anyone' is singular, so 'themselves' doesn't entirely fit either. The best thing might be to rewrite the headline so as to avoid the problem. Maybe 'What qualifications are needed to call yourself a therapist or counsellor?'

[T42]

All words are made up.  'themself' is at least 600 years old.  *shrug*

Aye, but 600 years ago nothing was standardized so precedence doesn't apply. Even pronunciation was very different from today's: it'd be halfway through the Great Bowel Shift or summat like that.

[Kim]

There doesn't seem to be anything about pronouns in the BBC News style guide, beyond:

It is increasingly common for non-binary people to use the singular pronoun “they”.

Seems like a bit of an omission.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/collections/news-style-guide

[Cudzoziemiec]

For a minute, I was thinking this is actually a bigger change in grammar than we realise, because it means verbs no longer agree with their subjects. We could say "John Smith is the first non-binary person to become mayor of an English town. They were elected mayor of Piddletrenthide on Tuesday... ". But actually, I don't think that's not correct. Instead, it's more like the process by which the old plural and formal 'you (are)' replaced the old informal singular 'thou (ist[?])' giving us identical single and plural pronouns and verbs in the second person. Now we're seeing the same for the third person, and presumably someone who wants to be addressed as 'they' would refer to themself/-ves as 'we'. So we're halving the number of pronouns – a great simplification!

[orienteer]

There's always been the royal we.

[Kim]

presumably someone who wants to be addressed as 'they' would refer to themself/-ves as 'we'

None of the non-binary people I know do.  Small sample, admittedly.

[T42]

Consistency is probably too much to expect.

[Cudzoziemiec]

presumably someone who wants to be addressed as 'they' would refer to themself/-ves as 'we'

None of the non-binary people I know do.  Small sample, admittedly.

Okay, I suppose that's actually more sensible than we if the idea is to avoid gender in pronouns. But I'm wondering, in a grammatical rather than pobi way, what the equivalent non-binary people French people use, seeing as French only has il(s) and elle(s). Although I suppose there's on. T42, any ideas?

[Kim]

https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Nonbinary-pronoun-they-sparks-French-language-debate-after-Merriam-Webster-word-of-the-year-nonbinary

Of course, it's hard to be gender-neutral in a language with grammatical gender, to the point where activisim tends to take a different focus.  I think we've discussed this one before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender

[Wowbagger]

For a minute, I was thinking this is actually a bigger change in grammar than we realise, because it means verbs no longer agree with their subjects. We could say "John Smith is the first non-binary person to become mayor of an English town. They were elected mayor of Piddletrenthide on Tuesday... ". But actually, I don't think that's not correct. Instead, it's more like the process by which the old plural and formal 'you (are)' replaced the old informal singular 'thou (ist[?])' giving us identical single and plural pronouns and verbs in the second person. Now we're seeing the same for the third person, and presumably someone who wants to be addressed as 'they' would refer to themself/-ves as 'we'. So we're halving the number of pronouns – a great simplification!

Thou art. Still quite common in t'Land o' t'Whippet.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Of course, it's hard to be gender-neutral in a language with grammatical gender, to the point where activisim tends to take a different focus. 

Activism or expression?

In Polish you can't even say 'I was' without gendering yourself (oneself?) but in some other aspects it's perhaps easier. There's a neuter gender which you could use for adjectives and you could invent an obvious neuter first-person verb ending (it doesn't exist,* for obvious reasons, but would surely be -om). "It" is already used for children (the word for child is neuter, again for obvious reasons)** so that could be extended, though it does sound odd.

And, bringing us full circle, the words for himself, herself, myself, themselves/self, etc, are all the same (it's all just "self" regardless of gender or number), so that bit's much easier!

*It might be in use in certain circles for all I know.

**Ed: Just realized that might be a bit misleading. You'd only use the neuter with the word "child" or with the neuter pronoun referring back to the word, not with a named child.

[yorkie]

For a minute, I was thinking this is actually a bigger change in grammar than we realise, because it means verbs no longer agree with their subjects. We could say "John Smith is the first non-binary person to become mayor of an English town. They were elected mayor of Piddletrenthide on Tuesday... ". But actually, I don't think that's not correct. Instead, it's more like the process by which the old plural and formal 'you (are)' replaced the old informal singular 'thou (ist[?])' giving us identical single and plural pronouns and verbs in the second person. Now we're seeing the same for the third person, and presumably someone who wants to be addressed as 'they' would refer to themself/-ves as 'we'. So we're halving the number of pronouns – a great simplification!

Thou art. Still quite common in t'Land o' t'Whippet.

Tha's not wrong there! Sithee! 


Of course in Leeds (from whence I originate) the word "us" can be both singular and plural!

• Off for us tea. (Singular - I am going for my tea)
• Off for us teas. (Plural - We are going for our tea)

And don't get us started on "While" 

[hellymedic]

'Whence' does not need 'from'...

<the pedant>

[T42]

Copious use in the 19th century, declining towards and during the 20th, with a bit of an up-tick in the 21st:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=from+whence&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfrom%20whence%3B%2Cc0

The up-tick may be due to the use of portentous language in pseudo-mediaeval RPGs and TV series.

[drossall]

To go back to a topic that was covered much earlier in the thread, did anyone else see this BBC report? I thought that, by phrasing it in terms of whether the Oxford comma should or should not be used as a matter of course, they entirely missed the point of what Sir Philip was probably saying.

The power of the Oxford comma lies in using it appropriately, where it helps understanding, and not routinely. So neither of the two viewpoints that the BBC report pitches against each other is either correct, or even useful. Rather, we should ask what is meant by:

"Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations."

Correct use of commas will allow the words to be comprehended more quickly. Clearly there is a list of three items, and I believe that the writers mean us to associate "all nations" with "friendship" in particular. Thus, whilst they'd be happy for everyone else to have peace and prosperity as well, they don't really mean:

"Peace with all nations, prosperity with all nations and friendship with all nations" - not least because "prosperity with" is not really a meaningful expression, so suggesting it makes the phrase hard to comprehend.

To allow me to comprehend that as easily as possible in the 0.5 nanoseconds that I'm prepared to analyse to parsing the back of a 50p coin, an Oxford comma would indeed help in this instance:

"Peace, prosperity, and friendship with all nations."

But the idea that one should routinely use it is nonsense. We might also talk about playing:

"Cricket, rugby, and football with all nations" - but that would mean that we played the first two only amongst ourselves. The trick lies in using it at the right times.

Sadly, though, this little diatribe of mine is a much less interesting read than the BBC report, however much I might believe that it's more useful...

[Nuncio]

But by that logic, wouldn't 'cricket, rugby and football with all nations' suggest that we're keeping cricket to ourselves?