ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

When in doubt, desecrate bananas.

Ha, I started a whole thread about that issue! Ripple effect of their as 3PS! I think it was sparked in part by some sentence that said something like "the patient should consult their gynecologist," or similar -- like geez, you can say HER in this case, you know?

Haha, I think the laydees in my Spanish classes (80% female) would have something to say about students being presumed mostly male. "If only", for instance.

"Anyone who suspects they have testicular cancer should talk to their doctor immediately"

"Anyone who is exhibiting symptoms ovarian cancer should talk to his doctor immediately"

They taught us in copywriting class to use his/her or he/she. With the slash. But also to aovid it wherever possible because it's sloppy-looking.

eg. "Those who suspect they have testicular cancer should speak to their doctor immediately."

hmm. making the subject a plural ain't always going to work, though ...

me: i'm waging a brutal crusade for "their" to be accepted as a non-gender-specific singular possessive pronoun. anyone who disagrees can get back to the last century, where they belong :)

on the subject of absurd approaches to gender-specificity: we had a columnist last week who referred to "penile cancer, which affects only males".

I believe you mean "Those who suspect they have testicular cancer should speak to their doctors immediately" -- haha, also per my "ripple effect" thread!!

i'm waging a brutal crusade for "their" to be accepted as a non-gender-specific singular possessive pronoun

I will join your crusade

i nominate we replace he/she with SHAHEE, and him/her with HURM, and his/her with HERJ.

Just because you have to be male to have something doesn't mean you have to be male to suspect you have it. Or something.

I would like to join this crusade too. G00blar's suggestion to "use one or the other, and alternate throughout your writing for fairness" on the other thread makes me itchy; whenever I've seen that approach it's disrupted my reading flow while I've stopped to consider how jarring and tokenist it seems.

I aten't no subeditor nor grammar fiend, mind you, as I'm sure is all too obvious.

I'm pretty sure you have to be male to suspect you have testicular cancer, wtf are you talking about?

Unless you are way more confused than I can imagine being.

GHOST TESTICLES

Laurel that's exactly the kind of complacency that puts you at risk

"It can't happen to me," you say

then BLAM

She was just sitting there, posting on ILX, when BLAM, they got testicular cancer.

the "their" thing is interesting because third-person-singular is a yawning gap in the english language that has persisted since whenever "one" went out of common usage, without any consensus about what to do about it. there's a HOLE in our LANGUAGE, someone should fix it. stat. stet.

anyway i came to post this, which gets a little more into the collective-singular discussion above. (that whole blog is pretty excellent for anyone who finds things like this thread interesting.)

Laurel, I was just allowing for the possibility that there quite probably is somewhere out there someone more confused than you can imagine being, and it's not the place of grammar fiends to impose discriminatory restrictions on gender-bewildered hypochondria

this time around I am following the style guide set out by nabisco there and have swapped my "or something" for a more standard ILX signifier of flippancy: no concluding punctuation

(yeah, I know, breach of unwritten law of ILX and/or universe that if it was so unfunny someone called you a moran the first time round then, duh, leave thread until you're not in the latest 50)

i'm waging a brutal crusade for "their" to be accepted as a non-gender-specific singular possessive pronoun

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2299489063

I'm not fond of 'their' as a singular possessive pronoun, mostly on totally subjective aesthetic grounds (ie it just looks wrong to me). I do a lot of translation and journalistic writing and I have to say this his/her/their thing is rarely a problem for me - in 80 percent of cases you can convert to a plural. In the other cases, I use "his or her" if you only have to use it once and it doesn't sound too clunky in the sentence. In the few remaining cases I can usually rewrite the sentences to avoid the issue, and as a last, last resort I'll use "his" unless obviously referring to women or mostly women (but I can't recall having to resort to this any time recently). "Her", when it's totally gender unspecific, still feels a bit like you're trying too hard, but I have a feeling this may change in the future.

Ah, thanks Alba. I was just looking for that for grimlers. There are other groups arguing for the same thing but they have SPELLING mistakes all over them.

I like they and their but I've also started using 'one'.

Cos sometimes I'll be saying to the wife something like "you get in a mood when it starts getting darker earlier in the evening". And he'll be like: "No I don't". And I'll be like: "No, ONE gets in a mood when one notices it getting darker earlier." So now I just use one and don't care how it sounds, cos at least then he knows what I mean.

I launched a campaign to use "one" as much as the French use "on" a few years ago. It didn't get anywhere much, though an ex-girlfriend was momentarily amused. This was in the days before Facebook.

'One' - what is wrong with it?

I'm now thinking I should have said "getting dark" and not "getting darker". Thanks.

On doit start that campaign for the return of 'one' on FB, Alba.

I use "one" a fair amount, but if one has a sentence where one has to refer to oneself lots of times then one does feel that one starts to sound a bit strange.

I quite agree. I don't use it to talk about myself for this reason.

Underground Kingz' Pimp C or Underground Kingz's Pimp C?

the former i would say. the rule applies to the sound, i think, rather that the letter.

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but is there some rule about the word 'that' and its placement after a verb? I thought I read something about that being a bad thing (e.g. "I think that you're right" vs. "I think you're right")

has it already been pointed out that "copyeditor" should be written as two words?

Know who told me about that? MY COPY EDITOR.

Following the less/fewer stuff relating to percentages above, what about this sentence?:

A boy born in Manchester today can expect to live 10 years fewer than a boy born in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

It seems to me that that "fewer" should be "less", but why? Those ten years are countable. Complicated also in that you'd say the K&C boy would "live 10 years longer" than the Mancunian, but you certainly wouldn't say "ten years shorter" here.

PP, this is a relatively new development and it's still fairly contentious, as you might imagine. Proponents of the change cite professions like "songwriter" as having set precedence.

In related news, Copy Editor newsletter just changed its name to Copyediting.

"Her", when it's totally gender unspecific, still feels a bit like you're trying too hard, but I have a feeling this may change in the future.

It may... in Fantasyland. I find it difficult to imagine a time when it won't feel like a political statement and therefore be distracting in your "average" text (i.e. unless the author intends to make a specific point with the text). I've been diligently changing "his" to "their" for 15 years, so I find it a bit of a betrayal. That said, I love writing "s/he" -- it seems like such an elegant solution.

How about

A boy born in Manchester today can expect to die 10 years earlier than a boy born in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Yeah, that's a good suggestion - and 'die' is much stronger than 'live'.

Jaymc, I accept the fact that she may be just a bit sensitive about her title.

I find it difficult to imagine a time when it won't feel like a political statement and therefore be distracting in your "average" text

It feels totally apolitical and distracting to me already, mostly because writers who use it well make it seem like an example. You can frame something like, say ... "a given patient may find herself facing mounting medical bills" or "the average patient will find herself etc.," it feels almost like you're positing a character: just for example, imagine this woman...

I've seen plenty of magazine writers switch back and forth between using a generic "his" or a generic "her," and often to great effect, sort of conjuring up a mental image of the right person, rather than a truly abstract/generic genderless "their."

Sorry -- totally apolitical and non-distracting

(the "example" angle is also great because it allows you to notice it but also appreciate the way it's being deployed)

(also in the case of something like "the average patient" up there, it can do handy work in communicating that maybe the average patient really is a woman -- you can suggest demographics and likelihoods this way)

OK, this might seem ridiculous, and I'm convinced I'm right, but justify me how:

Referring casually to going round to the house of some aquaintances, I wrote "I went round to theirs"

Is that right? Common sense tells me that the place I refer to is the house belonging to them. Which would be "them's house" if shit like that made sense. Someone explain me how "theirs" is right? Is it just as simple as "theirs" means "that which belongs to them", or "them's", as it were?

Also, the word "theirs" looks really fucking odd written down, which doesn't help at all.

That sentence does seem weird, but I can't tell if it actually is or whether it's just to my American eyes.

Whose house was it? ==> Theirs -- that's the source, surely? Hahaha if you feel weird about it you could always try substituting "them lot's."

But I mean this is a Brit colloquialism where you're already omitting the thing and referring to it with a sidelong possessive -- trying to cut pure grammar in with this sounds like a losing battle to me

please advise as to not stabbing out own eyes

Right, that's what I thought (nabisco, not rrobyn) - it's one of those weird colloquialisms that defies grammatical explanation, isn't it? Which is why I was having my head done in with it when I asked it - I was trying to make grammatical sense of it and couldn't.

Though "whose house was it --> theirs" doesn't help, does it? That's what I was asking. It was the house belonging to them. Them's house = their house. So, yeah, their = possessive. So why theirs? Just one of those random things that makes English odd?

yeah, fighting a losing battle. I know.

Haha wait: are you getting tripped out by the fact that we use possessive pronouns, instead of saying stuff like them's, him's, you's, and us's?

You are totally French

made it through afternoon with eyes intact but ugh
nothing to contribute to grammar debates tho

Ailsa, 'their' is a possessive adjective which (like any adjective) tells you something about the noun that it goes with. So "it's their house" tells you that the house belongs to them, in the same way that "it's a big house" tells you that the house is big, but you can't use those adjectives without the nouns (i.e. you can't say "it's their" or "it's a big"). 'Theirs' is a possessive prounoun, i.e. it's a noun which means 'the one which belongs to them', so it can be used on its own, but it would have to be clear from context what kind of thing you were talking about anyway. It sounds more natural to use the possessive pronoun when you're answering a question so that you can avoid repeating the noun that was in the question.

i.e.
"Whose house is it?" -- "It's theirs/mine/his/hers/ours/yours"
(sounds more natural than "It's their house/my house/his house/her house/our house/your house")