ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

I think "a panel of experts answer your questions" is acceptable in the same way that "a number of people are coming". I mean, logically it should be "is coming", but no one is going to ever say/write that, are they?

but no one is going to ever say/write that, are they?

Or perhaps, "is he or she?"

but it's different (only in degrees, I admit) bcz those ppl ARE coming separately, for (near) certain.

so I am, as ever, querying.

(a number of) people are coming (from all over the place).

a number (of people) is coming (from the same place).

this is wildly pernickety, no?

actually it's not. we're talking about two different kinds of subjects, collective singular and collective plural. the "panel of experts" is acting as a collective singular, because it is the panel itself that will answer questions (there's no guarantee that any given member of the panel will answer any given question, and the q&a session will be conducted jointly and simultaneously by all the members of the panel). the "number of people" are acting individually as morbius notes, and so it makes more sense to give them the plural verb. (the confusion there is created by the "a number of" construction, but if you sub that out for, say, "several," the essentially plural nature of the subject becomes clear.)

but you can sub in "several" in the other case as well: several experts [sitting at a panel] will be answering questions. what's the difference?

A lot of people is thinking this is a bit silly.

do you come all over the place separately, or together - it is a question that has plagued mankind for millenia

panel has now blossomed into a very funny word

but you can sub in "several" in the other case as well: several experts [sitting at a panel] will be answering questions. what's the difference?

well try it like this: the difference is which word is the subject. in "a number of people" the active subject is people. the subject is not "a number." a number is just modifying the subject, telling you how many of them there are. conversely, in "a panel of experts" the subject is actually the panel. the panel is what will be answering questions. "experts" is just telling you what the panel is made of. and yes, if you change the sentence to "several experts," then experts does become the subject and would take a plural verb form.

Yes.

more the death of editing.

more ON the death of editing.

(or maybe i did that on purpose)

heh. interesting and worrying but nothing desperately new -- i mean, as the technology used to produce newspapers has adapted, so have all the age-old "but do we really need subs?" arguments.

the copyeditor's role is already changing, and will continue to do so. me ... i'm not sure i want to be part of that change. but that's my decision.

i posted this on the subs' group on facebook a week or so ago, in a discussion called "the vanishing subeditor".

well ... as i've said before around these parts, this particular sub is planning to vanish -- not just yet, but within the next few years.

after more than a decade as a staff sub/chief sub/production editor, i'm back at university part-time, with a view to a complete change of career. basically, i didn't get into this game to be marginalised as some kind of old-journalistic anachronism, which seems to be what an increasing number of managers and proprietors think. (and yes, as david so rightly points out: reporters are viewed in pretty much the same light, too.)

i take immense pride in my work as a sub, and will continue to do so for as long as i'm doing it. but really: i look at what's happening to newspaper journalism in the UK and i think, sod it, i don't want to be part of this any more. i've always said that, as a sub, my job is basically quality control: i think that's a reasonable definition. but when quality ceases to matter, where does that leave me?

i don't think the noble art of subbing is going to die out altogether. there'll always be room in the, er, "news hub" for -- let's think like a senior manager for a second -- "multimedia content refacilitators", battering away turning PA snaps into three-dimensional holographic txt msgs, or whatever this week's glorious digital dawn involves.

i just don't want to be one of them, that's all.

WE ASK THAT ALL SHOPPERS PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOUR CARTS

I'm editing an article that uses the phrase "evoked comparisons to" (as in "Fernandez's glamorous image evoked comparisons to Eva Peron"), which a quick Google search shows is used by all sorts of reputable sources and yet there's something that seems kind of wrong about it. Notably, how can you evoke a comparison? Like it seems like it should either be "the image evoked Eva Peron" or "the image drew comparisons to Eva Peron" -- am I wrong?

i think you can evoke a comparison. if you're reporting that people compared fernandez to eva peron, then it's fair to say fernandez evoked (called forth, produced) the comparisons.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

xpost You're half and half, I think?

Technically it's fine -- it's using "evoke" in its most original sense (to call forth), the suggestion being "it calls that comparison out of me / other viewers" ...

But I'm with you, actually, because there's a vagueness of meaning due to the other sense of "evoke," the one often used in these contexts -- "to bring to mind," or into the imagination -- and in that sense, it doesn't belong. (Or else it's comically vague, and that phrase could mean stuff like "I looked at Fernandez's glamorous image, and it brought to mind this one time someone compared my mom's haircut to Eva Peron.")

It might depend on context, really -- I feel like there are a lot of art-related and criticism contexts where people automatically read "evokes" in the "brings to mind" sense rather than the "calls forth" sense.

Yeah, I think that's what I was doing. The article is a biography of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the new president of Argentina, and since the usage doesn't seem to be all that controversial in that context, I'm going to let it stand.

Is a singular antecedent for pronouns they/their really so bad? Is v common in speaking and writing of all kinds.

Interesting, anti-prescriptivist, slightly smug post here:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005116.html#more

Is a singular antecedent for pronouns they/their really so bad? Is v common in speaking and writing of all kinds.

E.g.

The private mustn’t desecrate his banana.
The nurse mustn’t desecrate her banana.
The student mustn’t desecrate his banana.

What outrageously sexist style guide does that come from?!

what if one is always in doubt, about everything

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.