It's Friday, I'm entitled to bitch.
There are certain word confusion mistakes that bug me to no end. I just saw one in an LWN article, where the author wrote, "for all intensive purposes". It's "for all intents and purposes"; if you're going to write cliches, at least get them right! They may sound similar, but what the heck is an "intensive purpose"?
Other favorites:
I heard a strange story on NPR last night about an exotic animals pet store that's sold prairie dogs that may have monkeypox. The interviewer asked the owner, "Have you had any returns?" That's a very specific question.
The owner replied, "We had one customer return a prairie dog". That's a very specific answer, with one very specific customer in mind. She continued, "They had some questions about their..." at which point I started lamenting the state of English usage in this country.
Subject/pronoun number agreement? Yes, please! This is *one* customer! Gender of a singular noun? Presumably, the owner of the store knew the gender of the specific customer — especially as it's not a mixed group!
The resident linguist heard my complaint and started talking about language drift and patterns of acceptance and I've never been one to think that "laws" of language or physics or science in general were prescriptive, but I said "make up I communicate okay language describe general perfectly" and was satisfied.
Sebto mean, blarg's not as if wibble don't have perfectly good pronouns for blufflub already!
Re:Prairie Dog Weirdness
djberg96 on 2003-06-13T22:33:37
Perhaps it was a husband and wife who came in. It was the wife who actually bought the prairie dog (i.e. "one customer", or perhaps the wife and husband lumped together as "one"), but they returned the prairie dog and both had questions (i.e. "they had some questions").True
chromatic on 2003-06-13T23:46:13
That would work. You should still feel guilty for spoiling a perfectly good rant, though.
Re:Prairie Dog Weirdness
Damian on 2003-06-14T18:00:37
Sorry, chromatic, but I have to concur with "the resident linguist" on this one.Singular they has over half a millenium of general acceptance in English literature, having in that time been used to good effect by such luminaries as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis.
The construction only started to fall into conservative disfavour about 100 years ago, when overzealous prescriptive grammarians began misapplying the rules of Latin grammar to it.
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