gam@amdahl.UUCP (gam) (01/13/85)
> > I've been following the discussion here about the use of 'they' instead > of 'he' as a third person singular indefinate sex pronoun, and as I was > writing an article recently, I needed just such a pronoun. I thought: > "What the heck, let's try out this 'they' word."; and did. The results > were less than satisfying. This is the phrase I ended up with: > "<someone's userid> is anonymous; if they finds out where I live, will > they come bomb my house?" This has a more serious error: you want it to be subjunctive. "<someone's userid> is anonymous; if they were to find out where I live, would they bomb my house?" Not so bad, is it? -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam
chabot@amber.DEC (l s chabot) (01/14/85)
Jeff Sonntag == > > I've been following the discussion here about the use of 'they' instead of > 'he' as a third person singular indefinate sex pronoun, and as I was writing > an article recently, I needed just such a pronoun. I thought: "What the heck, > let's try out this 'they' word."; and did. The results were less than > satisfying. This is the phrase I ended up with: > "<someone's userid> is anonymous; if they finds out where I live, will > they come bomb my house?" > Now it may be that I've used this word inappropriately somehow, (though it > seems to be right to me) but if not, then I guess I'll have to agree with the > people who said that it looks and sounds very clumsy. It *does* often sound clumsy to have number conflict between the subject and the verb ("...if they finds out"). It is suggested that you rephrase your sentence to be "<someone's userid> is anonymous; if they find out where I live, will they come bomb my house?" Now evaluate it for clumsiness. And in answer to the question, I think they'll do that only if their userid is "anarchist" rather than "anonymous". :-) L S Chabot UUCP: ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot ARPA: ...chabot%amber.DEC@decwrl.ARPA