Re: What did you guys order?
But worse, by far, is usage like this: If anyone thinks, does, has or whatever, THEY ... This is rapidly becoming standard. The feminists won the political battle, and quite rightly in my opinion. Now as a result of their victory the language is being forced into new and uncharted territory.
I can't agree with you on that one, probus. This is one occasion where a little bit of PC pressure has tipped the balance in favour of common usage. For the majority of native speakers,
they/them/their were
always the pronouns of choice for
some/any/nobody, some/any/no-one, etc. Generations of tyrannical schoolteachers tried to insist that only the 'all-embracing' (!) masculine pronoun should be used, and generations of editors and proofreaders enforced the rule. Meanwhile, ordinary people ignored the rule in their everyday speech and correspondence, either (depending on their approach to arbitrary authority) blushing or looking a little puzzled if they were reproached by Class X, that small, self-appointed and self-perpetuating clique of people who knew beyond any doubt that people who used a plural pronoun for indefinite determiners belonged in that subspecies of yahoos who did not understand when to use
whom, dropped inital
hs, split infinitives, said 'It's me', didn't wear a tie on Sundays and ate
dinner in the middle of the day.
Formal logic has never been one of the foundations of natural languages, though for several centuries 'educated' people tried to force native speakers of English into its (somewhat twisted) yoke. A rearguard action by Class X to compromise on the replacement of
he with
he or she, she or he, s/he, (s)he or newly-invented words was largely treated with the contempt it deserved.
PC pressure has caused some changes in usage which I regret, largely because they are, or were, not natural.The release of the plural pronoun from its underground
samizdat existence to a newly-won respectability is one of the changes I welcome.