My mother was a high school English teacher for 30 years. Consequently, I have had (currently) 31 years of English grammar education, free of charge, whether I asked for it or not. I write that somewhat facetiously, because I truly am grateful for a mother who had the knowledge and dedication to help me learn to express myself clearly and accurately.
Now that I am on my own, my mother and I enjoy calling each other when we notice errors of language in the public arena. And it is amazing to me some of the simple and humorous mistakes we have noted along the way, from network news shows to nationwide magazines. Many of these are forgiveable, particularly on live shows where a slip of the tongue could easily happen.
But when I saw the poster above for the upcoming movie Apocalypto by Mel Gibson, I was completely shocked. The tag line at the bottom of the poster reads "NO ONE CAN OUTRUN THEIR DESTINY."
Now, I realize that not everyone shares my dedication to precision in grammar, but hopefully many of you immediately felt something akin to nails scraping on a chalkboard when you read that. It is about as blatant as you can get in the realm of pronoun-antecedant disagreement (because the singular "NO ONE" as the antecedant of a pronoun cannot relate to the plural "THEIR"). Written correctly, it would say something such as, "NO ONE CAN OUTRUN HIS DESTINY" or, if one is overly-sensitive about potential sexist language, "NO ONE CAN OUTRUN HIS OR HER DESTINY."
For an error that obvious to make it onto a poster for a major movie, I have to wonder if Hollywood is hard up for editors. If so, please give them my e-mail address, and I will be happy to apply for the job. They certainly could afford to pay me more than my current job, right?
Ok, I'm climbing down off my soapbox now. Click below to enjoy some light-hearted moments....
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Am I a Geek or Is the Rest of the World Stupid?
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6 comments:
I barely made it to the post link because the barrage of sexy men was distracting me. It's so odd that the day I check your blog that there is some fun language-related tidbit available!
From a prescriptive level, I'm absolutely on board with you with the disregard for agreement in anaphora. The way I was taught to avoid the whole problem in editing class was to pluralize the antecedent. Unfortunately we have this peculiar word "no one" (called oddly enough an n-word in the semantic literature), that you can only pluralize by turning it into something like "All people" and then negating the verb. So we end up with "All people cannot escape their destiny". Yeah, really bad. So the his/her thing must stand.
From the descriptive level, the battle is already lost. The spoken language has changed to such a point (that is losing the number agreement) that I doubt it will go backwards. This change is just another example of how language changes to accomodate certain needs. In English, we used to be fine with gendered pronouns but that ceased to become the case, so we needed a gender-neutral pronoun. Rather than invent one, we simply borrowed we already had in the lexicon. Many languages lack gender on their pronouns, and this just might be our way of gravitating that way. In a linguistic analysis, could very easily say that the pronoun "their" is a third-person pronoun that is unspecified for number and gender (thus allowing it to agree with everything). It's just currently competing with the gender-marked singular pronouns.
It all boils down to the fact that language change genuinely occurs from laziness.
One of my professors said she would flunk any of our papers if we didn't choose one gendered pronoun or the other (the "his or her" option forbidden in her class). To this day, I always choose the male pronoun, because deep down inside I truly am a misogynist (just catch me during an episode of ANTM and see how much of a woman-basher I am). It's pretty evident in my writing that I prefer the male subject too--I can't write women.
And for consistency, Auto-grat, you should reconsider how you capitalize / don't capitalize your articles (a, the) in your blog's subject title. I'm always for the little person, so I would go for no-caps!
Thanks for pointing it out. It, too, rubs me the wrong way. Usage snob? Maybe.
I did get over my revoltion for the use of "irregardless" once it was added to the dictionary.
Another thing that annoys me is this: "Attached you will find...". God, I hate that.
J. Cihlar...
I think we could solve part of the problem if people wouldn't be so sensitive about the gendered pronouns. Certainly there have been instances where a gendered pronoun has been used in a sexist manner, but following the logic that generic use of a gendered pronoun must of necessity be sexist would imply that, for example, the entire French language is sexist. I can handle language change from laziness better than from excessive political correctness.
Jimmy....
Yeah, yeah....that's not as bad as the fact I originally typed the phrase "NO ONE CAN OUTRUN THEIR DESTINY" as "NO ONE CAN ESCAPE THEIR DESTINY." On a post about being accurate in publications, perhaps I should have proofread a bit more carefully. The great thing about blogs, though, is that I can fix my mistakes and nobody will ever know.
Anonymous...
"Irregardless" is a good example of the academic community caving to laziness, but as J. Cihlar said, it's a reality of life. Back in the early 1900's, a movement in the US pushed for the simplificaiton of the English language. It grew popular enough that, for a time, even President Theodore Roosevelt adopted the proposed changes in his writing. But it seems drastic changes don't catch on so much as incremental ones through ever-expanding lazy usage.
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