1116: They: Generalizations Dec 29, 2017

-
'He', 'she', 'they', 'he or she', and alternating between 'he' and 'she' are all options for general 3rd person singular referents, all with their respective problems. 'They' is both favoured and criticised for its vagueness, which can employed purposefully even when the gender of the antecedent is known as to make it clearer that the statement should make the listener imagine something hypothetical, e.g. "imagine your creepy male friend thinking you owe them something" (-Solomon Georgio). Other times, such as in this line from an Indian police chief, "a 4-month-old baby cannot move things from their face, and, basically, it suffocated", transitioning from a specific idea to a more general one (i.e. a particular baby to babies in general) will call for 'they'. This example is particularly noteworthy, because it uses 'they' and 'it' for a person whose sex is assumedly known. This occurrence is also quite common when people use the singular 'everyone', 'anyone' etc for generalizations.
You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Important Announcement: Blogspot Access Will Close

-
There will be no additional new content hosted on this blogspot account, and in 4 weeks from now (30th of September 2020), the blogspot account will no longer be publically available. If you are subscribed via email, please visit WordFacts.Org and subscribe via email there; there is a link to do so on the bottom of every page, so you will only need to scroll all the way down on any page you are on (see video below if needed). Apologies for the inconvenience, but the blog, video, and commercial services are now being moved specifically to WordFacts.Org 
Continue »

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
Continue »

852: delilah Apr 8, 2017

-
Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees , come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Li
Continue »