| 1:54 PM J: the caption of this photo is : the truth about dinosaurs 1:55 PM me: how sad J: haha 1:57 PM me: if foo were a dinosaur that would be him J: AHhahahHAHhHAhaa it's funny cuz it's true! me: =\ |
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| Somebody really needs to fix/repaint the lanes on the 101S entering San Mateo, post-haste.
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| What the heck am I going to do with digital cable when I have no TV? |
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| Today, I saw the following update on my facebook wall:
"Kyle just transformed their ugly duckling into a beautiful swan in FarmVille!"
Disregarding for a moment the ridiculousness of how all these farmville updates is assimilating my wall, this particular update reminded me of a particular dilemma in constructing grammatically correct sentences, and something that mildly annoys me sometimes. I'm not the biggest grammar Nazi in the world; I don't really go around correcting people but I do try to make my sentences correct most of the time. This particular grammar violation bothers me more than others, possibly because it is encountered fairly often (but not to same extent as the over-exposed incorrect usage of "me" vs "I"), and yet at the same time there is not a really good correction to it.
In the above message, you will notice that the singular "Kyle" is referred to by the plural possessive "their", which is a mismatch. Now it could be that "Kyle" is actually super-fat, in which case the "their" indicates that "Kyle" is the equivalent of more than one person. Or it could be that "Kyle" is actually the plural form of itself (like "fish" or "Zerg"), in which case the message actually means the ugly duckling belongs to "multiple Kyle".
But seeing as only one "Kyle" has tried (unsuccessfully) to coerce me into playing farmville, I will assume that "Kyle" in the message is singular, making the message grammatically incorrect. The obvious correction to this is (assuming that "Kyle" is male) to replace "their" the singular "his".
The problem on farmville's end is presumably that it does not store the gender of its inhabitants/players. Thus when it tries to make a statement about "Kyle", farmvilile does not know that he is male, so it does not know whether to dynamically use "his" or "her". People in this situation usually use one of two static solutions: to use the grammatically incorrect "their", or to use the grammatically correct but awkward "his or her". The latter is especially clumsy to use when it needs to be repeated over and over again. In fact, even in the farmville message it would be weird to use: "Kyle just transformed his or her ugly duckling into a beautiful swan in FarmVille!" just doesn't sound quite right.
Actually, there is a third solution in cases when the subject being referred to is an abstract entity, i.e. a subject not determined at the time the statement is being made. In this case, I would recommend using "his", with the understanding that it is gender-neutral in this context. For example: "Every student should bring *his* own lunch to the picnic." Here, the student may be male or female, but the word "his" is gender-neutral. Some might consider this solution sexist, but I find it preferable over both the clunky "his or her" and the incorrect "their".
But returning to the farmville message, that solution does not work either because the subject *is* already determined. The word "his" is gender-specific in this context. If farmville used "his" universally for this message, then replacing "Kyle" with "Joyce" would make that statement obviously incorrect (and even more ridiculous than it would have been).
Thus I feel at a loss, looking at a statement that I know is grammatically incorrect and being slightly annoyed at it, but at the same time knowing there isn't really a good way around it (other than having farmville store gender information so it can switch between "his" and "her").
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