My First Rant about Language

There are many things in contemporary use of the English language that just drive me up the wall.  Here are a couple.

You’re watching a news or sports broadcast, and some expert (or just someone who plays an expert on TV) is being interviewed.  As part of his response, he essentially starts interviewing himself, offering his comments as questions which he then answers:

Interviewer:  “So, coach, your team lost 59 to 3 today. I guess you’ve had better days.  How would you judge the performance of your team and coaching staff?”

Coach:  “Well, Chuck, yeah, it’s true that we had a pretty bad day.  Could we have played better?  Of course we could have.  Did we have a chance to turn the game around in the second quarter?  You bet we could have, if our running back hadn’t fumbled the ball to the other side twice.  Is he upset about his performance?  We all know that he’s not happy about it.  Am I upset with our team’s performance?  Of course I am very disappointed.  Will we take a different approach to practice this week?  You can count on it."

When I hear interviews like this, I just want to reach through the screen, grab the guy by the throat and yell something like, “Am I sick and tired of hearing you answer your own questions?  You can bet your life on it!”

OK… so I wouldn’t really say it like that.  I would make it a clear and simple statement like, “Stop making questions out of everything, you numbskull!”

This kind of interviewing has become an epidemic on television.  It’s exponentially worse in sports, but I find it happening with aggravating regularity in news interviews as well, even among people who are supposed to be polished, professional speakers.  Let’s take a minute and look at how the coach SHOULD have responded to the interviewer’s question:

Coach:  “Well, Chuck, it’s true that we had a pretty bad day.  Of course we could have played better, and we had a chance to turn the game around in the first half, but lost it when our running back fumbled the ball twice to the other side.  He is very unhappy with his performance, and I am very disappointed with our team’s overall performance. You can be sure that we will take a different approach to practice this week.”

Ahhh… that would have been so much better. 

But, it won’t get better.  This trend is growing and will only get worse.

Another growing trend over the past few decades, which for me is like the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard, is the politically correct – yet grammatically incorrect – use of third-person plural pronouns (they, them, their, etc.) to create gender-neutral, third-person singular pronouns.  I absolutely hate it when I hear broadcast professionals do this.

For background, English does not have a gender-neutral pronoun for the third-person singular.  We have he (him, his) and she (her, hers), and that’s all when we are speaking about people.  Of course, we have it, but we can’t use it when speaking of people.  We get into a gender bias problem when we are speaking in the singular to refer, in a general sense, to anyone. 

Decades ago, we would have said or written the following, and no one would have been concerned: “When you send your child to school, be sure he wears a warm coat.”  Everyone knew that this meant girls too, but the language had a masculine bias in it, and that’s how it was done.

Enter political correctness and the “need” to make sure that our speech contains no bias, either explicit or implicit.  We started writing that sentence as: “When you send your child to school, be sure he or she wears a warm coat.”  That’s a fair and appropriate change, and not too awkward. 

But sometimes, the “he/she” construction can become very awkward.  This would have been the old sentence: “If your child does not have his coat, he probably will find himself feeling cold, and he is likely to become ill.”

I think you can see how this is going to turn out when we go with the “he/she” routine:  “If your child does not have his or her coat, he or she probably will find himself or herself feeling cold, and he or she is likely to become ill.”

Arrggghhh!  It’s awful.  Many in the politically correct crowd decided that the perfect solution is to just make up a new pronoun: replace the singular (but gender-specific) he and she with the plural they and make this the new “gender-neutral” singular pronoun.  Here’s how their sentence would read: “If your child does not have their coat, they probably will find themselves feeling cold, and they are likely to become ill.”

Immediately you have a terrible numbers problem.  “Child” is singular, but “they” and the other pronouns are plural.  And the phrase, “their coat,” suggests that more than one person shares the same coat.  That’s just terrible!  I guess we need more government aid to make sure that every child has his or her own coat.

Of course, the real solution is to rewrite the sentence so that it is completely plural:  “Children who do not have coats will probably feel cold and are likely to become ill.”

This ridiculous use of third-person plural to replace singular pronouns has gotten so bad, that even when speaking completely about males or completely about females, many commentators still use they and create the number problem. 

It’s one of my pet peeves.  Hence my rant.

Also, for those of you budding language students who may be tuning in, remember that in correct American English, commas and periods ALWAYS go INSIDE of closing quotation marks.  Question and exclamation marks go inside of the closing quotes only if they refer exclusively to the quoted material; if they refer to the broader sentence, they go outside.  In proper British English, this rule applies to periods as well.

Yeah… this was a boring post, but it was stuff I needed to get off my chest.  Better stuff is coming.