After eight years of working from home, I’m commuting to an office again. Because I live in Manhattan, this means taking the subway, and because I live on the north end of the island and the office is south of Canal Street, it’s a longish commute.
Reading time!
What a luxury to have forty minutes each way to spend reading. I’ve pulled out books I’ve meant to read for years and have only dipped into. The one in my bag at the moment is Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules. I admire the way Pinker makes the complex subject of linguistics accessible to the layperson without dumbing things down. I also like the way he uses language as a writer, so I was particularly interested in the following sentence, which appears on page 47: “A generation of speakers uses their language and lexicon to produce sentences.”
This is not an example of false attraction of their to speakers. If it were, the verb use would be in the third-person plural instead of the singular. He’s clearly treating generation as the subject, which it is, and making the verb uses agree with it. What’s interesting is that he has chosen to use their instead of its as the possessive pronoun substitute for that generation’s.
This sentence shows neatly how complicated the choice of pronoun can be. His or her would not work here; a generation is not a person. Its seems too impersonal, especially because it’s a generation of speakers, who are clearly people — not, say, a generation of fruit flies. Yet “uses their” still sounds wrong, to my ear at least. This pattern — in which the subject and verb are both singular, but the pronoun their is used to refer back to the subject — is common in spoken English, surviving despite the determined efforts of 19-century grammarians to stamp it out. I’m seeing it more and more in the written language as their marches toward acceptance as an epicene pronoun (a gender-neutral singular pronoun).
I’ve also noticed, though, that in most sentences like this, there is some distance between the singular verb and the plural pronoun, as in “Redbook magazine uses focus groups to test their readers’ reactions to advertising.” Seeing the singular verb and the plural pronoun directly juxtaposed made this middle-aged reader stop and re-read the sentence; I wonder, though, whether it would give a younger person pause.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Tags: "their", Epicene pronoun, Grammar, Pinker, Pronouns
“Redbook magazine uses focus groups to test their readers’ reactions to advertising.”
I doubt that sentence would give most younger readers a pause. (I also wonder if many younger readers have ever read or seen Redbook.)
Yeah, I’d forgotten about Redbook, too, until I got an unsolicited call asking if I would participate in a focus group! I guess I fit the magazine’s demographic. Depressing.
As a younger reader, I did pause a little bit in reading the Redbook sentence, but probably mostly because my attention was drawn to it. However, this shift in use does add an interesting dimension of clarity to the sentence. ‘Their’ makes it clear that ‘Redbook Magazine’ is being used metonymically to refer to the management/leadership of said magazine. Although this is obvious in this example, one can imagine how this clarifying aspect might provide a different dimension to a more abstract sentence.
Also, I’ve definitely heard of Redbook, but I only knew the name until now.
Lucky you.
Here in Pennsylvania, a commute means driving yourself in your own car. I live 25 miles away from my work, which equals 1 hour and 15 minutes each way in clogged traffic.
No reading time for me.
I remember my commute of an hour and ten minutes each way when I worked in Menlo Park but could only afford to live in the foggiest part of San Francisco. It’s one of the reasons I gladly fled to New York when the opportunity arose.
I’m with Andrew on this. “Redbook Magazine” is being used - fairly - as a collective noun, where the individual members are not acting as a single unit. It’s not as if ALL the staff at Redbook are engaged in data collection. When a collective noun refers to its members acting as a group, then it IS treated as singular, but when its members are acting individually (only the folks in market research in this instance) it takes a plural form; hence “their readers’ reactions.”
Until fairly recently, speakers of American English have preferred a singular verb and a singular pronoun with collective nouns except in very limited contexts. In fact, most usage books and handbooks still dictate that practice. We don’t say “The government are responsible for this mess” but rather “The government is respsonsible.” Similarly, we would have said “Redbook uses focus groups to find out what its readers think.” Construing Redbook as a plural should then dictate “Redbook use focus groups to find out what their readers think.” But note that, unlike speakers of British English, we don’t use a plural verb. We may now tend to construe sports teams as groups of individuals, but we still construe companies–including publishers–collectively.
I really like using “their” to avoid gender specific “his” and “her.”
The usage here isn’t bad; it just isn’t necessary. “Its” would have worked just fine. (Perhaps this is just an error.)
I often find myself changing “their” in my writing to his/her, because I’m not never sure if it’s okay to use “their” as a gender-neutral pronoun.
And as a “younger reader,” I would’ve preferred to use “its” instead of “their,” mostly because I don’t think of Redbook as a person, or group of people, but as a corporate entity.
Yes, as a younger reader the sentence did give me pause, since “their” is plural and Redbook is singular. If the author wanted to specify the management team at Redbook, then the author should have said so (e.g. “Redbook’s management team”).
And yes, I know what Redbook is. I think I even read it a few times, as I’m sure I’ve found it around their house before.
*ahem. Their = my parents’
What puzzles me about both these sentences is why ‘they’ bothered to use a pronoun at all. Both sentences would have been just as clear if the writer (or writers?) had omitted the word ‘their’.
I agree that “their” could have been deleted from the Redbook sentence. But removing it from the Pinker one would have violated the meaning. The possessive–”their”–is important here, because it’s not just any language and lexicon that a “generation of speakers” is using, but the one that is proper to them.