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thadley -at- ttacs -dot- ttu -dot- edu wrote:
>
> Quoting Victoria Whitehorne <vwhitehorne -at- cgn -dot- net>:
>
> > "If the user is ...then customize their session."
> While the use of the plural pronoun with a singular
> antecedent is still considered technically incorrect,
By whom? This is entirely unjustified pedantry.
> 2
> factors--English's lack of an appropriate pronoun, and
> popular usage--will eventually conspire to make the
> plural pronoun acceptable in these constructions.
Writers cited there as using the construction include Chaucer,
Swift, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Lewis Carrol, Thackeray,
the King James Bible, Walt Whitman, CS Lewis, Oscar Wilde, ...
I think there may be some dialect variation on this. It
is perfectly acceptable to me (Canadian), in fact strongly
preferred to the more complex his or her, but may be less so
for other dialects.
I've never been able to work out whether those who object to
it are:
objecting purely on the basis of what they think the
rules should be, and actually do use the construction
when they're not thinking about it
or
actually describing the rules they use themselves,
and the construction is deprecated in their dialect.
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