Chuzzlewit, I am clearly beginning to weaken in my lifelong opposition to treating "everyone" as anything but singular. See, for example, the two items I recently posted about the "singular their":
Message 9619025
Message 9619595
In the distant past, I would have written:
That meant I did everyone else's homework for him.
In the more recent past, to be more politically correct, I would have written:
That meant I did everyone else's homework for him or her."
Now that sounds truly goofy, even goofier than the first sentence. The fact is, I did the homework of five people (although I was really trying to curry favor with just one of them, a boy on whom I had a hopeless crush). So colloquially, speaking to friends, I would probably always have said:
That meant I did everyone else's homework for them."
And this time, that is what I wrote.
We are in a dilemma here, Chuzzlewit. We are forced to choose between grammatical correctness and logical sense. What to do?
Frankly, I think the colloquial usage is probably bound to win out, in the course of evolution. Call it the survival of the logically fittest! <g>
Joan
(ex-purist) |
