/u/Atario decrees that the singular "they" is wrong and he shall not conform to such wrongness! (np.reddit.com)
badlinguistics
34 ups - 6 downs = 28 votes
117 comments submitted at 06:56:45 on May 2, 2014 by awrf
/u/Atario decrees that the singular "they" is wrong and he shall not conform to such wrongness! (np.reddit.com)
badlinguistics
34 ups - 6 downs = 28 votes
117 comments submitted at 06:56:45 on May 2, 2014 by awrf
People have been using 'they' as a singular pronoun for a long time.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen have all used "they" or "their" in this way.
Well... I mean, I guess they're all pretty good. Y'know, if you like that sort of thing.
It's widely known Chaucer couldn't spell for a damn and had no facility with English. I mean, for crying out loud, the man uses "ax," consistently flips around consonants in simple words like "bird," and was apparently blissfully unaware that "orange" is a color so he relied on clumsy work arounds like "yellow-red," or "fox-colored."
And don't get me started on Shakespeare, whose facility with English was so poor you can hardly go two pages without finding a word he simply made up.
> And don't get me started on Shakespeare, whose facility with English was so poor you can hardly go two pages without finding a word he simply made up.
This is a very good point. Does this mean I can be absolved from the crime of "arguing from authority" since it's now clear that neither writer was an authority?
Argument from authority.
I don't think you understand what the fallacy of "argument from authority" actually is.
Argument from fallacy.
Authority from fallacy.
Argument ad bonhomie
But no authority from argument.
http://imgur.com/a/E9vbZ
Argument from tradition.
/u/Atario sits down at a formal dinner. He's prepared for this! His English teacher told him exactly what silverware to use and he's confident that he's a paragon of the mannered classes. When the soup is served, /u/Atario notices that it has oysters in it, and so he picks up the oyster fork and begins to eat.
But then he notices, wait - everyone else at the table is using a spoon to eat the soup. This sends /u/Atario into a fit of smug. ~Hah,~ he thinks, ~I'm the only one here who knows the correct way to do it.~ He brings this to the attention of the other people at the table. It has oysters, don't you know you should use the oyster fork?
Everyone else just looks confused, though. They tell /u/Atario that, actually, it's perfectly acceptable to eat soup with a spoon. People have been eating their soup with a spoon for hundreds of years, regardless of whether it has oysters in it or not. /u/Atario can use the fork if he wants, but he doesn't have to, and in fact some people might think he is behaving a little oddly.
/u/Atario doesn't disagree that people having been using spoons to eat any kind of soup for a long time, but he read about this thing called a "logical fallacy" on the internet once, and he thinks he knows the type of logical fallacy that applies here. Argument from tradition, he crows! Just because people have done it for a long time doesn't mean it's right. And so, feeling like he has successfully destroyed the other side's argument, the triumphant /u/Atario returns to eating his oyster soup with his oyster fork.
But ... the people at the table look at each other, confused by this response. It seems they have a question that they want to ask. One of them does.
"Wait, but then ... if it's not correct to use a spoon for oyster soup just because it's what people have done for hundreds of years, why is it correct to use an oyster fork? Where does that rule come from?"
Everyone but /u/Atario knows the answer to this question: you use an oyster fork for oysters because that's also how it's been done for a long time.
That straw you are grasping for, yeah, just let go.
Go back to speaking Proto-Indo-European, then, if you're so upset about all these nasty language changes.
I suggest you actually try to defend your own position rather than feebly attempting to discount others’ without actually knowing how.
They sent me a pm trying to continue the argument about measuring the usability of words in which they went straight for the "shouldn't we just smash all the words together then!?".
I felt like replying "reductio ad absurdum" to them and nothing else.
You mean the guy with the mouse in his pocket? Poor mousey...
I think it was a hamster, and I don't think it was inserted in his pocket.
They sent me one too. I just blocked them, I’m not interested in wasting my time with someone who’s too lazy to do their own reading.
ruh-roh, somebody call FALLACY MAN
> Argument from how language is actually used.
FTFY