User: discadence (posted by cadence) Date: 2008-11-11 20:09 Subject: I am a (occasionally neurotic) linguistics dork Security: Public

Somewhat predictably, my spike of outgoing productivity has been followed immediately by a minor bout of "arrgh no one likes me I am braindead everything I say is coming out wrong why did I ever think I could be clever arrgh", which is never fun even when I've identified it as such. But! I'm totally GETTING OVER IT, which is why I am posting.

...Fortunately I have something more interesting to post about than that. >_>

So! On the shuttle coming home from work today, the radio (NPR, possibly?) was talking about international politics. The part that I found kind of odd was that they kept saying things like "the next US president" - not once in the ten minutes or so I was on the shuttle did they use Obama's name. They were being ambiguous about names more generally, too, but we did get "the Bush administration" at least once.

The part that I found most interesting was this sentence (possibily paraphrased; from memory):

What should the next US president - or, for that matter, their secretary of defense... ah, what should they do, if they start hearing reports of further violent actions in Iraq?

The part that caught my attention there is the pronouns! Particularly the first one. "their secretary of defense"? That's "Obama's secretary of defense" - the gender isn't at all ambiguous, so they could have said "his" quite reasonably.

But I'm glad they didn't! I'm a big supporter of using "they" as a singular pronoun when the gender is ambiguous - and also when it's not ambiguous, but that still seems a lot more awkward to people. But this is an example of it maybe becoming less awkward!

Although it probably was caused by the fact that they were trying so hard to be ambiguous about it even though it's not, which I still don't really understand.

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