Should the chief
executive of a powerful English-speaking nation knowingly commit a subject-verb
disagreement error just to make a single line in a major speech more eloquent
and compelling? Indeed, as an English-savvy speaker and with all the powers at
his command, why had President Barack Obama not chosen to be a role model for good
English by being grammar-perfect in his recent State of the Union address? In the
essay below that I wrote for my weekly English-usage column in the January 31,
2015 issue of The Manila Times, I
offer some answers in response to what I initially thought was a Filipino lawyer’s
red herring* of a question about faulty English in the U.S. president’s speech.
(February 1, 2015)
---------
*Just for those encountering
this old idiom for the first time, a “red herring” is something used to divert
attention from the real matter, issue or object. It is often deliberately used
in fiction and nonfiction to plant a false clue that can lead readers or
characters towards a false conclusion.
Grammatical
pitfalls when ‘everyone’ is the antecedent
I thought I was being presented with a red
herring when I received e-mail a few days ago from a Quezon City-based lawyer who
made this observation: “In his recent State of the Union address, U.S. President
Barack Obama said: ‘Everyone must do their
share...’ That is now very common. We hear a lot about ‘everyone’ being asked
to do ‘their’ part in nation-building, etc. And what’s the deal with ‘between
you and I’?”
Atty. Stephen Monsanto evidently meant to say
that President Obama could have said “Everyone
must do his or her share” instead but
didn’t because even if that usage is grammatically airtight, the preferred
option now is the plural adjective “their” for such constructions even if it’s
grammatically faulty.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly checked the quote
with the text of President Obama’s speech and found that it wasn’t a red
herring after all. It wasn’t exactly what the president said but close to it, with
the debatable usage even repeated in this scrupulously parallel construction (italicizations mine): “That’s what middle-class
economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair
shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. We don’t just want everyone to share in America’s success—we
want everyone to contribute to our
success.”
Now the big question is: Did President Obama unknowingly
commit a subject-verb agreement blunder in that speech?
My opinion is a qualified “No, he didn’t,” and
I’ll now proceed to explain why.
Recall that “everyone” is a singular pronoun
that refers to every unspecified person in a group; there’s a presumed zone of
ignorance on whether the group is all-male, all-female, or mixed-gender. In
President Obama’s speech, however, “everyone” clearly refers to the American people
as a whole, which is unquestionably a mix of males and females. I therefore
think that it would have sounded odd—and distractingly repetitious—for him to
use “him or her” with that certain knowledge about his constituency: “That’s
what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets his or her fair shot, everyone
does his or her fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules…”
But hardline grammar prescriptivists would
insist that to be an exemplar for correct English, President Obama should have
avoided the obvious subject-verb disagreement altogether by replacing “everyone”
with the pronoun “all”: “That’s what
middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when all get their fair shot, all do
their fair share, and all play by the same set of rules…” That’s
grammatically faultless all the way, but we can see and feel that the eloquence,
fluidity, and sense of urgency of the original statement are gone.
The problem with using “everyone” is, of
course, that English doesn’t have a singular third-person possessive adjective
of indeterminate gender. All it has are the masculine adjective “his” and the
feminine adjective “her,” and in contemporary usage, the classic recourse to
“his” as default possessive adjective when the antecedent pronoun’s gender
isn’t specified is now widely frowned upon as sexist. Also, as I’ve shown
above, we can replace “everyone” with “all” to sidestep the gender problem but this
tends to depersonalize the statement and make it less compelling.
This is actually why even at the risk of being
looked upon as less than perfect in their grammar, many English-savvy people
like President Obama now use “their” as possessive adjective for “everyone” as
antecedent even in their formal English—and I do think that it’s not an unwise
and illogical decision.
***
P.S. “Between you and I” is indefensibly wrong
usage, though; it should be “between you and me.” A pronoun that follows “between”
should always be in the objective case, like “me” instead of the
subjective-case “I.”
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