Oh, tsuwm! Thank you for that link! I am laughing out loud. How did I come to associate the title maven with being female, can you tell me? And what the heck does "radical Whorfianism" mean, in the article, please?
And now I finally know for sure what prescriptivist means; I'd never heard the term until I read it on this board, and kind of picked up the meaning by context.
I am rolling, over Mr. Pinker's comeback to arguments against sentences such as: If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone. He says, in part, Such feelings of disquiet—a red flag to any serious linguist—are well founded in this case. The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:
Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.
Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible "improvement," Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.
The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an "antecedent" and a "pronoun" referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a "quantifier" and a "bound variable," a different logical relationship. You-all should really read the rest of it; it's great. (p. 378.)
Oh, he mentions something we've discussed here: that a baseball hitter flied out. tsuwm, I know you loved that section on verbing nouns! ;-)
