"Anybody who can't keep their mouth shut, raise his hand."
- John Sandford, Mortal Prey

ROTFL! That's gotta be on purpose, no?

It is funny as well. Yes, it has to be on purpuse. I'm still lost in the morass of Grimm's Law.

Etymology: Morass \Mo*rass"\, noun. [from Old English expression marras, mareis (perh. through Dutch moeras), from French marais, probably from Latin mare sea, in LL., any body of water; but perhaps influenced by some German word.

( the decline and fall of all )

And what would you suggest instead of the pronoun you perceive to be wrong? This is not a rhetorical question; I'm really interested in y'all's answers.

the character in question, a Minneapolis cop, was rhetorically addressing a tableful of unknown, off-duty or retired, St. Louis cops, in a bar, all men.

"[Would] Anybody who can't keep his mouth shut, raise his hand[?]"

-joe (context, context, context) friday

edit: or maybe even "your hand", but that's probly a hypercorrection, for the context.

That would be my suggestion as well, tsuwm, even if they weren't all men. I've read John Sandford and I don't think Lucas Davenport and his cop friends would be too fussy in any case. At least about language.

>At least about language.

If there's one specific person in the group it's actually applies to, I think it works as a "and you know who you are" type comment. For politeness, I'm pretending to correct everyone, but you know I'm only talking to you.

tsu, Fal: The usage is recognized as singular in the late editions of some dictionaries

The prescriptivists warn us that by 2082 any word in the language can be used to mean anything the speaker wishes

Even today, a drive drive drive drive is the flight of a ball in a baseball game, the outcome of which results in an automobile trip by the all-time home-run champion to a venue in which culturally-acquired concern for the proliferation of a keychain semiconductor memory is sponsored through the profits of a lumber mill whose continued existencce depends upon the legalization of dredging a shallow river intended to convey logs downstream for further processing

but, as I went on to point out, that ain't the context, in this case.

<sigh>

Well, without knowing the broader context it obviously looks backward and should be "her hand".

Do not despair, tsuwm. Look at AWADs May calendar as of Troy pointed out.We will have a blue gap day between May 12 and 13 , to recover from sighs and all other blues.

(but the price to pay is loosing May 8)

"If any of you cannot keep your mouth shut, please raise your hand."



TEd (making molehills out of mountains) Remington

I would have gone with "Anybody who can't keep their mouth shut, raise your hand," but I like TEd's better. The problem I see with the original "his hand" is that it sounds like the missing context involved someone totally unrelated to the group being spoken to and the direction was to raise that person's hand not unlike raising the hand of the victor in a boxing match.

tsu: Was that a sigh of disgust or of rapture

you could bet the house (or one of these) on your best guess.

-joe (I don' thin' your memory is all that bad) friday