Words I Hate II

In a tangent to my tentative series, “Words I Hate,” I’d like to make this commentary on an increasingly more and more popular new grammatical creation in 21st century America. Let me show you the example I saw a few days ago online:

“How to React When a Child Cuts Their Hair.”

(Yes, the Little One cut her own hair. But that’s a subject for another post.)

You see this most frequently in pop media, be it online or print. I don’t recall seeing it in a published book, certainly not like something by Norman Mailer. Despite his entrenched liberalism, the double Pulitzer winner would not deign to destroy the English language in such a crude, flagrant, and idiotic way to advance an agenda.

See, most of us are now so screwed up about being politically correct that we can’t write the word “him” or “he” when it is grammatically called for.* The result, using “their” in place of “he”, is obviously in error since it does not allow the noun and pronoun to agree in number.

Ideally, traditionally, the sentence above should read –

“How to React When a Child Cuts His Hair.”

Oh the horror! The female gender is left out! Second-class citizenship! A slap in the face! Sexism! Chauvinism!

No, correct grammar.

If the topic of the sentence is something having to do purely with the feminine, then it is fine to substitute “her” instead of using “their.” For example –

“How to React When a Child Loses Her First Barbie Doll.”

(I’m not even going to allow for the possibility that boys having Barbie dolls is normal.)

If using the male pronoun is too stressful for the writer or editor, there’s another way that’s acceptable, if a tad bit awkward-sounding:

“How to React When a Child Cuts His or Her Hair.”

It agrees grammatically because it agrees numerically, see? Just don’t use the word “their.” Oh, and don’t use a hyphenated His/Her. That’s even more awkward, ’cause it does all it can to call attention to itself, like a great aunt or uncle who gets too drunk at your Christmas party and makes a painful spectacle of his/her self. (See, it is awkward!)

But the worst, the absolute worst, the most horrid abomination from the ninety-ninth pit of grammatical hell, the cursed, the anathema, the evil I would never, ever wish upon my most detestable enemy, is –

S/he.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!


* Grammar purists will snicker at my often-used violation of the rule “thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition.” Believe it or not, I do have residual guilt over this, and cringe every time I write such a sentence. But my instinct, my inner critic slash editor, the idealized reader inside me, frets even more over the grammatical gymnastics involved with keeping such a sentence from ending in a preposition. So, I violate the rule, but only to appeal to an inner sense of style, not to advance an ideology.