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Missouri High School Principal Resigns After Posing As Student On Facebook
longacre writes "Suzy Harriston wanted to be friends on Facebook. The profile said she was from Clayton [Missouri] and had more than 300 friends, many of them from Clayton High School. No one seemed to question who Harriston was. That is, until the night of April 5, when a 2011 grad and former Clayton quarterback posted a public accusation. '"Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal," wrote Chase Haslett.' Suzy Harriston quickly disappeared from Facebook, and Louise Losos, the principal, subsequently took a leave of absence, and then resigned."
Since we are talking about FB for no reason, shouldn't more appropriate stories come up, like the fact that it's going IPO soon?
It's really amazing that the inflation is so gigantic now, that it destroyed so many businesses and killed off real savings, that the investors are flocking just to anything that has some buzz around it. Sure, sure, a half a billion to a billion accounts are there, it's a sea of information and contacts and eyeballs, it's really amazing that there are so many people using the same platform, but after everything it is just another site, it's not like there weren't sites like this before and nobody really prevents more sites like this from appearing in the near future. Are people really intimately tied to their FB accounts? I don't know, I am just asking. To me it looks like a huge inflation driven bubble and a reflection of our time of lack of genuine investment opportunities due to lack of real savings and freedoms, but maybe I am completely wrong on this, I just don't know.
Isn't that a more interesting story than somebody pretending to be somebody else?
You can't handle the truth.
Something is terribly amiss, my friend. I've been observing this phenomenon for some time now, but... could it be that you're not using Gamemaker? I'm detecting that you're not using Gamemaker (as you should be doing).
Return to Gamemakerdom. Return to it right this minuteness. What on Earth are you waiting for? Return to Gamemakerdom.
The practice dates back to at least Chaucer, presumably earlier since it's unlikely he invented it. 'They' has been the gender neutral singular since Middle English.
Well, yes, when it was introduced in the middle ages, until it had become the standard for plural around the time of Chaucer. But we're not speaking middle English here, are we?
It's a lot older than you are, so I can only conclude that it grates on your ears because you never read any proper literature in the English language (like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or George Bernard Shaw).
Shaykespere wasn't a great poet because of his grammatical skills, but despite his lack of them. Using Saxpur as an authority on English is disingenuous.
Shaksper seldom bothered with stuff like "who"/"whom" or other grammatical niceties, for that matter. But he did use "him" as a an anonymous singular:
"What rebell captaine
as mutnes are incident, by his name
Of course, the rest is garbage:
can still the rout who will obey th a traytor
or howe can well that pclamation sounde
when there is no adicion but a rebell
to quallyfy a rebell, youle put down straingers
kill them cut their throts possesse their howses
and lead the matie of the law in liom
And finally another epicene "him":
to slipp him lyke a hound
Not exactly a brilliant example on how we should write.
Anyhow, the only example I can find of Shakespeare using "they" or "their" for singular is when referring to an unknown but presumed large plurality.
As for Jane Austen and GBS, strong claims require strong evidence. So, citation?
What I can find is that the use of "he"/"him" and transcribing to "one" or "people" is what was common, or elaborating by expanding the qualifiers to "him or her".
Also, some use of "they" when pointing back on words that aren't obviously singular, like "anyone", "everybody" or "many a man".
Or with negations, like in Shakespeare's "no man" - "their".
While technically "man" here can be seen as the all-encompassing "man" and not a logical singular, it is immaterial, because the negation makes the quantity unknown. Here, the use of "their" is logical, not grammatical, and similar to using "were" in a similar context.
No grammar nazi would accept this use, but I am not one of them.
This particular use of "they" (and factual "were") cannot be used as a justification for using "they" to refer to a word that's singular in both grammatical and logical sense.
Fast forward to the 1960s. At that point, women's liberation called for eradication of sexism, including not just attacking the intent, but words themselves. Some proposed new gender neutral words, and some authors tried to revive the old Middle English feminine "hir" as an epicene pronoun. (Alice Sheldon, Dick Lupoff) Chaucer might have been pleased.
The claim that singular they is old is misleading at best (yes, it was used that way in the 1300s, but then again, everyone who mattered was presumed to be male too). The modern use really is a child of the PC movement, and it (not "they"[*]) should die.
[*] A subscriber to said political correctness might insist on "they" instead of "it" in my sentence, and by doing so introduce ambiguity. Be that on hir head.
Singular they has rapidly taken over to the point where it's now even used for persons where there is a presumed gender. While I may be fighting a losing battle, by god does it need fighting.