> From: Jeff Zeitlin <icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:31:10 -0400, David Mc wrote: > >On 9/17/2007 8:55:06 PM, Maria P (mudpuppy1@xxxxxxxxx) wrote: > >> In my last AYAW? game at DragonCon this year, I > >> don't think we wolves would've won had there not been a "face hugger" card > >> (or an alien card) that allowed them to silence someone once they died. > >The dead cannot talk in games I play. They are just observers. > > This is one of the bad things about English not having grammatical cases > like German or Russian. > > The Face Hugger allows a player to silence someone once they (the Face > Hugger) have died. Uh, not to be a prickly pedant, but YOU made the grammatical error by using "they" for a singular third person pronoun and by "casting it back" across the object in hopes it would stick to the subject (which, FYI, it rarely will--folks tend to "cast back" to the most-recent noun that they read). Had you written it as follows, you would have caused no confusion: "When the the Face Hugger dies, he or she may silence another player for the rest of the game." Now... I won't argue that English is in dire need of a neuter third person pronoun to get rid of that silly "he or she" crap or use of "they" as a neuter singular (which German DOES have, to the woe of German language students here in the US). Not to mention a third person plural pronoun distinct from the singular (hence the reason we invent words like "y'all" and "youze" to fill that niche). But anyhow... you made that confusion, not the English language.... David