Good lord people! Give it a rest! Sorry...it was late, long day & I didn't phrase things exactly as I should have. Teach me to speak up! You guys may continue to drag things on WITHOUT me! No I'm not leaving the list. No need for apologies. David made the appropriate clarification & that was the end people! --Maria P
On 9/18/07, Jeff Zeitlin <icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:09:06 -0700, you wrote to Freelance Traveller:
>> 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
You are correct; however, the original error was Maria P's (quoted
above), not mine. The issue was not one of grammatical gender, though;
rather, it was the ambiguity of the given construction coupled with the
lack of grammatical case in English that I was pointing out.
Maria wrote - and I've copied it from above - "...a "face hugger" card
(or an alien card) that allowed them to silence someone once they died."
The use of 'they' is ambiguous in this construction - the two possible
reading are (text in brackets mine for clarification):
1. "...a "face hugger" card (or an alien card) that allowed them to
silence someone once they [the person to be silenced] died."
2. "...a "face hugger" card (or an alien card) that allowed them to
silence someone once they [the person holding the Face Hugger card]
died."
Subsequent comments about dead people not being able to speak in other
people's games indicate that the people making those comments read the
construction as #1 above, when Maria's intent was #2.
Your correction directed at me - the less ambiguous construction of
"When the the Face Hugger dies, he or she may silence another player for
the rest of the game." - is in fact correct and would have clarified the
issue admirably - but it should have been directed to Maria, rather than
to me.
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