Oh, and wait ’til this “personal pronoun” crap gets entrenched into the mainstream. Someone wants to be called a “they” and “them”. Yeah, no. Unless you got MPD or have a tapeworm named Jerry, I ain’t using a plural pronoun on a singular person.
Or just in general, people using plurals for “gender nonspecific” speech. Uhhh, no.
Some yootoobers do that when reading those reddit stories. “My boss is an idiot, and they keep doing this stuff to me.” Uhh, what? Your boss and who else is doing that to you?
I’m Gen-x, but point taken. Nonetheless, you don’t realize just how many people of the millenial and GenZs I can’t hire simply because they have no command of basic grammar or the English language.
Now I’m showing my years here but I think that the use of computer spell-checkers has taken a toll on our grammar and the quality of our prose. I see it in the work of respected on-line columnists. Mistakes of; too vs. to, their vs. there, made vs. maid, etc. are just a few samples of errors that spell-checkers just don’t pick up. I see these mistakes immediately which brings me to my point. Back in the old days before spell-checkers were invented, we relied on fellow students, friends or colleagues to look over our work (if it was of some importance). We called it proofreading. Assuming we had a competent proofreader, we were not only alerted to misspellings but also to repetitive statements, poor grammatical structure and downright boring writing. It was humbling but……necessary. I suppose that practice still exists but I think too many people are content to glance over the screen and if no misspelling alerts are in view, then they’re happy. Progress?
If this is the case, then all of us are speaking incredibly improper English. English today is completely unrecognizable from what it was 1500 years ago. So I guess we’re all wrong.