"And I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket"
It lacks pronoun-antecedent agreement;
"a child" is singular, "their" is plural.
Either a child misses her (or his) blanket, or children miss their blankets.
Often people will go the route of singular noun and plural pronoun to avoid the gender issue, but it's still wrong. Traditionally, "he" or "him" have been inserted, because our language has no gender neutral singular third person pronoun. However, there is an argument that using "he" as the standard singular pronoun creates a sexist language. The use of "he" doesn't particularly bother me, but I usually use "she" instead, just for grins. Has a nice ring to it...
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(I made an effort to correctly name the parts of speech I was referring to, but I may have some of the terminology wrong. I can usually pick out grammatical or syntactical errors, but I don't usually know the proper name for them. Learning more about the English language is on my to-do list - I find it fascinating.
6 comments:
What a great winter break project that would be! Don't ever listen to rap if grammatical errors bother you.
I WAS SERIOUSLY THINKING THAT JUST THE OTHER DAY.
Ugh.
"the most loneliest day of my life" line out of a System of a Down song.
Sorry to call off the language police, but there isn't anything wrong grammatically problematic with Fergie's line. The use of the singular 'they' has been fairly common in English language and literature for a few hundred years.
There are several explanations in the literature that attempt to explain this phenomena. I like a suggestion advanced by David Lewis the variance in the usage of their has to do with the ambiguous quantification of the antecedent part of the sentence. So in Fergie's line the 'a' in "a child misses" introduces the indefinite article. So, it's ambiguous as to whether the reference is a particular child, or simply any old child.
There is a fairly nice wiki entry on this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Best,
Matthew
Be that as it may, it still sounds bad.
To me.
It may be acceptable to utilize the singular they, but the standard english rule still has validity. I simply prefer it the other way. Sounds cleaner, less ambiguous.
Somehow....I'm thinkin Fergie would prefer to think that she was using bad grammer...
Something about her humps,her humps her humps tells me that sounding intelligent isn't much of a priority for her.
But that's just me..
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