This case is not about standing. I think you may be confused about the legal meaning of the word "standing."
No, that's what I meant. In all fairness, you're right in that the case isn't about standing, and what I probably should have said earlier is that the thing should be dismissed for lack of standing. In essence, since the company itself, as a legal entity, cannot actually do anything insofar as observing religious practices are concerned, it is impossible for harm to result. Again, there's a difference between the company itself and those who own and operate it, and while your observations about legal culpability for criminal action is spot on, I would counter that it reinforces my point rather than disputes it. After all, while a company can be found to be criminally guilty of something, it is a person, a human being, who will ultimately bear the punishment for his or her decisions. All I'm contending is that the legal principle works in the opposite way as well.
So an archdiocese should not be immune to the ACA?
Frankly? It should not. I understand the argument that religious organizations should be exempt from compliance, but I find it to be absurd. The whole reason that people like Jehova's Witnesses can do stuff like refuse blood transfusions is that they're people exercising a religious belief. A legal entity of any sort cannot make such a decision. Now, I'm not saying that folks for whom birth control should have to get BC, nor am I saying that folks who oppose abortions should be made to have one. All I'm saying is that the decision for those acts must rest at the individual level, as a matter of personal conscience, rather than being dictated by the beliefs of whoever a person works for.
Besides, the Archdiocese is a terrible example here. The Catholic church recently did its own internal audit of its congregation and found that something like 98% of all practicing Catholics who regularly attend mass in the U.S. use or have used birth control. It would be absurd, given data like that, for the church to be able to impose its will upon its congregation; how is it less absurd for it to impose its will upon its employees?
This case is not about standing. I think you may be confused about the legal meaning of the word "standing."
No, that's what I meant. In all fairness, you're right in that the case isn't about standing, and what I probably should have said earlier is that the thing should be dismissed for lack of standing. In essence, since the company itself, as a legal entity, cannot actually do anything insofar as observing religious practices are concerned, it is impossible for harm to result. Again, there's a difference between the company itself and those who own and operate it, and while your observations about legal culpability for criminal action is spot on, I would counter that it reinforces my point rather than disputes it. After all, while a company can be found to be criminally guilty of something, it is a person, a human being, who will ultimately bear the punishment for his or her decisions. All I'm contending is that the legal principle works in the opposite way as well.
[quote]I think Kagen does not under stand what the issue is...its not about if the woman is harmed...its more about if congress have the right to force a company to give an entitlement that conflicts with their personal religious beliefs....who cares what entitlment congress has given? Even is you bought into this equivocation, what about the harm to the company?
While the debate has continued about whether tangible harm comes to a woman, I think that both sides have missed the real crux of the legal argument here, and the point upon which the case will be decided, I suspect. Let me emphasize a bit:
[quote]a company to give an entitlement that conflicts with their personal religious beliefs
A company is a legal entity for tax purposes. Period. A company does not have religious beliefs. It cannot. A company is a legal entity. People have religious beliefs, actual living, breathing human beings. A company may be entirely staffed by people with the same exact religious and spiritual code, but even as a result the company itself does not have a belief itself. What church does Hobby Lobby attend? Like, the store itself? What denomination? Who is Hobby Lobby's pastor? Has it taken communion? If we extend the same idea, does Hobby Lobby have a constitutional right to bear arms? How about free assembly? Can we get the legal entity Hobby Lobby in the same room as the legal entities BP and Xerox so that they can converse about their home lives? Can you see the absurdity of this line of questioning?
The legal problem with the strain of argument which contests that Hobby Lobby as a company objects to non-Christian anything whatsoever is that it assumes a fact which is not and cannot be in evidence--that a company, which has no mind or soul can itself have a religious belief; the principle here is the same as the principle by which a company cannot be sent to jail. Since a company lacks the ability to make decisions in and of itself, it cannot be held criminally culpable for its actions, though individual members of that company can be. In the same way, while individual members of a company can hold a given religious belief, the company, by virtue of its lack of self-determinative consciousness, cannot, ipso facto, hold a belief of any kind. Thus, Hobby Lobby lacks the standing to make the legal argument that this or anything at all infringes upon its religious beliefs, and the case will almost certainly be dismissed for that reason.
Scientology, the Branch Davidians, The Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, Family International, and any of these various doomsday cults that form all the time: you would believe we should encourage belief in these?
The right to an individual's freedom of belief is to be maintained and respected, yes, but that sure as heck doesn't mean that we need to respect what they choose to believe, and it certainly doesn't mean we cannot criticize it.
It's a free country, Highroller, and with explicit constitutional protection for freedom of speech. You can criticize puppy dogs and rainbows, if you want. If you do so with regards to religion, I would hope that you do so in light not of what those people believe, but how that belief causes them to act.
With regard to your paralleling of Paganism to doomsday cults, this seems to be a reduco ad absurdum to me; the Pagans I've known have mostly done their best not to bother anyone else, and don't seek to gain financial, political, or social advantage as a result of their religion, as all of your examples have done. It seems like you're making a comparison here which is, if not apples to Volvos in its disparateness, then at least apples to horses.
So, let's talk about actions: doomsday and personality cults, like those you've cited, exploit a belief in the divine in order to make one or several persons rich, politically powerful, or famous. There is a clear and disturbing social reality associated with that behavior, and I can and would criticize it. Pagans, on the other hand, do not appear to my understanding to have an organization of any sort, do not seek to gain financial, political, or social advantage as a result of their beliefs, and do not seek to recruit or subject others to their belief system. Mostly, it seems to me, they go on camping trips and like trees. I really don't see anything to criticize there; they're not hurting anyone, including themselves, and their behavior makes them feel closer to the divine.
Here's where I draw my line. Were I to encounter a member of one of those doomsday cults, I would criticize what the cult does, in a larger socioeconomic sense, but the cultist's right to believe in the basic tenets of the cult is something which I would consider to be off-limits. In essence, trying to proscribe any sort of belief is fundamentally the same as acting as thought police, and that does not and never has washed with me.
Finally, not all marginal religions are cults. There is an important semantic difference, and conflating the two is, in effect, an appeal to popularity which attempts to delegitimize any non-major religious organization.
There's some stuff going on here that seems pretty not cool to me, and I wanted to comment on it. For reference, I am not Christian, Pagan, or Atheist, so I really don't have a dog in this fight.
First, almost everyone in this thread is making comparative value judgments on various spiritual belief structures--most often Christianity vs. Paganism, but also Atheism vs. Christianity. Bottom line, folks: that aint right. The right to freedom of conscientious belief applies to all, and is only meaningful if everyone's right to believe & practice whatever they want, regardless of how weird it might seem to you, is respected and encouraged.
After all, whatever you believe (or don't believe), it was persecuted and disrespected at one point in time as well, and by disrespecting other spiritualities, you're behaving no better than the Romans after the death of Christ (if you're Christian) or Christians in the Middle Ages and Enlightenment (if you're Atheist). Mormonism, for instance, seemed pretty damn weird to most folks when Joseph Smith started it up a couple centuries ago, but it seems a lot less weird to us now.
So, in this discussion, I would like to remind and encourage everyone that treating other peoples' beliefs with disrespect is a reflection on you, not on whatever seeming absurdity you're objecting to.
Now, objectively speaking, there have been some incidences of discriminatory action taken against Pagans of various stripes in the past half-century or so since the religion became a thing. It's not right that this has occurred. However, speaking objectively again, we've got much bigger, more productive fish to fry, in my humble opinion, and the frying of those fish may well alleviate some of the problems that Pagans face. Have a look at the violence stats against trans* people sometime, for instance. Working towards a more equal, respectful society alleviates everyone's complaints, from Atheist to Christian, but it obliges us to accept the legitimacy of diverse opinions which we don't really agree with.
(For those who don't get that, PC began with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which had that Eskimos use so many words for snow as "proof". This "proof" was, of course, fabricated. As was their discussion on Hopi tenses, which "is closer to the current understanding of physics", and they managed to be wrong about Hopi language, Hopi ideas of time, and relativity all at once for a hat trick! In short, I charge that political correctness is racist.)
Umm... what the hell? No, really, what the hell? Saying that this is coming out of left field would inflict a rather nasty insult on left field, I think. Nevertheless, let's deal with what you've posted on a point-by-point basis.
1.) Rape is bad. Everyone agrees that rape is bad. Everyone agrees that rapists should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However.
However, we are capable of dealing with more than one problem at a time, both as individuals and as a society. Trying to understand the way that language is transforming does not preclude us from dealing with higher-order problems, such as rape, gender inequality, war or, for that matter, breathing at the same time.
On an entirely personal level, I am mortified that you've chosen to bring the cases of these women up in this venue, not because political correctness has nothing to do with our debate (it does), or because their experiences are not deserving of remediation (they are), but because that by addressing the magnitude of their suffering to such an insignificant problem as the semantic drift of the word 'their,' you're reducing the importance of their experiences by several orders of magnitude. Put another way, you have several real cases of gross injustice which demand attention, and the venue you choose to air those concerns is on an internet forum in a discussion about linguistic theory? If you want to be of service to these women, go volunteer at a rape crisis center! If you give me your address, or a city to look in, I'll even research the contact information for you.
2.) Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about Sapir-Whorf. For the uninitiated, the real scientific problem with Sapir-Whorf isn't that they screwed with the results of their experiment (though that is certainly a big one), or that Sapir and Whorf were racist (which is probably true, and definitely problematic if so), it's that their hypothesis is experimentally and demonstrably wrong. The idea that the language you speak shapes or controls how you think simply does not hold water.
If we choose to be charitable to Sapir and Whorf, and assume only the best intentions and scrupulous ethics on their part (i.e., to play the devil's advocate), the reason that their hypothesis failed is because they did not have an understanding of, and subsequently could not account for, the effect of social framing on human cognition. In short, shared cultural framing of common issues affects, in massive and demonstrable ways, how those ideas are perceived (ex.: look at how the word 'socialism' is perceived in America versus Great Britain). This has nothing to do with race, or with language, but with how individuals in a social group place themselves relative to that social group, and how that affects the way that social group deals with ideas and problems. At this point, the whole mess becomes a problem for sociologists more than linguists, and as it's a tangled, heavily subjective mess, it's one I'm personally quite happy to see go.
3.) Political Correctness has had a complicated history in America, and the phrase as we now understand it carries significant baggage. Political correctness began to be used in a way we would understand it in the 1970s as a reflexively satiric term which Feminists used internally to try and keep from going off the deep end. It fell out of general use shortly thereafter until the mid 1990's, when the political right picked it up.
From there things get disturbing, because the Right has been able to successfully rail against political correctness as a more subtle way to complain about not being able to be openly sexist, racist, or homophobic without negative repercussions. In short, before the concept of political correctness appeared (and, in fact, as a necessary component for it to appear), language and society had already shifted such that the behavior 'proscribed' by PC-ness had become the norm. Have you ever looked at a person of African-American descent and thought of him or her without using the n-word to describe them? How about looking at a woman and thinking of her as a capable person before you thought of her in a sexual way? Guess what, that's the behavior that people who complain about political correctness are upset about!
Rhetorically, folks can complain about PC-ness without looking like a jackass because the people who do will cherry-pick (generally non-existent or really really fringe) instances of language shift which obliterates useful meaning in language, rather than moving meaning off of offensive, loaded terms and onto ones which people on all sides of society are comfortable with.
Sorry, bro, but people *****ing about political correctness bothers me. Complaining about political correctness is almost always a subtle way to be a racist douchebag, and that dog won't hunt so long as I'm involved in the discussion.
Grammatical patterns tend to come from dialects, so I'm not sure I see the distinction.
Agreed. However, until a grammatical pattern moves into the prestige dialect, it is generally considered to be a variant. Dialectical oddments such as we've been discussing are inherently unstable, because they are restricted in space and population use; either they must spread and become the new standard, or they will slowly fade and become useless to their former speakers. This is the reason, for instance, that when Linguists discuss American English, they'll note a standard rule, such as the distribution of /a/ and /ɔ/, and then they'll note dialectical variations upon it, such as North-Central American English, wherein /ɔ/ typically subsumes /a/, amongst other things.
I guess what I'm trying to say, in more straightforward terms, is that the distinction between a 'standard' prestige dialect and variants upon it is the difference between a more conservative, homogenizing force and a more dynamic, evolving force. This distinction is useful, to me, to help understand how different groups of people are adapting the standard dialect to their own needs; sometimes their adaptations map back onto the standard dialect, but most often they don't.
I'm not entirely sure of the background of the pattern with measurement words, however, I did see some suggestion that the dialects that do it are relict areas rather than innovators.
In that case what I would be proposing is:
1. originally, most dialects do not pluralize measurement words
2. words like deer and head (of cattle) come to be thought of as measurements
3. they thus lose distinct plural forms
4. later, the pattern for measurement words changes to require pluralization in most dialects, leaving some dialects which retain the old pattern
Admittedly, I'm pulling it out of my ass, and it wouldn't explain why those measurement words didn't become irregular either.
I get what you're getting at, but that does not correspond to the historical record. Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Old English all had a complicated inflectional system which included three different categories (at a bare minimum) by which any word could be made plural. In fact, as soon as those inflectional endings collapsed at the end of the Old English period, the inflectional '-s' appeared (as in, within a generation or two) to indicate a standard plural pattern. Arguably, in fact, the inflectional '-s' is based on the nominative and accusative OE declensional endings of our good friend, the masculine a-stem, which was '-as.'
Some of our "irregular" pluralizations are holdovers from OE, and never lost their declensional patterns. A few examples of this include foot/feet, I/me/my (the old Nominative, Accusative, and Genitive forms, respectively, though they've undergone some slight pronunciation shifts), sing/sang/sung, and bear/bore (as in to carry). In reality, none of these are irregular in the least bit, and correspond precisely to their OE grammatical patterns.
I don't know how you intend for " deded" to be pronounced, but if anything, I would guess that a present tense "ded" would be the likely outcome of such a borrowing. We don't like borrowings that imitate our morphology too closely
(For example, we borrowed cherise from French and then decided the singular would be cherry.)
I suppose a backformation like that would be the most likely move in my hypothetical verb; I was just trying to illustrate something really weird, like the sound of our dental preterit happening three times as an uncomfortable-for-us example.
Well yeah, but what I mean is that I don't think those words even register as a paradigm as opposed to being simply words with unique conjugations/pluralizations (in the same way that "be", "have", "go", "do" and "say" stand completely alone).
Actually, every verb you cite there, with the sole exception of 'to be,' is, as with the examples I listed above, an instance of proper grammatical conjugation based on OE grammar rules. 'To have,' for instance, comes from the OE 'habban;' its first person conjugation, as in "I have" was "habbe," (the b's mutated to v's when the Normans came in and v became phonemic) its third person singular was "habbest" (which dropped out during the ME period), and its past tense was 'hadde' (I'm only noting the relevant conjugations here, but we can go through the others if you really really want to). "To Say" comes out of the same conjugation family, from "secgan", and conjugated to "sege," "segest," and "sede," respectively (the 'g' was vocalized in the move to ME). "Do" comes from "don" in the OE.
"Go" is a little more interesting here; it derives from the OE "Gon," but 'Went," the interesting and odd past tense which I think you're referencing, is actually a collapse between "Gon" and "Wend," which we still have as a functional, if archaic and odd verb, today. Regardless, "Gon" (from where we get gone, as in I have gone) and "Wend" are both the properly conjugated OE words for their respective categories.
See? We have more Old English grammar alive and well in Present-Day English than you thought!
To be, in almost every language, is irregular, because it's the most common word. We could probably learn some interesting stuff about fundamental language if we looked at everyone's 'to be,' but that sounds like way too much work to me.
That's more of a measurement word thing. Attorneys general is pluralized that way for a different reason - it's a calque of a French term, and hence the adjective comes after the noun rather than the usual order. There are other compounds like pluralize in a similar way, like passersby or men-about-town.
Sushi is not like that though, since "piece of sushi" is not a compound noun.
I think the use of piece as in "pieces of sushi" is common enough that normal people do not infer that the pieces should form a whole (cf. "pieces of software", "pieces of furniture," "pieces of paper", "piece of machinery").
In fact, I'm trying hard to think of another word that is so general, but it seems to that "piece" is a universal measure word/quantifier used for non-count nouns that are generally distinct units. I was trying to think if there was another word that could substitute for it in "piece of sushi" without having a more specific meaning ("unit" might work, but it sounds too technical). If you're using it with a non-count noun, then the normal interpretation is as with "piece of sushi" or "piece of furniture", I think.
However, I don't think "group genitive" is the word you were looking for there. Genitives are possessive. A group genitive would be either something like "William and Mary's mother" (with William and Mary being siblings) or the use of the possessive -'s clitic on a phrase rather than the head noun, as in "The boy down the street's house."
(As a side note, I get annoyed when people say that English noun system has a genitive case - we have a genitive clitic, English nouns have completely lost the case system. If we had a genitive case, you'd expect "The boy's down the street house" instead.)
Actually, group genitive is exactly the phrase I'm looking for, and it's not uncommon in other languages. Now, you might choose to take issue with the terminology here, on the grounds of possessiveness, but this is in fact a general term which is used in the literature, so I'll side with the literature for this one.
Here's the funny bit: almost all examples you listed are examples of the group genitive; it has become so common, so pervasive, that we scarcely notice it. The group genitive is assembled by shuffling the pluralizing or possessive -s ending around in a sentence to change meaning. I would normally illustrate this with 'pieces of sushi,' but since sushi pluralizes irregularly, it becomes unclear. I'll substitute 'chicken' instead. For instance:
"I ate several pieces of chicken." means something fundamentally different than "I ate a piece of several chickens."
Aside from the fact that the second sentence is vaguely disturbing, it implies that I ate, for instance, a big bucket of chicken wings, and not a whole chicken which had been split up into pieces. This is a useful distinction in English, because it helps us to clarify specific, non-named subjects, groups of categorized people, places, or things, or to distinguish pluralizing -s from possessive -s in spoken language, where they would be otherwise indistinguishable. For instance:
"The Attourney General's Office is bringing a lawsuit." versus "The Attourneys General are bringing a lawsuit.
or
"I'm eating at the Bob down the street's house." versus "I'm eating at Bob's house down the street
I've underlined the group genitive in each. Example one simply shows the semantic difference between possessive and plural, and the group genitive allows us to show that easily and clearly. The second example differs in emphasis; the first sentence identifies which Bob is the subject of the sentence by the position of his house (imagine you know five Bobs, who live all over the place), while the second where the house which Bob owns is. This meaning is carried only by the relative position of the possessive -s in this case.
I think that the name 'the group genitive' springs from the fact that one of the more common cases where this happens is with possessive phrases; however, since it crosses over so much with pluralization, the word might seem inappropriate. Does that make more sense?
It also occurred to me that if the clumsiness of the plural was an issue, you'd expect it in other trades - a tailor might want to speak of "two needle" if "two needles" is too much effort to say.
I think (and I'm just making an educated hypothesis here) that it could be related to the use of measurement words. In many dialects, measurement words are not pluralized, hence you get phrases like "fifty cent" rather than "fifty cents", "it's five mile down the road", etc. This may be a holdover from earlier English rules (I'm not clear on the details, I saw it suggested it was the Old English genitive plural). But at any rate, if you come to think of things like deer, fish, head of cattle, etc. as measures then it would make sense to follow that same pattern.
I've got to part ways on you here, because the examples you're citing are much more broadly representative of normal dialectical variation than they are of any underlying grammatical pattern. After all, you see phrases like 'fifty cent' or 'five mile' much, much more commonly in certain dialects than in others--for instance, I can say from experience that neither inflection you noted would be used with any frequency at all in Minnesota. We'd use the common plural on fifty cents, and our directions would sound more like "five miles that-a-way."
While the actuation problem (the problem of explaining how a sound change starts in the first place, as opposed to how it spreads, which is easier to understand and describe) makes the ultimate cause a bit tricky, you can still say a good bit about the causes.
For example, such vowel shifts are much more common in language with large vowel inventories, like the Germanic languages. By contrast to English accents, which almost all have their own vowel patterns, Spanish dialectal variation very rarely involves vowels - but even then, the vowels stay in place and don't move around or even trade places like English vowels do. This is generally the case in other languages with small vowel inventories (although you can get things like Arabic dialects changing from a 3-vowel to 5-vowel system due to diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ becoming /e/ and /o/).
But yeah, there are some things we can say about it, but other things, like why did original long /i/ change to /ai/ and the other vowels moved upward, rather than the shift going in the other direction... we just have to shrug our shoulders.
Oh, yeah, you're totally right; we've got a pretty good idea of how the GVS happened. I was just pointing out that nobody really knows why people started to pronounce their long vowels differently.
Well, yes, the strong verbs and irregular nouns are still with us.
But only a few of those irregular forms are still (marginally) productive. Occasionally, a regular verb or a newly created verb will fall into a strong paradigm (sneaked changing to snuck, or dived changing to dove). Most of them do not take new members though. The see:saw:seen paradigm has never admitted a new member in modern times as far as I know...
Yeah, the weak verb structure is the only properly productive one, and has been since OE. Pretty much the only time we go fishing around in the old strong conjugations is if we borrow a word which can't be easily or comfortably conjugated in one way or another. Imagine, for a moment, that we borrowed the verb "to deded" from another language. Doesn't matter what it means, but now we need to put it in the past tense; do we really want to go with "dededed"? I doubt it.
I guess what I'm saying is that most of the irregular paradigms are not really internalized as rules but rather as irregular forms which must simply be memorized on an individual basis. Patterns like goose:geese and teach:taught are dead, I don't think we're in any danger of ever hearing "cabeese", "jeece", "blaught" or "scraught" instead of "cabooses", "juices", "bleached" and "screeched" unless it's facetiously.
Well, that's because both goose and taught are Old English words which probably date all the way back to Proto-Germanic.
Also, I'll cop to the fact that sushi was a bad example. I just couldn't think of anything better offhand. It's a cool illustration of the group genitive, though (which didn't appear until Early Modern English)!
Eh? Group genitive?
What's genitive about it?
It's the pluralization of a word group, rather than a simple word pluralization, in the same way that Attourneys General is a group pluralization. While you can have just "pieces" as a simple plural word, it takes on a different and alternately significant meaning when it is in the context "pieces of sushi."
To explain, if I say that you have eight pieces of something, the obvious inference is that those pieces are components of a larger something else, like a puzzle, or are the broken shards of another thing which was once whole, like a piece of glass (the whole thing would be a pane). With 'pieces of sushi,' you get a different meaning; nobody's expecting you to assemble a castle out of the sushi, and nobody thinks that someone attacked it with a hammer or a knife (though that sometimes is the case, with sushi rolls, we can dismiss it because the same linguistic meaning attaches to nigiri sushi, which clearly was never part of a larger whole).
The problem is that you are making incorrect assumptions about language use 50 years ago.
Singular they has been used by at least some writers since all the way back in the 1300s.
- "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than themselves. " — Phillipians 2:3, King James Bible
- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
- There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,As if I were their well-acquainted friend. — Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors
- I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
- That's always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they're hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- Caesar: "No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed." / Cleopatra: "But they do get killed". — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)
(numerous examples could be found from less illustrious writers as well)
Linguistic studies have found that generic-he was not, at least as early as the 70s, interpreted as truly neutral. "He" would be used with stereotypically male antecedents, "she" with stereotypically female ones and "he" or "they" with neutral ones - but even when it was used with a neutral setting, subjects were more likely to associate it with male imagery. They were not truly interpreted as generic - even in a sentence like "Any nurse should keep his first aid kit handy", subjects responded that it could not refer to females, even though being a nurse is a stereotypically female job!
Unfortunately, we can't run such studies on people in the early 1900s or 1800s, but if you wanna check out this paper, Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar by Anne Bodine, you'll see that singular-they was in common use for a long time and not even all the grammarians agreed about it. Many of them neglected to mention this rule that later became so important. Some grammarians in the 1800s complained that "they" was too often used to refer to singular antecedents. The sexist statements of these grammarians makes it seem clear to me that their choice between the two options was not unbiased.
I would not be surprised to find that in speech, particularly the speech of the lower classes, singular-they has always been the more common pronoun than generic-he. Unfortunately, only the writing leaves a trace. But there's plenty of singular-they in old writing.
So... basically... this is not a rapid change that requires some special explanation. This is an old pattern that was for a couple hundred years opposed by prescriptivist grammarians. Those grammarians proposed many rules that were not based in natural linguistic development, that are now being cast aside once again, like most of their silly rules should be. We do not need to come up with some special theory to explain how this could happen so quickly. But also, as a student of sociolinguistics, I've studied language change a fair amount, and I think you're underestimating how quickly linguistic drift can occur.
(Also I would not consider the impetus for using singular-they to be a non-linguistic reason: if you don't begin by accepting that generic-he is truly generic, then the cause for using singular-they becomes preferring a grammatical "mismatch" in number to a grammatical mismatch in gender. It is the imposition of generic-he that I would consider to have been the result of non-linguistic motivations.)
Fair shake to you then; my real understanding of historical linguistics ends at the Early Modern English period, and if you've got evidence for singular-they use as far back as the nineteenth century, then your hypothesis is by far the more plausible. Some of your examples, however, run afoul of the conditions that I mentioned earlier, such as your Hamlet (the subject is plainly feminine), Austin (subjects are plural and mixed gender, not singular), and, arguably, your Shaw (direct subject is singular, but context indicates plural, because we may be talking about one man right here, but we're talking about him in the context of the many, many men which compose an army).
Your other examples look clean to me, though. Nice paleography!
I'm not saying that, I'm just denying that noun paradigms have anything to do with it.
People clearly have a motivation to use singular-they even against the teachings of grammar books. They perceive a need to be gender neutral - and not just out of political correctness, but because it seems wrong (semantically wrong) to use "he" in many of these cases. "If anyone calls, tell him I'm busy" seems wrong not because of feminists but because it seems odd to say that when the caller might well be female.
I wasn't saying that this was the result of feminist-based political correctness; I actually meant exactly what, it seems, that you mean here! This is a practical problem which, I believe I said earlier, leaves us searching for a practical solution. I just suspected that the sudden necessity of needing to refer to people of both genders in many more social contexts demanded this change.
Let's hear it for the internet erasing nuances in communication, eh? I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I apologize for the lag in response time, as I was in my final until 9:00 yesterday, and didn't really feel like talking shop again until now.
I would be wary of such just-so stories for the lack of a plural for deer and fish. That is, I don't think the "clumsiness" of "fishes" or "deers" should be seen as the explanation. If having to repeatedly use a clumsy plural was the motivation, then you'd expect plenty of more commonly used words to lack plurals, since their frequent use makes the clumsiness an even greater cost. But we pluralize fingers, streets, shoes, minutes, hours, plants, trees, etc. and any number of other commonly used nouns (that are also often used in the plural) in the normal way.
But there definitely is a pattern where hoofed game animals and fish especially don't have plural forms, and to a lesser extent some game birds (pheasant, sometimes quail). Something I would note is that these aren't farm animals and many of them live in groups.
You're probably mostly right here, Erimir, and certainly moreso than I; I'm just trying to reproduce a lecture I got a week ago. I should have, however, inserted a cautionary into that whole thing, as we really don't know why any of this stuff happened, only that it did. Historical Linguistics is all about most-plausible-explanations when it comes to this sort of stuff. See, for example, the Great Vowel Shift.
Again, I would be careful if you're suggesting that people really have the old Middle English or Old English patterns in their heads. A Modern English speaker only knows the Modern English paradigms, and so the only thing that would be the basis are the words that fit into that pattern in Modern English.
You are correct. However, I would argue that, while any given speaker of English only knows the rules for Modern English, that those rules are predicated upon Middle and Old English linguistic rules. Some of those rules have vanished, and some have remained in whole, while a few have remained in an odd patchwork. You don't need to know what a strong verb is to understand the conjugational differences between see and saw, and you certainly don't need to know which of the twelve (okay, seven with subcategories) Old English classes of strong verbs that 'to see' belonged to in order to conjugate it correctly in Modern English along the exact and proper conjugational lines that OE grammar demanded.
As with much of grammar, we don't know this on more than an instinctual level, any more than we know why it would be weird and wrong to have see'd as the past tense of to see. Certainly, there's no lexical block on see'd; we even use that exact sound pattern for another word (and, moreover, we're comfortable with multiple words sharing sounds, as in to, too, and two).
The point I'm trying to make, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that the grammar rules of Old and Middle English are still with us today; if we want to understand why a word is a particular way in PDE, it is generally essential to dive into the historical grammar of the word and look at how it evolved.
Also, I'll cop to the fact that sushi was a bad example. I just couldn't think of anything better offhand. It's a cool illustration of the group genitive, though (which didn't appear until Early Modern English)!
This is what I mean though - you're proposing a much more complicated mechanism for what is actually a very simple change.
People do not need to think that they are following a strong noun way of unpluralizing to simply do nothing to "they" and use it as a singular. That is, they don't need to think about strong nouns in order to use a plural as a singular. It's not fitting into a paradigm and it's not such a complicated, unusual or marked change (many, many pronouns in other languages have moved between singular and plural without any addition or removal of plural morphology, such as vos in some Spanish dialects, vous in French, sie in German) that we must look around for some precedent in English to explain the change.
At least, I would think you'd need some additional lines of evidence to claim that what's really happening is based on an irregular noun paradigm.
I dig what you're getting at here, Erimir, and linguistic drift is certainly a valid explanation for the movement of their into the singular. I, however, don't buy it, and I don't buy it because of the context I mentioned earlier.
The examples you're citing in other languages certainly happened, and are certainly valid, but they happened, as with almost all pronoun shift, very very slowly. They were, in short, drift. What's happening with they is different, I think, because right now users of the language seems to be groping for a word to fill a gap, because we don't have a word for singular third-person non-object, and we want one.
We can argue, if you want, about why this is so, and I can't offer any concrete evidence. However, I would point out simply that as recently as the 1950's, humankind was mankind, and all third-person singulars (unless the subject was plainly female) were he. In about fifty years, that has been utterly upended, and they is very well on its way to filling the lexical gap that 'he' is no longer able to fill, for entirely non-linguistic reasons. That, sir, is a damn fast pronoun shift, and I don't think that calling on linguistic drift really adequately describes what's going on.
After all, language responds to the needs of its users, and the users of English plainly have a need here. Maybe my colors as a pragmatic rhetorician are showing, but I just prefer the idea that people are using language in the way that they want it to be used to the somewhat disempowering notion that **** happens.
I totally didn't expect to bump into so many linguists in here! Also, I wanna thank you guys; the final's tonight, and you made me get off my butt and go back to double-check my notes to make sure I'm not insane.
Finally, as a disclaimer, I'm actually a Rhetorician, not a linguist, so there's a significant chance that you guys know more about this than me. Nevertheless, I shall carry on!
I'm not sure if it's just because I have forgotten the details of Old English noun classes, but this description is quite hard for me to follow.
Do you just mean to say that buffalo was interpreted as an irregular noun when it was borrowed into English?
Hokay, it just so happens that they and buffalo was a specific example that my professor used in class last week. Let's see how well I can explain what she explained.
In Old English, there are a total of 10 categories within which a noun can decline, all but two of which are based on gender (like Spanish). The most common of these were masculine a-stem nouns (Ctrl+F A-stem); it is from the masculine a-stem declension that most of our irregular nouns come, such as fish (used to be fisc). One thing of note here is that the genitive plural in the masculine a-stem is almost identical to the nominative and accusutave singular forms--we'll come back to this in a second.
In the late OE period, the vikings invaded much of England, and held it as the Danelaw for hundreds of years. At the point in time, OE and Old Norse were still pretty linguistically similar, and linguists theorize that, if both languages dropped their declensional endings, they were mutually intelligible. This is the likely cause of the collapse of the declension and vowel conjugation systems in OE, but it has some implications for our friend, fish.
Without classes to define its role in a sentence, and with all inflectional endings collapsed into a schwa, the plural and singular forms of masculine a-stem nouns like fish become identical. We can no longer know whether fish is the subject or the object of a sentence, or whether we need one or a hundred fish. That's a problem. So, we as OE speakers, start to lean more heavily on word order and start to use a few simple pluralizing endings, but the one that sticks is -s. Hence, for a while, fish becomes fishs. Most nouns settle here on their pluralizations.
Some words don't work well for this, though. Fish, in fact, stands out, because if you're a fisherman and you go out fishing, you're never ever going to catch a single fish. Yet, you've got this clumsy pluralization that you have to deal with. Similarly, if you're a hunter, you might go out to hunt a deer, but if you get the chance at a second, you'll take it. As such, some time in the ME period, the pluralization patterns for a few nouns lose their -s; moreover, they tend to fall into non-lexical categories, such as "creatures I go out into the wild to hunt;" they're non-exclusive, (i.e., goose/geese, which comes from Norman French), but they tend to clump up in an obvious way.
Fast forward several hundred years. Explorers are seeing buffalo (or bison, for that matter; which word you use doesn't matter in this example) for the first time, and borrow the word for them from their Native American guides. Now that buffalo is an English word, it needs a pluralization, so we have one of two choices: pluralize it along its baseline pattern, a la buffalos, or leave its plural the same as its singular, a la that old category which nobody knows consciously but everybody still uses. While you'd think people would go straight for the easy '-s,' it turns out that overwhelmingly people use these old ME categories, and not just for the creatures themselves (in our example) but for things associated with them as well when we obtain new words, like sushi (though it helps that there's no such thing as pluralization in Japanese in sushi's case).
I don't know to what extent you could say it "seemed to work like those words" since nouns only have two forms in Modern English. It doesn't have a phonemic form similar to other words which do not change in the plural, and it doesn't have a partial paradigm like sting:stung (which seems to work like ring:rang:rung but is missing the stang). The only work it would do is being a word for a type of animal similar to others which do not change in the plural, like sheep and deer (it doesn't share a phonetic similarity to other words of that type).
With they, this is happening in reverse (the reasons are different but the mechanics are the same). It's growing from being the third person plural to the third person singular as well, and it's doing so very, very quickly. However, since it doesn't have the plural -s at the end, we treat it like it's in an Old English strong declension, and reverse the old genitive a-stem pluralization pattern, which makes the singular the same as the plural.
Again, I'm not really sure I follow.
They enters into the conversation here even later. It is, naturally, a non-possessive gender-neutral plural form as is; lexically and socially, people want to move it into the singular form as well, to be an alternative for it which is gender-neutral and doesn't imply a non-person thing. Cool. All you have to do is unpluralize it, right?
Well... you can't. There's no obvious, or even incorrect-but-seems-okay way to do it. For instance, if you wanted to do this with either of the gendered versions, you could float over to the possessive 'his' or 'hers' and then cut off the seemingly-pluralistic 's,' and, while incorrect, you'd arrive at mostly the right place. You can't do that with they, though. When we get that sort of reaction out of a word, English speakers tend to instinctively move toward the "it must be an old Strong word" category, which transformed internally rather than externally to denote pluralization and past tense. Since, once the transformation has occurred and the base word is gone, it is impossible to replicate, what we do in English is leave the base form and the plural form identical. Hence, for entirely different reasons than fish and buffalo, they works the same way that they do.
So, as someone who's in the process of finishing a doctoral level History of the English language course, I just want to say that Blinking Spirit's posts so far in this thread have been 100% spot on correct. I think that I might be able to unfold a bit more for you though.
First, personal pronouns are, without exception, the slowest part of a language to change. The reason is simple: without exception, they are the most frequently-used component of language. The more often a part of language is used, the more slowly it changes. The phenomenon you're observing is that there has been a recent, major social shift, away from male-centered privilege, and toward gender and sexuality-based equality; this process has been going on for a while, but it wasn't until the Sexual Revolution in the 1960's that it really gained traction. Hence, you're seeing language that was considered normal in the 1950s struggle to keep up in modern times.
Should it keep up? Sure. On the other hand, it took Middle English speakers about 400 years to settle on a third-person feminine pronoun; for that period, they were using seo, heo, sche, scho, hire, hie, hires, che, and finally she! That's right--nine words that all mean that same thing! That's personal pronouns for you! We're actually doing pretty well with he/she/they right now, by comparison, I think.
Second, what's actually happening with they is what happened with buffalo, but in reverse. In the Old English period, words that worked like buffalo (it's complicated, and you probably don't want to know) lived in a declension where their basic present tense genitive a-stem plural was the same as their non-inflected form; i.e., I have one buffalo, or I have a herd of buffalo. When buffalo entered the language, it seemed to work like those words, so we pluralized it as though it were an OE holdover. With they, this is happening in reverse (the reasons are different but the mechanics are the same). It's growing from being the third person plural to the third person singular as well, and it's doing so very, very quickly. However, since it doesn't have the plural -s at the end, we treat it like it's in an Old English strong declension, and reverse the old genitive a-stem pluralization pattern, which makes the singular the same as the plural.
The tl;dr version is that the singular they isn't just grammatical, it's Old English grammatical. We're even declining it in the proper way, today, even though none of us knows the declensional rules for Old English. Is that cool or what?
There's a reason why 99% of all societies developed monogamous relationships, moreso as they grew larger and larger.
It just makes sense. It means there's greater stability for the children because there are two care-takers. It reduces the headache coming from taxes and logistics by allowing people to group people into simple familial groups. Etc, etc.
Promiscuity is not a bad thing, inherently speaking. It's just not particularly useful in terms of ensuring mankind doesn't go to the pits given its social development.
Well, this is a common misconception, but in reality, only a minority of societies today are monogamous; polygyny has a huge hold on cultures and nations across the world (not so much polyandry). Moreover, the idea of the American Nuclear Family is really only about 60 years old.
In your generic traditional society (averaged worldwide), one man would be married to between 2-5 women (much rarer on the higher numbers; generally, you had to be a Big Man). In many cases, each woman would have her own house, or would live with her family, while her husband would wander between homes (matrilocality). Alternately, the wife would move to her husband's family's home and live with the rest of his wives and his brothers' and fathers' families (patrilocality). Regardless of habitation patterns, there would be a very robust extended family unit which would surround all members of the family, and which would provide food, clothing, education, and all manner of support for, particularly, the children. Traditional kinship patterns can be a monstrously complex things. Within all this, it was exceedingly common for one or all members of a marriage unit to cheat on their spouse(s), as people typically married as an economic move.
We like to say that humans are hardwired for monogamy, because this reflects Western societal values and reinforces our social norms. The reality, however, is rather simpler: some people like the intimacy of a long-term, monogamous relationship, while others like the variety, excitement, and freedom of a polygynous relationship. Regardless of what the social norms are, people will behave in the way that they prefer; a man may essentially ignore all but one of his wives in a polygynous relationship, or a woman may sleep around on her partner in a supposedly monogamous relationship.
Well... I don't know why I wind up posting in economic threads pretty much exclusively these days, but I do. Here's another one, just for funsies. Oh, and before I get into this, full disclosure: I'm a member of the 1%... well, the anti-1%. I checked my salary yesterday, and literally 99% of Americans who have the exact job I have get paid more than I do. If I had no sugar mama, I'd live well below the poverty line; as it is, we scrape by, but life is pretty tight.
America is not a plutocracy, by any interpretation of the word. Period. As Highroller demonstrated earlier, we do not live in a society where wealth equates to the ability to rule and/or vote. We also do not live in a de-facto plutocracy, as everyone else seems to be arguing. That assumption is trash, but it's very seductive trash; I'll explain why in a minute.
Why do I make this claim? Well, for starters, the colossal failure of American Crossroads Crossroads GPS this past election year. For those of you who happen to not know, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS were a pair of Super PACs run by Karl Rove and which funneled hundreds of millions of dollars from conservative multi-billionaires into a series of political matchups. NBC goes into a little more depth, and I'll let you all read the full article at your leisure, but an extract is helpful:
The Sunlight Foundation calculation of "return on investment" was based on the percentage of money it spent on individual races-- and since Crossroads spent the most on the races it lost on, the group earned its low 1 percent "return on investment" or ROI. A sister group, Crossroads GPS, which operates out of the same offices as American Crossroads but does not disclose its donors, fared little better, netting a return on investment of only 13 percent, according to the Sunlight Foundation report.
Out of a total of fourteen elections, only three were won by the candidate which Crossroads backed. Moreover, those three were races which were relatively safe Republican wins anyhow--in Nevada, Nebraska, and (less so) New Mexico. The bottom line is that, if we were living in a de-facto plutocracy, the titanic amount of money that flowed through these two Super PACS--something like a fifth to a sixth of all the money spent on the election by both sides put together--would have had a much more significant effect. A salient argument can be made, indeed, that the money spent in this way had no appreciable effect on the election, as even if we remove the candidates which the PACs backed who disqualified themselves with rape-gaffe-a-palooza this year, the PACs fared well worse than chance. Again, if we were a plutocracy of any sort, this would not be the case.
The reality is that America is a democratic republic, period. Voters decided this year that the policies which the candidates financed by these PACs advocated did not represent their interests, and voted against those candidates. I'm not saying that junk like Citizen's United isn't a huge problem--it is. I'm not saying that the sort of behavior we saw this year is healthy in the long term for our system of government--it isn't. However, in America, the fact of the matter is that money does not equal votes, and does not equal elections.
So, why do we want to call this mess a plutocracy? Simply put, because, contrary to popular wisdom, Occupy Wall Street succeeded when it did its thing a couple of years ago. How can this be, you ask? They all got evicted. The camps were destroyed. People died, and militarized cops cracked down hard. The movement is just now trying to get back onto its feet with its Rolling Jubilee. How can it have possibly won?
OWS won because it changed the American conversation. If you'll recall, before OWS got started, the American financial conversation was about the national debt (remember the Debt Ceiling fight?); I'm not going to get into it here, but I broke this stuff down in another thread, and you can go read that if you want. After OWS, however, the American economic conversation was about economic inequality, and it still is. However, the rhetorical package that OWS used to promote its message/argument was the charged, politically-potent term, 'plutocracy'; it was a word which many Americans hadn't heard before but, when they looked it up, seemed to fit the stuff that OWS was talking about. Moreover, aside from some of the sillier nonsense that OWS was actually doing (human mic systems, camping out in faux-Hoovervilles with their high-priced electronics, and so forth), the complaints that they were levying resonated because they were essentially true. Real income for most American's hasn't risen since 1970. The ultra-rich have been successfully hoarding an increasing share of the total wealth in America, and weren't spending it. Companies had money to spend, but weren't (there are good economic reasons for why they haven't, and for why, regardless of economic policy, they probably will again in a HUGE way in 3-5 years), and the American people felt like they'd been stiffed.
After that point, the evictions, the paramilitary police, the whole nine yards, did nothing but cement the rhetorical power of OWS' message. To paraphrase Jay Heinrichs, who writes a rather delightful book about basic rhetoric, they lost all the battles but won the war. Based on nothing more than the rhetorical success of the OWS movement, I called the presidential campaign a year and a half ago in a long conversation with my mother, and I summed up my point as such:
"There isn't a Republican in the field this cycle who can actually address the rhetorical situation that they're going to be facing. Romney's the only credible candidate, aside from Perry (who was still in the race at the time), but he's actually the nightmare candidate, because if the GOP nominates him, he's going to become the poster-boy for everything that OWS has been saying. If that happens, there's absolutely no chance that Obama loses unless he does something unthinkably stupid."
I wish I could prove it, and I was kind of proud of myself when the 47% video came out, but that's neither here nor there.
One of my friends recently said that differentiating between Capitalism and Socialism wasn't very important because:
1. In both, a market exists that is partially free and partially manipulated by the government. (banned products/services, money supply, tariffs, subsidies, welfare, FDA, antitrust laws, etc.)
2. In both, the government collects taxes to serve the common good. (Basic infrastructure, security, legal system, etc.)
The only major line I can think of is if industries are private or nationalized, but obviously it's not an all-or-nothing kind of deal. Does having one nationalized industry make a government Socialist?
Just wanted to poke my head in here because the whole capitalism-socialism/communism binary is kind of a fake thing. It owes a lot more to the political reality of the Cold War than it does to any sort of actual conceptual binary.
Let's start with terms:
Quote from Wiki »
Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods or services for profit.
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, and a political philosophy advocating such a system.
At first glance, these two things SEEM to be opposed, but the reality is (as it always seems to be) a lot more complicated than that. Take, for instance, the retail supermarket chain Hy-Vee.
Hy-Vee, like many American companies, is employee-owned, which is a fancy way of saying that most stock is held by employees, and that the company gives its employees stock shares as part of its overall compensation plan. Now, Hy-Vee is a for-profit supermarket chain with a corporate superstructure. It is also an organization which is owned (mostly) by its employees, who have the power, as shareholders, to collectively steer the company in a variety of ways. Hy-Vee thus fits the fundamental definition for both a capitalistic and a socialistic enterprise. Which is it? The answer is both, at the same time.
Let's expand this concept to the absurd: Derpistan, an imaginary nation which exists for the sole purpose of this example. Derpistan's economy is a 100% state-controlled communistic enterprise, with all citizens obliged to hold state-mandated positions of employment, and for which all citizens receive equal rations, as well as an allowance of credits for discretionary acquisitions (birthday gifts, winter coats, shoes, and the like; your classic intermittent, at-need 'purchases'). Derpistan has chosen to orient its production economy such that it's a massive exporter of manufactured goods to other nations. The central government of Derpistan brings in a lot of foreign scrip from this exportation, which it uses to buy a variety of things, many of which it uses to make its manufacturing enterprises more efficient, safe, and productive. Derpistan is, thus, a capitalistic communist state.
I know this sounds kind of weird, but the actual opposed binary for capitalist is 'not-capitalist' (i.e., the economic system is not focused on a means of production for profit in any way, shape, or form--think the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek here). Similarly, the opposed binary for socialist is 'not-socialist' (or, a system where everyone's 100% on their own; total anarchy, without even the common bonds of family, friendship, or common language). Thus, every nation on Earth is at least somewhat capitalist and at least somewhat socialist.
The much more interesting thing, to me, is how this false binary came to exist, but that's a whole different ball of whacks. The takeaway here is to tell your friend that he's collapsing two completely different things into one big, confusing thing because of the way that America likes to tell the story of the Cold War.
this is why posting sources on here is useless. people just refuse to read the whole thing.
yes i did. evidently you did not. The whole fact check shows that the claims that SS is soluable are false. there is even a chart that shows that SS is paying out more and is running deficits.
It even states in the article that the US is using borrowed money to make the payments. It shows that everything that you claim is not true which is why it is called fact check.
picking one sentence out of an entire article does not make a valid point.
Well, now I'm suspecting that you're not even reading my posts, mystery, because you seem to be ignoring the parts where I say exactly what you're criticizing me for not saying.
Quote from Me »
I'd like to ask for you to please differentiate between insolvency, which is the inability to pay debts, and simply spending through your savings. SS is spending its savings now. It will not be insolvent until the mid 2030s. The definition of words matters, and I chose mine with care.
If you're going to debate me, mystery, please pay me the respect, as I do you, of not editing my quotes, and of not ignoring points I make which are inconvenient to you.
do not make alligations you can't back up. i never edited your post i never changed your post and i didn't ignore anything that you posted.
This is precisely what I meant when I asked you to not edit my posts; you're cutting enormous sections of what I said out of your responses; while normally, this is simply a matter of convenience, you have been consistently removing the parts of what I said that address, directly, what you eventually say.
unlike you ignoring an entire article that shows that SS is currently spending more than it is taking in.
I would refer you, again, to the section I just quoted from what I said in my prior post. I did not ignore your article. Far from it; I looked at it, provided a second source for context, and even went so far as to explain my specific word choices, and what I meant by them.
Unlike you, who actually did ignore not one, but five citations from my last post.
1.) That 100% of the American populace is financially literate enough to make robust, wise, diversified investments of the nature that you suggest. How about high school drop-outs? How about recent immigrants? Your plan works well for white, middle- and upper-class America, but isn't so good for other folks.
They don't have to make any decisions. which tells me you are not reading.
You currently are not paying for your SS. You are paying for someone else's. the government is promising you that when you retire that someone else will pay for your SS.
There is another investment scheme that is illegal and you can go to jail if you try to run it.
My system requires no decisions. people instead of paying for someone else start saving for themselves. their SS tax goes into their own account. the government does a simple % match and it gains a flat interest.
the system doesn't have to worry whether or not there are enough workers to pay out for people taking out. when you go to retire it will distributing the funds that you saved back to you.
This is, again, factually inaccurate. Let's look at just bonds, which you claim is a simple investment vehicle. I agree with you that it is more simple than stocks, but, well, bonds aren't exactly simple.
Would you like to buy a zero-coupon bond? How about a corporate bond? What interest rate over a given length of years is acceptable, profitable, or unacceptable? How does interest factor against inflation rates, in terms of real-dollar buying power?
I know people who are intimidated by the financial complexity of a checking account, mystery, and who will be utterly reliant upon Social Security for their retirement. Not everyone understands even relatively simple investment schemes.
Finally, complexity aside, I'd like to reiterate that comparing SS to traditional investment modes is like comparing a duck to a Honda Accord. The two things are NOTHING ALIKE. Please stop making this fallacious comparison. Social Security is NOT a personal investment. It is a government benefit, like food stamps or the mortgage interest tax deduction.
That this investment vehicle will be a more cost-effective, reliable method of ensuring retirement solvency than Social Security. I've seen no hard evidence to suggest this, simply assertions that it would be because, you know, Free Market. 'Murica. Flag. Call me an egghead, but I'd appreciate a little evidence.
[j/quote]
It will since the federal government can't meet the obligations they have promised so far. in fact they are looking at paying people less than what they paid in as a way to fix the system.
Please provide evidence to substantiate your claim.
it is far cheaper to pay a matching contribution and whatever interest is earned. the same way a 401k plan is cheaper than a pension which is why most companies don't offer pensions anymore.
Please provide evidence to substantiate your claim. However, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that what you have said here is true (because what you're claiming here is correlation, not causation).
Here's just one explanation for the move away from pensions: taxes. Right now, when you contribute to a 401k (or similar; there are others, like 403b plans, which are similar in effect, if different legally), taxes are deferred. Because of inflation, it's cheaper to pay taxes later instead of now. Guess what? Pensions are taxable.
Here's another explanation: 401k plans are cheaper to companies because the employee ends up with less money, in terms of cash + benefits. In this possibility, it's a clever way of shafting your workers and saving a buck.
There are other possible explanations, all of which fit reality just as well as yours. Please don't assume without evidence.
[quote].) That 401k plans (and investment vehicles like them) are guaranteed, reliable vehicles for retirement income. I know a couple of very nice elderly folks who have to work at my local Wal-Mart right now because their 401k's weren't reliable who'd have a few choice words with you about that.
That is because they were invested in the stock market. This is not invested in the stock market but the bond/CD market which has a flat % rate of return on it. also with that much money pooled the fund could invest in High yield CD's and bonds.
which would make it more money. it never has to be invested in the stock market.
Before we even look at anything else, please do recall that bonds and CDs can be defaulted upon, just like any other investment. They are not risk-free, merely low-risk. For instance, imagine those folks were extremely risk-averse investors and put all their money in municipal bonds. Government-backed, state-sponsored investment vehicles; should be safe as houses, right? Wrong.
So, mystery, I've done my best to meet you halfway with reasoned debate and a robust amount of evidence to support my claims. Unless you are willing to do the same and, moreover, deal with what I have to say with some reasonable approximation of the thoroughness that I've dealt with yours, I'm simply not going to respond to anything you have to say on this subject any longer. I feel like I'm debating an ideologue here at best, or the guy from the Monty Python argument clinic at worst.
I'm an educator at heart, and I've been doing my level best to help educate folks about what I happen to have learned from a very, very investment-savvy father to other folks who maybe aren't so financially sophisticated. If you're just interested in shouting someone's political talking points as loudly as you can, I've got better things to do.
Frankly? It should not. I understand the argument that religious organizations should be exempt from compliance, but I find it to be absurd. The whole reason that people like Jehova's Witnesses can do stuff like refuse blood transfusions is that they're people exercising a religious belief. A legal entity of any sort cannot make such a decision. Now, I'm not saying that folks for whom birth control should have to get BC, nor am I saying that folks who oppose abortions should be made to have one. All I'm saying is that the decision for those acts must rest at the individual level, as a matter of personal conscience, rather than being dictated by the beliefs of whoever a person works for.
Besides, the Archdiocese is a terrible example here. The Catholic church recently did its own internal audit of its congregation and found that something like 98% of all practicing Catholics who regularly attend mass in the U.S. use or have used birth control. It would be absurd, given data like that, for the church to be able to impose its will upon its congregation; how is it less absurd for it to impose its will upon its employees?
No, that's what I meant. In all fairness, you're right in that the case isn't about standing, and what I probably should have said earlier is that the thing should be dismissed for lack of standing. In essence, since the company itself, as a legal entity, cannot actually do anything insofar as observing religious practices are concerned, it is impossible for harm to result. Again, there's a difference between the company itself and those who own and operate it, and while your observations about legal culpability for criminal action is spot on, I would counter that it reinforces my point rather than disputes it. After all, while a company can be found to be criminally guilty of something, it is a person, a human being, who will ultimately bear the punishment for his or her decisions. All I'm contending is that the legal principle works in the opposite way as well.
While the debate has continued about whether tangible harm comes to a woman, I think that both sides have missed the real crux of the legal argument here, and the point upon which the case will be decided, I suspect. Let me emphasize a bit:
A company is a legal entity for tax purposes. Period. A company does not have religious beliefs. It cannot. A company is a legal entity. People have religious beliefs, actual living, breathing human beings. A company may be entirely staffed by people with the same exact religious and spiritual code, but even as a result the company itself does not have a belief itself. What church does Hobby Lobby attend? Like, the store itself? What denomination? Who is Hobby Lobby's pastor? Has it taken communion? If we extend the same idea, does Hobby Lobby have a constitutional right to bear arms? How about free assembly? Can we get the legal entity Hobby Lobby in the same room as the legal entities BP and Xerox so that they can converse about their home lives? Can you see the absurdity of this line of questioning?
The legal problem with the strain of argument which contests that Hobby Lobby as a company objects to non-Christian anything whatsoever is that it assumes a fact which is not and cannot be in evidence--that a company, which has no mind or soul can itself have a religious belief; the principle here is the same as the principle by which a company cannot be sent to jail. Since a company lacks the ability to make decisions in and of itself, it cannot be held criminally culpable for its actions, though individual members of that company can be. In the same way, while individual members of a company can hold a given religious belief, the company, by virtue of its lack of self-determinative consciousness, cannot, ipso facto, hold a belief of any kind. Thus, Hobby Lobby lacks the standing to make the legal argument that this or anything at all infringes upon its religious beliefs, and the case will almost certainly be dismissed for that reason.
It's a free country, Highroller, and with explicit constitutional protection for freedom of speech. You can criticize puppy dogs and rainbows, if you want. If you do so with regards to religion, I would hope that you do so in light not of what those people believe, but how that belief causes them to act.
With regard to your paralleling of Paganism to doomsday cults, this seems to be a reduco ad absurdum to me; the Pagans I've known have mostly done their best not to bother anyone else, and don't seek to gain financial, political, or social advantage as a result of their religion, as all of your examples have done. It seems like you're making a comparison here which is, if not apples to Volvos in its disparateness, then at least apples to horses.
So, let's talk about actions: doomsday and personality cults, like those you've cited, exploit a belief in the divine in order to make one or several persons rich, politically powerful, or famous. There is a clear and disturbing social reality associated with that behavior, and I can and would criticize it. Pagans, on the other hand, do not appear to my understanding to have an organization of any sort, do not seek to gain financial, political, or social advantage as a result of their beliefs, and do not seek to recruit or subject others to their belief system. Mostly, it seems to me, they go on camping trips and like trees. I really don't see anything to criticize there; they're not hurting anyone, including themselves, and their behavior makes them feel closer to the divine.
Here's where I draw my line. Were I to encounter a member of one of those doomsday cults, I would criticize what the cult does, in a larger socioeconomic sense, but the cultist's right to believe in the basic tenets of the cult is something which I would consider to be off-limits. In essence, trying to proscribe any sort of belief is fundamentally the same as acting as thought police, and that does not and never has washed with me.
Finally, not all marginal religions are cults. There is an important semantic difference, and conflating the two is, in effect, an appeal to popularity which attempts to delegitimize any non-major religious organization.
First, almost everyone in this thread is making comparative value judgments on various spiritual belief structures--most often Christianity vs. Paganism, but also Atheism vs. Christianity. Bottom line, folks: that aint right. The right to freedom of conscientious belief applies to all, and is only meaningful if everyone's right to believe & practice whatever they want, regardless of how weird it might seem to you, is respected and encouraged.
After all, whatever you believe (or don't believe), it was persecuted and disrespected at one point in time as well, and by disrespecting other spiritualities, you're behaving no better than the Romans after the death of Christ (if you're Christian) or Christians in the Middle Ages and Enlightenment (if you're Atheist). Mormonism, for instance, seemed pretty damn weird to most folks when Joseph Smith started it up a couple centuries ago, but it seems a lot less weird to us now.
So, in this discussion, I would like to remind and encourage everyone that treating other peoples' beliefs with disrespect is a reflection on you, not on whatever seeming absurdity you're objecting to.
Now, objectively speaking, there have been some incidences of discriminatory action taken against Pagans of various stripes in the past half-century or so since the religion became a thing. It's not right that this has occurred. However, speaking objectively again, we've got much bigger, more productive fish to fry, in my humble opinion, and the frying of those fish may well alleviate some of the problems that Pagans face. Have a look at the violence stats against trans* people sometime, for instance. Working towards a more equal, respectful society alleviates everyone's complaints, from Atheist to Christian, but it obliges us to accept the legitimacy of diverse opinions which we don't really agree with.
Umm... what the hell? No, really, what the hell? Saying that this is coming out of left field would inflict a rather nasty insult on left field, I think. Nevertheless, let's deal with what you've posted on a point-by-point basis.
1.) Rape is bad. Everyone agrees that rape is bad. Everyone agrees that rapists should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However.
However, we are capable of dealing with more than one problem at a time, both as individuals and as a society. Trying to understand the way that language is transforming does not preclude us from dealing with higher-order problems, such as rape, gender inequality, war or, for that matter, breathing at the same time.
On an entirely personal level, I am mortified that you've chosen to bring the cases of these women up in this venue, not because political correctness has nothing to do with our debate (it does), or because their experiences are not deserving of remediation (they are), but because that by addressing the magnitude of their suffering to such an insignificant problem as the semantic drift of the word 'their,' you're reducing the importance of their experiences by several orders of magnitude. Put another way, you have several real cases of gross injustice which demand attention, and the venue you choose to air those concerns is on an internet forum in a discussion about linguistic theory? If you want to be of service to these women, go volunteer at a rape crisis center! If you give me your address, or a city to look in, I'll even research the contact information for you.
2.) Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about Sapir-Whorf. For the uninitiated, the real scientific problem with Sapir-Whorf isn't that they screwed with the results of their experiment (though that is certainly a big one), or that Sapir and Whorf were racist (which is probably true, and definitely problematic if so), it's that their hypothesis is experimentally and demonstrably wrong. The idea that the language you speak shapes or controls how you think simply does not hold water.
If we choose to be charitable to Sapir and Whorf, and assume only the best intentions and scrupulous ethics on their part (i.e., to play the devil's advocate), the reason that their hypothesis failed is because they did not have an understanding of, and subsequently could not account for, the effect of social framing on human cognition. In short, shared cultural framing of common issues affects, in massive and demonstrable ways, how those ideas are perceived (ex.: look at how the word 'socialism' is perceived in America versus Great Britain). This has nothing to do with race, or with language, but with how individuals in a social group place themselves relative to that social group, and how that affects the way that social group deals with ideas and problems. At this point, the whole mess becomes a problem for sociologists more than linguists, and as it's a tangled, heavily subjective mess, it's one I'm personally quite happy to see go.
3.) Political Correctness has had a complicated history in America, and the phrase as we now understand it carries significant baggage. Political correctness began to be used in a way we would understand it in the 1970s as a reflexively satiric term which Feminists used internally to try and keep from going off the deep end. It fell out of general use shortly thereafter until the mid 1990's, when the political right picked it up.
From there things get disturbing, because the Right has been able to successfully rail against political correctness as a more subtle way to complain about not being able to be openly sexist, racist, or homophobic without negative repercussions. In short, before the concept of political correctness appeared (and, in fact, as a necessary component for it to appear), language and society had already shifted such that the behavior 'proscribed' by PC-ness had become the norm. Have you ever looked at a person of African-American descent and thought of him or her without using the n-word to describe them? How about looking at a woman and thinking of her as a capable person before you thought of her in a sexual way? Guess what, that's the behavior that people who complain about political correctness are upset about!
Rhetorically, folks can complain about PC-ness without looking like a jackass because the people who do will cherry-pick (generally non-existent or really really fringe) instances of language shift which obliterates useful meaning in language, rather than moving meaning off of offensive, loaded terms and onto ones which people on all sides of society are comfortable with.
Sorry, bro, but people *****ing about political correctness bothers me. Complaining about political correctness is almost always a subtle way to be a racist douchebag, and that dog won't hunt so long as I'm involved in the discussion.
Agreed. However, until a grammatical pattern moves into the prestige dialect, it is generally considered to be a variant. Dialectical oddments such as we've been discussing are inherently unstable, because they are restricted in space and population use; either they must spread and become the new standard, or they will slowly fade and become useless to their former speakers. This is the reason, for instance, that when Linguists discuss American English, they'll note a standard rule, such as the distribution of /a/ and /ɔ/, and then they'll note dialectical variations upon it, such as North-Central American English, wherein /ɔ/ typically subsumes /a/, amongst other things.
I guess what I'm trying to say, in more straightforward terms, is that the distinction between a 'standard' prestige dialect and variants upon it is the difference between a more conservative, homogenizing force and a more dynamic, evolving force. This distinction is useful, to me, to help understand how different groups of people are adapting the standard dialect to their own needs; sometimes their adaptations map back onto the standard dialect, but most often they don't.
I get what you're getting at, but that does not correspond to the historical record. Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Old English all had a complicated inflectional system which included three different categories (at a bare minimum) by which any word could be made plural. In fact, as soon as those inflectional endings collapsed at the end of the Old English period, the inflectional '-s' appeared (as in, within a generation or two) to indicate a standard plural pattern. Arguably, in fact, the inflectional '-s' is based on the nominative and accusative OE declensional endings of our good friend, the masculine a-stem, which was '-as.'
Some of our "irregular" pluralizations are holdovers from OE, and never lost their declensional patterns. A few examples of this include foot/feet, I/me/my (the old Nominative, Accusative, and Genitive forms, respectively, though they've undergone some slight pronunciation shifts), sing/sang/sung, and bear/bore (as in to carry). In reality, none of these are irregular in the least bit, and correspond precisely to their OE grammatical patterns.
I suppose a backformation like that would be the most likely move in my hypothetical verb; I was just trying to illustrate something really weird, like the sound of our dental preterit happening three times as an uncomfortable-for-us example.
Actually, every verb you cite there, with the sole exception of 'to be,' is, as with the examples I listed above, an instance of proper grammatical conjugation based on OE grammar rules. 'To have,' for instance, comes from the OE 'habban;' its first person conjugation, as in "I have" was "habbe," (the b's mutated to v's when the Normans came in and v became phonemic) its third person singular was "habbest" (which dropped out during the ME period), and its past tense was 'hadde' (I'm only noting the relevant conjugations here, but we can go through the others if you really really want to). "To Say" comes out of the same conjugation family, from "secgan", and conjugated to "sege," "segest," and "sede," respectively (the 'g' was vocalized in the move to ME). "Do" comes from "don" in the OE.
"Go" is a little more interesting here; it derives from the OE "Gon," but 'Went," the interesting and odd past tense which I think you're referencing, is actually a collapse between "Gon" and "Wend," which we still have as a functional, if archaic and odd verb, today. Regardless, "Gon" (from where we get gone, as in I have gone) and "Wend" are both the properly conjugated OE words for their respective categories.
See? We have more Old English grammar alive and well in Present-Day English than you thought!
To be, in almost every language, is irregular, because it's the most common word. We could probably learn some interesting stuff about fundamental language if we looked at everyone's 'to be,' but that sounds like way too much work to me.
Snip.
Actually, group genitive is exactly the phrase I'm looking for, and it's not uncommon in other languages. Now, you might choose to take issue with the terminology here, on the grounds of possessiveness, but this is in fact a general term which is used in the literature, so I'll side with the literature for this one.
Here's the funny bit: almost all examples you listed are examples of the group genitive; it has become so common, so pervasive, that we scarcely notice it. The group genitive is assembled by shuffling the pluralizing or possessive -s ending around in a sentence to change meaning. I would normally illustrate this with 'pieces of sushi,' but since sushi pluralizes irregularly, it becomes unclear. I'll substitute 'chicken' instead. For instance:
"I ate several pieces of chicken." means something fundamentally different than "I ate a piece of several chickens."
Aside from the fact that the second sentence is vaguely disturbing, it implies that I ate, for instance, a big bucket of chicken wings, and not a whole chicken which had been split up into pieces. This is a useful distinction in English, because it helps us to clarify specific, non-named subjects, groups of categorized people, places, or things, or to distinguish pluralizing -s from possessive -s in spoken language, where they would be otherwise indistinguishable. For instance:
"The Attourney General's Office is bringing a lawsuit." versus "The Attourneys General are bringing a lawsuit.
or
"I'm eating at the Bob down the street's house." versus "I'm eating at Bob's house down the street
I've underlined the group genitive in each. Example one simply shows the semantic difference between possessive and plural, and the group genitive allows us to show that easily and clearly. The second example differs in emphasis; the first sentence identifies which Bob is the subject of the sentence by the position of his house (imagine you know five Bobs, who live all over the place), while the second where the house which Bob owns is. This meaning is carried only by the relative position of the possessive -s in this case.
I think that the name 'the group genitive' springs from the fact that one of the more common cases where this happens is with possessive phrases; however, since it crosses over so much with pluralization, the word might seem inappropriate. Does that make more sense?
I've got to part ways on you here, because the examples you're citing are much more broadly representative of normal dialectical variation than they are of any underlying grammatical pattern. After all, you see phrases like 'fifty cent' or 'five mile' much, much more commonly in certain dialects than in others--for instance, I can say from experience that neither inflection you noted would be used with any frequency at all in Minnesota. We'd use the common plural on fifty cents, and our directions would sound more like "five miles that-a-way."
Oh, yeah, you're totally right; we've got a pretty good idea of how the GVS happened. I was just pointing out that nobody really knows why people started to pronounce their long vowels differently.
Yeah, the weak verb structure is the only properly productive one, and has been since OE. Pretty much the only time we go fishing around in the old strong conjugations is if we borrow a word which can't be easily or comfortably conjugated in one way or another. Imagine, for a moment, that we borrowed the verb "to deded" from another language. Doesn't matter what it means, but now we need to put it in the past tense; do we really want to go with "dededed"? I doubt it.
Well, that's because both goose and taught are Old English words which probably date all the way back to Proto-Germanic.
It's the pluralization of a word group, rather than a simple word pluralization, in the same way that Attourneys General is a group pluralization. While you can have just "pieces" as a simple plural word, it takes on a different and alternately significant meaning when it is in the context "pieces of sushi."
To explain, if I say that you have eight pieces of something, the obvious inference is that those pieces are components of a larger something else, like a puzzle, or are the broken shards of another thing which was once whole, like a piece of glass (the whole thing would be a pane). With 'pieces of sushi,' you get a different meaning; nobody's expecting you to assemble a castle out of the sushi, and nobody thinks that someone attacked it with a hammer or a knife (though that sometimes is the case, with sushi rolls, we can dismiss it because the same linguistic meaning attaches to nigiri sushi, which clearly was never part of a larger whole).
Fair shake to you then; my real understanding of historical linguistics ends at the Early Modern English period, and if you've got evidence for singular-they use as far back as the nineteenth century, then your hypothesis is by far the more plausible. Some of your examples, however, run afoul of the conditions that I mentioned earlier, such as your Hamlet (the subject is plainly feminine), Austin (subjects are plural and mixed gender, not singular), and, arguably, your Shaw (direct subject is singular, but context indicates plural, because we may be talking about one man right here, but we're talking about him in the context of the many, many men which compose an army).
Your other examples look clean to me, though. Nice paleography!
I wasn't saying that this was the result of feminist-based political correctness; I actually meant exactly what, it seems, that you mean here! This is a practical problem which, I believe I said earlier, leaves us searching for a practical solution. I just suspected that the sudden necessity of needing to refer to people of both genders in many more social contexts demanded this change.
Let's hear it for the internet erasing nuances in communication, eh? I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I apologize for the lag in response time, as I was in my final until 9:00 yesterday, and didn't really feel like talking shop again until now.
You're probably mostly right here, Erimir, and certainly moreso than I; I'm just trying to reproduce a lecture I got a week ago. I should have, however, inserted a cautionary into that whole thing, as we really don't know why any of this stuff happened, only that it did. Historical Linguistics is all about most-plausible-explanations when it comes to this sort of stuff. See, for example, the Great Vowel Shift.
You are correct. However, I would argue that, while any given speaker of English only knows the rules for Modern English, that those rules are predicated upon Middle and Old English linguistic rules. Some of those rules have vanished, and some have remained in whole, while a few have remained in an odd patchwork. You don't need to know what a strong verb is to understand the conjugational differences between see and saw, and you certainly don't need to know which of the twelve (okay, seven with subcategories) Old English classes of strong verbs that 'to see' belonged to in order to conjugate it correctly in Modern English along the exact and proper conjugational lines that OE grammar demanded.
As with much of grammar, we don't know this on more than an instinctual level, any more than we know why it would be weird and wrong to have see'd as the past tense of to see. Certainly, there's no lexical block on see'd; we even use that exact sound pattern for another word (and, moreover, we're comfortable with multiple words sharing sounds, as in to, too, and two).
The point I'm trying to make, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that the grammar rules of Old and Middle English are still with us today; if we want to understand why a word is a particular way in PDE, it is generally essential to dive into the historical grammar of the word and look at how it evolved.
Also, I'll cop to the fact that sushi was a bad example. I just couldn't think of anything better offhand. It's a cool illustration of the group genitive, though (which didn't appear until Early Modern English)!
I dig what you're getting at here, Erimir, and linguistic drift is certainly a valid explanation for the movement of their into the singular. I, however, don't buy it, and I don't buy it because of the context I mentioned earlier.
The examples you're citing in other languages certainly happened, and are certainly valid, but they happened, as with almost all pronoun shift, very very slowly. They were, in short, drift. What's happening with they is different, I think, because right now users of the language seems to be groping for a word to fill a gap, because we don't have a word for singular third-person non-object, and we want one.
We can argue, if you want, about why this is so, and I can't offer any concrete evidence. However, I would point out simply that as recently as the 1950's, humankind was mankind, and all third-person singulars (unless the subject was plainly female) were he. In about fifty years, that has been utterly upended, and they is very well on its way to filling the lexical gap that 'he' is no longer able to fill, for entirely non-linguistic reasons. That, sir, is a damn fast pronoun shift, and I don't think that calling on linguistic drift really adequately describes what's going on.
After all, language responds to the needs of its users, and the users of English plainly have a need here. Maybe my colors as a pragmatic rhetorician are showing, but I just prefer the idea that people are using language in the way that they want it to be used to the somewhat disempowering notion that **** happens.
Finally, as a disclaimer, I'm actually a Rhetorician, not a linguist, so there's a significant chance that you guys know more about this than me. Nevertheless, I shall carry on!
Hokay, it just so happens that they and buffalo was a specific example that my professor used in class last week. Let's see how well I can explain what she explained.
In Old English, there are a total of 10 categories within which a noun can decline, all but two of which are based on gender (like Spanish). The most common of these were masculine a-stem nouns (Ctrl+F A-stem); it is from the masculine a-stem declension that most of our irregular nouns come, such as fish (used to be fisc). One thing of note here is that the genitive plural in the masculine a-stem is almost identical to the nominative and accusutave singular forms--we'll come back to this in a second.
In the late OE period, the vikings invaded much of England, and held it as the Danelaw for hundreds of years. At the point in time, OE and Old Norse were still pretty linguistically similar, and linguists theorize that, if both languages dropped their declensional endings, they were mutually intelligible. This is the likely cause of the collapse of the declension and vowel conjugation systems in OE, but it has some implications for our friend, fish.
Without classes to define its role in a sentence, and with all inflectional endings collapsed into a schwa, the plural and singular forms of masculine a-stem nouns like fish become identical. We can no longer know whether fish is the subject or the object of a sentence, or whether we need one or a hundred fish. That's a problem. So, we as OE speakers, start to lean more heavily on word order and start to use a few simple pluralizing endings, but the one that sticks is -s. Hence, for a while, fish becomes fishs. Most nouns settle here on their pluralizations.
Some words don't work well for this, though. Fish, in fact, stands out, because if you're a fisherman and you go out fishing, you're never ever going to catch a single fish. Yet, you've got this clumsy pluralization that you have to deal with. Similarly, if you're a hunter, you might go out to hunt a deer, but if you get the chance at a second, you'll take it. As such, some time in the ME period, the pluralization patterns for a few nouns lose their -s; moreover, they tend to fall into non-lexical categories, such as "creatures I go out into the wild to hunt;" they're non-exclusive, (i.e., goose/geese, which comes from Norman French), but they tend to clump up in an obvious way.
Fast forward several hundred years. Explorers are seeing buffalo (or bison, for that matter; which word you use doesn't matter in this example) for the first time, and borrow the word for them from their Native American guides. Now that buffalo is an English word, it needs a pluralization, so we have one of two choices: pluralize it along its baseline pattern, a la buffalos, or leave its plural the same as its singular, a la that old category which nobody knows consciously but everybody still uses. While you'd think people would go straight for the easy '-s,' it turns out that overwhelmingly people use these old ME categories, and not just for the creatures themselves (in our example) but for things associated with them as well when we obtain new words, like sushi (though it helps that there's no such thing as pluralization in Japanese in sushi's case).
They enters into the conversation here even later. It is, naturally, a non-possessive gender-neutral plural form as is; lexically and socially, people want to move it into the singular form as well, to be an alternative for it which is gender-neutral and doesn't imply a non-person thing. Cool. All you have to do is unpluralize it, right?
Well... you can't. There's no obvious, or even incorrect-but-seems-okay way to do it. For instance, if you wanted to do this with either of the gendered versions, you could float over to the possessive 'his' or 'hers' and then cut off the seemingly-pluralistic 's,' and, while incorrect, you'd arrive at mostly the right place. You can't do that with they, though. When we get that sort of reaction out of a word, English speakers tend to instinctively move toward the "it must be an old Strong word" category, which transformed internally rather than externally to denote pluralization and past tense. Since, once the transformation has occurred and the base word is gone, it is impossible to replicate, what we do in English is leave the base form and the plural form identical. Hence, for entirely different reasons than fish and buffalo, they works the same way that they do.
Hope that was helpful!
First, personal pronouns are, without exception, the slowest part of a language to change. The reason is simple: without exception, they are the most frequently-used component of language. The more often a part of language is used, the more slowly it changes. The phenomenon you're observing is that there has been a recent, major social shift, away from male-centered privilege, and toward gender and sexuality-based equality; this process has been going on for a while, but it wasn't until the Sexual Revolution in the 1960's that it really gained traction. Hence, you're seeing language that was considered normal in the 1950s struggle to keep up in modern times.
Should it keep up? Sure. On the other hand, it took Middle English speakers about 400 years to settle on a third-person feminine pronoun; for that period, they were using seo, heo, sche, scho, hire, hie, hires, che, and finally she! That's right--nine words that all mean that same thing! That's personal pronouns for you! We're actually doing pretty well with he/she/they right now, by comparison, I think.
Second, what's actually happening with they is what happened with buffalo, but in reverse. In the Old English period, words that worked like buffalo (it's complicated, and you probably don't want to know) lived in a declension where their basic present tense genitive a-stem plural was the same as their non-inflected form; i.e., I have one buffalo, or I have a herd of buffalo. When buffalo entered the language, it seemed to work like those words, so we pluralized it as though it were an OE holdover. With they, this is happening in reverse (the reasons are different but the mechanics are the same). It's growing from being the third person plural to the third person singular as well, and it's doing so very, very quickly. However, since it doesn't have the plural -s at the end, we treat it like it's in an Old English strong declension, and reverse the old genitive a-stem pluralization pattern, which makes the singular the same as the plural.
The tl;dr version is that the singular they isn't just grammatical, it's Old English grammatical. We're even declining it in the proper way, today, even though none of us knows the declensional rules for Old English. Is that cool or what?
Well, this is a common misconception, but in reality, only a minority of societies today are monogamous; polygyny has a huge hold on cultures and nations across the world (not so much polyandry). Moreover, the idea of the American Nuclear Family is really only about 60 years old.
In your generic traditional society (averaged worldwide), one man would be married to between 2-5 women (much rarer on the higher numbers; generally, you had to be a Big Man). In many cases, each woman would have her own house, or would live with her family, while her husband would wander between homes (matrilocality). Alternately, the wife would move to her husband's family's home and live with the rest of his wives and his brothers' and fathers' families (patrilocality). Regardless of habitation patterns, there would be a very robust extended family unit which would surround all members of the family, and which would provide food, clothing, education, and all manner of support for, particularly, the children. Traditional kinship patterns can be a monstrously complex things. Within all this, it was exceedingly common for one or all members of a marriage unit to cheat on their spouse(s), as people typically married as an economic move.
We like to say that humans are hardwired for monogamy, because this reflects Western societal values and reinforces our social norms. The reality, however, is rather simpler: some people like the intimacy of a long-term, monogamous relationship, while others like the variety, excitement, and freedom of a polygynous relationship. Regardless of what the social norms are, people will behave in the way that they prefer; a man may essentially ignore all but one of his wives in a polygynous relationship, or a woman may sleep around on her partner in a supposedly monogamous relationship.
America is not a plutocracy, by any interpretation of the word. Period. As Highroller demonstrated earlier, we do not live in a society where wealth equates to the ability to rule and/or vote. We also do not live in a de-facto plutocracy, as everyone else seems to be arguing. That assumption is trash, but it's very seductive trash; I'll explain why in a minute.
Why do I make this claim? Well, for starters, the colossal failure of American Crossroads Crossroads GPS this past election year. For those of you who happen to not know, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS were a pair of Super PACs run by Karl Rove and which funneled hundreds of millions of dollars from conservative multi-billionaires into a series of political matchups. NBC goes into a little more depth, and I'll let you all read the full article at your leisure, but an extract is helpful:
Out of a total of fourteen elections, only three were won by the candidate which Crossroads backed. Moreover, those three were races which were relatively safe Republican wins anyhow--in Nevada, Nebraska, and (less so) New Mexico. The bottom line is that, if we were living in a de-facto plutocracy, the titanic amount of money that flowed through these two Super PACS--something like a fifth to a sixth of all the money spent on the election by both sides put together--would have had a much more significant effect. A salient argument can be made, indeed, that the money spent in this way had no appreciable effect on the election, as even if we remove the candidates which the PACs backed who disqualified themselves with rape-gaffe-a-palooza this year, the PACs fared well worse than chance. Again, if we were a plutocracy of any sort, this would not be the case.
The reality is that America is a democratic republic, period. Voters decided this year that the policies which the candidates financed by these PACs advocated did not represent their interests, and voted against those candidates. I'm not saying that junk like Citizen's United isn't a huge problem--it is. I'm not saying that the sort of behavior we saw this year is healthy in the long term for our system of government--it isn't. However, in America, the fact of the matter is that money does not equal votes, and does not equal elections.
So, why do we want to call this mess a plutocracy? Simply put, because, contrary to popular wisdom, Occupy Wall Street succeeded when it did its thing a couple of years ago. How can this be, you ask? They all got evicted. The camps were destroyed. People died, and militarized cops cracked down hard. The movement is just now trying to get back onto its feet with its Rolling Jubilee. How can it have possibly won?
OWS won because it changed the American conversation. If you'll recall, before OWS got started, the American financial conversation was about the national debt (remember the Debt Ceiling fight?); I'm not going to get into it here, but I broke this stuff down in another thread, and you can go read that if you want. After OWS, however, the American economic conversation was about economic inequality, and it still is. However, the rhetorical package that OWS used to promote its message/argument was the charged, politically-potent term, 'plutocracy'; it was a word which many Americans hadn't heard before but, when they looked it up, seemed to fit the stuff that OWS was talking about. Moreover, aside from some of the sillier nonsense that OWS was actually doing (human mic systems, camping out in faux-Hoovervilles with their high-priced electronics, and so forth), the complaints that they were levying resonated because they were essentially true. Real income for most American's hasn't risen since 1970. The ultra-rich have been successfully hoarding an increasing share of the total wealth in America, and weren't spending it. Companies had money to spend, but weren't (there are good economic reasons for why they haven't, and for why, regardless of economic policy, they probably will again in a HUGE way in 3-5 years), and the American people felt like they'd been stiffed.
After that point, the evictions, the paramilitary police, the whole nine yards, did nothing but cement the rhetorical power of OWS' message. To paraphrase Jay Heinrichs, who writes a rather delightful book about basic rhetoric, they lost all the battles but won the war. Based on nothing more than the rhetorical success of the OWS movement, I called the presidential campaign a year and a half ago in a long conversation with my mother, and I summed up my point as such:
"There isn't a Republican in the field this cycle who can actually address the rhetorical situation that they're going to be facing. Romney's the only credible candidate, aside from Perry (who was still in the race at the time), but he's actually the nightmare candidate, because if the GOP nominates him, he's going to become the poster-boy for everything that OWS has been saying. If that happens, there's absolutely no chance that Obama loses unless he does something unthinkably stupid."
I wish I could prove it, and I was kind of proud of myself when the 47% video came out, but that's neither here nor there.
Just wanted to poke my head in here because the whole capitalism-socialism/communism binary is kind of a fake thing. It owes a lot more to the political reality of the Cold War than it does to any sort of actual conceptual binary.
Let's start with terms:
At first glance, these two things SEEM to be opposed, but the reality is (as it always seems to be) a lot more complicated than that. Take, for instance, the retail supermarket chain Hy-Vee.
Hy-Vee, like many American companies, is employee-owned, which is a fancy way of saying that most stock is held by employees, and that the company gives its employees stock shares as part of its overall compensation plan. Now, Hy-Vee is a for-profit supermarket chain with a corporate superstructure. It is also an organization which is owned (mostly) by its employees, who have the power, as shareholders, to collectively steer the company in a variety of ways. Hy-Vee thus fits the fundamental definition for both a capitalistic and a socialistic enterprise. Which is it? The answer is both, at the same time.
Let's expand this concept to the absurd: Derpistan, an imaginary nation which exists for the sole purpose of this example. Derpistan's economy is a 100% state-controlled communistic enterprise, with all citizens obliged to hold state-mandated positions of employment, and for which all citizens receive equal rations, as well as an allowance of credits for discretionary acquisitions (birthday gifts, winter coats, shoes, and the like; your classic intermittent, at-need 'purchases'). Derpistan has chosen to orient its production economy such that it's a massive exporter of manufactured goods to other nations. The central government of Derpistan brings in a lot of foreign scrip from this exportation, which it uses to buy a variety of things, many of which it uses to make its manufacturing enterprises more efficient, safe, and productive. Derpistan is, thus, a capitalistic communist state.
I know this sounds kind of weird, but the actual opposed binary for capitalist is 'not-capitalist' (i.e., the economic system is not focused on a means of production for profit in any way, shape, or form--think the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek here). Similarly, the opposed binary for socialist is 'not-socialist' (or, a system where everyone's 100% on their own; total anarchy, without even the common bonds of family, friendship, or common language). Thus, every nation on Earth is at least somewhat capitalist and at least somewhat socialist.
The much more interesting thing, to me, is how this false binary came to exist, but that's a whole different ball of whacks. The takeaway here is to tell your friend that he's collapsing two completely different things into one big, confusing thing because of the way that America likes to tell the story of the Cold War.
Well, now I'm suspecting that you're not even reading my posts, mystery, because you seem to be ignoring the parts where I say exactly what you're criticizing me for not saying.
This is precisely what I meant when I asked you to not edit my posts; you're cutting enormous sections of what I said out of your responses; while normally, this is simply a matter of convenience, you have been consistently removing the parts of what I said that address, directly, what you eventually say.
I would refer you, again, to the section I just quoted from what I said in my prior post. I did not ignore your article. Far from it; I looked at it, provided a second source for context, and even went so far as to explain my specific word choices, and what I meant by them.
Unlike you, who actually did ignore not one, but five citations from my last post.
This is, again, factually inaccurate. Let's look at just bonds, which you claim is a simple investment vehicle. I agree with you that it is more simple than stocks, but, well, bonds aren't exactly simple.
Would you like to buy a zero-coupon bond? How about a corporate bond? What interest rate over a given length of years is acceptable, profitable, or unacceptable? How does interest factor against inflation rates, in terms of real-dollar buying power?
I know people who are intimidated by the financial complexity of a checking account, mystery, and who will be utterly reliant upon Social Security for their retirement. Not everyone understands even relatively simple investment schemes.
Finally, complexity aside, I'd like to reiterate that comparing SS to traditional investment modes is like comparing a duck to a Honda Accord. The two things are NOTHING ALIKE. Please stop making this fallacious comparison. Social Security is NOT a personal investment. It is a government benefit, like food stamps or the mortgage interest tax deduction.
Before we even look at anything else, please do recall that bonds and CDs can be defaulted upon, just like any other investment. They are not risk-free, merely low-risk. For instance, imagine those folks were extremely risk-averse investors and put all their money in municipal bonds. Government-backed, state-sponsored investment vehicles; should be safe as houses, right? Wrong.
So, mystery, I've done my best to meet you halfway with reasoned debate and a robust amount of evidence to support my claims. Unless you are willing to do the same and, moreover, deal with what I have to say with some reasonable approximation of the thoroughness that I've dealt with yours, I'm simply not going to respond to anything you have to say on this subject any longer. I feel like I'm debating an ideologue here at best, or the guy from the Monty Python argument clinic at worst.
I'm an educator at heart, and I've been doing my level best to help educate folks about what I happen to have learned from a very, very investment-savvy father to other folks who maybe aren't so financially sophisticated. If you're just interested in shouting someone's political talking points as loudly as you can, I've got better things to do.