The Angry Grammarian

by Jeffrey Barg

There’s a very good reason why Facebook is the sixth most popular site on the Web, and the most popular site overall for people who aren’t old and lame: because it’s championing progressive grammatical forms. Specifically, Facebook has embraced the gender-ambiguous “their” over the horrendously awkward “his/her” and “his or her,” the obnoxious “his,” and the precious “her.”

Don’t fill in your gender on your Facebook profile, and the site refers to you as “their,” which is a wonderful, beautiful thing.

“Jeff changed their profile picture.” Ha!

All our lives we’ve been fed prescriptivist smut about how to use a pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is ambiguous. But “their” has staged a comeback, earning its rightful place as the singular pronoun it so longs to be.

All the other options are too clunky and will make the reader trip and fall. They’re no match for “their,” with its one syllable, its soft “th,” its airy “eir.”

Such a pretty word could never be bound by constrictions of gender. “Their”: the friendly, happy hermaphrodite of the pronoun world.

What are the rules regarding multiple end-of-sentence punctuation? I was always told that if you meant to ask a question emphatically, you put the question mark first and the exclamation point second. Or should we simply resort to online conventions such as: “OMFG?!?!?!?!!!!!!!”

One question mark, no exclamation point. This is why God invented italics.

?!? etc. is sloppy, ugly, the mark of someone with no control over their punctuation. Take their exclamation points away until they calm down and learn to control themselves. Such people don’t deserve to be writing, let alone punctuating.

I was having a discussion with my friend about his sink, which he claims is “permanently clogged.” He then told me it’s “uncloggable.” I told him that’s false, because it’s clogged right now, thus not uncloggable. He then offered that it’s un-uncloggable. It started to hurt my head so I ended the conversation there.

The sink is incorrigible, but not uncloggable.

You’re quite right that a clogged sink is the opposite of uncloggable. I’d recommend the proper industry terms of: “stopped up,” “overloaded” or “fucked.”