Word: paper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite being outmatched on paper, Harvard hung tough with Queens, trailing at the half by a score of only 5-3. But the second half was a different story altogether, as the Royals outscored the Crimson 8-1 after the intermission, winning the contest...
...this summer's shake-out among hedge funds (big buyers of junk paper), coupled with a belief in an imminent recession, has widened the spread between high-yield and government bonds to extraordinary levels. Speculative bonds now yield almost double what you get on risk-free Treasury bonds--a remarkable opportunity...
...study after study has shown that people of both sexes take this pronoun to refer exclusively to a male. The elusive "gender unspecific pronoun" represents a gap between the rules of grammar and the rules of society that students and academics constantly face. Any student who has written a paper in college has found himself--I mean, herself--I mean, themselves--oh, forget it; I'm moving on to the next paragraph...
...construction nowadays...suddenly calls attention to the writing and the writer. Unfortunately, many of the proposed alternative constructions...also stick out." For example, writers commit stylistic suicide if they repeatedly use the clunky "he or she" ("If anyone wants to, he or she can pick up his or her paper after lecture") or the dull, formal "one" ("If anyone wants to, one can pick up one's paper...
Linguists have offered other solutions. The most common alternative--which has become acceptable in everyday speech despite its grammatical incorrectness--is to follow the gender-unspecific subject with the plural "they" ("If anyone wants to, they can pick up their paper..."). This construction may not sound too bad when spoken, but it doesn't look too good on paper. Another possibility is the hybrid "s/he." However, whereas "they" seems awkward on paper, "s/he" is awfully hard to pronounce in everyday speech. A few years ago, Expos instructor Nathaniel Lewis came up with a novel solution to the pronoun problem when...