Word: plurality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What is "the media"? Usually, a contumacious cliché. Often, a grammatical abomination. The word is eternally plural - literally, more than one "medium." In the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review] University of Wisconsin Communication Professor George Bailey deplores the persistent and growing tendency to use the word with singular incorrectness. Echoing a TIME Essay (June 7, 1971), he attributes that offense to something more ominous than doubtful command of the mother tongue. "People who write or say 'The media is against Nixon' or 'The media exploits children' actually conceptualize the media as a singular, unitary...
Those days are gone. The wait is still sometimes lengthy, but now you can spend it leisurely imbibing mixed drinks and raw oysters, clams and shrimps in the upstairs bar while waiting for your number to be called. The dining rooms (plural now) are no longer full to overflowing, just full to capacity. And people no longer breathe down your neck waiting for your place...
Returning along the long ramp which leads into the Garage I brought a svelte, sensitive, Southern friend of mine and a few journalistic plural pronouns. We found the Appalachia shop in a small open booth near places that push Polish and Central American crafts. It was full of stuffed animals, handmade cutting boards, quilts encased in plastic, patchwork pillow kits, brightly colored hearth brooms, and a couple of striking cardboard carton displays of something called "Jack Guy Folk Toys...
...construction jobs round the Southwest wherever he thought Tanya's career might blossom. "It's because of my father's blood and guts that we are where we are today," she says. It is not clear whether "we" is a superstar's first-person plural or an indication that Tanya cannot yet separate her identity from that of her close-knit clan...
...event, Shapiro is lying both times so why fuss over contradictions? I answered his questions like my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Wynertzky, taught me, politely, using "I" or "we" depending on whemher the singular or plural seemed appropriate. For example, I said that "we" (in this instance, the May 2nd movement), rather than me personally (as Shapiro reports it) initiated the Harvard anti-war movement in '64. Unlike Shapiro's other case studies, me and others in the WSA didn't drop off into a private world after '69. Since "we" have done much political organizing and much discussing things...