Word: spokenness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...work, be it excerpts from or complete versions of poems, portions of his translation of Beowulf or an impromptu reading of probably his most famous poem, "Digging," meeting with thunderous applause. Perhaps Irish consul general Conor O'Riordan said it best when he said, "Seamus Heaney has spoken eloquently about a time in the future when poetry and history, rhyme and peace becomes a reality...
Mansfield has become well-known at Harvard for his memorably controversial comments. In 1993, he testified on behalf of an anti-gay rights proposition in Colorado, calling the "kinky sexual practices" of gays "shameful" and saying homosexual love is "imperfect and stunted and frustrated." Mansfield has also spoken out against affirmative action, linking the practice to declining academic standards at the College...
...sorry that Barbara Martinez was scared by someone else's anger ("A Helping Hand Rebuffed" Editorial Notebook, Oct. 22), but perhaps she would consider how she would feel if someone she hadn't seen and didn't know had taken hold of her on the street, without having spoken a single word, much less asked her permission...
Surprise surprise, the movie isn't over at that point--Visnjic comes back to haunt the sisters, bringing police officer Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) to the scene. At this point the real story begins as Bullock begins to discover that love ain't all that dangerous (spoken with sexy southern drawl, compliments of Quinn) and Kidman, having battled Visjnic on earth, takes him on in the spirit world...