You Don’t Say

As Donna in the new movie musical Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep sings the wistful ballad “Slipping Through My Fingers.” Her daughter is about to be married and Donna reflects in song how quickly her only child has grown up.

It’s a lovely moment in the film, and Streep carries it off beautifully. Except when she sings these lyrics:

Sleep in her eyes
Her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake.

Her and me? Fingernails on a chalkboard.

OK, I know they’re only song lyrics, and songwriters (Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, in this case) get a certain amount of poetic license when it comes to usage. But there’s no rhyme scheme to preserve here, and the correct pronouns–she and I–sound fine to me. Maybe her and me is easier to sing. I don’t know, but the line sure sounds awkward to this listener.

Anyway, the movie is fun, maybe not as much as fun as the stage show, but worth the price of a ticket, despite the pronoun lapse.

I’m all for a genderless personal pronoun. The trouble is we don’t have one in English. We’re stuck with he, she, his, her, and him.

Or are we?

This following paragraph comes from a Los Angeles Times article about how the LA school board solved a labor problem regarding health benefits for some food service workers.

“That effective Sept. 1, 2007, the district increases the hours of all cafeteria employees to at least four hours a day and at least 800 hours a year to enable the last child in line to have 20 minutes to eat their lunch.”

Since I work for the school district, I’m glad to know the board can solve a problem. But it seems to me, the board has inadvertently shined a light on another problem. Shouldn’t a school board be a bit more careful about the way it uses the English language? After all, as the governing agency of an educational entity, it should strive to set an example of excellence.

I wonder who approved the statement of the solution that appeared in the article. Notice how their is used to refer to the last child—a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent. Would it have been so stodgy or stilted to have written his or her lunch? Grammatically, his or her lunch would have been unimpeachable. Which makes me wonder: Did anyone at LA Unified actually think about the word choice and decide to veto his or her in favor of their?

The LA school board isn’t alone in this lapse.

Here’s another example, this one taken from a list of “tips” for University of

“Promote grammar as a source of power. Grammar is a tool each writer [singular antecedent] can use to effectively express their [genderless plural pronoun] ideas and persuade their [ditto] reader.” 

Then, of course, there’s the ubiquitous they, used to refer to anyone and anything: