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Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.”

I fall into category C: Native English speaker who has no idea how to use English properly. Could someone please explain what is supposedly wrong with this sentence?

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I found that sentence mildly painful to parse because the relative clause that attaches to "everybody" is split by verb phrase "ought to do" (bit of a garden-path sentence). It would be much easier to read if it was "as everybody who falls into deep water in their clothes ought to do".

I suppose for people opposed to the singular "they," the "correct" way to write this would be something like:

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in one's clothes.”

or:

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in his or her clothes.”

I don't get it. "their" in this sentence clearly refers to "everybody", which is plural.

The post goes into some detail about this. "Everybody" is semantically plural, but its verbs are conjugated as singular:

Everybody is, everybody has, everybody does, etc.

"everybody" refers to a group of people, but the word itself is singular and would typically use singular verb forms.

In day-to-day English, I've seen people use it both ways though.

Everybody is here. Everybody are here.

The former is the usual form and the latter sounds very odd to me.

Everybody and his dog vs Everybody and their dog sounds fine to me but for some people it sounds strange.

Weird. I guess this kinda reminds me of my revelation that "data" is plural, "data are" etc. It still sounds odd to me. But data == many datums (right?), so it technically makes sense. Everybody == many/all people, and yet is conjugated as singular? English is weird.

Now back to hacking javascript...

Using "data" as if it were plural sounds odd to most English speakers. Some people insist that because it is technically the plural of datum (in Latin anyway) it has to take plural verbs. But what is technically correct is meaningless compared to what sounds correct. What sounds normal compared to what sounds odd is the only thing that really determines if a usage is correct or incorrect (unless writing in a context that mandates following a specific style guide).

"Data is" sounds correct to most people so it is correct, Latin be damned.

'Everybody' is singular, and 'their' is (generally) plural. One way to resolve that conflict would be to rewrite the second clause to say "...as one ought to do when one falls into deep water in one's clothes". Using 'one' isn't very common in North America in my experience.

"their" is used kind of like an indefinite pronoun. I guess you could use "one's" instead.

The article arguments against people who would say that "their" is incorrect, and "his" should be used instead

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