Word: plurality
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...math homework. He later copied his mother's calculations in his own handwriting. "He knew how to do it," Solomon shrugs. "It was just busywork." In the affluent Boston suburb of Sherborn, Mass., parents at the public Pine Hill School tend to talk about homework in the first-person plural; and they sometimes become more than equal partners in carrying out such third-grade projects as writing up the ownership history of their house, complete with a sketch of the floor plan. Homework has been known to arrive at school two hours after the child does...
Epps said that despite the University'srelatively small contingent of tenured womenprofessors, "[Harvard is] an exciting place to befor someone who is working on feministperspectives. It's plural because there are many,"he said...
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...
Gates addressed the conflict between personal identity and political image. "A distinctive trait of America is that we think of ourselves as a plural nation," he said...
David Harlan wrote that American historians used to write "morally instructive histories-histories that taught us to speak in the first-person plural." As George Will noted in a column last year, these histories were usually about "the greatness of great men and the nobility of American ideals." He continued, "Those were the sort of writings that moved Martin Luther King Jr. to say that reading history made him feel 'eternally in the red,' that is, with an un-payable debt to those whose lives are imperishable examples of worthy aspirations." The current academic climate, though, of showing the United...