Since I brilliantly managed to leave my lunch on the kitchen counter this morning, I walked out for a sandwich at noon. As I waited in line, a coworker showed up a few places back. He is the primary author of Dot Org's weblog, an recent entry of which mentioned, in the context of addiction to PDAs, someone who admitted checking his Blackberry under the table while the president of the United States was speaking--actually responding to a question he himself had asked--and only reluctantly hanging up when his neighbor indicated his gaffe.
(Now, I understand a normal person wanting to distract himself from the sound of that man's voice and the idiocy of his speech. But this person was a grateful, invited guest at the Crawford "ranch" and presumably does not usually flinch at the noise.)
I told the author that I was glad to know a pack of unschooled teenaged athletes wearing flip-flops to the White House had been out-ruded by a single adult, a state legislator to boot. We discussed the incident for a moment and I moved forward to pay. As I tucked bills into my wallet, both the coworker and a little girl arrived at the counter. The girl was short enough that she needed one hand to pull herself high enough to reach straws arrayed in a mug behind a little barrier. She grasped with a hand just out of seastar-shape, ineffectually struggling against the dried beans holding the straws upright. I drew one out and handed it to her, and she took it but began reaching again. I drew out another and asked her how many she needed. "Two," she said, and scampered away with her straws. I said "You're welcome" after her, because I'm mean like that, especially considering I had deprived her of the unlikely satisfaction of retrieving her own straw. "Never get between someone and their straw," my coworker smiled.
Is the nongendered third-person plural pronoun so pervasive now that people default to it even when the antecedent's gender is obvious? Was he making such a global statement that he needed a nonspecific pronoun?
This makes me slightly crazy because the "blog" (a construction I have not yet ceased to hate) is written in just such a colloquial manner. Our organization's reputation for thoughtful, objective analysis and reporting is vital to its survival, but I believe we risk it when we release sloppy writing, indicative of sloppy thought. I said as much upon the weblog's launch, and I have suggested corrections in many entries: the 70s is a temperature range, not a decade, and "Bluetooth" should be capitalized even as an adjective, and a hyphen is not an em dash, and an apostrophe serves no purpose in "PDA's" other than to annoy me and perpetuate that mark's misuse, plus several non-trivial syntactical confusions. A casual tone might suit the medium but a casual (I might say slapdash) approach to punctuation and spelling and most importantly construction does not necessarily follow.