Proofreading Philly

Proofreading Philly tries to capture typos, wordos, and all other kinds of grammatical mistakes that we see around the city. But we need your help! Email photos to us from your computer or your phone, and show the city that you care about good grammar.

We have to admit that we didn't find this one ourselves. When we went to the Arden last night, they gave us a program that had apparently already been in the hands of some like-minded individual, because the error (in an ad for Studley Commercial Real Estate Advisors) was circled in blue ink. (We photographed a clean copy.)

Unfortunately, the English language doesn't have a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. "It" counts, we suppose, but you don't use "it" when referring to people. It's strange and usually only used negatively. "One" is often used, but that's technically not a pronoun. So the convention, at least colloquially, is to use the plural "they." It's especially common when the gender of the subject is unknown—or when one wants to keep it undisclosed. In Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith refers to it as something along the lines of the "pronoun game." (We looked for the exact quote but couldn't find it.)

But colloquial or not, it's still wrong. And when you're paying for a full-page ad in a program, you probably want to get it right. "A tenant" could easily have been changed to "tenants," or, because the clothes hanging in the ad are decidedly men's, "they've" could have been changed to "he's." Sure, Studley would be sacrificing the gender-neutral tone—but they'd also be grammatically correct.