I was curious what Eben and others had to say about this construction. Unlike a mere typo, this construction comes out in people's papers because it's common in colloquial speech. But more than that, I would say that it has now achieved a status of sounding correct to native American English ears. And I would even go so far as to say that it is close to having achieved a "correct" status in written English prose, if it is not there already. Eben clearly disagrees with this proposition. My questions are:

1) Is the construction "wrong" in formal writing?

2) If it is "wrong," is it close (say, a decade or two away) from being right, as a result of natural evolutionary tendencies in language?

3) As lawyers, or even as professionals in general, are we well-advised to write conservatively, with traditional rules of grammar ("up with which I will not put"), or will it be considered sloppy (and make us seem illiterate, as Eben says) to push some of these rules toward what seems to be their natural dissolution, in our own writing? -- MichaelBerkovits - 19 May 2008

I cannot speak for Eben, but personally think that he is generally right. Even if the construction is not "wrong" in colloquial English, it is distracting for the more conservative readers. Put it this way - you could write with informal solecisms and put off half your readers, or you could write with elegant style and "conservative" grammatical constructions and not put off any readers.

Writing almost always lags behind oral linguistic innovations. Natural evolutionary tendencies in language are sometimes slow and other times rapid, as well as sometimes random and other times deliberate. I wonder whether the "everyone" and "their" construction is a result of the gender faux pas in using "him" as the default singular neuter pronoun. We have the neuter subject pronoun "one" but no corresponding neuter direct object pronoun. That asymmetry may explain the recent outburst of confusing our grammatical numbers to keep our genders neutral.

It seemed evident to me that Eben's critical generalizations of a writer's literacy in response to a grammatical error were intentionally exaggerated. The harsher the criticism, the more scrutiny in the revision and future drafts. That said, I think it would be sloppy because any writer must keep his audience in mind when composing a written piece. If your reader is a judge, write for a judge; if a reader of McSweeney? 's, then strap on your literary flare.

-- JesseCreed - 19 May 2008