Pronoun: Difference between revisions

Pronoun (view source)

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-{{pe}}Lawyers don’t like pronouns because they (pronouns, that is, not lawyers) tend to be short and idiomatic.
+{{pe}}[[Legal eagle]]s distrust [[pronoun]]s because they (pronouns, that is, not [[legal eagle]]s) tend to be short and idiomatic.
-This unnecessarily lowers the bar. Much better is repeated use of the [[noun]]s to which they (the [[pronoun]]s, not the {{tag|noun}}s) might, if they were used, relate.
+Using them, they feel, infinitesimally lowers a bar that was put up for a reason: ''to keep [[muggle]]s out''. It is a small thing: abstention from pronouns doesn’t change the semantic content, much less its legal freighting, but it makes text just that little bit denser to those who do not have a direct financial incentive in reading it.
-The use, or not, of pronouns doesn’t change the semantic content much less the legal freighting, but their eschewal makes any text just that little bit less penetrable to those without a direct financial incentive in the job of reading it.
+The official excuse has something to do with imprecision: “you” and “it” may be the {{tag|subject}} or {{tag|object}} of a sentence: unlike those ultra-precise Germans, we Englanders only half-heartedly [[declension|decline]] our [[pronoun]]s.
-The official excuse has something to do with imprecision: “you” and “it” can ambiguously refer to the {{tag|subject}} or {{tag|object}} of a sentence: unlike those ultra-precise Germans, we Englanders only half-heartedly [[declension|decline]] our [[pronoun]]s. For all that, the English language — complete with [[pronoun]]s — works unambiguously well in most other linguistic contexts. Besides, lawyers have their own special form of {{tag|pronoun}}: the {{tag|definition}}.
+“[[We]],” in one of those ghastly interpersonal contracts that are set up like a conversation between friends and not the stiff passive account of a scientific experiment they should be, is [[definition|defined]] as the ''drafter'' of the contract (as opposed to “[[you]],” its recipient, but in idiomatic English, can refer to both of them together. How are we meant to know?
+But the English language, shot through as it may be with these and other ambiguities, has yet managed to hang on in the evolutionary arms race of linguistic models. It has done rather well, in fact, all things considered. ''Too'' well, some might say.
+There is an argument that constructive ambiguity is no bad thing. Perhaps a runniness at the edges of one’s contractual commitments and rights might moderate one’s tendency to officiousness when policing one’s [[relationship agreement|commercial relationship]]s. Any that can encourage merchants away from the docs and towards ''calling'' the other guy has got to beca good thing.
 ===Pronouns and [[gender]]===