Jun 24, 2009
When someone’s apologizing, it’s a good time to put away editorial fussiness.
I won’t blame WORLD because other news sources did it too, but…
Changing the original their to [his] is unnecessary at best.
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Related:
- One time you shouldn’t use they as a singular pronoun.
- 3 pronoun options for replacing singular they.
- A grammar book said this sentence is correct.
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Quoting my daughter, “I’m not a grammar diva!”
It is also quite an apology to wish death on your father…
I beg to differ. The editor needed to modify the quotation so that the meaning was clear. Otherwise people skimming the headline might have gotten the wrong idea. By changing the word, they actually remained truer to Von Brunn’s intended meaning.
What did the quote mean before it was edited?
Von Brunn expressed regret at Mr. Johns death. ‘His’ is the correct pronoun to agree with the antecedent ‘Mr. Johns.’ He probably used ‘their’ because ‘Johns’ sounds plural and because of the interstitial ‘my father.’ In person, this would be no big deal and it would be very inappropriate to have corrected Von Brunn. In reprinting the quotation, however, the edit was necessary because skimming readers might assume that both ‘Mr. Johns’ and ‘my father’ had died, if they were not reading closely.
Don’t assume that every grammatical correction is meant as a slight to the originator.