Everyone Who Hates Talking about Antecedents, Raise its Hand

Our local hockey heroes closed out the calendar year in fine form last night, with an impressive win over the high-flying (high-swimming?) Sharks. Even Province hockey columnist and noted grumpster, Tony Gallagher, was impressed--particularly with the play of goalie Ryan Miller:

In short, it was another a masterful performance in a crucial situation which should make everyone here in Vancouver feel better about it’s beloved team’s goaltending. 

I'll put aside for now the matter of using "which" to begin a restrictive clause (feel free to re-visit my tipsy thoughts on that here); the trickier question here arises from that little "it's." A couple of message board commenters jumped on Gallagher for using the contraction for "it is" when clearly the possessive, apostrophe-less, model was called for--hockey fans are notorious sticklers for correct usage, after all.

But I submit that neither one is the correct choice here. It all comes down to arranging the right marriage of pronoun and antecedent, and, in this case, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends on what the definition of "its" is. I'm sure that Gallagher, in his post-game haste, just went with the pronoun that best matched the nearest preceding noun: "Vancouver." But the antecedent in that sentence is not "Vancouver," it is "everyone here in Vancouver." Just try reading it as "make everyone here feel better about its team" and the issue becomes clear. "Everyone" isn't an "it." The pronoun to use in this situation is "their."

Or is it? Some people with pinched faces who wear sweater vests will insist that "everyone" is a singular noun, and because you can't say "everyone are..." you also shouldn't use the plural "their"with it. But I think, this is a rule worth breaking.

In the end, the best way to resolve this whole mess, especially since it's New Year's Eve and we all have drinking to get to, is to recast the phrase thusly: "...make people here in Vancouver feel better about their beloved team's goaltending." There. As is so often the case with even the most vexing issues in life, the best course of action is to find the easiest way to avoid dealing with the problem.

Wile E. Cougar

The bears are back--and this time they've brought the cougars with them. Each day seems to bring another news account of a lively unexpected encounter between man and homicidal woodland beast. There have been two bear maulings in recent days (one fatal) and a sign on my local running trail advising of a cougar sighting in the area had me nervously scanning the perimeter for crouching cats.  

The Province tells us of a teen girl on Vancouver Island who forestalled a cougar assault with the time-tested trick of "making herself taller" and ringing her bike bell. That's a trick I'd like to learn. The spontaneous heightening, I mean. I already know how to ring a bike bell.

The piece goes on to inventory other encounters, ending with:

And in the Squamish area, in mid-June, a cougar possibly trying to pounce on a rider preparing for the annual Test of Metal mountain bike race missed and landed on his real wheel.

The cougars have wheels now? Given their already significant predatory advantage, that hardly seems sporting.

This Sentence Needs a Circumcision

 Reporters are supposed to be ready for anything, but ABC's Jim Sciutto probably never envisioned having to deliver his own baby boy during his birth.

So goes the opening sentence from a HuffPo report today. Having performed this "emergency home birth" stunt myself--twice!--I can say with a measure of authority that it's really not that difficult. Mostly, you just have to yell "You're doing great!" at regular intervals. The rest pretty much takes care of itself.

But Sciutto not only delivered his own baby, he did it while being born himself, which I confess adds a significantly complicating dimension to the process. Unless, of course, that final "his" refers to the baby's birth, not Sciutto's. But really, when else are you going to deliver a baby? To do it before the birth is abortion; to do it after is...well, self-contradictory. So I think we can agree that those last three words are (like most babies, coincidentally) inane and superfluous.

He Followed Me Home...Can I Keep Him?

The SPCA, in a shameless attempt to cause civil unrest in my home, has sent my daughter, Abby, a 4-color bi-fold brochure on the joys of guinea pig ownership. That's what you get when you let your kid make contributions toward funding the reproductive mutilation of furry critters at Bob Barker's urging. Abby's donations earned her a spot on the organization's propaganda mailing list, hence the guinea pig promotion, which features this historical tidbit:

A few hundred years ago when European explorers traveled to South America, they returned home with guinea pigs. Because of their affectionate nature, they soon became popular pets in both Europe and North America.

When it comes to creating unintentional humor, the ambiguous antecedent is second only to the dangling participle in its capacity to pull the pin on a linguistic grenade. In this case, because the subject of the first sentence is "European explorers," the reader is led to assume that those same explorers constitute the "they" of the succeeding sentence, and, for a moment at least, is treated to the image of an intrepid (but affectionate) seafaring adventurer being kept in a sawdust-strewn habitat for the amusement of children and eccentric adults.

The Dick Cheney Award for Freestyle Hunting

Here's another of those tragic "hunter mistakes other hunter for a deer" stories you hear about too often. The Canwest story out of Alberta includes these lines:

"He fired one shot," Sylvan Lake RCMP Sgt. Duncan Babchuk said Monday. "He saw movement and fired a second shot. This time he heard a very strange noise and he realized something was wrong, and he ran to the scene and found his hunting partner with a gunshot to the abdomen."

Babchuk said the shooter called 911 and conducted first aid on his partner until the paramedics arrived. He died at the scene.

Wait a minute. Who died at the scene? I know it's easy to figure out from the context, but I came flying around the corner toward that last sentence at a pretty good clip, and the pronoun/antecedent confusion really jammed a stick in my spokes. The shooter was the subject of the main clause in the preceding sentence, so I assumed for a moment that he was the "He" leading off as the subject of the final sentence. (A case could even be made that "He" refers to Sgt. Babchuk, who perhaps died at the scene when delivering this statement.) A minor mix-up, but a telling example of how an ambiguous antecedent can throw a reader off course, if only momentarily.

By the way, at the risk of sounding grotesquely insensitive, I have to say that this story reminds me of a joke. The world's funniest joke, in fact, according to an actual university professor who conducted a study to identify and crown said joke, while his colleagues were off smashing atoms and finding cures for fatal diseases.

The joke, according to the Wikipedia entry about the study, goes like this:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "OK, now what?"

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! AND AN AMBIGUOUS ANTECEDENT!

From a review of the upcoming eschatological* blockbuster "2012", in today's Vancouver Sun:

The plot is made up of several stories of human drama as the world races closer to destruction. This is because of solar activity that creates neutrinos...

On first reading, I was bumfuzzled and nonplussed (never a pleasant combination of sensations). The plot is made up of several stories because of solar activity? Sure, after the eye doubles back, it becomes clear enough that "this" refers to the world and its race to destruction. Hardly the most egregious example of the confusion that can result from an unclear antecedent, but the best one I've found today.

*"Eschatology: The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind." Cool word, don't you think?