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While doing my TOEFL prep I encountered the following statement where I am asked to find which of the bold words is being used wrongly in the sentence:

If one has a special medical condition such as diabetes, epilepsy, or allergy, it is advisable that they carry some kind of identification in order to avoid being given improper medication in an emergency.

The bold they and carry should be treated as two words (meaning, only one of them can be wrong, but not both).

I would say being is used wrongly just because when I reread the statement it doesn't sound right, even though most of the time a gerund is used after the erb avoid.

tchrist
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Nino
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1 Answers1

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Whoever wrote your exam is pretending they is an invalid pronoun to use when the referent is one. They expect you to write the same word each time:

If one has a special medical condition such as diabetes, epilepsy, or allergy, it is advisable that one carry some kind of identification in order to avoid being given improper medication in an emergency.

I wouldn't put much stock in their prescriptive fussiness. They clearly don't care about how people actually speak.

Remember, this is somebody who thinks “it is advisable that one carry” doesn’t sound deathly stuffy. But it does. The normal way to phrase all that mess would be more along these lines:

Anyone with a medical condition like diabetes, epilepsy, or a drug allergy should carry some document or wrist-band identifying that condition so they aren’t accidentally given dangerous medication in an emergency.

tchrist
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  • ... but don't forget your medical card. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 09 '15 at 14:52
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    The confusion is there supposed to be only one mistake and if I call out they as a mistake then carry is not fitting either. it is not referring to the third person. I could be wrong. – Nino Aug 09 '15 at 14:55
  • @Nino: My guess is the confusion arises because the test setter isn't even a native speaker of English, rather than that they're excessively prescriptive / fussy. – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 14:57
  • @Nino I don't understand what you mean. They want you to say that it must be written "it is advisable that one carry". This is horribly stuffy and formal and off-putting, but it is not incorrect. – tchrist Aug 09 '15 at 14:58
  • I don't know about the TOEFL, but other tests administered by the ETS seem to have a list of kinds of grammatical errors that they put in test sentences. One of the things on the list for the TOEFL may be that they can't refer back to one; one should use one's (using they with one sounds vaguely British to me, and ETS is American). – Peter Shor Aug 09 '15 at 15:04
  • @tchrist What I was trying to tell is if I use one, shouldn't I use carries afterwards? like "it is advisable that one carries", too stupid question. if it is the case then there appears to be 2 mistakes. That is what I meant by telling carry is not fitting either. – Nino Aug 09 '15 at 15:04
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    @Nino: no, if you're American, you should say advisable that he carry because it's subjunctive. – Peter Shor Aug 09 '15 at 15:04
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    So if one* wants, they can ignore the (pedant who set this TOEFL test)* – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 15:06
  • I can't put my finger on exactly why, but *advisable* seems slightly "colloquial" there. To me it would seem more fitting to use it is advised** in this kind of formal context. – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 15:09
  • Let me retract my previous comment: googling "one could have their own", it seems like a lot of the instances are indeed American. – Peter Shor Aug 09 '15 at 15:10
  • @FumbleFingers Their native language is not English but Bureaucratese. – tchrist Aug 09 '15 at 15:10
  • @tchrist: Well, they should stick to bureaucrating, and leave the teaching / testing of English skills to people who actually know the language. – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 15:12
  • @Peter: Are you sure? Here's a chance to use my favourite AmE/BrE highlighting device. One could write their own cheque gets a claimed 1,830,000 hits, compared to just a single instance of One could write their own check. And I've no doubt the idiomatic write your own check is perfectly common in AmE. – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 15:18
  • @FumbleFingers: Google actually finds no instances of "one could write their own cheque", and so it deletes the quotes and finds lots of hits. But if you search for "one *can* write their own check/cheque", the American spelling is three times as common. Brilliant device! – Peter Shor Aug 09 '15 at 15:42
  • @PeterShor the real question is, at one time did people say "one could write his own check?" and was "his" changed to "their?" – michael_timofeev Aug 09 '15 at 15:52
  • @Peter: Oops! I didn't notice what Google did when there were no hits at all for the quoted string. But I certainly think that particular spelling difference is even more likely to be accurate than Google Books US/UK corpuses. It helped explain why you're not exactly comfortable with the (to me, perfectly ordinary) usage Can you cash me a cheque? (regardless of spelling! :). – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 15:54
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    @FumbleFingers Plenty of folks of my acquaintance use Can you cash me a check without the least bit of hesitation. I don’t understand why certain people are seized with inexplicable fits of apoplexy over simple indirect-object use. It’s a basic way that English works. This sort of thing is super-common in southern Wisconsin, and it raises no eyebrows here now in Colorado, either. – tchrist Aug 09 '15 at 16:20
  • @tchrist: When it came up before (in the context of that What's wrong with “I'll open you the door”? question) the vast majority of votes went to John Lawler's (American?) assertion that the usage is ungrammatical (because you won't wind up owning the door by virtue of it being opened). I was left with the general impression BrE is on average more flexible in this respect than AmE. (Either that, or I personally have an unusually "laissez faire" attitude to syntax! :) – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 16:27
  • @FumbleFingers Please open me this jar sounds perfectly normal to me. Note that there were a lot of German settlers in southern Wisconsin, and Scandinavian ones throughout that region northwards. I had an old friend from Madison WI visit a few weeks ago, and I noticed that even her kids said things this way so it’s hardly something that’s dying out. Perhaps “certain” other Americans have forgotten that using a “dative of interest” to mean *for me* rather than just to me has always been a normal part of English. Probably that means we all just need to use it on them more often. :) – tchrist Aug 09 '15 at 16:37
  • @tchrist: It just seems to me that the US educational system is more concerned with precisely-defined syntax than we are in the UK. It's the same with spelling, where the concept of "spelling bees" seems pervasive on your side of the pond, but rather "quaint" to most Brits (but maybe we're less bothered there because sheer weight of numbers often forces us to accept US spelling norms). – FumbleFingers Aug 09 '15 at 16:45
  • @FumbleFingers: I don't believe this has anything to do with the US educational system. From my and my daughters' experience, they worry about spelling, not using the passive, not mixing the past and present tenses inappropriately, and a few other bugaboos. But as far as I can tell, this kind of stuff is something that grade- and high-school teachers wouldn't go over. – Peter Shor Aug 09 '15 at 18:11