Grammatical error?

[DavidOdden]

Now then.... recall that the text in question is "The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind."

"What you cannot do is match a singular noun with the plural possessive their in an attempt to be [gender] neutral."

This rule doesn’t apply here, because Rand wasn’t attempting to be [gender] neutral. Still, notice that the referent of “their” is “men”, both being plural. Chastain’s rule would apply to a sentence like *“The teacher received their severance pay in a pink envelope”, which is clearly ungrammatical. Here, there is no question that you’d have to use “his” or “her”.

Cook's more thorough Line by Line lists audience as a word that can be either plural or singular.

But “men” is very different from “audience”. “Men” refers to homo sapiens, in the plural, and the individual (singular) members of the set are singular men. Words like “team, audience, department” do not refer to just one person, which is why you have to say things like “member of the team / audience / department”. So conclusions drawn about words like “audience” don’t always apply to “men”, But now moving to the rest of that...

"If the collective noun denotes a unit, make it singular; if it refers to the individuals the group comprises, make it plural" (p 84). An example she gives is "The department comes from a variety of backgrounds" where 'comes' ought to be 'come', since a singular department comes from one place whereas the department members can come from several places.

But in fact it would be completely wrong to use a plural for such sentences, i.e. *“The department come from a variety of backgrounds”.

Statements like We all got our driver's license at the age of seventeen and All in favor raise their right hand are careless and illogical" (p 96).

His last example is particularly poorly thought out, since you should say “All in favor raise your right hand”. Applying his judgment (which doesn't say what is correct, thus gives no hint of what he thinks the repair should be), we should then say “All in favor raise your right hands”, implying that we have more than one right hand? There's no plural second person pronoun in English, unless he's really suggesting that we say

“All in favor raise y'alls's right hands”? Anyhow, he isn’t offering a rule, this is an ad hoc judgment of his in a specific instance: I don’t see that the first example is analogous to Rand’s example. Analogies work only when they are correctly constructed, i.e. reflect the application of one rule to essentially identical cases.

Strunk and White agree with using singular pronouns even if the sentence becomes awkward

Well, the problem is that the pronoun’s referent “men” is plural, so it would be, by a general rule, desirable to use a plural pronoun.

Strunk and White also say that "the number of the subject determines the number of the verb" (p 9).

In the sentence, there is one inflectable verb, “is”, and the subject of that verb is “value”. So this rule would not be relevant to the question at hand. Now on to Anker

"A pronoun must agree with (match) the noun or pronoun it refers to in number:

Thus “their” because the referent is “men”.

We really have two separate issues here. The first is about Rand's sentence; the second is about how to objectively validate rules of grammar. Obvious, I tend towards a fact-based answer, and consider questions of language to be questions about reality, a systematic method of communication in societies. I don't think that rules of grammar come into existence top-down by certain legislation from a central governmental committee or an academic elite whose opinion has a privileged position, I think they arise because of the function that they serve.

[miseleigh]

I know that not all of my quotes above relate to Rand's statement; some were meant to apply to other pieces of this thread. The ones involving "their" were responses to your statement earlier, where I thought you were trying to apply "their" to a singular antecedent. (Perhaps I misunderstood.) The ones about collective nouns were intended to apply to Rick Pritchett's statement:

Quoting from the Handbook of Current English-Seventh Edition (Corder and Ruszkiewicz):

"Nouns Referring to Individuals in a Group:

When a collective noun refers to the members of the group, especially if it represents them as acting individually, a plural verb and plural reference words are used:

The audience have taken their seats (emphasis mine)."

Which, of course, you have said is blatantly ungrammatical in English. If you want to claim it's blatantly ungrammatical in modern American then I won't argue, but it's acceptable in England, as Capitalism Forever pointed out.

I apologize for trying to cover too many separate issues at once. I was not trying to say that Rand should have used anything other than "their," nor do I think she was treating "men" as a collective noun.

Claire Kehrwald Cook's book is the best reference I have available for the 'mind vs. minds' question. It was copyrighted in 1985, so if you have an older book that addresses this, please share with us.

I believe that Cook's second example, "All in favor raise their right hand," was supposed to be fixed by changing 'hand' to 'hands' rather than letting them share a hand. That's in the section where she's talking about subject-object agreement. Here are some other examples she uses: "Lawyers are told that if they do not become a partner [become partners] by age forty they never will." "'This is the line being peddlied behind the furrowed brow of the most earnest and nonpartisan politicians.' Of course, changing brow to brows won't help if you're troubled by the notion of peddling a line behind a brow, but that's not the issue here." Although Cook does not state this in a clear-cut rule, she goes through several examples of sentences where people are sharing things they shouldn't be, and then goes on to show some examples where the object ought to be singular ("They keep their apartment neat" where 'they' refers to people living in the same apartment.) She also makes sure that the reader knows that attributes, like courage, are always singular.

I would try to base the answer on the English language itself if I could, but my only reference for that is me, and I absolutely think that Rand made a mistake in letting men share a single mind.

[DavidOdden]

Which, of course, you have said is blatantly ungrammatical in English. If you want to claim it's blatantly ungrammatical in modern American then I won't argue, but it's acceptable in England, as Capitalism Forever pointed out.

Right, I actually surmised that the book was not about American English but rather about British English, so I was poking a bit of fun at the way the Brits talk (after all, they poke fun at how we talk, so it's all good fun). The real point is that Rand was not writing in British, she was writing in American, so British rules would not apply.

I would try to base the answer on the English language itself if I could, but my only reference for that is me, and I absolutely think that Rand made a mistake in letting men share a single mind.

On the other hand, it would also be a mistake to imply that men are of two minds; even when they are, we shouldn't encourage it.

[Adrian Hester]

In this case, the normative question on the table was whether the noun itself should have been "minds" rather than "mind" (thus the proffered rule was in sensu stricto irrelevant, as the issue is not at all about the pattern of agreement). In my view, the best way to understand this problem is in terms of the proposition that Rand intended to communicate (which doesn't seem to be at all in doubt), and then secondarily the best means of doing so. I can find no fault on the latter score, given my knowledge of the rules of English which govern how other people should be expected to understand her meaning. But naturally, even though I am a native speaker of English and Rand was, in fact, not, I am open to argumentation that we both misunderstand the nature of English grammar. That's why I'm waiting for a superior and more authoritative opinion on this matter of fact.

That would be mine.

Now, on to the serious stuff. First off, I agree with you wholeheartedly. However, I think there's more to say. As you pointed out, the grammatical point is whether (or perhaps which) English speakers distinguish the distributive and collective senses of the plural--that is, whether the plural is used to refer to each member of the group individually or to all of them as a group. Many do, including any number of great native-speaker English writers. Dismissing the distributive sense of the plural (which allows you to distinguish singlar and plural possessions of plural possessors) as ungrammatical does injustice to the many writers who have employed the distinction effectively--and if a dictum from on high prevents the reader from appreciating its use, then it's not a good rule for describing English grammar. It's a subtle distinction, however, and often people don't notice it, much less learn about it, when it's encountered while reading, but it can be used to very sharp effect. Here are some good examples from the Wikiquote page for William Hazlitt, a master of conversational prose, to get an idea of the stylistic issues involved.

First: "The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion." A nice parallelism there, with two sentences joined with a semicolon. You could say that each group has one cause shared by all its members (collective), or possibly that just as power or freedom is various, each member has his own idea of what his cause is (distributive), but I'd say the first reading is more natural. Going to the second half of each sentence, it would be a stretch to say he's implying that all slaves of power have the same interest (collective), though it's possible; and it's not at all sensical to say that all friends of liberty have the same self-opinion, so a distributive reading is required. So there is a contrast between the sense of the plural in each half of either sentence, collective in the first half and distributive in the second. Rather malaprop, no? Indeed no, quite the contrary. Consider the second sentence. Why do the friends of liberty sacrifice their (collective) cause? Because of their individual respective spleens, vanities, and self-opinions (distributive sense). The tension between the cause of the group and the motivation of each individual is brought home more forcefully by the contrast between the plural and singular.

Consider the effect if a singular were used in the second sentence: "The friend of liberty always sacrifices his cause...to his own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion." What is lost is the implication that this is a collective sacrifice, or better a mutual one, made as each individual friend of liberty plumps for his own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion. And notice that the spleen, vanity, and self-opinion only come into play because the friends of liberty form the same party and step on each other's toes; just as the sacrifice is mutual, so the grievances that trump the cause are with reference to each other as a group. And since this is contrasted with the cohesion of the slaves of power, who glom onto each other because their individual interests are served by the same cause, the use of the plural for parallelism all the better serves to point up the contrast between the two groups. (There's a secondary issue that the use of the singular in the second sentence allows spleen and vanity to be taken either as mass or count nouns.) You can see this especially when compared with this: "Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety." The singular is effective because it focuses attention on any individual who meets this condition; nothing is gained by speaking of them as a group because they don't act as a group; their mutual relations have nothing to do with their ignorance or thoughtlessness.

Second: "Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress." In fact, this sentence is ambiguous--either dress is a mass noun throughout (meaning garb) or the second dress can be taken as singular (a particular woman's dress). Each reading has slightly different connotations--the former implies that they will have no value but their outer appearance, the second that their value reduces to their outfit, and by extension to their success in the futile battle of fashions and social striving. I suspect Hazlitt used the plural precisely to get both shades of meaning.

Contrast that with a third: "We all wear some disguise -- make some professions -- use some artifice to set ourselves off as being better than we are..." Surely we don't all wear the same disguise or use the same artifice, so a distributive sense is required here. This allows Hazlitt to contrast the disguise and artifice, which are singular for each of us, with the several various professions we might make, but he could have done the same by making it a singular sentence about "each of us." (I take "each of us" as sufficiently emphatic a parallel with "we all"; "everyone" would be too weak a fit parallel, though it would suit a simple "we.") The use of the plural "we" allows all the possessive pronouns to be first person rather than third person to drive his claim home--as it stands it is much more immediate than "Each of us wears some disguise -- makes some professions -- uses some artifice to set himself off as being better than he is..."

Now, against that background consider the sentence from Atlas Shrugged: "The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind." In the first part, "the only value men can offer me," it's still unclear whether men is a collective or distributive plural; are men a unitary group who can offer a collective value or are they a group of distinct individuals who each produces values separately? "The work of their minds" calls to mind a collective project whose value derives from its being cooperative, while "the works of their minds" could either be the individual works of each man separately or the various collective works of several men's minds (or all of the above). "The work of their mind" forces the distributive reading to excellent effect--the only value that all and any men can offer me is the work of their individual minds. Far from being ungrammatical, this sentence uses the resources of English masterfully and subtly.