Books: Surveying The State of the Lingo THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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In matters of grammar, everyone can now do their own thing -- or so RHD-II argues in a note that endorses using their with a singular antecedent like everyone, something that was "nonstandard" in RHD-I. Hopefully seems a hopeless cause, a butterfly of an adverb that has turned into the caterpillar it-is-to-be-hoped, which RHD-II proclaims "fully standard." And because many people wrongly consider the past tense of sneak to be snuck (instead of sneaked), the word has been promoted from "chiefly dialect" in RHD-I to full respectability here.

Data and media were plurals pure and simple in RHD-I; the new edition advises that data can be either singular or plural, and media as a singular has become common in, of all places, the media. Another favorite media word, kudos, has undergone an even more perplexing transformation. Originally a singular meaning praise or glory, it has been misconstrued so often as a plural that, by a process lexicographers call back-formation, it has spawned a synthetic singular. Sure enough, here it is with its own entry in RHD-II: kudo. What next? Will a single instance of pathos be called a patho?

In the end, of course, all these matters will be settled by the heedless masses of people who rarely look at dictionaries, much less write them; that is the way of linguistic evolution. So is there any point in resisting changes that may be inevitable? Yes, indeed, as the late poet and translator John Ciardi eloquently argued. "Those who care," Ciardi wrote, "have a duty to resist. Changes that occur against such resistance are tested changes. The language is the better for them -- and for the resistance." It is regrettable that RHD-II resists so little. But it is admirable that it erects such a splendid arena in which to carry on the struggle.