When grammar goes bad

Yesterday afternoon I was driving from Ann Arbor to Detroit -- on my way to represent Teach For America at the Sigma Xi conference at the Renaissance Center downtown -- when I passed a billboard on I-94 that made me do a double-take and almost drive off the road.

You might be wondering, What was on this billboard? I'll give you three guesses.

[Pause] Ah-hmmm, no, no, and no.

The correct answer was "a truck." The intended message seemed to be that this model had a lot of interior space, but the only space I saw was the one between the ad writer's ears. The wording went like this:

"Everyone gets their own space"

Sometimes it's hard being one of these people that actually knows English, and by that I mean real English, not mamby-pamby feel-good MySpace English. This was one of those times. I was stunned -- stunned! -- that no one in that company's chain of command said, "Let's not drop thousands of dollars on English that's -- what's the word? oh yeah -- wrong."

The error? Not matching numbers. "Everyone" should be followed by "his" and not "their" because "everyone" is singular. The straightforward test is to substitute "he" for "everyone" and check that the new sentence still makes sense. "He gets their own space". What? Absurd. "He gets his own space." Ahhh, much better.

The ad should therefore read: "Everyone gets his own space" or the more PC "Everyone gets his or her own space". Of course then you've lost the toughness that comes with beating up on grammar. But beating up on grammar is like being a sixth-grader with an overactive thyroid beating up on a first-grader in headgear. Get your kicks some other way, buddy, like thinking up better slogans.