it drives me crazy when people butcher words like that. it's hilarious when they type them out. i saw a person type starberry the other day. they meant strawberry. i hear people say that all the time. it just baffles me - where are these people learning English?
Okay, I am calling you out on this one, only because you seem like someone who appreciates the English language and wants to see it used correctly.
"i saw
a person type starberry the other day.
they meant strawberry."
This is one of the most common mistakes in the language, and one that I find very frustrating. "They" refers to multiple people. But writers constantly use it to refer to "a person" or "someone." This is just wrong.
There are numerous ways to avoid this problem, which I will go into if anyone cares enough to request it by sending me a private message.
This is NOT just a matter of being fussy or pedantic; sometimes a written statement can become ambiguous or just incomprehensible if this mistake is made.
Edit: Here is an easy example: "A person kicked dirt on the players. They got upset."
Who got upset? The players? That is what the sentence says. But, if the sentence were written by a writer who uses "they" to refer to "a person,"
the writer may have actually been saying that the person who kicked dirt was the one who was upset.
Additional Edit: Notice how the problem is avoided in the previous sentence. The bolded and underlined "the writer" is often erroneously replaced with "they" simply because the sex of the writer is unknown.
