Cat class, cat style, cat reality

JUNE CASAGRANDE

When we got our new house, I hired a handyman to “cat proof” the

backyard. Specifically, I asked him to staple wire mesh on the parts

of the wooden fence that the cats could squeeze between or under.

The handyman asked, “Won’t the cats just go up and over the

fence?”

His question was the embodiment of something that, to him, was a

universal truth. Everyone knows that cats can climb, don’t they?

I stifled my laughter. How could I ever explain that our three

cats, and especially the aged and wimpy Eddie, don’t really qualify

as cats?

They’re more like, oh, I don’t know, azaleas. Their idea of a

rowdy good time is lying on the floor in any patch of sun streaming

through the window and making us wonder whether they’re still

breathing or whether they’ve crossed that magic line between animal

and vegetable.

So in their minds, a patch of rose bushes is like the treacherous

Amazon rain forest. And in the six months that they’ve had this

backyard playground, nobody has gotten out. Not even once.

Neighborhood cats somehow find their way in and out. We’ve even

had a visit from an opossum that managed to find an exit. But despite

a face-to-face encounter with one of these strange cats, Eddie is

still certain that the world ends at the garage.

Just as cats can be conditioned to accept the limitations of their

surroundings, so can English speakers be conditioned to accept the

limitations of their language. (Whew. I was wondering how I was going

to segue from a cat tale into a grammar topic. A tenuous bridge at

best, but it’s all I’ve got.)

Consider the simple rule that verbs must agree with their

subjects. “A cat knows how to climb.” “Cats know how to climb.” “He

climbs.” “They climb.” The verb changes to match the number of the

subject. Everyone knows this, don’t they?

Wait a minute. Isn’t “everyone” singular? Isn’t that why it takes

the verb “knows” instead of “know”? And if so, what’s that pronoun

“they” doing in there?

Welcome to a fluke in the English language as insurmountable as

any wooden fence is to Eddie.

In fact, trying to make “everyone” and “everybody” agree perfectly

with verbs and pronouns is so impossible that the British have made

their surrender official.

Bryan Garner of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” explains:

“Today it is standard British English to use ‘everyone’ and

‘everybody’ with a singular verb but a plural pronoun.”

He gives an example from the Sunday Times of London. “Almost

‘everybody’ now seems to be a ‘victim’ of something -- of society or

‘their’ own weaknesses.”

He gives another example, this one from a book titled “Unlocking

the English Language” by the venerable R.W. Burchfield: “The

compilation of the [Oxford English Dictionary] made it possible for

‘everyone’ to have before ‘them’ the historical shape and

configuration of the language.”

Garner goes on to explain that some people think “everyone” should

be plural and that others think it should be singular. But neither

guideline holds up as a rule. That’s because if “everyone” is

singular, you’d have to say, “Everyone knows this, doesn’t he?” If

“everyone” is plural, you’d have to conjugate “know” accordingly,

saying, “Everyone know this, doesn’t he?”

But unlike the lie-down-and-take-it British, we Americans don’t

face reality so easily.

Many Americans, Garner writes, continue to think of British rules

as slipshod and still try to force “everyone” into one category or

the other.

Perhaps it’s time we Americans forget about what might be on the

other side of the fence and just accept that, for us, the rational

world ends here.