The Decline of the Dictionary

[Robert Hartwell Fiske]

One ADS member privately pointed out to me that the sentence:

People using "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" do not displease a 
descriptivist.

The subject of the sentence, she wrote,  is the gerund "using," and as you 
know, a noun or pronoun that modifies a gerund takes the possessive case.  The 
verb should agree with the subject gerund "using" rather than its modifier 
"people."  The correct sentence would read: 

People's using "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" does not 
displease a descriptivist."

I replied to her -- and mention this now to spare others from having to make 
this particular criticism of my article -- that I had "does." Someone at TWS 
changed it to "do" after I signed off on the article. They also added the title 
"Don't Look It Up!: The Decline of the Dictionary" which I don't much care 
for.





Robert Hartwell Fiske
Editor and Publisher
The Vocabula Review
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