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Kids as young as 7 are finding ingenious ways around Apple's screen time controls:
[...] Parents can use the feature to impose restrictions on their children's device usage — or so they thought. One Reddit shared the story of how their seven-year-old had gamed the feature, sparking a chat that has nearly 500 comments.
"When iOS 12 came out I limited my 7-year old son's screen time through the family share. For a few days I felt like he was playing a bit more than he should, but I couldn't figure out why," u/PropellerGuy said.
"Finally today, my son revealed his hack: When he runs out of screen time and his games get locked, he heads to App Store, downloads a previously installed (but later removed) game through the cloud icon, and it works without limitations!"
"What can I say," they added. "I'm not even mad. That's impressive."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @01:18PM (5 children)
Shakespeare uses 'they' but not truly in simple singular sense, not like what we see above here.
You might be thinking of
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend "
At a glance you might expect *his instead of their right? Man/his rather than man/they.
But look again. The referent 'they' points to here is not the word 'man' it's the nominal *phrase* in the first verse, and that is no simple singular subject. The sense of they here is still plural - the actual subject is not a single man, but every man of the town!
"They" in this context is not incorrect, and the combination of plural with singular is done for a purpose - it gives the sense of successive plurality, something very much like a for loop. He's not being saluted by all the men together, but he is saluted by each in turn.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
I mean, it's right there in the phrase "every man".
That's why Shakespeare was wrong. As the AC pointed already [soylentnews.org]: Shakespeare fell prey to a heuristics failure (if not a desire to produce a certain artistic, rather than logical, sequence of syllables).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:26PM
Now, I suspect I know where you got this idea. You're thinking back to your grade school sentence diagrams, right?
So what I suspect happened is you got the part about how you could break down nominal phrases, strip away the phrase and just match the noun. And normally that works, it's probably the appropriate level to be going over in your 3rd grade English class. But it is an oversimplification, because English is a language that has nominal phrases that just don't work that way. All of the examples in this thread are examples of that.
You're looking at a nominative phrase that uses the unmarked bare noun but is still clearly plural semantically. And there's ample evidence that English allows and has long allowed for the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a phrase like that, as is always pointed out when I say you can't use 'they' as a singular pronoun.
That's missing the point. I didn't deny you could use it with a plural object, the entire POINT is to use it with plural objects, not singular.
The usage being criticized, from TFA, used 'they' to refer to "\PropellerGuy" and we have zero indication of any kind that he's actually a collective or a large abstract set of people rather than being a single individual, so it's not the same thing at all as what you see Shakespeare doing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:55PM (2 children)
If you don't like Shakeſpere, how about period bible translations, say the KJV (James 2:15-16, original 1611 version)?
Or Tyndale's (not sure which revision this is, but 1530ish)?
Hey, we can go right back to Wycliffe (Purvey's 1395 revision), if you're down with Middle English:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:51PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:19AM
A brother or a sister -- one person. That's unambiguously a singular subject. Not a brother and a sister, or every brother and sister in town one by one.