Inauguration Day was a glorious day, which I spent with my daughter and two of her friends from 7:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night
•    getting into downtown Washington on the subway,

•    shuffling along like a penguin in the crowds pouring out of the station,

•    breaching a “secure” area to get onto the Mall,

•    staking out our few square feet of space in front of a Jumbotron, where we stood for hours getting       to know the people around us,

•    finding a warm place after the swearing-in to hang out until crowds thinned at the closest sustation (which they never did), and

•    finally giving up on public transportation and walking 20 blocks to a friend’s house where we waited     for my husband to drive in from the burbs get us.

It was a marvelous, moving, historic day, and I thought of grammar only twice.

First during the oath of office when Chief Justice Roberts moved the adverb “faithfully” from the midst of a compound verb to the end of the sentence, where the word was left barely hanging on to the sentence, ready to be blown away by the chill gusts of the day. How awkward, and how much better as our forefathers wrote the words, with the adverb right there in the middle of the sentence’s predicate: “I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.”

Afterall, didn’t Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise not say, “to boldly go where no man has gone before”? There is absolutely nothing wrong in my grammar book with inserting an adverb in the midst of a compound verb.

The second time I had a niggling grammar thought was when President Obama, in his address, referred to the “selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job.” Oh dear, I thought, there’s that ubiquitous “they.” Why couldn’t he have said “see friends lose their jobs”?

Or maybe I’m the one who needs to change and accept this use of “they” with singular entities, either as a substitute for “his or her” or when referring to an entity comprised of many people. (I believe I heard Daniel Zwerdling on NPR this morning say something along the lines of “Before they took over, the administration planned. .  . .”)

I’ll reserve judgment a while longer on “they” but may just have to give in if someone as well spoken as President Obama has accepted this useage.

—Lesley Rogers

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