Jesse Ventura hit the airwaves of Washington in recent days. Listening to one of his interviews, I was struck by how articulate a speaker he is, with little hesitation, few ums, likes, and I means. He’s direct, knows what he wants to say, and says it with clarity. Perhaps that’s because, as he says, wrestling taught him to think quickly on his feet, something that carried over to his political career as the Independent governor of Minnesota.

So, being impressed with his speaking style, I grimaced just a bit when he said, “If you allow the third party equal footing, they can be successful.”

The use of they when referring to a single entity such as an organization, corporation, government, or, in this case, a political party is something I hear frequently on the radio, spoken by commentators and reporters as well as by those being interviewed. It’s also a grammatical error I find myself correcting more and more in proofs of articles to be printed in National Geographic, and that’s usually after writer and editor have spent some time on the text.

The Brits, of course, have long used plural verbs with an entity composed of individuals (“the government have instituted new procedures”), and it could be argued from the modern “notional” approach to grammar that a plural pronoun is acceptable because the single entity is made up of individuals.

I am not convinced by notional grammar in this particular structure, though apparently I don’t always persuade National Geographic editors and writers to follow me down the strict path of structural agreement (see, there’s a degree of wrestling in my work too!).

Here are two examples of pronoun and antecedent not agreeing. The first was corrected before publication in National Geographic; the second was not.

            • The crew was freed. Later, they were stunned when investigators revealed
               that one of their own had betrayed them.

            • That fall, Lishui [a city] applied to add another 13.5 square miles to the
              development zone. The expansion would require an investment of almost
              900 million dollars, most of which would come from bank loans. They planned
              to double the city’s population by 2020.

Jesse seems to be in good company. 

Why is it that in recent years the definite article the has become commonly attached to a description of a well-known person as if he or she were the only such person in the world?

For instance, one no longer says “paintings by cowboy artist Charles M. Russell.” Instead, it’s “paintings by the cowboy artist Charles M. Russell,” no doubt leaving the ghost of Frederic Remington a bit unsettled, not to mention the living, breathing members of an organization called the Cowboy Artists of America. In fact, if one Googles “cowboy artist,” a multitude of modern-day names appears before Remington’s, and still no Charley Russell. He’s obviously not the only cowboy artist of note.

One of the most annoying examples I’ve seen recently of what I consider a misuse of the definite article is in Joan Acocella’s otherwise entertaining and insightful critique of Dancing With the Stars, in the April 14 New Yorker (emphasis below is mine):

    “The new season kicked off last month with twelve stars:
    the comedian and magician Penn Jillette; the tennis
    champion Monica Seles; the rhythm-and-blues singer
    Mario; Jason Taylor, the Miami Dolphin’s defensive end;
    Kristi Yamaguchi, the gold-medal figure skater. . . .”

None of these people is the one and only in a category. There are many tennis champions, and Kristi is a gold-medal figure skater.

Elsewhere in the same New Yorker I came across “married to José Ferrer, the actor” and “Erica Jong, the novelist, essayist, and poet” and then in this week’s issue “by the novelist and short-story writer Mark Poirier.” What’s wrong with “married to actor José Ferrer” or “by novelist and short-story writer Mark Poirier”?

I don’t want you to think I’m beating up on the New Yorker unfairly; it just happens to be what I’ve been reading in the past day or so. I can assure you this construction is used in virtually all publications today, even in National Geographic, although I’ll continue to delete extraneous the’'s if I can.

In addition to being annoyed by this particular word usage, I’m also intrigued with how quickly and universally writers can adopt and advance a new construction. I’m probably one of the few left behind grumbling about abused definite articles.

By the way, I’m rooting for Jason Taylor to win Dancing With the Stars, even though Kristi Yamaguchi let her hair down and danced an amazingly sensuous rumba in this week’s show.

Yikes! I misspelled receive in an email to members of a committee I serve on. Thank goodness they are gardeners and not grammarians, and so far have been too polite to point out my mistake.

But it’s made me ponder the fast-paced world of email, and how the number of messages seems to be expanding exponentially. We write, we read, we respond all at lightning speed. We monitor email close to 24/7, via iPhones, BlackBerries, laptops. There’s little time anymore for thoughtful, well constructed, correctly punctuated and spelled emails. Instead, the pressure is on to respond quickly to those messages in our in boxes before we become overtaken by unread emails. And, of course, we churn out new emails to others, thus keeping them as frantic as we are.

Does it matter that a professional editor, in her haste to conduct personal business and finish a task, misspelled a word? It wasn’t that I didn’t know the correct spelling, and I noticed the mistake myself the next day. Still, it’s troublesome. For years my training and profession has pushed me to be exact and precise. Now years of discipline are being challenged.

I think too of my daughter, who from a very young age was a voracious reader but even now in graduate school is a terrible speller. When she was in eighth grade her English teacher tried to ease her father’s and my concern by suggesting that spell check was the answer. We were skeptical.

I suppose misspelling a word is not worth agonizing over—or angsting, as my colleague Cathy likes to say. It’s not as if anyone were harmed by my mistake. And the email went to only a few, apparently forgiving, people.

Maybe the answer is to slow down—and remember to spell check. Or maybe it’s to move on quickly and don’t sweat the small stuff. That could be a life-changing experience.