There There

As of this writing, "Why We Must Ration Health Care" is the most read story on the New York Times Web site. It also contains a couple of grammatical errors. If you can follow me for a bit on on the boring stuff, maybe we can share some thoughts at the end.

The New York Times, a big deal, some would say, publishes a very good weekly magazine on Sunday. Its features are often strong and there's usually an essay unique enough to keep my interest. The magazine is a free insert that's treated very seriously, which is why any bush league grammatical mistake is incredibly surprising.

In Peter Singer's 166 inch, 5,100 word, 41 'graph essay in the most recent New York Times Magazine on providing health care to all, a few words boldly stuck out to me, and not because they added greatly to his argument. Let's go to the 'graph in question.

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"There’s no doubt that it’s tough — politically, emotionally and ethically — to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way. But if the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system of rationing health care, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay."
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In that block of text that dragged for a bit, rather symbolic of the story, there is a morsel I'd like to point out.

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"There’s no doubt that it’s tough — politically, emotionally and ethically — to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way. But if the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system..."
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There. In the first sentence, Singer writes about a singular person in the hypothetical sense. "Someone," so any one person, would die sooner than "THEY" would have. As cool as our language is, it lacks a singular person pronoun. "They" is often used in place, despite the fact it is always plural.

Here's the kicker, in the next sentence, Singer writes that two individuals' stories cause us to "think BADLY of the British system." This, as is some weird rule to the language, implies that we do the act of thinking, poorly. It does not mean we think either good or bad things, just that the process of our thinking isn't done to a satisfactory job.

Alright, now that enough background is thrown out there, let's talk. Language is constantly growing and evolving. The clearest example of this is the dozens of words added each year to the dictionary, but there are also more subtle events, such as using "they" as a gender-neutral term.

We all have our grammatical pet peeves. I cringe every single time the subjunctive mood (that the plural should be used in the hypothetical, like "I wish I WERE going to the store) isn't used properly, but it's more of a personal thing. To ever bring it up would obviously grate anyone you talk to.

It goes without saying that everyone understood what Singer was getting at, even with these terms being misused. In conversation, these mistakes are made constantly and no one bats an eye, but I expect more from the Times' magazine. Perhaps they just didn't catch everything in such a massive story, and that would make sense.

Still, such mistakes, even small ones in a very long story, take away some credibility. Not much, granted, but Singer is a professor at Princeton with a team of the best copy editors in the world checking over a magazine that comes out once a week. These mistakes just shouldn't happen.

-30-
The fantastic essay, although maybe a bit long, on why health care reform rests on our ability to not let everyone live so long.