Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and one of my favorite songs has a lyric that drives me absolutely crazy. For copyright purposes, I’m going to change the line slightly, but it’s something like this: You hold every man to their word.
The problem is with that pronoun, “their.” This sentence should read: You hold every man to his word. That’s because “every man,” although it’s describing every single man in the room, is actually a singular subject. “Every man” is one man—every individual man. Better yet, it’s also a gendered noun phrase, making the pronoun selection easy: the singular, masculine “his.”
How big of a grammar error is this? Well, in speech, it’s not that big of a deal. People talk colloquially all the time. But I can still hear it every time I hear the song, and I would definitely mark this up if I were editing a printed page. So it’s worth avoiding.
That’s your Grammar Minute! Visit thegrammarminute.com for more tips and tricks.