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But it's unclear whose status has been updated.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
But it's unclear whose status has been updated.
- vertex-four 10y ago"Brian thanked Jamie for updating his status" is also unclear and needs context. Did Jamie update Brian's status? That's the first thing I parsed from it. If that sentence appeared as a machine-generated message on a social feed, I'd expect to see the actual status duplicated underneath. Thing is... there's already plenty of people going primarily by singular "they" for a pronoun, and it generally works pretty well.
- marak830 10y agoI agree with vertex, even with the male pronoun, it could still be confused( like a lot of things in English, you have to make an educated guess as to the meaning). I hear that a lot from students.