Lol, I hear people talk about internet mee-mees and I cringe.

Also I pronounce FAQ "fawk" because I used to think FAQ was a way of telling someone off. (faw-cue)

PJ is right about RBI(s) imo, and I think it is getting to the point at which the same argument wins for FAQ(s), though maybe not yet. This is different from the discussion that sparked it and which I take up below, because the act of abbreviating a phrase essentially changes it, creating a new term.

But I'd sooner chew glass than have to say or write "one... themselves" except in order to mock it. Literally every option, including him/her (well, maybe not that one), is better than the gross, facial grammatical error. There's no reason we cannot have number agreement between pronouns, and just because a few dictionaries have kowtowed to popular demands and declared the unarguably plural they, them, themselves, and so forth to be singular as well doesn't make it correct.

• When one cannot care for himself. I'd use this one if the impersonal tone is appropriate in context, feminist claptrap be damned, but tbh I suspect that you can do better.
• When a [person, patient, whatever's appropriate] cannot care for himself. Grammatically correct, more concrete than the above, perfectly acceptable to everyone but the estrogen-addled.
• When patients [or whatever] cannot care for themselves. Use this unless there's a good, clearly articulable reason not to, as it's unobjectionable to everyone from curmudgeon to feminazi and is better writing than the first one and most of the other suggestions because of its concreteness.

and the new term "FAQ" is a webpage which has a list of questions and answers. So unless you have more than one page, you should not be using the plural FAQs to refer to it.

Could be; I don't know because I don't hear people using the term either way, but that's what matters imo: when the term FAQ came into use, how were people using it. It's funny because it's possible that if asked almost everyone would say it means "frequently asked questions" but they may still have been using from the beginning it as if it meant "frequently asked question" (just one, so a page would be the FAQs). I think you're probably right, but I know that I see "FAQs" used enough that it bears investigation.

Great pseudonym.

I still like the logic of agreement by numbers, even though the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun has become a real nuisance in the last few decades ...

How about "For those who cannot care for themselves"?

yeah FAQs is used on many high profile websites to describe on set of questions...one of the counter arguments to mine.

I also deal with "RFPs" a lot...but I think that is a different situation...because RFP can and does also stand for Request for Proposal. We use both RFP and RFPs to different effect...

This is pretty nitty but I was listening to public radio recently, and they had a science question-and-answer show on. Listeners would give pre-arranged questions, and a different university professor, an expert in the relevant field, would give the answer. Questions like, "What would happen if the sun were replaced with a black hole?" and that sort of stuff.

Thing was, EVERY single answer-giver started each response with the word "so". I'll try to give an e.g.:

"Jerry from Goose Bay asks, 'How did the same species of fish end up in hundreds of thousands of unconnected Canadian lakes? For the answer we turn to Professor Blah-Blah."

Professor: "So, if we go back 12,000 years, all of Canada was covered by a massive ice sheet..."

Follow-up question: "Now does that mean that these fish species will always stay the same, or are they evolving?"

Professor: "So, when we have isolated pockets of fish..." And so forth.


Just about every responder did it, and usually several times within a reply. Must be the current fad in academia.

Every time I use the phrase "please advise" in an email, Outlook 2007 wants to correct it to "please advice"

Please advise if I'm going crazy.

They are wrong -- someone should advise Outlook developers to correct their advice -- but the original usage is also wrong.

yeah, i know. i don't like using it, but in my industry it's the standard way of say "i need a response right away you c*nt"

Grunching, but watching American Chopper and Paul Teutul saying idear is driving me crazy.

"Please advise" is ****ing horrible imo.

It's amazing to me when Americans type out monetary figures and put the $ after the number. I would bet that around 30% of 2+2 posts with dollar figures have the $ after the number. Maybe 5% of those come from non-American posters, so fully 1/4 of people are ******ed.

Like, isn't the "$1,500" notation so standard in our culture that we see it everywhere, every day? I can't even figure out the process by which you'd make the mistake if you'd seen prices written out before -- only if your computer didn't have a backspace/delete key and you didn't think to put the $ until you got done writing the number, then it was either there or nothing.

I'm sure it's in places other than 2+2 but this is pretty much the only place I read informal writing online. But still, fairly appalling.

They probably just refer to their internal dialogue. Since, spoken aloud, it's "fifteen hundred dollars," they just follow along and write "1500$."

Do they have multiple personalities?

30% seems way too high. I don't think it's a common error, but maybe I just haven't noticed it.

I don't recall seeing that at all.

I've seen it before -- probably more like %5 of the time -- but it didn't really bother me.

Some people "imagine" a voice while they read/write.

Yes, but it would be a monologue unless they are imagining multiple voices.

icwudt

Maybe it's like RPN (reverse polish notation) like they use in HP calculators. To add 3 and 5 you type: 3 5 +

I love my old HP 48g+. Reverse polish is so good.

I miss my 45 and my 15C. I do use RPN calculator apps on my computer and my phone.

pj's point about "1,500$" is interesting for its broader connotations. Specifically, our (US English) denotation of dollar amounts with the symbol in front of the number is an example of written and oral English being entirely different, and that's pretty rare. There are many things that one would say much more or much less willingly than one would write them (chiefly colloquialisms, which are more acceptable in oral commiunication), but there are few that are completely correct when spoken and flat out wrong when written, or vice versa. In fact, no others come to mind right now.

Back to the RPN calculators: Those are in a sense an extreme example of the same thing. I always thought of it this way: "regular" Polish notation would have the keys being pressed in exactly the order in which you'd say them —

• I want to add (+ key)
• 3 and
• 5.

Reverse Polish (roughly) reverses this order:

• 3 and
• 5;
• I want to add them.
  

I have no idea whether that's how it came to be called what it's called.

Wikipedia backs up your assumption on regular Polish notation. It's much easier to do a string of different operations using reverse than it is using regular.