On the Ted Radio hour, linguist Ann Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people.
Where they will say to me, but.
It can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is the history behind words causing a lot of debate.
That's on the Ted radio hour from NPR.
This is FRESH AIR.
I'm David B.
And Cooley.
Today on FRESH AIR, we're going to remember two notable people who died last, documentarian and author Eleanor Coppola and veteran tv news reporter and anchor Robert McNeil.
We'll start with Robert McNeil, who was 93 when he died last Friday.
Robert MacNeil was born in Montreal in 1931, the son of a Royal Canadian Mountie.
Though his early ambitions were to be an actor and a playwright, he changed gears while at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and became a journalist during his long and distinguished career.
MacNeill was in Germany when the Berlin Wall went up in the sixties and was there again when it was torn down in the nineties.
He was in Dallas working for NBC the day John F.
Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1971, he joined PBS, covering the news in a way that offered more depth and less flash than the other us broadcast networks were doing at the time.
He was still a relatively unknown entity, but at the time, so was PBS, with programs like Sesame Street, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and imported british dramas presented under the title Masterpiece Theater.
Eventually these shows became very popular on public television, and so did McNeil, when he was paired with another journalist, Jim Lehrer, to anchor the networks primetime evening reruns of each day's coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.
The other networks rotated live coverage during the day, but PBS considered it a public service in the days before home video recorders to have the hearings available for viewing at night.