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Difficultés anglaises

> him/her The third person masculine personal pronoun when used as the object of a sentence or clause, as in "She shot him", "When the police caught the thief they arrested him" and "His parents punished him after the boy stole the money". Traditionally him was used to apply not only to masculine nouns, such as "man" and "boy", but also to nouns that are said to be "of dual gender". These include "architect", "artist", "parent", "passenger", "pupil" and "student". Without further information from the context, it is not possible for the speaker or writer to know the sex of the person referred to by one of these words. Formerly it was acceptable to write or say "The artist must bring an easel with him" and "Each pupil must bring food with him". In modern usage this convention is considered sexist and there is a modern convention that "him/her" should be used instead to avoid sexism, as in "The artist must bring an easel with him/her" and "Each" pupil must bring food with "him/her". This convention is felt by some people to be clumsy, particularly in spoken and in informal English, and some people prefer to be ungrammatical and use the plural personal pronoun "them" instead, as in "The artist must bring an easel with them" and "Each pupil must bring food with them". In some situations it is possible to avoid being either sexist or ungrammatical by rephrasing the sentence, as in "All artists must bring easels with them" and "All pupils must bring food with them.• See also HE. Pour éviter fautes de grammaire, contresens et confusions. The English Usage Dictionary est le parfait complément des dictionnaires bilingues, du dictionnaire de définitions anglaises et du Thesaurus. Ce dictionnaire signale toutes les difficultés que recèle l'usage d'un mot: orthographe, grammaire, prononciation, homonymies, etc. Exemple d'article du dictionnaire English Usage Dictionary