I often suggest that people not assume that “erroneous” usages are some sort of innovation. Here’s one example that came up in an exchange with an academic friend of mine: the singular “they.” Feel free to dislike it, and to urge people not to use it. But suggesting that it’s some sort of innovation runs up against, among other people, Shakespeare:
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquiainted friend.
Or how about Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, “A person can’t help their birth”? The Merriam-Webster Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has many more examples.
I’d go further and suggest that if a certain usage was good enough for some of the leading writers in the English language, it’s hard to see just what can be so wrong with it (unless it’s archaic, which this usage is not). But at the very least we should acknowledge the historical fact that the usage is not new; and even if it is somewhat more common now, a matter on which I’ll remain skeptical until I see hard data, it was common enough back then.
Special bonus to our very few Russophone readers: Note how the Shakespeare quote above is channeled by Cheburashka:
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