Once you have lost Trooper York....you have lost America!

The NFL’s ratings are indeed tanking. Care to guess why?

Hot air POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 BY JAZZ SHAW

This is the story I’ve been expecting to see since the pre-season began, honestly. The NFL has been embroiled in one controversy after another for more than a few years. Through it all, the fans have still remained largely loyal and the ratings for broadcasts have been a proven winner in the advertising market. With that as the backdrop there’s been very little incentive for change. But this year something has been different. I’m still watching the Jets’ games, but I found myself losing interest in sitting through some of the other contests. While preparing for our weekly prognostication battle, Ed Morrissey even signaled on a recent Monday night that he’d be watching something other than the big game.

It wasn't just us. As Pat Imig reports at the Sporting News, viewer-ship is down and it’s not simply a one week blip on the radar.

The League of Integrity, the National Football League, is beginning to learn it’s not infallible after all.

Early TV ratings reports show viewer-ship is down in prime-time games and in featured national telecasts.

The NFL Kickoff game on NBC was down from a year ago, and the Week 3 “Sunday Night Football” telecast between major markets Dallas and Chicago was down 7 percent from 2015 (Denver-Detroit). That’s pretty significant when you consider the market sizes.

We also have seen the two lowest-rated “Monday Night Football” telecasts since at least 2009, which includes a Week 2 snoozer between Philadelphia and Chicago. The Week 3 contest between Atlanta and New Orleans drew a 5.7 overnight rating, which would be the lowest MNF rating ever on ESPN.

I suppose it would be easy for most of us who follow the sport to single out one issue which is causing this. Pat Imig lists quite a few suspects on the list of possibilities and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of us were quick to point to Colin Kaepernick and the spate of other players protesting the national anthem. To be sure, that’s got to be a factor. I’d hardly be the first to pen a column about how football is a treasured tradition where even the most politically involved among us get to set aside the daily grind of partisan warfare and just enjoy ourselves for a few hours. And protesting the national anthem is simply unpatriotic, no matter what motivated you to do it. Who needs a serving of that alongside their beer and hot wings?

They don't know what they're talking about

Over the course of writing a fair amount lo these many years, I've run into a lot of grammar issues.

My own, certainly. I'll be the first to admit that my public school education did not guide me well in the ways of grammar. Sure the basics, but once you get past the basics, there's a whole lot left.

I started really learning grammar when I started taking foreign languages.  I write intuitively with English, mostly picking up tips and tricks from reading. But other languages? There's no intuition to be had (for me at least), so it becomes more of a scientific pursuit.  Everything with a genus and species, connected with sure laws of that language, which once mastered can be flexibly ignored.

In my continuing quest to finally learn the English language, I've run into problems that aren't so nicely settled. They're not my problems. It's not me.  It's English. 

For instance, English lacks a generic singular.  We have a neuter: it.   But, when I'm trying to talk about a general person's ideas or behaviors, it's not nice to say, "It may think."  We're not robots!  "He may think," would suffice, but maybe I want to include the ladies.  "She might think," maybe, but that might lead Instapundit to give it a #waronmen tag. 

The old standby was to assume the masculine. Everyone is a he unless otherwise noted, and, like with the Greek, a group of guys could mean all guys or a mix of guys and gals.  Mankind, for instance, isn't  just for men, but everyone "man-like" in a genetic/clinical sort of way.

You don't even need a kind, just Man suffices.  "How to serve Man" was a cookbook for how to eat people, not just humans with penises. 

That's not acceptable anymore.  We say humanity now, or the tortured 'humankind', instead of mankind.

"All men are created equal" isn't allowed, as we want to say everyone has equal rights no matter what parts they have below.

Did you notice what I did in that last sentence?  Each person (a generic singular) has rights, no matter what... what....

What pronoun is appropriate to press on in that sentence?

 If you're old-fashioned you use just the "he" or if you're enlightened just the "she."  Some use "he or she," but that's a sign of indecisiveness, and that's something I will not abide.  Which is it?!

Admittedly, in our contemporary world "he or she" might even be an appropriate label for a specific subset of people.  We're not talking about hermaphrodites, however, in our generic sentences, we're trying to talk about a specific, yet not specifically gendered, person. 

Picking one or the other satisfies the need for a singular pronoun, and we all know a person isn't limiting the discussion to one gender.  But this brings its own problems.

So, I've gotten into the habit, along with many others, of using the plural "they" as a singular.  Which doesn't fit any rule but does fit how language has adapted itself to fill in missing gaps.  Like with memory, it may not be correct but it does allow us to function. 

A number of people disagree.  But they're wrong.