Counting cats

Google Search's "People also ask" turned up the question What is syntax in English grammar? In high school, I dismissed the need to know that. Now I regret that decision, so I clicked.

The answer they offer:

Syntax is a form of grammar. It is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when they are used together. So it is, in a sense, acting as a kind of 'police officer' for the way in which sentences are constructed. English is a language that has a structure known as SVO.

The answer is attributed to What is Syntax? Perfect Your English Grammar With WhiteSmoke. I didn't know what SVO was, so I clicked again. Then I got distracted by their cat, and now I'm writing this post instead of the one I was working on for the past two hours.


Again,

Syntax ... is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence and with the agreement of words when they are used together.

Good to know. I won't remember it. But good to know. And the SVO thing?

English is a language that has a structure known as SVO. That is subject, verb and object. The cat (subject) washes (verb) its paw (object). This is the correct word order and also there is agreement between the words.

Ah, okay, SVO order and agreement. Nice.

Next three sentences:

If there were no agreement within the sentence, it could read, “The cat washes their paw”. This does not make sense. The cat may have four paws, but it is only washing one paw.

Yeah, no. (I love that "yeah, no" thing. One place I worked, the boss would say it all the time. I use it to mean "Yeah I hear you, but no, that's not right".) That's not right. And I'm not even looking at the "if there were".

If The cat washes its paw is right, and The cat washes their paw is wrong, the problem is not that the cat is "only washing one paw". The problem is that there is only one cat, but the word their refers to more than one cat. Or it did, you know, in the days before we decided to solve a gender problem by replacing it with a how many problem: How many effing cats are we talking about here? I still struggle with the change, but "they" is now used to mean "one or more". When I learned it, it meant "two or more". For me it will always mean two or more.

WhiteSmoke, in fact, says there is just one cat:

The cat may have four paws, but it is only washing one paw.

"The cat" tells me there is only one cat. The word "it" confirms this.

The rest of that paragraph:

For there to be agreement, the possessive ‘it’ has to be correct. Thus “The cats (plural) wash their (plural) paws (plural)”. This is the correct use of the plural possessive (their).

Wow. What does that even mean? They say "the possessive ‘it’ has to be correct." They don't say it has to be corrected. Probably they mean it has to match the noun and verb. In other words, "their" should be changed back to "its", or "cat" should change to "cats" and "paw" to "paws".

But which change should we make? Well, it depends how many cats you're talking about! Isn't it better to get the fact (the cat count) right (even if the syntax is wrong) than to get the syntax right and the fact wrong?

Or are you talking about one of those crazy old ladies with 37 cats?