Just finished my article “Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: Who’s in a usage guide and why” for a special issue with papers from Liv Walsh’s workshop In the Shadow of the Standard September last in Nottingham. It’s basically a critique of Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), one of the usage guides in our HUGE database. One of the groups criticised by Taggart are television presenters, for saying these ones and those ones. And look at what I ran into during my little walk to the city centre of The Hague during lunch time:
So what’s wrong with this, I wonder, Caroline: it looks just like the plural of this one, as the picture suggests.
I think the argument is that it’s wrong to say “ones” when you really mean “two” or some other number. It seems like a rather silly thing to be bothered by.