Quote:
Originally Posted by ColinHowell
Oops, you're right. It is actually valid English; that entry appears to be from the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary. so the word has definitely been around for a while.
Still, it seems to be used far more rarely than "self-sufficient" and "self-reliant", at least judging by the frequency of matches for these phrases in Google searches of both web pages and Google Books. That might explain why it sounded wrong to me. I wouldn't use it myself, much less recommend it to an English learner.
As for "themself", I agree with you--only "themselves" is correct. I would guess the writer is trying to use it in an attempt to make up for English's lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun. This is certainly an unfortunate flaw in the language, but most attempts to fix it end up sounding clumsy and unsatisfying to me.
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Uh…is “independent” OK in that context?
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