The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun in number. I find "I can tell each one what /they/ make," "each fellow put /their/ foot on the line," "nobody can do what /they/ like" and "she was one of /these/ kind of people" in Charters, and "I am not the kind of man that is always thinking about /their/ record," "if he was to hit a man in the head ... /they/ would think /their/ nose tickled" in Lardner. At the bottom of this error there is a real difficulty: the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in English, corresponding to the French /soi/ and /son/. /His/, after a noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds inept, and /his-or-her/ is intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substituted. The brothers Fowler have discovered "anybody else who have only /themselves/ in view" in Richardson and "everybody is discontented with /their/ lot" in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote "if a customer wishes you to injure /their/ foot." In spoken American, even the most careful, /they/ and /their/ often appear; I turn to the /Congressional Record/ at random and in two minutes find "if anyone will look at the bank statements /they/ will see."[70] In the lower reaches of the language the plural seems to get into every sentence of any complexity, even when the preceding noun or pronoun is plainly singular. [Pg226]
/The Adverb/--All the adverbial endings in English, save /-ly/, have gradually fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever used to form new adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other endings were used, and some of them survive in a few old words, though they are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-Saxon endings were /-e/ and /-lice/. The latter was, at first, merely an /-e/-ending to adjectives in /-lic/, but after a time it attained to independence and was attached to adjectives not ending in /-lic/. In early Middle English this /-lice/ changes to /-like/, and later on to /-li/ and /-ly/. Meanwhile, the /-e/-ending, following the /-e/-endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, ceased to be pronounced, and so it gradually fell away. Thus a good many adverbs came to be indistinguishable from their ancestral adjectives, for example, /hard/ in to /pull hard/, /loud/ in /to speak loud/, and /deep/ in /to bury deep/ (=Anglo-Saxon, /d[)e]op-e/). Worse, not a few adverbs actually became adjectives, for example, /wide/, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective /wid/ (=/wide/) with the adverbial /-e/-ending, and /late/, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective /laet/ (=/slow/) with the same ending.