No heads turn when someone says, “Everyone is bringing their own lunch.”

Except … it should be, grammatically speaking, “Everyone is bringing his own lunch.”

This brings up the whole question of our ubiquitous use of they and their as singular pronouns and possessives. As I noted, no heads turn when people use the plural to modify a singular antecedent.

I mention this after reading an interesting article in the New York Times, “Toppling the Grammar Patriarchy,” which describes French teachers’ rebellion over defaulting to masculine forms even when the subject includes both male and female.

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Some of these grammar jokes, courtesy of Reader’s Digest, are actually fairly funny:

20 JOKES EVERY GRAMMAR NERD WILL APPRECIATE

This was way back in the Pleistocene when I was in high school, but I remember to this day arguing with an English teacher over the pronunciation of the word clique. I said click; he said cleek.

There was no Internet back then. In fact, electricity itself was pretty new, so we grabbed our classroom dictionary (probably Webster’s, but who knows?), and sure enough, cleek was the only choice for pronunciation. I had lost our gentlemen’s bet.

My, how the times have changed. I just checked dictionary dot com and the pronunciations (now two) were given in this order: kleek, then klick.

Okay, so my “fake news” post bombed. Let’s move on to real grammatical issues.

Almost everyone I hear or read uses the phrase “as long as” in the conditional sense, as in, “as long as you don’t care, neither do I.” Wrong!

The phase “as long as” is a comparison of lengths. “That building is as long as three football fields” is one example of correct usage.

“So long as” is a conditional phrase, as in “so long as you don’t care, neither do I.”

Or can you?

A mysterious tweet by Donald Trump — “Despite the negative press covfefe” — went viral for about five-and-a-half hours earlier today, leading to all kinds of humor and speculation on the social media.

I sometimes end up making mysterious words and sentences when I put my cell phone in my pocket while it’s still on. Bodily movements and hand-in-pocket gyrations make for weird words and sentences, but this tweet seemed to start out straight and end with a new word.

Covfefe.

Coming soon to a market near you, a new candy bar called Covfefe.

As I watched one of my favorite TV shows the other night — “Imposters” — one of the characters mentioned that the word weird originally meant destiny.

I thought that was a bit weird and worth researching, and guess what? That was the exact meaning of the Old English word wyrd — fate or destiny.

It seems that Shakespeare started, or accelerated, the modern interpretation (with the help of the Scotch earlier), when he described the witches in Macbeth as weird.

Original usage of wyrd, however, was as a note, as wordorigins.com notes:

Weird is found in Beowulf (spelled wyrd) as a noun meaning fate or destiny:

Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel.
(Fate goes ever as fate must.)

and

Hie wyrd forsweop on Grendles gryre.
(Fate sweeps them away into Grendel’s clutches.)

Here’s where people can show some real stupidity, but let me give some background first.

I was just watching the World Baseball Classic on TV when an announcer, discussing the anniversary of outfielder Roberto Clemente’s elevation to the Hall of Fame in 1973, referred to him as “the penultimate Puerto Rican baseball player.”

I’m sure he thought penultimate meant beyond ultimate.

Egads, folks, penultimate means “next to last,” while ultimate means “beyond, tops.”

In origin, penultimate comes from the Latin paene, meaning “almost,’ plus ultimas “last.” So penultimate means literally “almost last.”

Unfortunately, in modern vernacular to many non-discriminating speakers and writers, penultimate has taken on the meaning of “beyond ultimate.”

Let it be known that in modern American English usage, the so-called Oxford Comma (the last in a string and usually before the words and or or) is completely optional. You don’t need it.

That being noted, here’s a court in Maine that ruled against a company for its not using the Oxford Comma.

Absence of the Comma Makes the Sentence Harsher

A mitigated disaster doesn’t exist evidently, though unmitigated ones do, according to talk show hosts and other nonsense deliverers. So if you can be discombobulated, can you be also be combobulated?

I bring this up because today, as I was driving to buy dog food, I felt discombobulated due to a terrifying, mystical incident I experienced on Friday night.

Without going into details, let me affirm that, as the saying goes, life can indeed “flash before your eyes,” but you don’t even have to be dead or dying. I experienced it on Friday, Jan. 6, 2017, and it left me transformed, and yes, discombobulated.

The answer to my initial question about being combobulated is no. The word discombobulated is slang, with no derivation from combobulate or combobulation.

There you go. And let me warn you: when your life flashes before you, you will never be the same.