"You all need to put your right feet/foot in front of your left"
My friend is trying to convince me that the following statement is correct when talking to a group of people.
- You need to put your right feet in front of your left.
To me, the following sentence seems correct rather than the former because every individual in the group only has one right foot.
- You need to put your right foot in front of your left.
I'd love to know which of these is correct, or if they are both are right then why (or why not).
You are right. And to use "feet" sounds absurd, as if a centipede were advancing multiple right legs simultaneously.
Marjorie Skillin, Words into Type (1974): "To avoid ambiguity, a singular noun is often used with a plural possessive when only one of the things possessed [or in this case one pair of legs] could belong to each individual" (p. 357). Among the examples given are these:
Forbes knew most of them by their first name.
They eyed each other furtively and cursed under their breath.
If text surrounding your sentence makes it clear that a group is addressed, then the reader will know that "you" is in the plural; otherwise one could not tell whether "you" is sing. or pl. when the singular "foot" is used. Or the sentence could say, "You all need to put your right foot in front of your left." (That's not meant to evoke you-all as in Southern dialect, but simply means "all of you.")
It doesn’t matter how many of “you” there are. You each only have one right “foot” so the singular is the only correct statement here.
Whether you addresses an individual or a group, “your right feet” is nonsense because none of you have multiple right feet (assuming you’re all bipedal).