cellio | Entries tagged with language

From Fantasy in Miniature: Check, Please, on playing a certain game with Death.

From Meirav Beale on G+: an epic tale of technology and grandparents. Excerpt: Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Fernadale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

From Lilie Dubh on G+: The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor. Thoughtful and well worth the read. (Language is not 100% work-safe.)

From Language Log: What would Jesús do?

Lost your cell phone and don't have another phone to call from handy? Nyan Cat can help. (This came via G+ but I've lost track of who posted it.)

From Law and the Multiverse: Legal responsibility for insane robots.

It's summer. High heat and humidity are normal for summer. I get that. But I still hold that, for Pittsburgh, temperatures in the 90s and heat indices in the 100s until 10PM and by 10AM are abnormal. Just sayin'. I sure hope I can catch a ride to Shabbat services tonight; there's nothing to do about the walk home, but it'd be nice to not arrive soaked in sweat. Especially since I'm leading.

Buying subcutaneous fluids from the vet is expensive, except that they had a price-match policy so it wasn't. But they restricted that policy, so I asked for a prescription. I was going to fill it online but it'd be easier not to, so today I talked with someone at CVS who determined that yes in fact they could order these (by the case -- which is fine). So today I dropped off the prescription and met the full force of the paperwork engine. After supplying the cat's birth date, drug allergies, insurance information, primary care physician, and a few other things, we were ready to go. I wonder if Giant Eagle, where I had the Prednizone filled (but they don't do fluids), just punted on this info, filled in N/A, or what.

I got a postcard notice of a class-action suit this week. They know their typical audience: "how much can I get?" and "how do I get my money?" were in bold; "what is the suit about?" took rather more digging. I've gotten money from a few class-action suits over the years (and I'll send this one in too), but I always do so with some degree of ambivalence, not knowing which ones are real (and people should be compensated) and which are "it's easier to settle than prove plaintiffs are on crack" -- and in the latter case, how I feel about benefiting from ill-gotten gains given that the defendants are going to pay the money out anyway. But I also admit that thus far I haven't been motivated enough to actually research any of these cases... the moral high ground is way over there, not here where I'm standing, it would appear.

Links:

The comic on this Language Log post made me laugh. Three negatives in six words indeed!

In the spirit of the song, kinda: Weird Al, Stop forwarding that crap to me (video).

Google+ circles you can use. Social networking: new media, same old problems.

Google Art Project appears to be collecting high-quality images from art museums around the world. I haven't explored much yet but it looks like it'll be nifty.

I thought this picture from APotD of the moon and Venus over Switzerland was a painting rather than a photo when I first saw it. Pretty!

I've often wondered what "X% chance of rain" really means -- anywhere in the geographic area during that time period, or something more specific? I found this answer informative.

The comic in a recent Language Log post made me laugh out loud.

Speaking of language, so did this 101-word story (link from

arib). Go, read!

This elaborate prank on a phone company with terrible customer service is making the rounds. As

nancylebov put it, some people deserve live muzak. (Hey, the Firefox spelling checker knows "muzak". But not "Facebook".)

Who knew Facebook was so complicated? -- a flow chart for one "what comment to post" decision tree.

Reminder: the Jewish Life and Learning project over at Area 51 is still looking for people interested in participating in a beta.

Last night at choir practice a member asked me to sing in a subgroup that she'll be directing. Naturally, much medieval and renaissance music is religious (particularly Catholic), which poses problems for me, so when I was handed music without a translation I knew I'd have to do a quick check. The process went something like this:

Language: Latin or Italian. I don't recognize most of these words and I don't see any of the markers that would tell me it's Italian. (That doesn't mean it's not; I only know either language to sing, really.) Skim skim skim... aha, there's an "aleiluia" [1] at the end; suspicion is Latin and sacred. Nope, still don't see any obvious problems like references to Jesus or the trinity or Mary. Still don't know Latin. Ok, off to Google.

Oh! Yes, sacred, but it would never have occurred to me that John Dunstable would set this popular passage from Song of Songs. Ok, I can work with that. :-) (But wherever did they get that translation? Here, try this one. Are we seeing the effects of two other languages between the Hebrew and English? Does the Latin really say what CPDL says it does?)

The performances I've heard of this song are somewhat ponderous and somber, not at all matching the text (either version :-) ). I'm not sure how much of that is driven by the music itself and how much by performance decisions. (I haven't started to learn it yet, but I did download the Encore source so I can play with it.) I wonder what we'll do with it. It should be fun.

[1] In Latin texts we sometimes see "Alleluia" and sometimes "Hallelujah". I can see how a listener could get the former from the latter, since a leading 'h' is pretty weak, but this is not an oral tradition. Is there some semantic difference between the two?

Everything I know about work, I learned in the SCA, by

metahacker.

Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)

dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!

From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): Shopping while Black: a social experiment.

From a coworker: this wedding gift won't open until it's in the right location. Only 50 tries. Fun!

What cats would say to you if they could talk (GraphJam).

I enjoy Bill Walsh's writings on language and copy-editing, such as common punctuation problems. And sometimes he makes me laugh, as in this work of a punctuation vigilante.

(Aside: RSS feeds to LJ seem to be broken again.)

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from

filkerdave)

As

dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

( Read more... )

A coworker is currently helping to train a bloodhound for police work. She is not in the law-enforcement business; she happens to run an animal sanctuary when she's not being a software geek, and somehow that apparently led to this. How cool. (Also sounds like a lot of work; she's training with the dog every morning and evening for the next couple weeks.)

Erik's appetite has been much improved this past week. I'm not sure what's different, but I'm glad to see it. We have not started him on prednizone yet; my vet is playing phone-tag with assorted specialists first.

Porridge: what really happened that fateful morning.

A funny cat video (from a locked entry, so identify yourself if you like but I won't).

This bunny hero made me smile (link from

paquerette). I had a house rabbit for a few months a long time ago (before the cats). He was a rescue, and I'd read that rabbits were smart enough to be trained to use a litter box. I failed at that and wasn't interested in keeping him in a cage his entire life, so he went off to live with other house-trained rabbits on the theory that there's power in crowds.

From Language Log: be careful your translation says what you think it does.

Hey, CMU alum from approximately my generation, and others who enjoy quirky folk music: Michael Spiro has made much of his music available for free download. (I'm going to buy one of the CDs anyway, because he asked nicely and I believe in supporting independent musicians. I have the other on vinyl, so I probably won't buy the CD.) I particularly commend to you "The Folkie" and "Killing Me Softly With Kung-Fu". I would also point you at "Music, Sex, and Cookies", except the file appears to be corrupted. :-(

I'll be leading services tomorrow night (and Saturday morning) at my synagogue, including reading torah. (Both the rabbis are away.) I'm looking forward to it. One small monkey wrench was thrown at me -- last week we switched to a new siddur for Friday nights, an interim prayerbook based on the forthcoming Mishkan T'filah. (MT is out, but our copies are still "forthcoming".) So all the familiar page numbers are wrong, some of the songs are in different places, some of the English is a little different, etc. I borrowed a copy and applied stickie notes for a few page cues; it should be fine. (If you're local and want to come, that's 7:00 tomorrow night.)

When I registered for the NHC summer institute (the learning program I'm going to after Pennsic), I checked off the "willing to read torah" box. I had looked at the portion; there is one very long aliya (two columns!) and the rest are managable, but there was no place to indicate "but please not levi". Fortunately, they don't just send out assignments; yesterday I got mail asking what I'm interested in. (There are several options, not just Shabbat morning.) There were a bunch of people on the To: line of that message, including some with "rab" in their user names. I hope I won't be outclassed. I don't think so.

Links:

The Art of Conversation is a new blog that promises to cover some of the issues, philosophical and practical, of online conversations. Good stuff from

jducoeur and others; I suspect it will appeal to many of my readers.

Running for office the XKCD way (link from a locked post). I loved the first campaign attempt (the petition drive), though I agree it was ill-advised.

Misspelled signs are common, but this collection of signs with the same error made me laugh.

Speaking of misspellings, this thread in

magid's journal is fun. Doesn't everyone know about the fourteenth-century Sephardim/Ashkenazim diphthong wars?

Duck Darwin awards (source forgotten), or "what happens when a duck builds a nest on a high-rise?".

Vegan zombie t-shirt (from

kmelion). It looks like the shirt doesn't actually exist and it's just a design. Pity.

There's a parlor game going around that calls for the poster to list three things he has done that he doesn't think any of his readers have done. I think I must be too boring; I can't think of three (that would also be interesting enough to post).

I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing this because I thought there might be correlations between meds and appetite changes; none have emerged so far, but it's turned out to be useful in other ways. ("Any vomiting?" "June 2, in the morning". "You know that stuff?") So anyway... Erik's appetite had been low last week, so at my vet's direction I gave him fluids for a few days (also logged). Things got better so I stopped, but Monday he was back to not eating so I hit him again, this time with a bit more because I could (150ml). Tuesday's log entry: "oink". :-) Good to see that work sometimes... (The healthy appetite has continued today.)

I have a minor workplace mystery. Yesterday someone left me a post-it note containing a charge code and nothing else, and used my Sharpie to do so without recapping it (so it was dried out and useless). I asked the usual suspects, but no one recognized the code. Shrug. Today I came in to find my entire post-it pad and several pens missing. WTF? I have the back desk in a two-person enclosed space; it's unlikely that a passerby needed a pen or some paper and my desk was the most convenient source. I wonder what surprise will greet me tomorrow.

Language peeves: "council" is a body; "counsel" is what advisors give. "Populous" means there are lots of people; "populace" is the people. The "populous" should not be giving "council" to anyone, ok? (Both of these errors are common on SCA mailing lists.)

Language Log reproduces some careless spam from Barnes and Noble. I like the poster's method of thanking them.

Funny cat video via thnidu.

Something in our house is chirping intermittently. It sounds like a smoke detector, but we've changed all the relevant batteries and it hasn't stopped. It does not happen predictably (and when it does it chirps only once), so it's very hard to localize. Whee.

Words that are often misused #1: "periodic". To be meaningful, this word needs to be accompanied by some indication of the period. "Daily" is "periodic", but probably not what is meant in a recipe's direction to "stir periodically". :-)

Two facts that seem to be at odds with each other: (1) a lot of medieval Islamic recipes call for vinegar; and (2) Islam forbids the consumption of wine.

Our baron (who lives in a castle) shared one way to get your castle past the zoning board. I wonder how that's going to work out for the owners in the end, now that the neighbors have noticed. (Who would have thought you could build a castle on the sly in a populated area?)

Two interesting posts that showed up on my reading list within a few hours of each other, serendipitously: whom do you friend? (from

cahwyguy) and who owns the conversation? (from

jducoeur). Both have lots of comments that I haven't yet digested.

Words that are often misused #2: "rebate". A rebate is a refund of monies paid. If you give money to someone who didn't pay any (or as much as is being given out), the correct word is "gift" (or "grant", if you want to be more governmental about it). Just sayin'.

Query: can anyone reading this point me to a neutral high-level discussion of economics, that I can consume in an hour, that explains how merely pushing small amounts of money into the economy helps fend off a recession? What does the mere act of one-time spending accomplish, and does it matter whether it's splurge-buying or spending you would have done anyway? My knowledge of macro-economics is, as you can tell, a little on the spotty side. I don't care enough to read a tome, but I'd like to read something shorter, particularly if it doesn't come with an agenda. And yes, I realize that the rhetoric and the real reasons behind the stimulus package probably differ; I'm exploring the stated reason here.

I used to think I wanted the internet in my brain, but I've reconsidered.

The phone rang around 8:30 this morning. That was early enough to be plausibly important, so I answered. The caller butchered my name (my last name doesn't even have several of those morphemes); my suspicion that it was a junk call was soon confirmed.

She was calling from "Concerned Women for America". She got about three more words out before I said "don't call me again" and hung up. That was based on the rudeness of a solicitation at that hour, but I also had a negative reaction to the name of this group I'd never heard of before, and I found myself wanting to look them up while on the phone, with no computer immediately to hand. Every word in that name except "for" set off a warning bell (and "for" is on probation due to proximity). Taking them in the order the alarms sounded:

"America": in a political context, high correlation with rabid right-wingerss
"Women": you're going to try to categorize my beliefs, interests, and priorities, and you will be wrong
"Concerned": you have a crusade

If you want to see how I did, check Google. It's not hard.

Maybe I don't want a neural link to the internet. It's much easier to scrub the pollution from a browser cache when it's on disk.

(Not dead, just busy. :-) )

Term heard at work: heinosity, as in "the heinosity of this bug is higher than the heinosity of the bad interface fixing it would introduce". I know that "heinousness" is already a word (at least in some dictionaries), but this version is more striking, perhaps by analogy with "bogosity".

(Speaking of vocabulary, I used the "word" "gogetitude" in describing a job candidate recently. People laughed and knew exactly what I meant. :-) )

I got the Golden Compass daemon generator to work a few days ago. I don't know what the different critters mean, but so far mine has morphed from a tiger to a spider to, err, some sort of feline (I'm not sure what that is). There's still time for you guys to go adjust it if you like.

I got a letter today reminding me that my biblical-Hebrew class starts tomorrow. That was polite of them (I signed up weeks ago), but the time in the letter is different from the time in the original catalogue. I wonder which is correct. Fortunately, the letter includes a phone number.

The gas stations I use most often have two rows of (double-sided) pumps, so there are four "lanes" to pull into. These can be approached from either side. Depending on which side of your car holds the access point, you will want either left sides or right sides. You would think it would be possible to develop some sort of convention, so that two lanes go in each direction, one lefty and one righty, but it never seems to work itself out on its own. ("Use the pumps to your right" doesn't seem hard to me...) Tonight while getting gas I waited almost as long for shuffling as for actual fill-ups by people ahead of me. Whee. (Now there's an argument for fuel-efficient cars: reduce trips to the gas station! :-) )

For those wondering what happened with that online talmud-study effort I mentioned a few days ago: the originator started a mailing list and said we'll be starting with introductory stuff (not daf yomi any time soon), and I've heard nothing more from the URJ person. Actual study has not yet commenced. They've announced a book, which sounds so basic that I won't spend money on it but I'll borrow it from a library if I can.

( Read more... )

For the two or three people reading this who haven't already seen the interview game, here's how this works:

If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
(I will probably fail to get back to you for some time, because this is a busy time of year.)
I will respond, asking you five questions.
You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

The trip to Toronto was relatively benign. As I mentioned earlier, we spent some of it helping the family fight a computer problem and some of it at the ROM (open on Mondays, for future reference). Dani's mother seems to have decided we're the charoset experts and asked us to make it; we wanted to do it there, so we also had to find a store for ingredients.

Nomenclature: to me "grocery store" and "supermarket" have become pretty much synonomous. If I mean the small mom-and-pop store, that's the "corner grocery" or the "mom-and-pop grocery". Giant Eagle is a grocery store. (There is a new class of humongous stores (that are to real supermarkets as real supermarkets are to corner groceries); I don't know what these mega-supermarkets (humongo-marts?) are called yet.) None of this is true for Torontonians, though. A friend had asked us to look for "kinder eggs" (novelty candy), and when I asked if they'd have those at grocery stores I was told to go to a supermarket instead.

( seders )

New word: bloggerrea. I'd been wondering why sometimes an update causes the RSS feed to spew old entries. Pretty annoying.

Clever, in that "uh-oh" sort of way: one piece of spam-sending malware installs its own anti-virus program, because it doesn't want all your other viruses slowing it down. (I recommend Security Mentor to pretty much everyone, even the tech-savvy. Syndicated here as securitymentor2.)

Unclever, in that "uh-oh" sort of way: A few months ago I replaced my anti-virus software (moved from MacAfee to BitDefender). I disabled MacAfee but didn't uninstall at the time. This weekend my subscription expired -- and something (MacAfee? Windows?) decided that since I was obviously unprotected, it would be best for all concerned if I couldn't see the internet. Ahem. Fixing that was much more hassle than it should have been.

When I was in Boston one of the LJ folk I talked with (I forget who) mentioned t'fillin Barbie. I've now forgotten where I got the link too; I think a (different) LJ source. Twisted, very twisted. (The Barbie, I mean, not my friends. :-) )

I found this article on reaching the 20- and 30-somethings in congregations interesting. Excerpt:

Jewish community leaders would do well to examine the changing nature of today's 20 and 30 year olds. For Baby Boomers, synagogue membership and Jewish institutional affiliations were primary markers of Jewish identity. In the past, Jews showed their support for synagogue life by paying dues- whether they were enthusiastic participants or not. Today, that sense of obligation is gone: young adults do not feel compelled to join a synagogue if they have no intention of attending. However, when they to do decide to join, they participate as active, invested members.

One of the things that's hard about learning English from the outside (and, I presume, hard about other languages) is how much of common usage is idiom and analogy. This thought came to mind during a meeting today with exchanges like the following (in fairly rapid succession):

( silliness ahead )

[1]

Quote of the day: "Don't worry if you don't know what eschatology is; it's not the end of the world." (From Dani.)

This map shows the dominant words used for soft drinks across the country. I don't know what's going on in Alaska, or in that swirl of yellow over Missouri.

Word of the day: insinuendo. (Applied to the phrase "sometimes it works the first time", referring to software development.)

Seen in a book on design patterns: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be a turkey wrapped in a duck adapter".

This one's been around for a few days, but in case there are folks who haven't seen it: a fun way to deal with folks who are stealing your wireless access (though tsk tsk for not locking it down if you care).

For his birthday I got Dani (among things) a USB-powered cup warmer for his coffee. So far the packaging is providing as much entertainment as the device itself. Sample: "Do not use the plastic or paper cup." And the temperature ranges from (whatever) at "the boarder" to (higher whatever) at the center. I wonder what language this stuff was translated from, and by whom.

We have two programmable thermostats in our house, one for the furnace and one for the AC. (Yeah, so it's up to us to make sure only one is engaged. This is not hard.) The one for the AC is on daylight savings time (sic), and the one for the furnace is not. As I was thinking about this and determining that there's no need to reset the latter, it struck me that "standard" time will soon be only 4.5 months of the year. That doesn't sound like much of a standard to me. A "standard" transmission in a car isn't standard any more either. What other things are still called "standard" even when that's no longer true?

On the edge of an aphorism by metahacker rings true to me.

Iron Chef Programmer by merle_ made me laugh even though I've never seen the TV show.

A service that could be useful to some of my readers: DynDNS gives you a domain name that you can then point anywhere else, for free. It's not as good as a full vanity domain, but the price is right and sometimes you just want a path that's better than "obscure.isp.com/users/my_arcane_account_number/public" or the like.

Shavuot is tomorrow night and Friday. This is one of the three festivals, equal in importance to Pesach and Sukkot, though it seems to be less prominent in many people's eyes. (It's one day instead of a week, which is part of it.) A holiday celebrating the giving of the torah is special for me, though, and I'm looking forward to late-night torah study with my rabbi tomorrow night.

I have paid the deposit to go on my rabbi's trip to Israel in December. There's a meeting next week for people interested in the trip; ironically, it conflicts with one session of the ulpan (intensive Hebrew class). Oops. :-) (It sounds like missing the meeting will not be problematic.)

Two questions, one fairly trivial and one meta.

1. Sight : visual :: Sound : aural :: Touch : tactile :: Smell : ?? :: Taste : ???

2. Where should I have looked this up? (A dictionary helps if you have an unknown word; a thesaurus helps if you have an approximate synonym. Googling on the three adjectives I have didn't get me the other two.)

The discussion in my previous entry has made me curious, so... poll time!
( Read more... )

Dani and I had an interesting conversation about abbreviations and acronyms (pronouncable abbreviations) tonight, prompted by the assertion that the location of a web page is a "u-r-l", not an "url" (rhymes with a man's name). We both consider that obvious, but we both know people who think it's "url". A similar case applies to "s-c-a" (not "sca"), the historical organization we belong to.

So, I asked, what characterizes an acronym? I'm not sure; Dani's take is that an acronym has to "sound like a word" (in English, in our case). (But "url" does, so it's not just that -- but I didn't drill into that.) What does "sounds like a word" mean? I guess it's a comfortable sequence of phonemes, the sort of utterance that would make you say "I don't know what that word means" as opposed to "have you been drinking?". NASA, NARAL, and UNICEF are examples of this. We tried to think of three-letter acronyms; neither of us were sure whether NOW is usually "n-o-w" or "now". (I've heard both and neither makes me twitch.)

I opined that the longer an abbreviation is, the more incentive there is to pronounce it if you can No one wants to say "n-a-s-a" if "nasa" will do; the former is too many syllables. ("I-e-e-e" is cumbersome in a different way, hence "i-triple-e".) With a three-letter abbreviation the cost of spelling it out isn't so high, though Dani thinks there are fewer of them that are going to sound like words. "Ibm" would never be mistaken for a word in the English language; "doj" (sounds like "dodge") would be but we say "d-o-j". So I'm not sure what's going on with three-letter cases.

There was an amusing bit of dialogue: ( geek humor )

Addendum: Combined forms. "H-vac", not "h-v-a-c", but "b-a-t-f", not "bat-f".

I know that medication instructions are intentionally terse. There's limited space on the label and they have to assume that the person reading them is dumb, or confused, or too doped up to think straight. And I know that "we all know what they mean" trumps accuracy in that case. Ok, fine.

But even so, I cannot shake the two immediate reactions that "take one pill twice a day" always provokes in me: (1) recovery and reuse sounds icky, and (2) then why did you give me more than one?

I've been saying the Sh'ma daily for years (including the paragraphs that follow, though mostly with the Reform filter). I've known enough Hebrew to understand, broadly, what I'm looking at for at least a few years, and now, of course, I'm studying the language in more detail. Even so, because I learned the meaning first from the English translation and only later from the Hebrew, I was slow to pick up on something. Until, err, last week.

English needs more verb forms, like it used to have. Specifically, it needs both singular and plural "you".

The first paragraph after the Sh'ma (v'ahavta...) is translated "you shall love God with all your heart, with all your soul, etc etc". That's all singular "you", and both verbs and possessive nouns carry number so that's pretty darn clear. This is the intimate, one-on-one directive from God.

Then, however, it moves on to the plural you -- you will receive rain in its season, etc, and you shall remember the exodus and do the mitzvot, and so on. If I didn't know anything about Hebrew, this change in number would completely elude me. Lots of Jews don't know a lot about Hebrew, rely on the English translations of everything, and, presumably, miss this.

I knew at some level that this happens, that the blessings after the Sh'ma speak to us both individually and corporately. But somehow I didn't make the connection at the deep level that produces "aha" moments. And then one night last week, pretty randomly, it jumped off the page at me.

It might not be very dignified for the siddur to say "y'all shall remember the exodus" etc, but it might be a public service.

Some folks at work have been having the discussion/argument about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. This usually boils down to a religious argument and hey, I know better, but today I sent the following message:

[We should be trying to communicate clearly, and sometimes language rules prevent that.]

I agree. This is why, when conventional language rules would dictate something that would make my writing harder to understand, I violate those rules. For example, I only place terminal punctuation inside a closing quotation mark if it is in fact part of the quoted text, because to do otherwise misleads the reader and is logically incorrect. That's not how the language rules evolved, but (fortunately) that's becoming a more common practice within the field of technical writing, and eventually we may be able to drag the rest of the English-writing world along with us.

This argument does not apply to singular "they", however. Or if it does, it doesn't apply the way you think it does, at least for some readers. If I see a well-crafted sentence that completely avoids the problem, I don't find myself thinking "wow, that was really unclear; he should have just said 'they'". Because it's well-crafted, I don't notice. That's good; one of the jobs of technical writing is to get out of the way so people can understand what you're writing about. On the other hand, every time I see a use of singular "they" that (I think) could have been easily avoided, it derails me in my reading -- exactly as an incorrect "it's" does. It distracts me from what I was doing -- absorbing communication -- and draws my attention to the writing itself. Further, that attention is negative; it lowers my opinion of the author or company whose work I'm reading. None of this is conscious and I can't will it away. I know I am not the only such reader.

While we should not necessarily write to the lowest common denominator, if one choice results in clear communication to everyone and another does not, we should follow the one that does, even if it's a little more work on our part. So quite aside from the (very real) religious arguments against singular "they", I hold that there is a practical reason to avoid it: it derails some readers and is not necessary.

Monica

link round-up

random bits

link round-up

in search of a translation

link round-up

random bits

random bits

short takes (no election content)

Shabbat, NHC, and a few links

random bits

short takes

(no subject)

random bits

interviewed by steven

Pesach

random bits

Sokath, his eyes uncovered [1]

short takes

random bits

Dear LJ brain trust...

pronouncing abbreviations (poll)

acronyms and abbreviations

not quite what they meant

verbs

singular "they": a practical objection

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