Monica

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]

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.)

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

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?

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.

Big fluffy snow! I wonder how long that will last. (It also seems to be somewhat slippery, at least for cars. Maintaining traction is mostly fine; acquiring it while turning (e.g. making a turn from a stop) requires a bit more attention. Or did a few hours ago, anyway, and the multiple noisy near-misses at the intersection in front of our house seem to confirm.)

Dani's company's holiday party was this afternoon. They held it at the children's museum, which seemed an unusual venue for small gatherings (I don't think of museums as having party rooms), but on the way in we passed a sign directing people to a birthday party. Ok, that makes sense -- a child's birthday party at a children's museum makes sense, and they won't turn down adults. :-) (There are about a dozen people at the company, and we and one other couple are the only ones without children.) To clarify: it's a museum filled with stuff interesting to children, not a museum displaying children. I suppose the latter would be, properly speaking, the "child(ren) museum". :-)

Yesterday morning, alas, instead of enjoying Shabbat services, I was at the vet clinic with Erik. (Why yes, I do think health of a pet trumps Shabbat. For myself, for anything short of Major Injury or Impending Death, I'd wait.) Fortunately, the problem was only a pulled dressing and not, as I had feared, pulled stitches. They fixed him up with a bigger dressing with more adhesive, which seems to be holding up well so far. But not the most calming way to spend (part of) Shabbat.

Yesterday afternoon and evening we played another game of 7 Ages. This time we ran from the first age through the beginning of the fourth, but it took a long time. At 9:00, in the middle of the third age, it seemed reasonable to set that boundary. At midnight it was less obvious that it was correct. So, still some calibration to do, but it's a fun game (though I got thoroughly whumped this time).

Short takes:

Ah, that's why there were a bazillion messages waiting in the moderation queue for an SCA mailing list today. Someone posted a query about sewing machines. That's kind of like posting a query about editing tools to a software-developers' list. :-)

Interesting if true, but entertaining either way: legal complications of a bizarre death (link from Dani).

My sister has never read the Narnia books and would like a copy. Does anyone know if the ones currently in print have been altered (from the ones we read in childhood) other than to change the order? (I can solve the ordering problem if I buy individual volumes or a boxed set rather than one of the compedia that's out there.)

Never try to visit a car wash on the first nice day in March. I'm glad I wasn't blocked in by the time I could read the sign a few cars up that said "45-minute wait from this point". (Well, the sign wasn't punctuated correctly, but I'm used to hyphen neglect.) I'm willing to live with filth for a little longer. :-)

I saw an odd traffic-light failure this morning. At one intersection (where visibility isn't the greatest to begin with), the red lights were out -- all of the ones I could see. But not the greens. They should kill the light entirely until they fix that; at least that way everyone gets a clue that something might be wrong, and maybe most drivers even know to treat the intersection as an all-way stop in that case.

Someone on the street asked me what time it was and I said "20 after 9". If it had been five minutes earlier it would have been natural to say "quarter after", but had I said "third after" he would have looked at me cross-eyed. I wonder what led to "quarter" and "half" being acceptable but not other simple divisions.

(I am reminded of a book -- I forget which -- that I read as a child, where the child protaganist thought that "quarter past" meant 25 minutes past, because there are 25 cents in a quarter-dollar.)

My rabbi was at services Friday night. I didn't expect that; he's still recovering from surgery and we weren't expecting to see him so soon. He's taking it very easy and he didn't come Saturday morning, which is probably good. Don't want him pushing himself.

On the original schedule he was going to read torah next Saturday morning. Last week I asked someone else to learn it on contingency (i.e. you'll probably get to do this but you might get bumped). (This is someone who explicitly volunteered to do stuff on short notice; we'd know a couple days out if he was going to get bumped. So it was a request for speedy work, not possibly-wasted work.) On Wednesday he told me oops, he'd forgotten about a commitment that would keep him away that day. So I started to look at the portion myself, because I can't ask anyone else to do possibly-wasted work. Fortunately, I'm now off the hook; I asked the associate rabbi if he could do it (he'll be there anyway) and he said yes. I'd rather have more than a week to learn a portion, even a short one.

This afternoon I went to a friend's baby shower. There seemed to be a "classic Pooh" theme going, and, of course (the baby being a girl), enough pink to set off allergic reactions. :-) It was a fun afternoon; it was nice that so many of her friends could be there.

There was one game (showers are required to have games, apparently). The hostess had taken the names of everyone who would be there and looked them up in some sort of "meanings of baby names" book. She grouped them in batches of ten or so and we were to match the names to the meanings. Of course, many of these so-called meanings are hokey rationalizations applied after the fact, not the origins of the names, but you expect that from a book that attempts to attribute meaning to every name. (Y'know, sometimes a Susan is just a Susan...) Anyway, I looked over the list and said to myself that hey, I know a lot of the relevant cognates in at least three source languages (English, Hebrew, Latin), but that even so, I didn't know half of these names. So I filled in the ones I knew and guessed the rest. I was surprised to get 29 or 41 right, which I gather was the highest score in the room.

No, I have no idea of the basis this source had for saying that my name means "advisor". I can't even get a language connection out of that one. I completely missed "Cara" ("beloved"), but could have gotten it if I'd made a logical leap from the madrigal "Matona mia cara". Duh. I was minorly proud for getting "Barbara".

Speaking of languages (sort of), my friend dglenn has a question about language structure and resulting expressiveness, with a geek twist that made me giggle. Hebrew speakers in particular might be able to help him out.

I had planned to go to a going-away party for a friend who's moving to the west coast, but I've been losing a fight against a headache all evening, and I don't think the noisy environment will help. I hope to connect with him before he leaves town. Worst case, he'll be back in a few weeks to arrange for packing and moving.

There's nothing quite like a fire truck parked outside your garage to get your attention upon looking out the back window. (Err, is there a problem on our property we're not aware of?) Near as I can tell, the bus stopped between the fire truck and the ambulance had caught fire. There was lots of milling about but no haste, so I assume no one was badly hurt.

This has been mostly a quiet weekend, which I'm not complaining about. :-) We did Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday, and we've been puttering around the house the rest of the weekend. (We'll be headed out to dinner with friends tonight.) Friday afternoon I cooked a brisket for Shabbat because, for once, I actually had the 3.5 hours available to tend it. (I'll freeze the rest -- there's no point in making only a little brisket.) It was quite tasty, and very easy. Saturday for lunch we had leftover turkey et al.

Odd Thanksgiving nomenclature: lots of people apparently call the bread stuff "stuffing" if it's in the bird and "dressing" if it's in a pan, but I learned it all as "stuffing". magid refers to them as endostuffing and exostuffing, which I think sums it up perfectly.

Services Friday and Saturday had lighter attendance than usual but not as light as I had expected, and Saturday morning the 94-year-old woman who asked if she could chant halftarah brought several family members along. She did a good job (especially considering the challenge) but felt that she had made mistakes. I'm glad she gave it a try, though, and lots of people had kind words for her.

We almost had the opposite end of the spectrum at the same service -- a recent bar mitzvah who wants to keep up his involvement and was going to chant torah -- but family holiday complications kept him away. He'll chant next week instead. The confluence of young and old would have been nifty if it had worked out.

Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed) recently published a book collecting some of his blog-published essays and a few new ones. It's an interesting read. I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations of the best blog entries, either from a single author or in topic-based compilations. While entries like this present one are just "daily life" stuff not really interesting to most people, some entries out there are more like essays and, I imagine, the same writing considerations go into them whether they're for blogs or print. Compilations of essays are nothing new; there's just a new venue for building up a following prior to a collection.

We had a clear sky for last night's eclipse, though things were darker than I expected. Yeah, duh, "dark" is part of the definition -- I mean that I was somehow expecting the moon to be closer to red than it was.

There are only two classes at the upcoming Academy (SCA event) that specifically interest me. (Thanks, dagonell, for the list.) Naturally, they are scheduled against each other. Sigh. (They weren't on the previous draft.) There are some classes that I wouldn't mind taking so it's probably worth going, mind; I'm just a little frustrated. (The advance information doesn't include names of teachers [update: just added, yay], which could make a difference for classes I wouldn't attend just based on title. A good teacher can make all the difference, and we have some of those in this kingdom.) Still, it looks like a weaker slate than I'm used to.

A news story reported that someone was convicted of "attempted first-degree intentional homicide". I thought the difference between homicide and manslaughter was intent, meaning there's no such thing as unintentional homicide. So I'm assuming sloppy writing here, though I'll admit to being a little confused at times about the degree thing, which might be relevant. My impression is that "first degree homicide" means "I specifically meant to kill you, in cold blood if necessary, you scum", that "third degree manslaughter" means "I was doing something I should have known could kill someone, but I sure didn't mean to kill or hurt anyone, let alone you specifically", and that everything else falls in between.

To the writers on West Wing: we want our characters back; could you repeat the ransom demand?

The relevant network [1] moved Jack and Bobby into the same time slot as West Wing. That's a smart move, as the show seems to be aimed at the same viewers (though the shows are very different) and WW is floundering. But I also wonder how much scheduling actually matters these days; doesn't just about every TV-viewing household have at least one recording device? Competing shows aren't the problem they once were.

[1] Yeah, branding is real effective on me... I notice the intrusive logo on the screen but just don't retain the data, and the VCR takes care of remembering what channel it's on.

Today, as I approached the checkout lines with a dozen bagels, my salad, and a few other things, I found myself wondering about the specification of "12 items or fewer". (Fewer! They actually said "fewer" instead of "less"!) I assume they do not mean 12 individual items no matter how packaged, else you could never go through with a case of pop or a bag of potato chips. So do they mean 12 scannable things, or 12 items at the smallest unit size sold? Would my dozen bagels be ok in a pre-packaged bag with a UPC symbol but not if the clerk had to type in "12 @ [price]"? Or is the fact that it generates a single line on the receipt what matters?

These thoughts brought to you by "total items: 20" on my receipt, a need to maintain my reputation as a pedant, a desire to test posting by email, and caffeine deficiency. :-)

This is funny: Never let it be said that a naked fat woman can't get no respect (link from cahwyguy).

I seem to have more GMail invites. Speak up if you want one. I'm probably going to offer some of them to the troops in Iraq, like I did with the last batch.

The UPS in my office went from sounding its "my battery is failing" alarm once a day, to sounding it twice a day, to sounding extremely pitiful when doing so, to doing nothing at all. That last stage is the real cause for concern. Fortunately, the replacement has now arrived. (I didn't know that they died over time. I didn't even know they had that alarm until it went off.)

I attended a brief HHD rehearsal tonight (I have a part in the Rosh Hashana morning service). Yes, there's a sound system, but let's just say that projection was not a problem for me. :-) I wonder why it's so much easier for me to project properly (supporting my voice from the diaphragm) when singing than when speaking. After all, I spend a lot more time speaking in an average day.

Meta: I spelled "diaphragm" correctly without looking it up first, but was uncertain enough that I checked. It's a funny-looking word.

What happened to MapQuest's preferences in getting directions? I'm trying to find a route that doesn't use the highway that bogs down in traffic, but that check-box is no longer there. (I know a route exists, though MapQuest's maps aren't helping me work it out. Time for paper, I guess...)