Someone is wrong on the internet

from http://www.xkcd.com

I came across an interesting linguistic analysis of the wording of this familiar cartoon - starting with whether or not the word order is wrong, then moving from there to why it's not just right but also funny, which he reckons is to do with the difference in meaning between "wrong" in "something is wrong" and "wrong" in "someone is wrong". Interesting, I thought.

But the bit I really loved was where he says: "someone is pretty much always wrong. This is normally not something that has to be put right before you can rest easy."

So simple, so profound, so true - and not just when it's on the internet.

so, am I a bloggeress?

There's a guy called Oliver Kamm who writes a weekly column in The Times called The Pedant - for obvious reasons this is one of my favourite bits of the Saturday paper :)

Usually I just read his column and nod enthusiastically, but this time he got me thinking, as he's picked a rather thorny issue - he's talking about the rather quaint and outdated word "authoress", and a bit more generally about the change in English usage in the last half century or so - the tendency to avoid gender-specific terminology so as not to offend.

I found myself wondering - how come "authoress" in English would bug me (and I know it would, just as it bugs me when I hear people talk about "a lady doctor") whilst in Hebrew it doesn't bug me that the word that would be used to describe me if I ever get round to finishing that novel would be gender-specific. But then I answered myself that of course it wouldn't bug me in Hebrew because in Hebrew that is normal - every noun has a gender, there is no gender-neutral form, so there's nothing unusual about the fact that the words for author are either masculine or feminine. Whereas in English most nouns are not gender-specific, so when you add "ess" at the end of a noun, the effect is that you are stressing the gender - and the question then is: why stress it? why mention it at all? is it relevant? does it matter if a book was written by a man or a woman? or if we go back to my other example of what seems to me quaint British usage - "lady doctor" - does it matter if the doctor is male or female?

At which point I argue back with myself and say, well, actually sometimes it can matter.

In the case of the doctor, it actually matters to me sometimes as a woman that I see a woman doctor and not a man - it rather depends on what the problem is and how embarrassed I might feel, as a woman, discussing it with a man. This was actually the reason that when my husband and I moved here we registered with a doctors' surgery that is not the nearest to us, because the closest one has only male doctors.

In the case of the author it doesn't matter to me personally, but I can imagine there might be women who prefer to read novels written by women; or men who prefer to read novels written by men. I can't see any reason to hold that against them.

So yes, gender can sometimes be relevant, it can be a useful piece of information. But here's the thing - you only get that information if it's a woman, not if it's a man. And I think that's why it can be annoying - it can feel like we women are being singled out, and it can feel like we're being singled out as being of less value. This might not be the intention, but because of the long history of women being belittled, regarded as less intelligent, less "up to the job" in certain areas (like medicine, or - amazingly - like writing!!!) - and when I say "history" that's not to say that these prejudices have totally disappeared off the face of the earth - because of this, we have good reason to assume that when we're being singled out, it's for the purpose of belittling us, as if to say: hahaha, isn't it funny that a woman, with her fluffy feminine brain, is playing at being a doctor...

Oliver Kamm ends his column with this:

An "authoress" is a writer of trifles, not a female writer. If used at all, it should denote writers such as Barbara Cartland or Judith Krantz, not Jane Austen and George Eliot.

And I think that sums up what the problem is with this kind of terminology - that's the kind of thing it implies, a kind of ditzy femininity, all pink fluffiness and not much serious thought. That's why it's offensive.

I needed to think this through, because I feel that sometimes the avoidance of gender-specific terminology can get a bit over the top. There's all of that chaos we get into with saying "he or she" because some people aren't comfortable with the use of "he" as a non-gender-specific pronoun. There's all that stuff about saying "person" instead of "man" because some people aren't happy with the use of the word "man" to signify mankind in general. So I don't want to just go with the flow - I needed to work out for myself whether or not I agree that the term "authoress" had better go on the scrapheap.

But yes, speaking as a writer who happens to be female - let's leave the "ess" ending to animals (e.g. lioness), royalty (princesses) and nobility (e.g. duchess). It's annoying and patronising when it's used for an occupation.

the clear English award...

does not go this year to HM Revenue & Customs (that's the tax authorities here in the UK) for their "How to fill in your Short Tax Return" guide, which had my head spinning whilst staring at one paragraph in particular.

(Note: the "did you start" in the heading refers to when it was that I started to be self-employed - I started in November 2007 and therefore this paragraph applies to me; the british tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April and the tax return I'm having to complete now is for the year to 5 April 2010.)

here's what they say - clear as mud...

Did you start between 6 April 2007 and 5 April 2008?

If you made up your first books to a date before 5 April 2009, put in boxes 3.7 to 3.10 (or 3.11) the figures for the year beginning on the day after your last end of year date, and ending on the end of year date between 6 April 2009 and 5 April 2010.

If you made up your first books to a date after 5 April 2009, you cannot use this form.

I did eventually manage to understand what I'm supposed to do (I think) but I could have had more hair left on my head if they'd have actually written this thing in English in the first place.

"had on"??? what's happened to "was wearing"?

I'm reading a novel by Anita Shreve, really good stuff but there's one thing that keeps bugging me in this book and it's the way she describes what people are wearing. Again and again I find myself accosted by sentences such as:

"Margaret had on jeans and a long-sleeved blouse."

Is it just me, or this is a weird and clumsy alternative to the perfectly normal "Margaret was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved blouse"?

I'm pretty sure I've never come across this sort of thing before. Perhaps this is the latest, most modern way, and I'm just (as usual) behind the times?

Your thoughts please, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

Apparently spellcheck howlers have a name

Apparently spellcheck howlers have a name - you know those times when you type something and the spellchecker comes up with an alternative suggestion and you just accept it without thinking? well, apparently it's called the Cupertino effect, because that's what sometimes comes up when people misspell the word "cooperation". And thus some linguistic beauties are born, such as the "South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino".

Reading about this brought back fond memories from my days as a typist in an accountants' office in London, where one of the guys I typed for had a business contact with the unusual surname "Nuttgeons" - whenever I typed a letter to him, the spellchecker would suggest the closest alternative: nightgowns. And so this person was forever embedded in my mind as Mr Nightgowns. (By the way, my browser's spellcheck put a wavy red line under the name Nuttgeons and suggested Nuttiness instead... Some of these Cupertinos can be dangerous!)

Whilst still working in that office, I had even greater fun when we got new software which included not just a spellchecker but a grammar checker. One of the optional features of the grammar checker was to check for gender-specific terminology. The firm I worked for had a branch in the Isle of Man, and when I used the grammar checker on a document that included references to that branch, the computer suggested I might want to change it to Isle of Person...

Who was it that thought up this expression - and why?

Once again I read in today's paper about a crime involving a "member of the public", and no matter how many times I've come across this expression I still can't get my head round it.

Am I missing something? It just seems like such a pointless, meaningless piece of euphemistic journalese. What does it actually mean when they say that someone is a "member of the public"? As far as I can see, all it means is that this is a person, one of us plebs, an ordinary human being. The public is us, not an exclusive club or political party or even book club or library, where you have to take out membership. I've been a member of the public for 46 years now, how long have you been a member? Can I cut up my membership card and stop being a member of the public? Are there any benefits to being a member?

I can see the point of euphemisms for expressions that may be considered obscene or offensive, but what's so bad about saying the guy who was stabbed on Oxford Street was, well, a guy who was stabbed on the street? an ordinary bloke? If what they're trying to say is that they think he wasn't a criminal, then they could say just that: the man stabbed on Oxford Street is believed not to have been a criminal. How about that? And anyway, I don't see that criminals aren't members of the public - they're just not very law-abiding ones, that's all. And there's another expression they could use if the intention is to say he wasn't a criminal: a law-abiding citizen.

Hey, I think I've got it. In other countries they could say he was an ordinary citizen, but the Brits aren't citizens, they're subjects, and nobody would understand the expression "ordinary subjects". I wonder - am I right? Is "member of the public" just a British expression?

We have a name for it!

There was a news item in my local paper about someone killed in a hit and run accident. And suddenly I found myself thinking: isn't it awful that we have a name for this?

I mean, isn't it awful that someone running over a fellow human being and then leaving them there is a thing that has happened enough times for us to feel the need to give it a name?

There are lots of things like that once you start thinking about it - words and phrases that tell us how low we have sunk. We have words and phrases to describe one person killing another, one person forcing another to do the thing that is supposed to be an act of love, one person paying another for this act, one person offering herself (or himself) to others for sexual gratification, one person physically hurting the person they claim to love, and so on and so forth - all these terrible things that we do to one another, that are so awful that they should really be unheard of, they should be shocking, they should be things that just don't happen...

but they have become things that happen so much that we have given them names.