Link Banana

I now know who to blame whenever I feel bad about using “they” as a singular pronoun.

Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

And along with promising that soon the dark days of the plural-only “they” will pass into memory, the piece mention a pronoun I’d heard in lore, and begun to consider apocryphal: thon.

Now if only we could settle on a second-person plural more accurate than “you”…

(via Daring Fireball)

You know that symbol in email addresses that you don’t know the name of? The one that you always replace with “at”? Well, I’ve been saving two links about it:

• Bits tells a brief story of it’s move onto keyboards and into email:
  

  The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in records of transactions written by English merchants.

  That’s why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail.

• In the LRB, Daniel Soar tells a characteristically longer story, including this tidbit:
  

  This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

I’m pretty sure I’ll find fault with any such list that fails to include the word “marshmallow,” but Robert Beard’s is an interesting list.

(I think I also have to object to all words — especially French imports — with silent letters.)

(via kottke)

And because I haven’t done it in over a year, any nominations?

While explaining that “motherfucker” is a popular insult worldwide, Nina Shen Rastogi says that:

Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology.

No part of that really surprises me, but I’d just like to congratulate anyone who gets paid to discover stuff like this.

The article in the last post mentions that both leotard and cardigan are eponyms. I hadn’t known that.

Other surprises from a list of eponyms on Wikipedia:

• lynching
• bloomers
• silhouette
• boycott
• sideburns
• chauvanism
• guy
• gerrymandering
• mausoleum
• shrapnel

In explaining how she unintentionally made “Duro” the eponymous name for a style of dress, Erin McKean tells a cogent story about where words come from:

Someone wants an easy way to refer to something, and grabs whatever’s close to hand. Other people with the same need pick up the same tool. If the word fits, people will use it.

Apparently, that’s what a Greek would say to things that we’d call Greek.

The strangest thing I see on chart is that some French apparently call things they don’t understand Javanese. Is there some historical linkage I don’t know about between the people of France and an Indonesian island? A commenter suggests that the chart may be intending Javanais.

(via kottke)

This is interesting:

But there’s a wide range of definitions of “home” among Americans who have lived in at least one place besides their original hometown: 26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.

(via Big Contrarian)

A conservation site for nearly dead words. You can do your part by pledging to start using a few in normal conversation.

(via BF)

A beautiful, well-designed (and apparently smut-free) alternative to Urban Dictionary, the coolest feature about Addictionary is probably that you can request a word for your definition of a new thing.

(via Neatorama)

Forvo’s a relatively-new site collecting pronunciations by native speakers. It’s current library’s disappointingly small — it has nothing to contribute to my constant waffling on “machination” and “gnocci” — but it’s still a neat idea.

(via matt.cc)

Elizabeth Dickenson has her list of campaign cliches she could do without. #1 is an ax I’ve been grinding myself.

1)  Wall Street to Main Street. I know the financial crisis affects me and that bashing bankers wins you applause. What I’d rather hear? A solid explanation of how the bailout will work (or won’t), how it will be paid for, and how it will affect government spending in the next administration.

Barbara Wallraff — The Atlantic’s new language blogger — says that the singular they becoming standard is the best of four bad options.

Write “he” about a nonspecific person and you’re a sexist. Write “she” and you’re a flaming feminist. Write “he or she” and you’re a pedant. Write “they” and you’re an ignoramus.

I debated for a while whether to Twitter or post this new-to-me neologism (discovered here), I obviously chose the latter.

The etymology of this is a little vexing; my guess is that it grew out of the belief that the people who make or serve dogfood should try it before giving it to canines. Ah, Wikipedia confirms.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wondered what the difference was. By way of analogy:

When you talk about how much you like a tune, you don’t say: “That’s a great MP3”; you say: “That’s a great song”. An MP3 is the delivery mechanism, not the creative work, just as a font is the delivery mechanism, and a typeface is the creative work.

(via Cameron.io)

Though this quiz is a tad on the detail-oriented side, I did enjoy it. I’m guessing you can do better than 23, but you’ll need to be able to tell an Estonian accents from a Lithuanian. Or a Canadian from an American.

(via Passport)

I wasn’t aware of the massive unpopularity of semicolons among male literary types; apparently only the effete are supposed to use them.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

From Tierra del Fuego’s Yaghan language, the definition of this “world’s most succinct word”:

It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.

(via kottke)

Tyler Cowen points to another astounding fact from this book:

Behavioral scientist Ellen Langer and her colleagues decided to put the persuasive power of this word to the test.  In one study, Langer arranged for a stranger to approach someone waiting in line to use a photocopier and simply ask, “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine?”  Faced with the direct request to cut ahead in this line, 60 percent of the people were willing to agree to allow the stranger to go ahead of them.  However, when the stranger made the request with a reason (“May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), almost everyone (94 percent) complied…

Here’s where the study gets really interesting…This time, the stranger also used the word because but followed it with a completely meaningless reason.  Specifically, the stranger said “May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

The rate of compliance was 93 percent.

My best attempt to write the proper pronunciation.

(via Snarkmarket)