Pop-Culture Linguistic Change

English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. (“It” is neuter, not neutral.) There’s a movement afoot to create one, I think. This particular manifestation of the movement, from the comic Boomerangs, is new to me:

I seem to recall “thon” offered as a gender-neutral term several years back, but haven’t seen it since. I predict we’re not going to get a new word.  Back when women’s lib was a new movement, there was a push to use the slightly awkward “he or she” and “him or her” to replace the generic “he” and “him,” and that has become the most common approach to this challenge. I think that’s a reasonable solution, we’ll get used to it, and things will settle down.

What’s your opinion? Don’t be too hard on me for using the term “pop culture.”

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We have five horizontal lines in English writing. I’m not going to write about the strikeout and the underscore today. The other three are the hyphen, the N-dash, and the M-dash. I’ll skip the hyphen, too, except to say that you shouldn’t use it in place of the two dashes. Unless you’re using a typewriter, where you don’t have a choice.

The N-dash shows a range such as the opening and closing times of a store. 5:00–9:00 for example. An N-dash is the width of a capital N.

The M-dash (width of a capital M) indicates a break of some kind. An interruption, change of thought, or to emphasize a parenthetical idea.

The rules permit you to use an N-dash with spaces instead of an M-dash. But don’t.

Never use spaces around an M-dash—and that leads to my quoted passage. Until today I had never seen anyone put spaces with an M-dash.

In a discovery that raises fundamental questions about human behavior, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have found that the immune system directly affects — and even controls — our social behavior, such as our desire to interact with others.

This is from an article in a Kurzweil newsletter. Those are M-dashes, and they shouldn’t have spaces around them. They do correctly emphasize the parenthetical remark, though.

Did I forget any rules about dashes? Tell me in the comments.

I aim to post every other day, on odd-numbered days, and sometimes I take a “vacation” on the first of the month when the previous month ends in an odd number. But my brother sent me a link to something fun, and mentioning it is easy enough that I’m posting it on the first of August, the day after July 31.

It claims to be a vocabulary test, and it probably is, though it tells you a vocabulary size “accurate” to five digits, and your percentile score accurate to hundredths of a percent. Those numbers are probably unrealistically precise. But the test itself seems reasonable, and it was fun.

http://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/

The website itself looks like a good time-waster. It’s a lot of made-up tests. I’d be a little bit suspicious that they collect some data from their visitors.

Okay, I scored in the top 0.12% with a vocabulary of 29975. I invite you to post your score in the comments.

P.S. I mentioned dubious numerical precision in the second paragraph. Here’s an article about the opposite—indefinite hyperbolic numerals. Numbers such as “zillion.”

I feel grumpy today, so here’s the first paragraph of an article I pulled pretty much at random from some material that should have been proofread by an editor. I’m going to grouse about the writing.

Thank you to everyone that contacted their legislator, testified on a bill, or attended a committee hearing this session! You know the old saying “You when some, you lose some?” Well that about sums up the 148th General Assembly! Here is a run down of legislation and budgetary items addressed this year.

First, something they got right: They didn’t say “We’d like to thank you…” They actually said thank you. Good for them.

Sigh.

Goof one: People are “who,” not “that.” So it should be “…everyone who contacted…”

Goof two, check your references. It’s “Win some, lose some.”

Goof three: The question mark should go outside the quotes. It’s not part of the old saying.

Goof four: “Well” is an aside. Separate it from the rest of the sentence with a comma. Myself, I’d have left it out and started the sentence with “That.”

Goof five: too many exclamation points. One per paragraph is a great plenty.

Goof six: “run down” should be “run-down.” It’s a compound noun.

That was the first paragraph. I shudder to read the rest of the article. To avoid embarrassment, I won’t cite my source.

When people read good expository writing, they think about the content, not about the writing. (This doesn’t apply to poetry, by the way, where part of the attraction is admiration of the writing itself.) In a way, this is a disadvantage for technical writers and such, because by definition, then, you tend not to notice the good stuff. Several years ago someone got a Nobel prize in economics for describing this situation, in which the highest value things tend to be under-priced because the purchaser tends not to appreciate the difference in quality.

Tourette syndrome is a condition when a person with physical tics involuntarily inserts profanity into their conversation. That’s the point of this Carpe Diem comic—the fortune teller has Tourettes. I suppose the comic censors prevented the cartoonist from making her say anything more profane, though “serial killer” is bad enough.

All that leads to a hobby horse of mine that I’ve mentioned only once before. You don’t need profanity to explain something. It calls attention to the writing, jolting the reader away from the content. If you’re a tech writer with Tourette syndrome, be sure to proofread your work really really carefully.