Dennis Baron traces the odd history of futile attempts to concoct a gender-neutral pronoun:

Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail. Coiners of these new words insist that the gender-neutral pronoun is indispensable, but users of English stalwartly reject, ridicule, or just ignore their proposals.

via OUPblog » Blog Archive » The Gender-Neutral Pronoun: 150 Years Later, Still an Epic Fail.

from Wired:

Georgia Aquarium zoologist Alistair Dove snapped the photograph from the window of a Cessna plane during a recent research trip to the Gulf of Mexico, where he studies whale sharks. He’s been less successful in capturing whale shark defecation in the water, though not for lack of trying. It’s hard to keep up with the fast-cruising giants, and their deposits fall quickly. And for a zoologist like Dove, the feces are research treasure.

“Nobody has done this analysis yet,” said Dove, who referenced a scene from Jurassic Park, when Laura Dern’s character is ecstatic at the chance to poke through a pile of dinosaur droppings. “It could be a literal gold mine.”

via When the World’s Biggest Fish Poops | Wired Science | Wired.com.

via xkcd: Period Speech.

Gene Weingarten on the new newspaper:

Not very long ago, the typical American newsroom had three types of jobs: reporter, editor and photographer. But lately, as newspapers have been frantically converting themselves into high-tech, 24-hour online operations, things are more complicated. Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: “Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters.”

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

[more] via Gene Weingarten – Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga..

Charlie Brooker in the Guardian:

Flippantly putting the grave environmental tragedy of it all to one side for a moment, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak isn’t just causing extensive damage to the Louisiana coastline. What about our accents? Our lovely British accents? Thanks to the BP link, they’ve been destroyed too. Don’t know about you, but whenever I’m around Americans, I tend to exaggerate my Britishness in a pathetic bid to win their approval. Those days are gone.

The first time I visited the US, I ran into trouble at immigration. Half the group I was travelling with decided to get drunk on the plane, which probably would’ve been fine with all the other passengers if it hadn’t been for the unrelenting cackling and yelping and removal of trousers. I was fairly drunk too, incidentally, but only because I was so terrified of flying I’d decided to blot out the whole of reality by glugging myself into an inflight coma. From my slumbering perspective the flight was a warm 15-minute snooze. To the other passengers it must’ve felt like a 30-year sentence in baboon prison.

Upon arrival, we were identified as troublemakers and hauled off one-by-one for a comprehensive bothering. Instantly I realised my only hope of avoiding instant deportation was to behave like a minor royal – not an aloof, chilly posho, but a genial gosh-what-a-wonderful-country-you-have Hugh Grant-type, one who smiles a lot while using slightly formal language. I apologised profusely by saying, “I apologise profusely.” The officer started out prickly – one of his opening gambits was, “You could be spending the night in jail, wiseguy”, which simultaneously impressed and scared me – but several minutes of profuse apologies and crikey-I’m-sorry delivered in an embellished British accent appeared to disarm him, and I was released without being subjected to gunfire.

[more] via The BP spill has poisoned our tongues … our poor, crisp, British tongues | Charlie Brooker | Comment is free | The Guardian.

from the NYT:

FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”

It was a message to mark the annual celebration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the epic novel built around events unfolding on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of the fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom. But the postcard also served as a kind of diploma for the men who received it.

Two years earlier a number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

In 1952, Gillen took the problem to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. Together with representatives of the university, Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education. There were lectures and seminars led by scholars from Penn and other colleges in the area — 550 hours of course work in total, and more reading, Baltzell reported, than the average graduate student was asked to do in a similar time frame.

At the same time, the institute’s curriculum provided for the sorts of experiences that were once the accidental concomitants of a liberal education: visits to museums and art galleries, orchestral concerts, day trips meant to foster thoughtful attention to the history and architecture of the city that surrounded the Penn campus, as well as that of New York and Washington.

Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival.

When the students read “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark 1950 study of their own social milieu, they didn’t just discuss the book, they discussed it with its author, David Riesman. They tangled with a Harvard expert over the elusive poetry in Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos,” which had sent one of the Bell students to bed with a headache and two aspirin.

The capstone of the program, and its most controversial element, came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to “Ulysses.” The novel, published in 1922, had been banned as obscene in the United States until 1933 and its reputation for difficulty outlived the ban. The Bell students “found it a challenging, and often exasperating, experience,” Baltzell wrote.

[more] via Op-Ed Contributor – The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone – NYTimes.com.

Why snakes are more useful than language scolds, from The Observer:

… The Queen’s English Society (to which my knee-jerk response is: “No she isn’t. Doesn’t everyone say she’s mainly German?”) takes a different view. It’s decided that English needs an academy so that it can compete with less successful languages such as French and Italian. “We do desperately need some form of moderating body to set an accepted standard of good English,” it says, while the academy’s founder, Martin Estinel, a 71-year-old who claims still to use the word “gay” to mean “happy”, declares: “At the moment, anything goes… Let’s have a body to sit in judgment.”

Obviously this is absolute horseshit. By what authority would they sit in judgment? Where is their evidence that manacling our language to past usage is at all helpful or necessary? It would only stand in the way of the all-conquering self-diversification that has made English the global lingua franca, and allowed “lingua franca” to become an English phrase, while the French kick impotently against “le weekend”. Fortunately, people won’t take a blind bit of notice of this self-appointed academy and will continue, quite rightly, to use words exactly as they find convenient.

But what most annoys about the scheme is that it completely misses the point of linguistic pedantry. It’s no fun prissily adhering to grammatical rules if it’s mandatory. This academy wishes to turn something I have chosen to do – an attitude by which I define myself – into something I’m forced to do, along with everyone else. That’s like making everyone support Manchester United. It’s the blandly didactic product of priggish, literal, two-dimensional thinking. …

[more] via David Mitchell | Save your venom for the self-appointed language police | Comment is free | The Observer.

from the Guardian:

Pronouns are good, popular orange vegetables are bad. Confused? Allow me to explain.

One of the joys of being a subeditor is getting stuck into a ream of copy littered with gratuitous synonyms hogging space that should really be given over to facts. My first instinct is to get rid; sometimes, however, I revel in the writer’s inventiveness and leave them be.

But a popular orange vegetable? A carrot, of course; and apparently we’re talking about one going down well in the carrot community, orange in hue and belonging to the group of foodstuffs known as vegetables. Fascinating stuff, you might say. Or not.

Yet this phrase is well-known among a group of hungry subeditors on Guardian news – it’s a Pov for short – and was coined in honour of the arresting example that triggered my awareness of such nonsense when, as a former reporter turned subeditor on the Liverpool Echo, I was fast getting to grips with the nuances of subbing.

In a feature on the health benefits of eating carrots, the second par did indeed begin: “The popular orange vegetables …” Well, we sort of know that. Besides, what’s wrong with “they”? Much shorter, sweeter and doesn’t get stuck in the throat. The newsdesk was in uproar. The senior subs were in stitches – and I knew instinctively that I’d made the right move. These things mattered – and they still do.

[more] via My synonym hell | Mind your language | Media | guardian.co.uk.

from the Guardian:

Jeremy Clarkson had a point – and that’s not something you hear me say every day indeed, any day – when in a recent Sun column he challenged the scientists or “eco-ists” as Jezza termed them who had described a slab of ice that had broken away from Antarctica as “the size of Luxembourg”.

“I’m sorry but Luxembourg is meaningless,” said Clarkson, pointing out that the standard units of measurement in the UK are double-decker London buses, football pitches and Wales. He could have added the Isle of Wight, Olympic-sized swimming pools and Wembley stadiums to the list.

A Guardian letter writer, commenting on the same story, endorsed the argument: “I would have had some difficulty even if the chunk had been described in terms of the size of Wales. Could you tell us how big it was in football pitches or Olympic swimming pools?”

As Nancy Banks-Smith has noted: “Any plague spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.”

[more] via Mind your language: Wales, Belgium and other units of measurement | Media | The Guardian.

A wonderful story about reading from the NYT:

WHEN Jim Brozina’s older daughter, Kathy, was in fourth grade, he was reading Beverly Cleary’s “Dear Mr. Henshaw” to her at bedtime, when she announced she’d had enough. “She said, ‘Dad, that’s it, I’ll take over from here,’ ” Mr. Brozina recalled. “I was, ‘Oh no.’ I didn’t want to stop. We really never got back to reading together after that.”

Mr. Brozina, a single father and an elementary school librarian who reads aloud for a living, did not want the same thing to happen with his younger daughter, Kristen. So when she hit fourth grade, he proposed The Streak: to see if they could read together for 100 straight bedtimes without missing once. They were both big fans of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and on Nov. 11, 1997, started The Streak with “The Tin Woodman of Oz.”

When The Streak reached 100, they celebrated with a pancake breakfast, and Kristen whispered, “I think we should try for 1,000 nights.”

[more] via Generation B – Father and Daughter Bond by Years of Reading – NYTimes.com.

When control freaks attack (and they sign your paycheck).  Via Robert Feder:

Sure, you’d think the chief executive officer of a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy and desperate to salvage an $8 billion buyout-gone-bad would have better things to do than pester his underlings with crazy proclamations. But in the case of Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, you’d be wrong.

The man at the top of the troubled media empire took time out of his real job this week to issue a list of words and phrases — 119 of them, to be exact — that must never, ever be uttered by anchors or reporters on WGN-AM (720), the news/talk radio station located five floors below his office in Tribune Tower.

Believe me, I’m not making this up.

WGN news director Charlie Meyerson, good soldier that he is, passed on what he identified as Michaels’ “list of forbidden ‘newsspeak’ words and phrases” in a memo to his staff Monday, with the explicit warning: “Don’t say them on WGN.”

[much more] via Memo puts WGN news staffers at a loss for words | Feder | blogs.vocalo.org.

A well-written piece about a remarkable man:

In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.

These things come to us, they don’t come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us.

We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down — Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve — transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

[more] via Roger Ebert: The Essential Man.

Discover Literary Oddities in the Weird Book Room on AbeBooks.

Or maybe not.  Colm Toibin:

From an early age, I have missed the point of things. I noticed this first when the entire class at school seemed to understand that Animal Farm was about something other than animals. I alone sat there believing otherwise. I simply couldn’t see who or what the book was about if not about farm animals. I had enjoyed it for that. Now, the teacher and every other boy seemed to think it was really about Stalin or Communism or something. I looked at it again, but I still couldn’t quite work it out.

So, too, with a lot of poetry. I couldn’t see that things were like other things when they were not like them. Maybe they were slightly like them, or somewhat like them, but usually they were not like them at all.

And allegory. I never got the point of allegory. If it was a choice between algebra and allegory, I knew whose side I was on. When I picked up Moby-Dick, I liked it because it was about hunting whales. And oh dear I just couldn’t concentrate when everyone began to explain, all at the one time, that the whale was a symbol or something, that it stood for… I cannot remember what.

[more] via Missing the Point « London Review Blog.

LAREDO, Texas — Mary Benavides steps from behind the cash register several times a day to embrace the mourners.

For more than 30 years, she has managed the mall’s B. Dalton outlet — the only bookstore in Laredo. It will close next month.

All B. Daltons nationwide are closing, as corporate parent Barnes & Noble shutters the chain. In this era of mega-bookstores with cafes and cozy couches and 150,000 titles — and with more than a million books available online — B. Dalton’s cramped outlets no longer make economic sense.

So the bookstore here in Mall Del Norte is decked out for its final Christmas season with giant red signs: “Everything on Sale!” Customers keep coming up to Ms. Benavides to murmur: “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

Laredo sits on the border with Mexico. It’s a poor city filled with immigrants who don’t speak English, let alone read it. A federal survey several years ago found half the adults in the county lack basic literacy skills.

Yet the bookstore has become a touchstone.

[more] via City Tries to Rewrite Lone Bookstore’s Last Chapter – WSJ.com.

From Harper’s, an interesting meditation on the death of newspapers:

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

A few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus.

In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t even notice.”

[more] via Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper’s Magazine).

Erin McKean decodes a modern annoyance:

There’s a certain kind of person – you may even be this kind of person – whose good will after receiving a favor and replying with “thank you” is completely wiped out when the response is not the traditional “you’re welcome,” but instead the breezier “no problem.”

As “no problem” has caught on and spread, replacing “you’re welcome” in situations ranging from casual personal encounters to business deals, the number, vigor, and shrillness of the complaints in etiquette columns and Internet forums has spread along with it.

The reasons given – or unstated – are varied. Many especially dislike hearing “no problem” in commercial transactions and from folks in customer service jobs, since, as the customer is always right, nothing a customer could ask for could ever be “a problem.” “I assume my business is not a problem,” huffed one complainer on the message boards at the Visual Thesaurus. Others on the Internet have taken the same tack: “Why would it be a problem? It’s her job, isn’t it?” and “It better damn well NOT be a problem, because I just gave you my money.” Some dwell on the counterfactual: “I always wonder if the person would have helped me if they had known it would be a problem.” And from Twitter: “I know it’s no problem. You rang up my orange juice. How could that be a…problem?”

[more] via The un-welcome – The Boston Globe.

I really like it, but now I can’t get the tune out of my head.