Especially the penguin one.

Just thought that the readership might enjoy getting the straight skinny on the next great threat to American Democracy - librarians (according to Rich Lowery at the National Review)

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/richlowry/welcome.shtml

And you thought we just ran around in our Birkenstocks saying "SHHHH!" and providing access to literature and information. Little did you know that we are all highly deluded and dangerous threats to the Reich - er, republic...

I'm horrified and cringing in terror now that Rich Lowry has out us librarians as the wicked people we are. However, I still have the terrible daring to point out that the OCLC's complaint is available online
and Hotelinteractive.com has an interview with Henry Kallan, the owner of the Library Hotel, available at in which he says a few things that might be regarded as having a bearing on how much he was or was not violating OCLC's trademark in a way that mattered and which OCLC, in order to maintain its mark, had to respond to.

Especially the penguin one.

Wow. I don't know what to say about that. I never realized dogs and cats looked so much alike; the first picture didn't look weird to me until I really looked at it.

The penguin one is something. I don't know what to think about it, yet.

I can't come close to the penguin picture, but here is a small dose of silliness. Click on link for "Cat Bowling."

(Warning: this site requires flash and is somewhat noisy.)

Re: a great short essay on Eng Comp: To avoid Engfish, try reading Howard S. Becker's WRITING FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS. He's one of the few academics who's actively been fighting that kind of writing. I've also been pushing his ART WORLDS for years....

Cheers,
Tom

Interesting thing found:

Pamela Dean musing about Anne Rice and methods of writing (livejournal).

Make it stop!

Should we not have a useful gender-neutral pronoun, or what?

"Zie" is a wholly unnatural graft onto English. I can't imagine it being used by anyone and that person not seeming painfully pretentious.

AFAIC, "they" might as well be formalized for this usage, despite any resultant potential problems with pluralization.

Especially the penguin one.

Avram,

Please, please, please tell me you saved the penguin picture somewhere. It's gone and I can't find it anywhere on the site, and my co-worker probably thinks I've made the entire thing up. Well, except for the fact of the other pictures, but still....

Thanks

I just don't have a very good alternative. I'm a big proponent of "they," but it doesn't work well for a personal pronoun when you're talking about a specific individual.

I'm okay with it being an unnatural graft. The dodgy aesthetic of it was something I figured I could learn to live with.(But I have to admit I haven't been able to bring myself to use it... pretentious though I am.)

Enjoy.

I find 'zie' pretty hard to take too, but I suppose many neologisms sound stupid at the start. 'Ms' sounds perfectly natural to me because I grew up with it, but I can imagine it might have sounded pretty stupid to someone who encountered it as an adult.

Most doomed attempted neologism I've seen recently: Richard Dawkins trying to push 'bright' as the opposite of creationist. It'll never fly...

Dammit, I had finally succeeded in convincing myself that I dreamed that entire silly "bright" episode. Thank you for forcefully removing my warm and comforting illusion. ;)

That reminds me of the old joke about Mensa... "the organization for people who are intelligent enough to join yet stupid enough to flaunt having done so."

And would the natural copyeditors around here be so kind as to tell me how to make the punctuation in my first line look less funny? Thank you.

The comma definitely should have gone within the quotes, but I would have used "I did grow up with 'Ms.,' but..."

The rapid proliferation of commas-outside-quotes is another thing I think could be attributed at least partially to the influence of computer use on our language, actually. Quotes being a delimiter of a literal string, including the comma within the string in many common computer language usages removes the function of the comma as an item separator, and literally changes the "meaning" of the string. You get to where it's hard to think of doing it another way...

I like the connotations of bright for ideological description, but it can't be used as a brag.

Thank you!

Oh, and I think we should just use "they" (and "them" and so forth) for non-count neuter pronoun duty. Nobody seems to mind being pluralized the way folks mind being misgendered. If someone has a better pronoun, let them offer it up or hold their peace. In print, I tend to go for the gooniest fake pronoun I can think of, like "s/him" because that way it looks like I'm sounding awkward on purpose instead of being unable to do better. I hope.

Posted by: Scott on September 27, 2003 01:32 AM

Scott, that confession right there, of objectively pro-subversive commie/mutant/hippie/traitor sandal wearing, is good to indefinite detention at Gitmo.

Not to mention that other confession, of p*r*o*v*i*s*i*o*n of a*c*c*e*s*s to k*n*o*w*l*e*d*g*e which strikes at the very foundations of our current system of government.

(That thing is disturbingly addictive...)

(and it does seem that that little mindworm from A. Bester would make a great flash animation, if one had any competence at visual design....)

Cheers,
Tom
suffering at least two of those from a major hard-drive crash [head-banging dead] of the drive he recently moved almost all his data to, no current backups, and losing his Palm Pilot -- is this what they mean by an identity crisis?)

In formal writing where 'they' will not be accepted, I use 's/he' in the nominative. I confess to using 'hir' in the objective and possessive cases (the latter, when predicative, appears as 'hirs'). I like it because people don't appear to notice it. They just read right over it, apparently taking it for 'her' or 'him' as their own mental predilictions dictate.

There is no excuse for 'zie'. It doesn't resemble ANY English pronoun at all. It ends in 'e', that's about it.

Some people get symptoms like sniffles, rashes, and a high temperature. Or is she describing a fever dream? When I have a fever, I always have these discomforting recurring dreams that seem to revolve around work. While working on the assembly line, I dreamt I was 'stretched out on a long white table' with people standing around it. When I worked for the answering service, my dream had me as some sort of cell in a phone system. I'd wake up and return to the same semi-dreams.

Anyway, feel better soon.

Jane

And if you're saying they got the 'zie' from German, they could have at least spelled it right. And it means 'she' or 'they' -- why not just use 'they' and be done?

Silly people, like the ones who invented Esperanto. No, like the ones who invented Loglan.

I envy the Spanish herman@ option.

Once again, ambiguity stands in for universality.

Up ambiguity!

I just realized that hir works for him/her as well as his/her. Hm.

MKK

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my, lump in the bed
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

Jane