Man vs. Marine

30 June 2016

The Washington Post reports that the U. S. Marine Corps is eliminating the word man from nineteen of its job titles. An infantryman will now be called an infantry marine, and what was once a field artillery man is now a field artillery marine. Some job titles are retaining the man, however. A marine can still be a rifleman. (How a rifleman differs from an infantry marine I don’t know. Perhaps someone with experience in the Corps can enlighten us.) But manpower officers and marksmanship instructors keep their existing titles.

The move is a result of combat arms positions becoming open to women and is in line with similar shifts in civilian nomenclature that happened decades ago, like policeman to police officer and fireman to firefighter. The changes are quite sensible and in a reasonable world would be uncontroversial. Even the retention of man in some job titles generally follows a logic: retained where it is part of a larger term with no clear gender-neutral replacement (e.g., marksmanship, unmanned) or in places where man is used to refer to staffing (e.g., manpower). Rifleman remains the anomaly. Perhaps it’s being retained for historical and cultural reasons—the identity of the rifleman is so central to the Corps’ vision of itself that it would be anathema to change the word. Or perhaps it was a bureaucratic sop thrown to those on the committee that resisted the changes.

The move is not without its detractors, though. The Post article includes the usual complaints about political correctness, but I haven’t seen any reasoned responses against the move. They all seem to be kneejerk reactions against change. And if anything, by replacing man with marine, the Corps is further strengthening its aura of being a breed apart. You’re not just a man, you’re a marine.

Woody Words

25 June 2016

This classic popped up on my Facebook feed today:

Wrong.

11 June 2016

Journalists love to write articles on language. Not only, since they make their livings with words, do they have a professional interest in the topic, but language is a popular topic. People, at least those who read newspapers, love to read about it. The problem is that journalists often get it completely wrong.

A case in point is an article by Dan Bilefsky that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June about how use of the period, that staid and boring punctuation mark, is changing. In some forms of discourse, the period does not simply mark the end of a sentence, it conveys urgency or emotion. He gets the facts right, but Bilefsky utterly miscategorizes what is happening, framing the period as “going out of style” and “being felled.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is actually happening that in short, electronic forms of communications, such as texts and tweets, the period is not really needed to mark the end of the sentence—much as it isn’t needed in street signs (“Stop” not “Stop.” Or “Exit” not “Exit.”) or in newspaper headlines. Since the period isn’t needed to signal the end of a complete thought, it is available for other purposes, and that’s what texters and tweeters have done. In short, digital messages the period can convey that the writer is not happy about the statement that was just made. So if you arrange to meet a friend at Starbuck’s and she replies “OK” that signals agreement. If she replies “OK.” you had better find a locally-owned, fair-trade coffee shop in which to meet; she is coming, but she’s not happy about it. This type of change is a natural, and useful, adaptation to changing conditions.

But the period is not disappearing from standard prose. While the linguists that Bilefsky quotes (David Crystal and Geoffrey Nunberg) take pains to note that this shift in orthographic convention is restricted to short, electronic messages, Bilefsky frames it as occurring in all forms of prose, even going so far as to write his entire article without using any sentence-ending periods—a cute device, but not at all an illustration of the phenomenon. Crystal even went so far as to pen a blog post pointing out that Bilefsky misunderstood what he was saying.

Bilefsky is not only wrong, he’s late to the party. He was scooped by his own paper. Jessica Bennett wrote a much more accurate piece on the changing roles of punctuation marks in digital communications in the Times over a year ago. Ben Crair had a piece on the changing role of the period in the New Republic back in 2012. (Mark Liberman wrote a Language Log post about the comments to Crair’s piece that is well worth a read.) A week or two before Crair’s piece, PhD Comics took the subject on. All of these other articles got the subject essentially right.

So late and wrong. I think we can expect better from the New York Times.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fututiones?

25 May 2016

The Times Literary Supplement discusses how translating Catullus is fucking hard.

Cunk on Shakespeare

17 May 2016

Philomena Cunk examines the life and work of William Shakespeare:

Cunk, played by comedian Diane Morgan, has this to say about Richard III:

Shakespeare wrote loads of plays about royals, known as his history plays. It was his way of pleasing the king and queen by doing stuff about their families, a bit like when your mum buys the local paper because your brother’s court appearance is in it. Perhaps Shakespeare’s best history play is Richard Three, which is about this sort of elephant man king. He’d be done in computers now by Andy Serkis covered in balls, but in the original he was just a man with a pillow up his jumper. It’s quite modern because it’s a lead part for a disabled actor, provided they don’t mind being depicted as the most evil man ever. ["I am determined to prove a villain."] Richard Three is actually based on the real King Richard of Third, who was in the Wars of the Roses. ["A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse."] At the end he loses his horse and ends up wandering round a car park looking for it, where he eventually dies, because in those days you couldn’t find your horse just by beeping your keys at it and making its arse light up. It’s quite moving and human because we’ve all worried that we might die in a car park, if we like lose the ticket and can’t get the barrier up and just die in there. Shakespeare makes you think about those things.