I was always inventing things when younger which, if they had come off, would have been an enormous boon to the world. Actually I didn't really invent them, merely conceive the ideas and wish that someone else would come up with the specs for such things as magic wands, individual flying machines, shrinking/enlarging machines, invisibility bubbles, and the like. No one has stepped up to the task, however, so I submit a revised list of helpful things to invent:
- 'Polite' setting for car horns. The fear of being thought rude all but renders the horn useless, since its original intent as warning device has been so abused as a mouthpiece for frustration. What I want is something the equivalent of a car clearing the throat, so I could tap on it when the car in front of me has sat at the same light for five seconds together.
- A reverse dictionary. It's all very well and good to look something up if you know what you're looking for, but if you can't remember the word, or don't even know what it is, then you're left seeking both the dream and the interpretation thereof. It's no use looking it up, because online dictionaries may not use the same words to describe it that you do.
Gripe of the day: I dislike this new trend to describe all babies as 'she,' simply as a cheap refuge from having to use the generic male pronoun or the grammatically correct but rather cumbersome he or she. Parenting Magazine does it all the time, but it's everywhere these days. Ugh. How is that not sexist in the opposite direction?
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2 comments:
Actually, from what I've seen, the tendency is to strike a balance between the two: in some articles the baby is "he," in others "she." It makes sense to me, really. It's immensely better than the nineteeth-century practice of referring to all babies (up to about age 2) as "it."
I've resigned myself to losing the battle against "they" as a generic singular pronoun.
-- SJ
Alas, I too have caught myself wrongly using 'they' when I mean 'he or she.' I still don't endorse it, but it's getting harder to kick against the pricks.
I haven't observed the same balance in modern fluff. The best way of handling it I found in the preface to an (older) book I recently read: 'We have chosen to refer to the baby as He in order to distinguish from the mother, She. No slight to either sex is intended by this decision.'
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