Over the past few days I've noticed a number of instances in which a British person has referred to a child (whose sex is unknown) with the pronoun "it", as in the following:

The smaller child has its eyes closed, and the bigger one its eyes open. (celebrity "news" story, LINK. Actually referring to one boy and one girl, but the writer does not appear to know which is which)

each child has its moment of glory as it goes up to collect a certificate proving its status as a "Young Egyptologist" (Swansea University, LINK).

To me the singular pronoun "it" sounds very strange when used to refer to a human, especially in the latter case where "it" is used multiple times; my initial feeling is that the use of "it" implies nonhuman characteristics (the only regular use I can think of hearing is offensive disparaging reference to someone of ambiguous gender). Oddly I don't have any such problem with singular "they" which seems like perhaps a more common (US English) way to avoid the "he/she" dilemma.  Indeed, google search for this use (e.g. ..."child has its"...) seems to give an abundance of UK sites once other kinds of cases are discarded (like "Parenting any exceptional child has its challenges", or reference to "child" that is not human, such as node/hierarchical structures).

So it's probably just that "it" is more acceptable to refer to a child in UK English. A quick scan of some other options suggests that this may not be true of adults. For example, "person has its" doesn't seem to give the same kind of results (most of the "neutral references" tend to be from non-English-speaking countries, or referring to a legal "person" which may or may not be human).  Nor does "human", and interestingly "teenager" doesn't seem to do it either. So maybe this use of "it" is only OK before a child hits puberty. But it's OK to use "it" to refer to it before then.

I'm a huge fan of local newspapers, and in my part of London I have a good half dozen or more weekly papers to choose from.  But they do not always present their news in the clearest and most sensible manner.  For example, check out the following from Ham & High (i.e. Hampstead and Highgate) March 20, 2008 exactly as it appeared in the paper:




I don't care how incompetent the donkey was at preventing crime, surely it doesn't deserve to be crucified!  And as usual for London it appears that a large mob has turned out for the public execution.


Of course this is actually just a classic example of silly layout, as you can see by the wider angle:

Previous / Next

Now and then (i.e. "all the time") I read blogs or other web content that has a handy navigation tool at the bottom of some pages, like the broken version illustrated above. But there's some maddening inconsistency about the way these things are used. Sometimes older content is referred to by "Previous" (because after all, it was written earlier, and therefore previous in time) and other times by "Next" (because in many cases one starts reading at the present, and therefore earlier posts have now become later in the reading sequence). Coupled with this is the problem of browser-based navigation which uses forward or back (sensibly mapped onto "Next" and "Previous" respectively) regardless of the sort of link one may have used to get there.

Sometimes you get sensible labels like "Older" or "Newer", or numbered entries (a system that doesn't work all that well for regularly updated push-down sorts of content, I suppose), but a lot of the time you don't. It's especially messy when the individual doing the browsing has many pages open at once, likes to navigate using multiple methods, and is totally scatterbrained.

Today on the bus ride to work, I overheard two undergraduate students complaining about the way their English literature essays had been marked. The main problem (in these students' eyes) related to the totally unfair and arbitrary manner in which their instructor used her own personal judgement in determining which kinds of sources were relevant and which were not. The phrase "books and papers by dead old white men" was bandied about, and it was suggested that this instructor's pro-dead/old/white/male attitude was having a drastic negative impact on the educational validity and relevance of the class, and therefore to their educational experience as a whole. I (mentally) nodded along at first; after all there's no shortage of current authors writing on the topic, placing the work in whatever sort of context one might imagine as being possibly relevant (and many that are frankly a stretch even for the stretchy mind).

But then, it turned out they were not actually contrasting dusty old tomes by long-lived, long-dead, long-white, long-males to spanking new ultra-relevant works complete with ISBN-13s which the instructor had unfairly discarded due to her irrational love of the long-everything publications mentioned above. No, the instructor's main beef with the essays was that a number of the students had made the same rather unusual point, mostly using a rather unusual turn of phrase, which happened to originate from Wikipedia. Now I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the devil, but merely that university students should probably rely on more than encyclopedias to write their papers. And if they do write their papers mainly from encyclopedias, they should suffer accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia's authors and editors are alive, and often young (erm, I'll have to get back to you on the "white male" business. I have my suspicions), but Wikipedia should hardly be considered as a primary source (Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought). It might be an entirely reasonable starting point to get some ideas if you're totally devoid of them, but it's never a good idea to pass off the ideas, or worse, the words, of Wikipedia as your own. It's particularly bad if you don't acknowledge the source and are not even clever enough to change the words around.

Frankly, I'm surprised that university students were caught by Wikipedia in this way, and they're lucky they were only downgraded instead of being swatted across the room for incompetent plagiarism. But it must be really terrible for teachers of slightly younger students, trying to get them to actually read assigned books in this day and age of instantly available summary information of all kinds. Back in the olden days, of course, the main way of doing this was through Cliffs Notes [sic?], whose distinctive cover design marked you out as a cheat from a hundred paces, and which were (allegedly) kept by most teachers for comparison with unusually insightful essays. Or by re-using a very good paper from someone else in some other year, possibly changing a few words here and there to hide the paper's origin (or at worst, just using White-Out to replace the original author's name with your own). This, however, required access to (a) a good paper, (b) from someone older, (c) on the right topic, which were seldom available. The Dunce family library, however, contained a number of highly abridged classic novels, which I understand were rented out to classmates by a certain relative of mine for book-report purposes. Shameful indeed. But not as shameful as university students cutting and pasting from Wikipedia!

The Dunce is now one small step closer to getting that long-awaited PhD.

Those who have been asking me questions related to the topic should be quite pleased, perhaps others are surprised that I don't already have one. After all, I've gone about things all backwards, getting a couple of postdocs and a fistful of publications first, and only slowly and gradually getting the PhD itself. Today I completed the "upgrade", a brief (15min) research presentation and interview about it, which is this institution's requirement for admission to PhD candidacy (or whatever they call it here). I was horrendously stressed about this upgrade interview. This stress was quite irrational, because I was incredibly well prepared for it (after all, I've been defending various aspects of this work for quite a few years now), and I was very aware there was no need for stress (my supervisors and all of my colleagues reassured me of that). And indeed, it went quite fine; the only critical comments were as minor as minor can be.

This means I can now write up my thesis and submit it at some future date. Or that's what it would mean, were I following the procedure correctly. But in fact I have already written it. One of my supervisors has already read through an entire first draft, and I've revised it based on her comments. So really what I need to do is lean on my other supervisor for comments, then revise and submit it as soon as possible.  How soon is that? Well, once news of my successful upgrade percolates through my institution, and my status is officially updated (we're probably talking January/February given the glacial pace of this sort of thing combined with the holiday season), it will be necessary to submit a letter requesting a waiver of the standard minimum registration period before thesis submission is permitted.  This is because I've been registered as a part-time student only for two years now (although I've been a full-time researcher here for 7 years), and such students are meant to submit after a minimum three years. My supervisor has already spoken to the relevant person, and it appears that my situation may permit this period to be waived.

If a waiver is granted, we will petition for me to submit (literally) as soon as possible from that moment (by which time I should have the next revision completed). The exact submission date is unclear, but the gap between submission and defense is something like four months.  That all is to say that if all goes well, it looks like I'll finish before the end of 2008.

If a waiver is not granted, I will have to wait to submit until January 2009, defending etc. as soon as possible thereafter. But this looks unlikely.

Today I received an email from an organization at my university about their winter party. You'd never guess what they're serving.

"There will be hot mold WINE and sizzling MINCE PIES offered to UCL Postgraduates ALL FOR FREE!"

Now it's rather unusual to have sizzling mince pies (usually they're room temperature and perhaps a little on the stale side), but my attention was drawn to the "mold wine". It's a classic sort of eggcorn for "mulled wine". I say "classic" because an unusual/uncommon word is replaced by a more common/better known one, and the reinterpretation sort of makes sense. And there are plenty of instances of its use out there (google "mold wine" or "mould wine" and you'll find quite a few, even discounting various other contexts where the two words can occur together).

In this case, "mulled" is hardly common, especially in this particular sense; before I looked it up in the OED I hadn't ever noticed any other use besides "mulled wine". The relevant definition looks like this "To warm (wine, beer, etc.) with the addition of sugar, spices, fruit, etc., to produce a hot drink (formerly sometimes thickened with beaten egg yolk)." So it's quite a narrow definition (implying a drink not normally served warm, with sugar/spices/etc added), and not so many modern drinks fit the bill, except during the festive season when traditional drinks get a look-in.   And there is the much more common word "mold" (a homophone in my dialect) waiting in the wings.  "Mold wine" sort of makes sense: mold is already associated with wine (in the sense of being corked), and it's easy to see how heating and addition of spices might be a good treatment against mold.

Mulled wine also is the source of another eggcorn, "glue wine" through the German word for it: Glühwein (trans: "glowing wine", presumably related to its warmth, see also the Swedish glögg which is like Glühwein only nastier, I think). No surprise that the false friend "Glue" makes an appearance here, especially among English speakers visiting German-speaking countries (one example here). 

If only it got cold enough here that mulled wine (or similar drinks) actually tasted nice...

Nearly a year ago, in this post I extolled the virtues of Library Thing, a site that gives interesting book suggestions (and "unsuggestions") based on statistics of users' libraries.

Well, we have now finally decided to bite the bullet and start recording the contents of our own library there as well. I must admit this has become a bit of an obsession in the Dunce house (who would have thought?!), but there's a long way to go. Despite the handy options to find books easily (looking up by ISBN using Amazon, Library of Congress or quite a few other databases) it's still taking us a long time. Mainly due to UK editions which don't always come up on Amazon or any of the others we've tried. So we're still working on our first room, the dining room. The main consequence of this is that cookbooks are relatively over-represented at the moment.

It gives all kinds of interesting information; perhaps the most interesting to us at the moment is the number of users who have a particular book in their collection (although this may not be exactly right due to variations in titles, editions etc. For example I find it extremely hard to believe that only two Libray Thing users have a copy of "Wrestling's Heels and Heroes", or that nobody but us has the Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics), and also the other books owned by people whose libraries are similar to ours so far.

Our catalog is visible to public view here, although please note that we have a long, long way to go before it will be complete. So don't use this as a definitive guide to gift book selection. Especially if the good book stores near our workplaces keep trying to clear out their second-hand books (I think we are +5 in the last couple of days for this reason).

Rumors that we are planning to convert the attic into a library are not completely true.

I have a possibly unhealthy obsession with picking up things from the ground, especially when they look like handwritten notes. A lot of the time they turn out to be uninteresting (e.g. someone's name, phone number and/or address) but once in a while they are quite interesting or mysterious. For example, the handwritten notes below, apparently an outline of a very depressing letter:

--------------------------------------------
-I have this decision to communicate this to you in writing. I am to outline how I feel abt what you have done.

-Extremely-

-I have had 4 years of the worst relationship

-You have been in many respects a complete enigma to me

-I am not a vengeful person

-With deliberate intent to commit the evil act

-malicious

-I saw you as a wonderful, caring and loving woman, who in sicken and in health, is richer and would stay by me

-I put my whole life in you, I trust you constantly to me

-Unscrupulous tendency to lie, and scheme your way to get what you want

-And when you have drained all the blood

-You have left me when I was in my lowest ebb

-You humiliated me in front of my kids

-I expected you after all that meant though to
--------------------------------------------

And that's the end. If that wasn't strange enough, it's written on the back of a piece of scrap paper, the other side some kind of police-related administrative data (it has to be police-related, because it has entries like CID, Operation Sapphire, CMU, Vehicle Crime, etc.). It seems to be some kind of inventory records, apparently keeping a running total on the number of [something] with a particular focus upon outstanding inventory (boldface columns indicate "Total Out of store for 5-27 days" and "TotalOut of store for more than 28 days"). It's cryptic enough to seem like an interesting puzzle (there are all sorts of mysterious abbreviations, never mind what exactly they are tracking, which could perhaps be guessed by looking at the relative numbers for different groups), but I've decided instead to shred it.

I think there are a couple of important lessons here:

If you must write an outline of an important, heartfelt letter to a loved one (or former loved one), it's probably best not to use the back of a sensitive document.

If you must write an outline of an important, heartfelt letter to a loved one (or former loved one) on the back of a sensitive document, it's best not to discard it on the street.

For that matter, it's probably best just not to litter.

On the way from our house to the bus stop, I walk through a handy pedestrial underpass to avoid crossing the very busy, high-speed deathtrap of a road that is Westbury Avenue (two "newsworthy" accidents in the last month alone: exhibit A, exhibit B). It's nice and well-lit, but on the other side is a large, plain wall which often attracts scrawled graffiti. It was recently painted over, but more graffiti has sprung up. It seems like it might be a roll of gang names, all written in black marker in the same handwriting. If so, I think some of the gang members might have gotten a bum deal when names were handed out. The list is below, in the order in which they appear. Is your gang name on there?

Lucifer
Satan 666
TMD
Flying Sqod
NPK
Love of Money
SW1 Crew
Assasins
Rowdey
Shower
Mob
Mob H Town
Buger Bar
Clap Town South
28


My favorite among these is Love of Money, which is a great gang name for reasons that are made clear in T.E.Cliffe Leslie's 1862 essay of the same title.

And I can hardly pick on those names that evoke evil or violence, as these sorts of names are crucial for instilling a sense of dread and fear. Included among these are Lucifer, Satan 666, Assasins, Mob, Mob H Town ("H" possibly referring to Haringey [local area] or Hackney [nearby and with perhaps more street cred than H'gey]), and to a lesser extent Rowdey, and possibly Flying Sqod. The latter is especially notable, as at the time of writing it yields exactly zero Google hits (Did you mean: "flying squad". No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.). No doubt this is a clever ploy to separate oneself from the zillions of Flying Squads out there (Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for "flying squad").

It's also fine to self-identify with a particular location as this follows a long tradition of geographically based gang names. Here we have Clap Town South perhaps referring to Clapton in east London, or Clapham in south London (see the similarly named Clap Town Kids from Clapham who have received some attention in the press), Mob H Town as mentioned before, and the SW1 Crew (SW1 referring to a London postcode with serious credibility on the streets, being home to Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street).

Then we have the cryptic ones, which are also just fine as they protect the identity from the authorities. For example, TMD. Could this be noted author Thomas M. Disch? Or maybe this person suffers from temporomandibular joint disorder (also known as TMJ) and has adopted its name as a statment of strength through adversity. NPK is much easier to figure out; this name is clearly a reference to fertilizer (N: Nitrogen, P: Phosphorous, K: Potassium). 28 is cryptic as well. It could either refer to the atomic number of nickel (hence a very clever reference to wealth, a subtle take on "Love of Money" mentioned above), or perhaps a shout-out to street hero Zbiegniew Brzezinski who was born on March 28, 1928.

And finally, there are the real losers. I think these are the gang members who were not present when the names were being handed out, and were assigned names for their insult value. I'm talking about Buger Bar (presumably this name is a degenerate form of Burger Bar, aka fast food joint, and I suspect its owner is above average in girth and displacement), and even worse, Shower, presumably a filthy young gentleman whose name must be a form of comedic opposition. Perhaps I, the Dunce, should count myself among their number.

From the names, I think these are all young gentlemen; ladies' names on such lists tend to contain one or more of the following: {Miss, Ms, Lady, Queen, Baby}, as in MS FLYING SQOD. Anyway, I look forward to meeting these young gentlemen and discussing their branding strategy in great detail.

I've read a number of pub reviews (mainly at Beer in the Evening which include the word "use", as in "I use this pub regularly" (source), "I used this pub a lot in the early 70s" (source), "I used this pub for the first time today" (source). To my midwestern US English ear the verb "use" sounds very strange in this context; my strongest interpretation is a running visit (if you will) to use the toilet and nothing more. But in the examples above (and the many others you find using search terms like "(use OR used OR using) (this OR that OR the) pub") quite clearly indicate a more leisurely sort of visit, likely involving having a drink or three, and possibly some craic as well. Of course US English permits the use of "use" when there is a specific purpose designated ("we used the pub for our party", "we have been using this pub as a meeting place", but "use" on its own doesn't quite sem kosher.

However, it seems like a very ordinary (UK) English usage and I wondered whether it extended to other institutions besides the public house (the only context in which I have noticed its use). Restaurants? YES (apparently, don't use this one). Hotels? YES (use this one). Museums? Apparently so ("a broader range of people used the museum": link).

So it seems like speakers of UK English can use just about any establishment, while I can only use their toilets.

Lately I've been playing with the quick search option in my web browser. It's a text box that gives search results right away (i.e., without having to go to a search page like Google). It can be set to use various different search engines (although I try non-Google options on a regular basis as a matter of principle, I have to admit that Google best serves my general searching needs. Or maybe I've just been Google-brainwashed into taking its idiosyncracies into account when I search). In any event, my main interest in the quick search option is its predictive search suggestions (active only for a few search engines, it seems): based on the letters typed so far, it attempts to guess my search terms, and displays them below the text box. Presumably this is based on frequency in some way (and definitely time-sensitive as you'll see below). So I've been playing with it a bit to see what it thinks I'm looking for. What better than the ego search? Below are the terms that are suggested as I attempt to search for myself on Google:

D: dictionary (followed by Dell, dictionary.com [interesting to see that people are using search for this, rather than just browing to it], dancing with the stars, debenhams [UK department store])

DA: Dancing with the Stars (currently popular US TV series based on the BBC format "Strictly Come Dancing". Followed by Dallas Cowboys, Daylight Savings Time [currently relevant], Daily Mail [UK newspaper, subject of much sneering in the Dunce household], dating).

DAV: Davids Bridal (US chain of bridal shops David's Bridal. Followed by David Beckham, David Copperfield, Dave and Busters, and only then David's Bridal [the web-searching public do not seem inclined to use apostrophes. see also "Dave and Busters").

DAVI: Davids Bridal (again)

DAVID: Davids Bridal (again)

DAVID : David Beckham (UK Ambassador to People's Republic of Southern California, followed by various other Davids not including me: Copperfield, Jones [Aussie department store, and a very common name], Bowie, Letterman).

DAVID V: David Villa (Spanish footballer currently playing for Valencia. Followed by David Vitter [US senator from Louisiana], David Vendetta [French band], David vs Goliath [Bible story used metaphorically all over the place]. I still don't feature)

DAVID VI: David Villa (again, followed by Vitter, Vincent and Virtue)

DAVID VIN: David Vincent (Morbid Angel frontman, followed by Vine [UK sports presenter], Viner [blues musician] and Vinson [Dunce!])

DAVID VINS: The only suggestion given is my name (shared with many other DVs, of course). So I am a relatively unpopular search until you reach the world of phrases beginning with "DAVID VINS".


Yahoo (I will not add the !) gives slightly different results which could say something about the typical Yahoo vs. Google user:
D: Daylight Savings Time 2007 (dictionary, daylight savings time, daylight saving time, driving directions)

DA: it's all Daylight Saving/Savings related

DAV: Davids Bridal (followed by Harley Davidson [the first case in which the search term doesn't begin with the letters specified!], Copperfield and Beckham)

DAVI: Davids Bridal (again)

DAVID: Davids Bridal (again)

DAVID : David Copperfield is first (followed by Beckham, Blaine, Letterman, Lee Roth. Seems to be more USA-centric than Google)

DAVID V: David Victoria Beckham (or maybe I spoke too soon! followed by Villa, Vetter and Vendetta)

DAVID VI: David Victoria Beckham (followed by David and Victoria Beckham wedding pictures, would you believe?)

DAVID VIN: David Vine is more popular than the Morbid Angel (followed by Vincent, Viner, Vinson)

DAVID VINS: My name, but many other suggestions too (David Vins, A David Vinson, David Vinski and so on).

I found someone's "to do" list on the ground near our local post office parcel delivery substation thingy*. I was impressed by the extremely general nature of the items on the list. But my main thought was sympathy for the poor person who lost the list, sitting in a house full of boxes, with a hire van parked outside, and no idea what to do next:

TO DO!!!
Pack up house
Clean up
Collect van
Move
Unpack
Return van




* We "missed" a special delivery on Saturday because the weekend post officer didn't bother to ring or knock. So I had to cycle a couple of miles to the aforementioned post office parcel delivery substation thingy, then wait a half hour or so while they looked fruitlessly for the missing envelope. They were able to tell me many things I didn't care about, such as the fact that the weekend post officer only works on Saturday and has braids, and that the missing delivery was indeed returned to the post office at the end of rounds on Saturday. "So it's probably around here somewhere, or else someone has picked it up by mistake and might find it in their bag at the end of their rounds today". Grrrrrrrrr.

For many Americans whose dialect doesn't include the handy pronoun "y'all" or "youse", the phrase "you guys" serves as a very handy second person plural of perhaps a rather informal register. But it also has the interesting property that, at least in this particular form, the word "guy" no longer necessarily refers to men. "You guys" can refer not only to a group of men, or a mixed group of men and women, but even to a group only of women:

I’m not here to make friends with you guys. -- contestant on season 7 of America's Next Top Model engaged in light conversation with some other (female) contestants.

As far as I know, UK English does not have a comparable phrase deployed in similar situations (although of course there's no shortage of ways to express second-person-plural should the need truly arise); the closest equivalent I can think of is "lads" which is obligatorily masculine.* Indeed, I've seen some female UK-ites take offense to being addressed as part of "you guys". This is no surprise, because it seems to me that only this particular use of "guy" permits female reference. (Not just "you guys". "Guys" can also stand alone in this manner when used for second person reference: "Guys, you'll never believe this forwarded email I just got")

For example, it would not sound at all right** to say "a guy" to refer to a female person (assuming one is not making a specific point about masculine appearance or manner, e.g. "one of the guys"). Plural "guys" also doesn't sound right when used to refer to a group ("All the guys were there. Bob, Mike, Tom, Donna, and Louise"). If I start talking about "sexy guys" there is no possibility that I am talking about a group that includes women. In fact, modifying "guys" with any sort of adjective seems to remove women from the equation, even in the pronoun(ish) sense:

"You guys" = can include women.
"You sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"Sexy guys" = doesn't include women.
"You stupid guys" = doesn't include women.
"You female guys" = doesn't make sense.

Quantification, hmmmm, this seems OK in the female-permitted sense of "you guys", but only when used in the second person. Third person female guys are still a no-no:

"You three guys" = can include women.
"Three guys" = none of whom are women.

Of course this subject has attracted more scholarly attention, and at least to some, "you guys" is a hugely big deal. The excitement practically drips off the page in George Jochnowitz's 1983 article "Another View of You Guys" (appearing in American Speech, 1983) "The rapid spread of you guys through the United States during the last decade [i.e., the 1970s] is the only major change in the prononimal system of English that has occurred since the loss of thou and thee four centuries ago". At the time of writing, (Jochnowitz claimed) "you guys" was the most frequently used second person plural pronoun in the United States, although I'm not sure whether he includes the ambiguous "you" in his count. He also points out that the pronoun is somewhat broken compared to others (you can say "You linguists" but not "you guys linguists"). So, what do you guys think?


* There's a wikipedia entry here which (at the moment) claims that "chaps" is "increasingly used for people of either sex". But I can't think of any cases in which I've actually heard the word "chaps" used in this manner (except perhaps where someone has used it in a weak attempt at comic effect, complete with faux upper class accent).

** All judgments are according to my own intuition only. Your mileage may vary. If so please leave a comment.

*** How can I not mention Guy Fawkes, the etymological grandfather of "you guys"?

Overheard on the bus today:

HE: Are you saying you want me to give you some space? Cause I'll do that if that's what you want.
SHE: Yeah, that's what I want. Space.
HE: Well OK, you just had to say so.
SHE: Only, it has to be space with someone else in it. Not you.

OUCH!