Sex, sex, sex

This is a post I wrote some time ago for another blog. I'm still quite pleased with it...

"Gender" is a perfectly good word. It is a linguistic construct which in many languages happens to be categorised as masculine and feminine (and sometimes neuter). There is no reason it should not be categorised by shape or colour and there may be languages that do so.

"Sex" is also a perfectly good word. It is a biological construct which is usually categorised as male and female.

It annoys me when "Gender" is used as a euphemism for "sex". No euphemism is required for that word, and if it were I am sure we could come up with something less confusing.

While I'm on the difference between "gender" and "sex", I'll touch on the use of pronouns.

In English we have masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns: "he", "she" and "it" respectively. In theory we could use "it" when we are talking of person of unknown sex, but we don't: it isn't considered polite. We should use "he", the masculine pronoun. It really annoys me when people use "she" for this purpose. Let me give you some examples to explain why it annoys me:

• I saw a footballer today. She was wearing boots.
• I saw a secretary today. He was wearing a suit.
• If you met a traffic warden, what do you think she would be wearing?

In the first two examples, I am talking about people I have seen. I presumably know their sex, and I've intentionally done a bit of sexual stereotype bending in order to make the point.

In the third example, I haven't yet met the person. By using the feminine pronoun "she", I am giving myself a picture that I am going to meet a female traffic warden. This doesn't surprise me, since a reasonable proportion of traffic wardens (in the UK) are female, but it does mean that if I meet a male traffic warden I won't consider the condition of the example to have been met. By replacing "she" with "he" in its non sex-specific sense, any traffic warden, whether male or female, will qualify. This is a matter of language, not of sexual equality. Our language is no more sexist than any other language - a language is not capable of being sexist even though its structure or vocabulary may reflect some historical bias.

I recently studied with the Open University and in some of the courses I found the author stuck permanently to using "she" in examples. I was left imagining a world full of women (incidentally, usually doing fairly menial jobs). I would not have objected to a random sprinkling of "he"s and "she"s, nor would it have caused a problem to have a text full of unspecified "he"s.

Please stop using "gender" where you mean good, old-fashioned "sex" and stop using "she" where you have no need to specify the sex of the person you are talking about.​

Grammar - Part 2 (the false plural)

FIFA World Cup Trophy

Is it just me that gets annoyed when people, and in particular the press, uses a plural verb with a singular noun, or less frequently vice versa?

Of course we are in the middle of the World Cup, so the very worst offences come out all the time. You know the sort of thing. First of all, as a non-football-fan I object to using "England" out of context to mean a team rather than a country... come to that I object to using the term "World Cup" without qualifying it will "football". In fact, it isn't even a cup, it's a trophy, for heaven's sake! However that's beside the point.

A typical statement from the press might be "England are favourites to win the game". Now, in no sense is "England" plural. England is a country (as already stated) but even the "England team" is singular, so it has to be "England is favourite to win the game". What else can it be? On the other hand "England team members play to the end" makes perfect sense: "team members" is plural.

I'll gather some interesting examples here as I find them.. This letter to the Boston Standard manages to get plural for singular and vice versa in one sentence. Perhaps it should go up for some trophy (or should that be cup?). Granted it was written by a reader and not by a staff journalist but it was surely the editor that put this sentence in bold print without correcting it.

"Interesting isn’t it that our county council say that Boston, the county’s second largest town, does not need a bypass, while towns like Crowland in the south of the county has two!"

Grammar - Part 1 (the apostrophe)

As usual when I set up a personal blog, I haven't really been making much use of this one, so I thought I might at least temporarily start posting about grammatical errors I see. I know, everyone does it, but I hope to make it at least slightly interesting.

There is a problem with writing such a blog and that is, what if I don't get my grammar right all the time. Well, I am not perfect in that respect, certainly. My punctuation can be a bit erratic as you may have noticed and I am prone to typographical errors when I'm typing quickly as I am just now.

Motor racing at it's best (sic)

I'll certainly do my best to keep on the straight and narrow but I do think there's a difference between a note to oneself (where grammar doesn't matter), a blog (where people will see it so you should make an attempt to get it right) and, for example, advertising copy (which should have been proof-read to death).

The first and most obvious target is the apostrophe. It seems that superfluous apostrophes, sometimes called greengrocers' apostrophes because they were once almost solely used on A-boards advertising vegetables, have found their way into everywhere that the written word can be found.

This week we are due to go to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I pointed out to my wife that she may be interested in one of the branded t-shirts but she went off the idea when we found the ones pictured here. I wonder whether Lord March knows about this blunder?

"It is" is contracted to "it's" using an apostrophe. That would make using an apostrophe for the possessive ambiguous, so it's omitted in "its" when it is possessive:

• "Motor racing at its best." but...
• "It's the best motor racing."

Readings largest tanning studio (sic)

Someone today pointed out a rare case of the missing apostrophe. I suppose with all these extra ones around the country we had to find where they'd been stolen from at some point. Here is the second exhibit showing an advert for a tanning salon in Reading.

I'll keep my eye out for interesting cases of the superfluous or missing apostrophe. This is no place for the banal, every day apple's and pear's of the greengrocer's sign.

Cats

Ban domestic cats (in the UK), I say. Keeping them indoors is cruel to cats; letting them out adds an unnatural predator for wildlife, and one that doesn't even usually know what to do once prey has been caught.

This New Zealander has the right idea.

I am fed up with hearing cat owners mourning the death of another wild animal or bird when the solution (or rather the problem) is staring them in the face. I am also fed up of hearing people saying their cat doesn't kill, when it is a predator and they have clearly not followed it everywhere it has gone.

There may be people (on farms for instance) for whom keeping cats is a good solution to a pest problem but mostly the cat is the problem.