Pet hates - language

This isn't your normal blog post because I intend to add to it over time expressions I hear which really annoy me. I'm not really the Mr Grumpy type. I don't necessarily react to neologisms or even to spelling or grammatical errors where they are clearly accidental and don't change the meaning of the message.

What's more I admit I am not immune myself and I am very wary of Muphry's Law. In fact, don't hesitate to pick me up on my errors; I'll try not to react badly but I will always take notice.

Here's the current state of the list.

• "One of the only..." as in "It is one of the only such bridges left in the country." This is meaningless. It may be "one of the few" or it may be "the only one"; make up your mind.
• "One year anniversary". I've dealt with this one before, here.
• "Me, myself and I". Which to use? See the dedicated article here.
• The greengrocer's apostrophe. This article is not exactly a how to. It's more of an anecdote.
• Here's another article on apostrophes, "its" and "it's" this time.
• Here's an article on my opinion on what is or is not plural.
• An article on my opinion on the difference between gender and sex and how that affects language. Please read the comment I left at the bottom of my own article; no offence is intended to anyone.

Would you trust this man?

I was in a pub recently and I noticed someone behind the bar was wearing a tee-shirt with pictures and writing on it. It somehow nagged at me subconsciously and I couldn't take my eyes off it but I couldn't work out why.

I realised quite quickly that it had on it a word with an extraneous apostrophe, which is enough reason for me to think "I wouldn't wear that" but there was more to it than that. What was it? Then I realised it was a tee-shirt advertising a tattoo artist which bore the word "Tattoo's". Now, I'm not on the lookout for a tattoo artist but if I were I think I would want one who could write better than that, or at least recognised the need for proof reading!

Anniversaries come once a year

I've had it up to here with anniversaries. No, I'm not saying I won't buy my beloved some token gift when the time comes round again, I mean I am fed up with the current fad for the tautology of the "n year anniversary". "Anniversary" comes from the Latin "anniversarius" meaning returning yearly. That in turn is made up of "annus" (year), "versus" (turned, or a turning) and the suffix "-arius" (connected with, pertaining to). There is no need to say "year" when using "anniversary".

Now we might sometimes use anniversary playfully in something like "six month anniversary", which is also wrong but I can accept it as an informal expression and there isn't really a good formal alternative. "Mensiversary" could work, derived from the Latin "mensis" (month) but it won't be widely understood.

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.​