John's Blog

I shouldn’t complain about toilet paper handling, as pop psychology buffs will gleefully label me anal. But I make a simple plea: Don’t load the new roll until the old roll is empty. When the roll on the wall is getting thin, I put a new wrapped roll nearby on the floor, so that no guest will have to search through my cluttered storage cabinet or call out for help.  But very often, someone removes the not-quite-empty roll, leaves it on the sink or somewhere and unwraps and mounts the new roll. WHY? Do they think the next person will not have the wit to unwrap the new roll and mount it when the old runs out? If I discover the situation, I remove the new roll, remount the old, find the wrapper in the wastebasket and rewrap the new. Is that anal, or just common sense?

Why is “incest” always included in the list of reasons everyone should excuse abortion? Mary is pregnant by Uncle Joe. If it’s not rape, then it must have been consensual sex. So are we saying it’s OK for relatives to have sex and then, if they get pregnant, have an abortion? Or if the reason for the abortion is that the child will probably have too many recessive genes, why is it not considered equally OK to abort a fetus that has genetic errors? Abortion should be an option certainly when the pregnancy results from rape or threatens the woman’s life, and, reluctantly, when the pregnancy was unintended. And perhaps even when a malformed fetus promises a life of medical misery and exorbitant expense. But let’s not elevate incest as a special class of reasons for abortion.

I suggest we stop using the cumbersome he or she, his or her, him or her. When we speak of someone whose gender we don’t know, or it doesn’t matter, we need a pronoun that doesn’t specify gender. We already have one! They, their, them is a perfectly good and ancient pronoun referring to two or more persons, animals, things, whatever. Is it a big stretch to let it refer to ONE or more?

OK, sure, the distinction between singular and plural is deeply imbedded in language, and a linguistically sensitive person may gnash their teeth when they hear this historically plural form applied to a single individual. But languages grow and change, and I think this is a worthwhile change for English to embark upon.

Some examples gleaned at random from the Internet and reformed:

“Ask questions that make your child think about what he or she just read.”
“Ask questions that make your child think about what they just read.”

“Do you tell your partner he or she is too fat for sex?”
“Do you tell your partner they are too fat for sex?”

We should still construe the word as plural, realizing that it could refer to one, two, or more people.

The Internet, by the way, is full of suggestions on this very issue, many accepting, or grudgingly tolerating, my solution. And of course rephrasing is always an option.

Gay marriage should not be a religious issue. It’s a basic civil right guaranteed by the Constitution. If you want a priest, rabbi or imam to marry you, good luck, but they shouldn’t be forced to do anything they don’t believe in. The civil authorities who perform marriages ought to be allowed to marry same-sex couples. The religious furor over this simple proposal is overblown, misguided and just plain stupid. The religious bigots who think gay marriage would destroy marriage and/or the family should save their wrath for something that really matters.

People who say plaintively that in 2000 Al Gore “won the popular vote” against George W. Bush as though that meant something important — please. The nationwide popular vote in a presidential election means about as much as the total number of runs scored by each team in the World Series. If one team wins big in some games but doesn’t win four games, it could score more runs than the series winner. But nobody would say they “won the run count.” Similarly, while the popular vote says something about popular preference, it says more about campaign strategies: The candidates concentrate on the states where the vote is likely to be close, especially the states with lots of Electoral College votes. If the president were elected by popular vote, the campaigns would be very different, and so would the popular vote. With the existing system, the popular vote means little.

Now that we have to dial all ten digits, we should format phone numbers as xxx-xxx-xxxx, NOT as (xxx) xxx-xxxx. And there is especially no reason to put the area code of toll-free numbers in parentheses, as (800) xxx-xxxx, as though you don’t have to dial the 800 if you live in the 800 area.

Some people change their email address and don’t bother to send out a change notice or even to discontinue the old address. You ask if they got your emails and get something like “Oh, I hardly ever check that one any more.” Or they DO discontinue and you don’t know why you can no longer reach them. Well, maybe they don’t notify their personae non gratae, and I could be one of those.

No, something in the news did not “reach a crescendo”! This ignorant use of the word, usually in news media, is offensive to musicians and anyone who cares about language. Crescendo is Italian for “increase” — in music it means a gradual increase in loudness, which could be from Very Soft to Somewhat Soft. If the metaphor must be musical, you could say something like “the crescendo of criticism reached fortissimo.”

Everybody jaywalks. Some do it intelligently and thoughtfully, others do it stupidly and rudely. When you have the light, cars have to stop for you. But when cars have the right of way, you should not interfere with them. The good-citizen way to jaywalk is to wait for a gap in the traffic and then walk through it. People who make traffic stop for them when the traffic has the green light should be fined for jaywalking.

I don’t know why it annoys me when people RUN across the street even though they have the light. They’re not just in a hurry, because they stop running when they reach the curb. Do they think they’ll be arrested if they’re still in the street when Walk turns to Don’t Walk? Do they think being in the street is dangerous so they want to minimize the time there? Don’t they realize that Walk means “You have the right of way; cars and busses must stop for you; take your time”?

Please, let’s stop saying “All x are not created equal” when we mean “All x are not alike”! The Founding Fathers never meant to say that everyone is alike, and to imply that they did is an insult to American history.

Retype your password. OK, that makes sense; I can’t see it to be sure it’s right. But retype your email address in a second box? I just look at the first one, make sure it’s right, then copy and paste it into the “retype” box. Anyone who can’t verify their email address by looking at it doesn’t deserve to get mail.

Why do so many people have trouble spelling THER correctly? It’s simple:

They’re putting their coats over there.

I hate (well, dislike) the moralistic arguments on both sides of the pro-life/pro-choice battle. Morally, abortion lies somewhere between birth control and murder. If it’s done early, it’s a lot like birth control (Catholic orthodoxy notwithstanding, morally pure). Done late, it’s a lot like murder. And it should never be undertaken lightly.