Genesis of a Verb
February 9, 2010 1 Comment
excellent well, you are a fishmonger
“The less/fewer distinction isn’t really that hard to learn, but it would be much easier to not have to bother. I can’t think of any situations in which the existence of the two different words is actually helpful to our understanding of what’s being communicated. Native speakers of the English language have a perverse tendency to take pride in the difficulty of our language, but it’s not actually a good thing.” ~ Matt Yglesias stating his case for “less words”
Okay, but the first problem with this is that we would have to do away entirely with one of the words – either less or few (not fewer – we’d pretty much have to ditch “few” itself). So then what would you use? For instance, “few” is not interchangeable with “less” even if we did rewrite the rules on less/fewer. Each word has its own double meanings (less = minus, for instance). Far easier, I think, to just remember that fewer refers to a measurable item (apples) and less refers to an immeasurable item (patience). Take out either word and you’re left with a less accurate description of what it is you’re actually speaking about.
This may sound double-plus-good to Yglesias, but I rather like having the ability to more specifically address what it is I’m talking about. Fewer words mean that we have less of an ability to express what it is we mean exactly. [Read more →]
June 4, 2009 13 Comments
Same Sex Marriage and Nomenclature
Writing in response to this, tough cookie (and same sex marriage skeptic) Helen Rittlemeyer wrote,
Everybody remembers Ali taunting Ernie Terrell in 1967: “What’s my name, fool?” Whether or not you sympathize with Terrell’s reluctance to legitimize Ali’s conversion, I think it’s clear that the gentlemanly thing to do, given the situation, is to bite the bullet and call the man whatever he wants…. Legal recognition of same-sex unions is the equivalent of putting “Muhammad Ali” on the fight card. It won’t force conservative churches to recognize gay marriages, but it will make every reference to a man’s “partner” sound hostile. If the government calls him a husband, I can’t refuse to call him one without putting myself in a class with the people who say “freedom fries.”
To which the obvious rejoinder, it seems to me, is “so just recognize the equality of the marriage.”
As John made clear in the podcast, and I think Helen believes too, calling gay marriage marriage is an example of failing to give the elephant a goddamn peanut; they believe that there is a difference between a union between two people of the same sex, and two people of different sexes. I can only say that, of course, there are some differences in those unions, some obvious, some not, but that those differences don’t need to be recognized by government in a way that changes our nomenclature for permanent romantic pairing. As John has alluded on his own blog, part of the problem with his question is that there is a sense in which race, like gender, is also real, and yet the state doesn’t see a need to differentiate between inter-racial marriages and homoracial (neologism!) unions. I think John does a little unnecessary mental gymnastics here; simply the fact that we can draw meaningful distinctions between different situations– in marriage or elsewhere– doesn’t, I think, compel us to create two different names for the institution. And I think we should always proceed with caution when we move in the direction of “separate but equal”, as the true insight of Brown vs. Board of Ed was precisely that separate is inherently unequal.
As I’ve said before, we can draw distinctions, but we absolutely are empowered, I think, as both a culture and as a society of laws, to make up our own mind about when its necessary to draw those distinctions in explicit ways. Sure, people will draw different reactions to same-sex unions, in some senses, than they draw from heterosexual unions. But cultural and social distinctions will take care of culture and society. We can leave the law out of it.
January 21, 2009 3 Comments
