Archive for the ‘communication’ Category

Nothin' but Bad Intentions

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Years ago, when I was pursuing a master's degree at IUPUI, I routinely listened to WTTS, which transmitted out of Bloomington but usually came-in quite clear, and which had one of the best play-lists of the many radio stations to which I've listened in my life.

They occasionally played a grim song, with lyrics such as

You've got nothin' but bad intentions
You've got somethin' to prove
You've got nothin' but bad intentions
Baby, it's your move
(or something very close to those) and made repeated use of a sample from Body and Soul (1947) where Charlie Davis (John Garfield) says What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies.

But I couldn't remember who performed it; and, over the last several years, my googling of the lyrics or of the sampling have not identified the song.

Yester-day, I telephoned WTTS for help. I was told that the man to ask was Todd Berryman, but that he was on vacation until to-day. This morning, I called again and was promptly connected to Mr Berryman. He didn't have the answer at his finger-tips, but he ran various checks against references to which he had access, and gave me a short-list of candidates, one of which was Bad Intentions by Robbie Robertson.

To-night, I found that Robertson's Bad Intentions was part of the sound-track for Jimmy Hollywood (1994), and was released to radio stations to promote the film; and IMDb says that Jimmy Hollywood referenced Body and Soul.

There's still a tiny chance that this song isn't the one that I've tried to identify, but I'm really quite sure that, thanks to Mr Berryman and to WTTS, my question has been answered. (I've ordered a copy of the promotional CD, so you'll read about it if I'm mistaken.)

Amendments against Enchantments

Saturday, 26 April 2008

The BBC WWWebsite has a story with the headline Dutch bill to ban magic mushrooms. My first-pass parsing of that headline took magic as a noun and mushrooms as a third-person singular active indicative verb.

Aha! Pronoun trouble!

Sunday, 6 April 2008

I am in favor of gender-neutral wording.

I have no grudge against those who assert that the English masculine pronoun is actually a neuter. In fact, people have got my back up by pretending that it was somehow proved to be a false neuter simply because some collectives of PC academics declared it to be such.

But the fact is that almost no one is always on-the-ball, and most people are never on the ball, and it's good to keep them from thinking that something is necessarily male or masculine simply because masculine pronouns are used.

My favorite resolution is one that I first observed in academic papers by economists; specifically, they would alternate the genders assigned to hypothetical subjects. (The prevailing practice seemed to be to start with a feminine.) This practice adds a few virtues to simple gender neutrality. First, the personal pronouns are familiar to the reader. Second, in many cases, two subjects subsequently are naturally distinguished by their genders, instead of by more complex constructions. Third, those readers who need to be awakened from sexist presumptions are often actively confronted with one gender where they were expecting the other.

(Naturally, some PC folk will leap on the first masculine or feminine that they spot, before discerning the pattern, and denounce the writing for being gendered. In some cases they do this in a sort of drive-by attack, and it's pure cost. In some cases, one can show the pattern to them and presumably put them on the road to being more thoughtful in general. In some cases, one does not so much try to get them on-the-ball as just throw the ball at them, in a game of verbal dodge-ball played to drive them from the court.)

Some years ago, various would-be reformers tried to push the idea of introducing a new pronoun — or something like a new pronoun — which (unlike it) would distinctly refer to singular things with personality but would be a neuter. The more clever ideas involved a sort of singularization of they, but all of the candidates that I saw were awkward — some indeed as if their creätors had wanted them to be so — and none really caught-on (though I'm sure that there's still some small organization or organizations trying to advance such constructs).

Another potential solution is to recast expressions in terms of one. Normally, I use one instead of the generic you. Like most people, I sometimes slip into using you not to refer to my audience, but to a generic person. Often this habit is innocuous, but one doesn't want to insult one's audience by seeming to make assertions about them which may indeed be true of oneself yet still offend them. Anyway, one can often serve nicely as referring to a hypothetical person of unspecified gender.

The Woman of Interest asked a question that I find interesting: Is this one a pronoun? As an alternative to the generic you, it plays a rôle otherwise assigned to a pronoun; and, like a pronoun, it has a reflexive form, oneself. Well, if it's a pronoun, then it's the only English pronoun with an apostrophe in its genitive, one's. My mnemonic, used to help people avoid using it's for the genitive its then fails.