Civis had been disappointed with the lack of response and wondered if something was amiss.
Well, it was. The emails were disappearing into a black hole. They have been rescued, and Civis has the welcome opportunity to respond to at least some of them.
The chats about language elicit the most replies. Today, we begin with two of them.
First up, another apology — of a sort — to Craig Radford for stealing a clap or two of his thunder.
One might call it one of those "great minds think alike" moments if perchance the mind from this quarter didn’t fall well short of that level.
Craig prepared a piece for the Sergeant’s Session at Rotary Dunedin on a Friday for the following week. He was stunned the next day to read that Civis shared a similar little "gripe about language" and outlined parallel points.
As unfortunate Craig emailed, it would be difficult to convince club members he had prepared his piece ahead of the ODT’s.
Craig is similarly irritated by "they" (a plural word) for he/she and him/her. He finds "they" applied in this way potentially ambiguous and confusing.
Like Civis, he understands that many in the LGBTQIA+ communities find the traditional pronouns objectionable and/or inappropriate.
Like Civis, Craig rejects the impersonal and cold "it" as a substitute.
Both Craig and Civis pointed to the emergence of "Ms" when many women baulked at the Mrs/Miss distinction that did not apply to men.
Craig’s challenge, like Civis’, was for society to invent neutral singular pronouns that were acceptable in the LGBTQIA+ communities. He was disappointed only to come up with "te" (pronounced "tee") for he/she and "hap" for him/her.
Rotary members were asked fun questions during Craig’s session to be given the chance to pay "fines".
Civis smiled at this sign-of-the-times suggestion: "Please pay if you still do a double take when you hear a man refer to ‘my husband’ or a woman to my ‘wife’."
Civis thinks, as Craig probably does, that those double takes will fade as most of society catches up.
* * *
Civis thanks John Burton for contributions, corrections and encouragement.
He followed up Civis’ gripe about "amount of people" with his about "multiple people" instead of many or several. John finds it commonly used, even in the ODT.
"It was never thus when I was at school in the 1950s."
Many (please not multiple) Civis readers will no doubt agree.
* * *
References to "black holes" are long part of our idiom, and the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta immediately came to Civis’ mind.
Curiosity demanded a check of Civis’ rudimentary recall.
The Black Hole was a tiny cell in which mostly British prisoners of war were held one night in 1756 after the Nawab of Bengal captured Fort William.
The authorised version had it that 123 of the 146 died from dehydration, heat exhaustion and suffocation. The number might have been smaller.
The incident grew in infamy and was deployed by the East India Company as a reason to take over Calcutta (now Kolkata) completely.
The term became widespread through Western culture and remains so. Mark Twain used it, and it was satirically referred to in the long-running risque musical Oh! Calcutta!
Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines) and Diana Gabaldon (of Outlander series fame) are among many (not multiple!) who could not resist references.
There’s apparently even a mention in the 1988 animated film Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, and by Jeremy Clarkson on the heat in a car he was driving. There are claims, too, that the Black Hole of Calcutta inspired the term black hole for the gravitational collapse of heavy stars.
