#usage guides

[allthingslinguistic]

Who profits off you feeling bad about how you talk?

📘LINGUISTIC📘"CORRECTNESS"📘IS📘JUST📘A📘RUSE📘FROM📘BIG📘GRAMMAR📘TO📘SELL📘MORE📘GRAMMARS 📘

[theparisreview]

In the seventies, the photographer Robert Cumming would browse Hollywood memorabilia shops, amazed at the degree of artifice on display: so much fakery went into making a movie look real. His experience led him, in his own work, to dissect what Sarah Bay Gachot calls “the mechanics of photographic perception,” building elaborate sets and photographing them to emphasize their illusions: “The French philosopher Hubert Damisch mandated in his 1963 essay ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’ that a true artist should never fall prey to the artificiality of photographic illusion. According to Damisch, photographs were not really ‘invented’ in the early nineteenth century; the camera obscura had existed for centuries, and the lens even longer. It was the desire to fix the image that was new—a latent image was revealed, developed, and preserved; it wasn’t magic: lenses and cameras complied to a spatial system dependent on distance and curvature of glass. Cumming was highly sensitive to these mechanics—for instance, the ability to transform a three-dimensional object with heft and depth into a flat representation. He celebrated this as a skill to be learned and exploited, rather than subverted as opaque—to simultaneously maintain and destroy illusion and quirks of vision with photography.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

[allthingslinguistic]

If style guides treated “eclipse” the way they treated “email” (via).

[allthingslinguistic]

[Updated Link] From the official website of the Canadian Department of Justice:

The use of the singular "they" is becoming more common not only in spoken but in written English and can prove to be useful to drafters in a legislative context to eliminate gender-specific language and heavy or awkward repetition of nouns.

Consider using the third-person pronouns "they", "their", "them", "themselves" or "theirs" to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun. 

Now if only we could get the Canadian government to approve of "yo" as a third-person pronoun... But seriously, I'm really excited to see formal official media recognizing the legitimacy of this construction that speakers of English have been using since at least Jane Austen's day and that pedants have been disputing since much more recently.