memo

[fox]

to: speakers of English
from:  fox
re: various

dear english speakers:

please note that, just as a man cannot be anyone's fiancée, he cannot be anyone's confidante.  we have borrowed these words whole from french, in which language a distinction is made on the basis of gender; therefore fiancées and confidantes are women, and if you are engaged to a man he is your fiancé and if you confide in and trust him he is your confidant.  (i'd prefer that you not pronounce the t in confidant, but that's a point i can stretch.)

also:  the mechanism used to stop a car or train is the brake.  please cease at once to use the phrase "the train put on the breaks."  especially if you are writing for a major newspaper.

thank you.

prescriptively,
fox

Comments

[gaeta.livejournal.com]

Hee, good luck maintaining order
;~)

[foulds.livejournal.com]

Oh face it, Fox, English is absolutely full of misused derivatives. So many words from the classical languages take no account of agreement, gender, number, tense and so on. My philosophy is this;

Ignore it. Let everyone else make idiots out of themselves by misusing langauge, then get looked at strangely for laughing at them for using an english word correctly.

[chains-of-irony.livejournal.com]

You have a Sam icon! How very appropriate for academic rage (actually, you remind me of him just a little...)

And Grrr, especially at that journalist.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i remind you of our relative ages. he reminds you of me.

;-)

[datlowen.livejournal.com]

What is it with the Post recently? After the naval/navel error on Thursday, whoever wrote their horoscopes on Friday siggested that Virgos "illicit advice." I'd write them and ask them if they need a copy editor, but I don't write letters and they can't afford me. So.

[sowilo.livejournal.com]

The other day, the Post used the word "unostentatious". I weep for the future.

[servalan.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that about the "confidante" thing. Is that still in descriptive US grammar?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

it's in merriam-webster online, and i also know people who do still preserve the distinction. is that descriptive enough? ;-) ('cause, i mean, if you go by what appears in the Post, then no -- but see datlowen's comment for the Post's recent copy editing successes.)

[parsnip.livejournal.com]

Could you drop in a word about blond and blonde</> while you're there? I seem to be the only person who acknowledges a difference.

Also, I need your advice as an anal linguist (and I mean that as a compliment). Apostrophe. Is it blob-at-the-top-and-tail-pointing-to-the-left (like a "9"), or blob-at-the-top-and-tail-pointing-to-the-right (like a "c")? All my fonts on here have it pointing to the left, but my mother swears blind that it's the other way around. I'm going to part with a sum of money to get one permanently drawn on my back, so I want to be sure of it, lol!

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i, too, make a distinction between "blond" and "blonde", and when i'm talking about hair, which has no gender, i often use "fair" just to avoid the issue entirely. :-)

i'm happy to report that i believe the apostrophe looks like a 9 in the absence of particular reasons for it to go the other way (such as if a word is abbreviated by lopping off the beginning of it, like 'phone used to be), in which event the point is to the right but the blob goes on the bottom. (this is what Microsoft Word will give you if you turn on "smart quotes", incidentally, though it calls them right and left single quotation marks, respectively.) however, it's not really my department -- i am fussy about this sort of thing, but to really be positive you'd want not an anal linguist, but an anal copy-editor or typesetter. :-) good luck!

[parsnip.livejournal.com]

damn. screwed up the italics.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Er, well, um, it's "confident" if we want to get technical...

*ducks*

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

confident isn't an adjective, and confidant(e) a noun?