I saw the following today, on the internet, on Reddit, while taking a brief pause from work:
The Return of the Most Winningest
English language
“None of them is” or “None of them are?”
Which of the following is correct:
It’s ok! None of the coffee is on my shirt!
I called the guys, and none of them is coming.
I called the guys, and none of them are coming.
(Oh man, usually when he asks Which one is correct? they’re all correct and he expects us to amazed. Watch)
Well, you might actually be amazed to find out that they’re all correct!
(*sigh* See?)
But why are they all correct?
My Ideas
How about a short light post today, after getting heavy yesterday (I mean, Nazis, after all)? A few weeks ago, I wrote about a typical example of how ideas come to me, and make their way onto your screen. Usually ideas come to me like that, just based on my everyday encounters with language. When I start a post with something like The other day I was listening to the radio and I noticed how the presenter pronounced the word haberdashery, it’s usually true, and not some awkward way to introduce the topic. And sometimes I’ll start with something like The other day I was wondering about the etymology of the word hamster… because that’s the kind of thing I do when my mind has a moment to wander.
Calling a Nazi a Nazi
Following the violence (from armed Nazis, and the one side they represent) in Charlottesville, some people have suggested that the perpetrators only acted like brutal, thuggish Nazis, because people had been calling them brutal, thuggish Nazis for so long. Of course they’re going to act like Nazis if you keep calling them Nazis! Obviously it’s an attempt to take the blame away from the actual Nazis committing the violence. It’s an attempt to say, Look, these are just troubled young men not happy with the way they’re country’s going. But they’ve been demonized by SJWs, and that’s made them lash out in frustration! What do you expect when you call someone a Nazi!
There a couple of assumptions being made here. The first is that if you label someone with a negative name often enough, they’ll become what you call them. And that seems logical enough. Imagine how angry it would make you to unfairly labelled as something as terrible as a Nazi!? Except, that only really works when the label is applied unfairly, doesn’t it? So let’s take a moment to have a look at some of the people being called Nazis:
Avoiding Getting into Habits as a Teacher
We all get into routines, often continuing with them long after we’ve realised any original context for them has disappeared. Teachers for some reason seem to be a little more prone to getting into bad habits than other people.
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
I mentioned this effect a while back, when writing about our tendency to find patterns and meaning in randomness. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when we learn some new information, often a new word, and seem to see it everywhere afterwards. I was thinking about this recently when I wrote about words I don’t know. I knew that I’d start to see some of the words I was reading for the first time, and sure enough, a few weeks ago, I came across the word ithyphallic while reading Foucault’s Pendelum. Given the specificy of its meaning, I hadn’t expected to see it often, though it did make sense in the context of the book.
The term, Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, is a somewhat unusual one.
Space: The Final Frontier
Space may produce new worlds; whereof so rife,
There went a fame in Heaven that he ere long,
Intended to create, and therein plant,
A generation, whom his choice regard,
Should favor equal to the sons of Heaven:
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I suppose, after talking about Earth and earth yesterday, there’s a certain logic to today having a look at the word space. Like earth, it’s got two very different levels of meaning, which are still quite similar.
English-Language Thoughts 