TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH THE LANGUAGE
I'm encountering more and more changes in the language that I don't fully
understand, and spending more and more time trying to figure out the new rules.
I'm using this space to describe some of the questions that are puzzling me in
the hope that someone can provide me with the answers.
12
March 2002
First Puzzle: Anniversary
Rapprochement
Observation: Anniversaries no longer accumulate in increments of a year. For
example as I write this, the "six month anniversary" of the attacks
on the World trade Center has recently been observed. Numerous other such
instances make clear that anniversaries can occur after periods shorter than a
year (I haven't noticed examples of periods longer than a year or thought about
how that might work). I haven't been paying careful enough attention, but I
seem to remember hearing reference to a one month anniversary.
My question is: what are the rules about having anniversaries?
For example, what's the shortest time required for an anniversary? Was I
right about one month? Is one week (or any other particular number of weeks, of
course) also acceptable? What about one or more days?
I presume that a so-many-day anniversary would be observed at the same hour
of the appropriate day. That is, the one day anniversary of an event that
occurred at 11:23 a.m. on one day
would be observed at 11:23 a.m. of
the following day.
If that's so, it suggests that there can't be anniversaries for periods
counted in units of time that aren't divided into subunits. And if that's the
case, you could perhaps have the one minute anniversary--it would occur at the
same second of the next minute. But you couldn't have a one second anniversary
because there's no unit for specifying the place in the second at which the
anniversary occurred. Unless, of course, we go to something
like nanoseconds...
Another question comes up, too. Do the periods between anniversaries have to
be designated in one unit of measure only? Do they have to be statable in just one of the following: years, months,
weeks, etc. or can there be a mixture of units? For example, could we have the
two year, one month, three day, and two-and-a-half hour anniversary? If this
were possible, it would present the obvious advantage that any moment would be
some kind of anniversary of any prior event that one cared to choose. (It would
of course present the same disadvantage).
If anyone can explain what the new rules are, I'd be most grateful.
Second Puzzle: Meridian
Creep
Observation: 12 noon, formerly 12
m., has now become 12 p.m. It's
apparent that the meridian--the line between a.m. (ante meridian) and p.m.
(post meridian) hours--has crept slightly forward (unless that direction should
be called backward). However, I'm pretty sure that the time one minute
earlier--the former 11:59 a.m.--is
still a.m. Therefore, the meridian must now lie somewhere between 11:59 a.m. and 12:00
p.m. (née 12:00 m). This raises several questions.
The first question would seem to be where exactly the meridian is now, but
my research so far hasn't turned up any useful information on this question.
A second question concerns the uniformity of the shift. Is it uniform
throughout the 24-hour cycle or are parts of the day shifting faster than
others? One obvious point to check was whether 12
midnight had also become 12 a.m.
If it hadn't, then the shift had resulted in an obvious bulge. I had to keep a
close eye out for quite a time, but I've finally found at least two instances
in which 12 midnight is indeed
referred to as 12 a.m.
Although this proves that times at the opposite side of the cycle have also
moved, it, of course, doesn't prove conclusively that they've moved at the same
rate. In fact, I can't shake the suspicion that 12
noon actually became 12 p.m.
just a bit earlier than 12 midnight
became 12 a.m.
And this possibility (not to say probability) raises a further question
about the prospects for the future. Suppose the meridian and the parts of the
cycle neighboring it are indeed creeping faster than the midnight neighborhood. What happens if and when the
meridian passes 11:59? At this
point, obviously the former 11:59 a.m.
becomes redesignated 11:59
p.m. But since the opposite side is creeping more slowly (according
to our supposition), this would have happened before the original 11:59 p.m. had become 11:59 a.m. thus making 11:59
p.m. occur twice a day. How would we distinguish? Would we say, "11:59 p.m. at night" vs. "11:59 p.m. during the day", or "11:59 p.m. née a.m." vs. "11:59 p.m. née p.m.", or what?
Any enlightenment will be appreciated.
20 August 2006
Third Puzzle: Sexes and Genders
Observation: People (and many other species) used to come in two
sexes, male and female, or so I understood. Now it seems that these two are
genders in many, most, or even all cases.
The question is: When are they
genders and when
sexes? The answer seems to keep changing: at least my idea of what the preferred usage is has passed through several stages over time. If I attempt to review my own successive understandings, I come up with something like the following:
1. At the beginning, as far as I knew, they were called
sexes. When I first became aware of the use of
gender in this sense, the explanation I heard was that it was begun by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that she did it to avoid the word
sex because it made her uncomfortable
(1). Anyway, I haven’t heard any more about her role in this, so maybe this explanation had no basis in fact.
2. Subsequently this use of
gender seemed to grow, and at some point I got the understanding that it was being actively promoted by advocates of the idea that the differences in human male and female behavior are in large part due to socialization. The explanation I got was that to emphasize their point, they advocated using
sex for the biological distinction and
gender for the culturally-assigned roles and to behavioral differences between those males and females socialized into them.
3. From some later point, it seemed that some kind of discomfort had become attached to the word
sex so that people felt easier avoiding the word entirely and just saying
gender for all (at least human) instances of the male-female distinction. At any rate, one now regularly hears talk of the
gender even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.
4. But maybe some distinction is still being promoted here. Might this, for example, be intended to make some point about the extent of influence from the external environment on the intra-uterine development of the fetus? Or is it simply that
gender just gathered a momentum that has carried it beyond its goal?
5. What then is to be the fate of the pariah word,
sex? It does seem to have re-emerged as the way to refer to the act of sexual intercourse so that people who copulate are now said to
have sex. (Does the expression
have sex fill some previous semantic gap? That explanation hardly sounds convincing since English-speakers had previously seemed to experience little difficulty in finding ways to refer to the act.)
6. But should the replacement of
sex by
gender in reference to male and female be regarded as now complete? There are still some loose ends as far as my understanding is concerned. First, I don’t know the rule for other species. Is the distinction between bulls and cows one of
gender, or are they still
sexes as of now? Is the answer the same for peafowl? Bees? Black widow spiders? Papaya trees?
7. And there’s the word
sexist? One would expect it have been replaced by
genderist. In fact, one might expect that someone who was
sexist would be someone who likes
having sex. (But that condition appears to be so common that one might have felt that it was its absence that was more in need of a name).
Any clarification would be welcome.
Note
1. Ginsburg would have been exploiting the facts (1) that the noun classes of certain languages, such as the Indo-European, have traditionally been called genders (from the Latin root genus meaning kind), and (2) that the individual two or three classes have traditionally been named after the sexes (or absence of sexual status in the case of neuter). Thus the word gender has become associated in people’s minds with sexual distinctions.
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First put on the Web on 13 March 2002
Third Puzzle added 20 August 2006
