Month: October 2013

Christen McCurdy isn’t convinced that epicenes – gender-neutral singular pronouns such as ou or ze – will catch on among English-speakers:

Linguist Denis Baron argues that pronouns are the most conservative part of speech in English, and that speakers are incredibly slow to adopt new ones broadly. The most recent one he counts is “its,” which appears in some of Shakespeare’s work (though Shakespeare uses other words, including “is,” to mean precisely the same thing), but not in the King James Bible. … If the first attempts at creating an epicene pronoun came from nitpicky writers and grammarians, it’s only been fairly recently – say, the 1950s and ’60s – that writers started proposing epicene pronouns as an argument for greater inclusiveness. Feminists trying to shift away from the generic “he” were among the first; transgender and genderqueer writers came later. Baron finds broad use of the Spivak pronouns – “e,” “eim,” and “eir,” coined by mathematician Michael Spivak – in transgender forums online and in science fiction, but hasn’t found an instance of a new epicene pronoun gaining traction in English.

The CW network has more faith that the epicene will emerge; it recently announced that its new drama about a transgender teenager would be titled Ze.

Some semblance of sanity broke out among the Republicans on Capitol Hill. But it may not last long. And the president turned down the first offer because of a postponement of the debt ceiling raise for six weeks because the GOP insisted on keeping the entire federal government shut down. We got some more clarity on why Obamacare’s federal website is so inexcusably awful.  And we imposed some unaccustomed accountability from all those who confidently decried any notion that the Assad regime was serious about turning over its chemical weapon stockpiles.

A non-English speaker tried to figure out what a party-pooper is; readers pitched in to a suddenly popular thread on animal welfare; and we passed our 30,000th subscription (30,043 right now). Join the experiment [tinypass_offer text=”here”] – and help forge a new business model for online journalism from the ashes of the old.

The most popular post of the day was The Depravity Of The Pro-Torture Right, as leading neocons lined up to joke about waterboarding prisoners at a roast of the war criminal, Dick Cheney. In a strong third place came a YouTube that still cracks me up. Booo Wendy!

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) leaves the U.S. Capitol for a meeting with House Republican leaders and U.S. President Barack Obama October 10, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I realised recently that this month marks 12 years of my daily visits to The Dish. I recall that you received a flood of toasts and roasts on your 10th anniversary, but I thought you might appreciate receiving another such email out of the blue.

I live in Hong Kong and in 2001, my brother, who lived in Manhattan at the time, posted me a printed copy of “This Is a Religious War.” I enjoyed it and so I googled you and I found your blog. I had no idea what a blog was at the time. I simply knew you posted little articles everyday and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. Now 12 years later, I am still a daily visitor to The Dish. I am a paid [tinypass_offer text=”subscriber”] and bought several copies of “The View From Your Window” book. I have emailed you a handful of times over the years and you have replied a few times. I remember very early days (maybe late 2001) you posted a survey designed to profile your readers. When the results came in, you were so amazed that you had any regular readers! You didn’t know if anyone was really out there.

We have certainly had our share of one-sided arguments with me yelling at my monitor – but hey, we got through it and I have always appreciated your intellectual honesty. I actually remember when you began posting your readers’ “Dissent of the Day.” I was so impressed with the transparency that those posts offered as well as the confidence it suggested you had in your own positions. (By the way, the “Dissent of the Day” posted without rebuttal from you remains my favourite Dish feature.) Congratulations on all your success and thanks to you and your team for the thousands of thoughtful posts – and for the daily grind of hard work that went into each one.

You’re extremely welcome. It’s a staggeringly rewarding – and utterly exhausting – thing to write for some readers for 13 years straight every day. But the experience has been the most fascinating in my life. And now, I’ve managed to find the best team of researchers, writers, techies and under-bloggers out there, the burden is nothing like as great for me personally. This has become a true team effort, and it remains true that I’m in awe of all of my colleagues, who are also, inescapably at this point, among my best friends.

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Natasha Geiling details the history of the movie theater snack:

Before the Great Depression, most popcorn sold was a white corn variety–yellow corn wasn’t widely commercially grown, and cost twice as much as the white variety. Movie vendors, however, preferred yellow corn, which expanded more when it popped (creating more volume for less product) and had a yellowish tint that belied a coating of butter. People became accustomed to the yellow popcorn and would refuse to buy the white variety at markets, requesting the kind that looked like “the popcorn at the movies.” Today, white popcorn accounts for 10 percent of commercially grown popcorn; yellow popcorn takes up almost the rest of the commercial market (with some color varieties, like blue and black, grown in negligible amounts).