No rush

30 January 2008 at 1.17 pm · Filed under Random

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Pizzaphone

13 January 2008 at 4.02 pm · Filed under Culture

You can now order pizza by text message.  I am a little dazed.

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Kill this phrase

12 January 2008 at 3.28 pm · Filed under Culture

“Their views of sea trends through this century still vary widely, while they agree, almost to a person, that centuries of eroding ice and rising seas are nearly a sure thing in a warming world.”

Does anything, other than the dystopic projection, strike you about that sentence?

I am officially starting a crusade against the phrase “to a person.”  It is clunky and irritating.

Everyone knows the old phrase was “to a man.”  “To a person” seems to have really taken hold in the last few years.  Now, I’m for women’s lib as much as the next guy (tweaking you here, of course), but I find “to a person” extremely grating — unlike many of the other gender-neutral phrases we’ve cleanly adopted, such as “flight attendant,” “letter carrier,” “firefighter,” “chair,” and even “chairperson.”  “To a person” just doesn’t work.  (Moreover, it never really made a lot of sense even in its masculine incarnation.  What, exactly, is going to these men or persons?)

The great thing about English is there are tons of replacements.  How about “almost unanimously,” “nearly universally,” or “almost all?”  (”Vast majority” continues to be off-limits.)  Other suggestions?

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