Before
A chronicle of an American life
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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Marcus wrote @ January 13th, 2008 at 4.10 pm
“virtual unanimous?”
Marcus wrote @ January 13th, 2008 at 4.12 pm
Whoops–I meant “virtually unanimous!”
“to the very last, duped moron among them”
No, that earlier one wasn’t right. How about “almost each one of the data-fabricating pieces of human debris”? Or does “human” not work because it has ‘man’ in it? Just throw in ‘excrement’ in place of ‘human debris.’ No wait…excreMENt. Crap. Yeah, ‘crap’ will work.
JUSTME wrote @ January 22nd, 2008 at 12.56 am
I was doing research on password security which has nothing to do with this article Bill wrote, but wanted to share some thoughts on this with all the Bill aficionados.
They reccommend using a password that’s easy for you to remember, but hard for others to guess. Never use your login name, your spouse’s name, or your birthday. But what about your spouse’s birthday?
Microsoft then advised not to use words found in the dictionary, because hackers have sophisticated tools that can easily guess passwords based on real words, in a variety of languages, even spelled backward. Wow.
Does this mean I have to use words not found in the dictionary?
Microsoft said not to make your passwords hard to remember. Say what? My password is already 37 characters long, keyed with a complicated spy code developed by the underground in prewar France, and then translated into an obscure Sanskrit dialect mixed with Chaucerian old English. Like I said, I have it hidden in my desk. But Microsoft then advised against that, too, saying it was too easy to find. So I put it in a jar, which I buried out in the back yard by the fence. Trouble is, I have to dig it up every time I want to go online.
They also said never give your password out to anyone, including your kids. All my kids know my password and they are also the only ones who can operate any and all electronic equipment at my house. I think they have locked me out of the porn channels on my DirectTv.
Microsoft gives you a bunch of helpful tips on what to do when your password is stolen. I looked out in the back yard, and sure enough, there was a deep hole where I’d buried my password, with muddy footprints leading away into the woods. The jar was gone stolen!
When I was a kid we didn’t have this problem. In fact it was a BIG DEAL if you didn’t have a party line, which allowed two families to listen in on each others problems, which both families did often.
There was one phone booth, two blocks from my house, and you could go there to make a call in private but since we lived on West Broad Street, and all traffic to and from California drove by the phone booth, it was impossible to hear anyone from said phone booth.
Plus if it was summer the bugs would eat you and if it was winter you would freeze to death.
If you wanted privacy on the phone at home, the best you could hope for was to pull the phone cord into the basement, close the basement door and sit about six steps from the door as that was all the farther it would reach and you might get some privacy.
The only things I had to know when growing up was my phone number, my address and my school bus number.
Maybe I should use some combination of those for a password.
Oh yeah, I do remember my master lock combination 37-24-15. Maybe I could use this for a password.
Lastly, please come visit my website that is in the creation stages www.aparatroopersstory.com/
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