The Winnipeg Wind Chill Factor Omission (or Making a Virtue out of Necessity)

 

We are experiencing a cold spell here in Victoria. Recently, I read that the temperature was going down to minus 20. It wasn’t, of course. It was going down to something like minus 8, but with a strong wind…. Oh no, I thought. The Winnipeg Wind Chill Factor Omission has reached the west coast.

When I arrived in Winnipeg in 1970, degrees Fahrenheit were being replaced by degrees Celsius. One New Year’s Eve the temperature went down to minus 41. Fahrenheit or Celsius, I forget which, but it didn’t matter, for they crossed over at minus 40. Forty below was minus 40. Along with the temperature came the wind chill factor, as a warning, for you would be frost-bitten much sooner in the wind. The temperature is minus 40, we were told — minus 45 with the wind chill factor. 

And then, for some reason, perhaps in the late seventies or eighties, the wind chill was no longer expressed as a temperature, but a four digit number, something to do with joules. Nobody knew what it meant, but 2,000 and above was bad. It was serious brass-monkey weather. 

There was a certain logic in expressing the wind chill as an independent number rather than a temperature. It may be minus 45 outside with the wind chill factor, but who is standing in the wind? And how much wind? In reality, the temperature with the wind chill factor varies for every individual, depending on the exposure. So it made sense to do away with “minus 45 with the wind chill factor”.

But because nobody knew what the four-digit number meant, and because Winnipeggers liked to brag about how cold it was, and the lower the temperature the better, the old system of measuring the wind chill factor returned. Once again, people would say, “It’s bloody cold: minus 25, minus 40 with the wind chill factor."

And then something happened.

Minus 25, minus 40 with the wind chill factor, 

evolved into 

Minus 25. Minus 40 (pause) with the wind chill factor, 

and then simply, 

Minus 40.

Suddenly, the temperature was lower than ever!

I suppose if you live in the coldest place on earth, you have to make a virtue out of necessity. You have to enjoy it. Instead of somehow easing the pain by saying, “It’s a dry cold”, you can embrace it, and say to other Canadians, 

It’s minus 40 here in Winnipeg!

You may have travelled from your garage in your heated car to heated underground parking, without venturing outside at all, and you certainly didn’t experience the wind chill, and the temperature isn’t really minus 40, but no matter,

It’s minus 40 here in Winnipeg!

Table of Contents

Like or As

 COVID-19 is not ever likely to be eradicated from the planet. It will become something that we can quite easily live with, like we do any number of other diseases. In the meantime, I am going to continue to live my life just as I was before I knew anything about Omicron.

In a recent column in the Globe and Mail, Gary Mason illustrates the language in transition. First, he uses “like” instead of “as” in front of the clause “we do”, but then he seems to have remembered what he learned at school, that “like” is a preposition to be followed only by a noun, while  the conjunction “as” should introduce a clause (“just as I was”).

We see this construction almost daily in the Globe. Just this morning for example, 

If maple spirit stops flowing like it did in the springs of my youth, what will Canada become?

I winced, just as I winced fifty years ago when sports celebrities with less education than I (but twenty times the income) would say in every interview, “Like I said...” Now, the error is everywhere, and I suspect the style guides are saying it is acceptable. But it still grates on my ear.

Like other grammarians, I will continue to use “as” in front of a clause, as I did in the past, and “like” in front of a noun.

“Like I said” — how the words grate on my ears,

Like stone on the glass or like chalk on the board,

And I will use “as” in my declining years,

As I learned at school, as the text book implored.

But when I am gone, and "like I said" becomes the idiom,

It will be deemed correct by the grammatical praesidium.

Table of Contents

Singular “They” Again

I may have solved the “singular they” problem. The problem is that in English we don’t have a singular, non-gendered pronoun. We have “he” or “she”, but no pronoun for the person whose sex we don’t know, or for the person who doesn’t want to identify as either male or female. We have the neutral pronoun "it", but that will not do.

This was a problem even before the non-binary age. Old grammatical farts like me would say “he or she”, but that would become very clumsy. Now that some people do not wish to be referred to as “he” or “she”,  the problem is even greater. Here is a version of a news item that I saw this morning. I have changed the details.

Winston is missing. They were last seen driving up the Pat Bay Highway in a Ford truck.

Of course, at first I wondered, who was with him? Then I suspected that Winston didn’t identify as either male or female, or the reporter was afraid of using the wrong singular pronoun and committing an act of micro-aggression.

In 2014, the Vancouver School Board attempted to introduce the neutral pronouns “xe”, "xem" and "xyr”. Bizarre as these pronouns would have sounded, at least it would have been clear how many persons were involved. But as far as I know, the pronouns haven't caught on.

So singular “they”, and “them”, may be here to say. Here is my solution, and I'm probably not the first to suggest it. To avoid confusion, if we know that a person does not wish to be referred to as “he” or “she”, then let’s make the verb singular as well.

Winston is missing. They was last seen driving up the Pat Bay Highway in a Ford Truck.

Then we'll know that he was alone.

For more on "singular they", microagression, and the Woke, see the Table of Contents.

Olefacto Ergo Sum

What is going through that little head of yours?

You meander in quick time along the way

Drawing me hither and thither, following 

The scent along the pavement. A rabbit, deer, 

Raccoon, or some other creature of the night? 

You relieve yourself, lingeringly, 

In lady’s fashion, upon a neighbour’s lawn, 

But then, a quick impulse, a sudden tug, 

Towards a bush: peemail, some people call it. 

Weighty correspondence indeed! You sniff, 

You sniff at length. Who has gone before?

Old Shep, with rhythmic bark and lurching gait

Or the wily whippersnapper down the street?

But then, you cock your leg and pee 

Again, not ladylike this time, but with purpose

And with masculine insouciance, 

As if to say, “I was here, remember me.”

Hermaphroditic being, what pronoun should I use? 

You pause and sniff again, and then, trot off. 

Veni, olefactavi, minxi.

Those of you with dogs will appreciate how much the daily round is determined by your canine companion. A look, a sudden descent from the couch,  a gentle nudge with a paw or an insistent scratch, a whine or even a bark — it’s time to go out. Or early in the morning, a scratch, a refusal to jump on the bed and go back to sleep, a fiercer scratch until there is no choice.

The poo-turnaround. Half-dressed, sometimes in shoes without socks, I

I stagger out and up the street, usually tugged in a straight line to the neighbour’s lawn for a pee, her, not me, no nonsense, no indecision, no darting back and forth, just a quick squat and a long pee. I count the seconds: seven, this morning, but once after an early night and a late start, it was thirteen. And then it’s up and off again with satisfaction, boisterous, jovial even, sometimes even with a little prance of happiness. Not me. I just want to return to bed, or coffee.

Halfway up the street, she (I wish we had the French word) obliques on to the boulevard grass and moves with purpose. Six quick steps in one direction, and then back again, a sniff, no, not quite right, three further steps, then yes, at last, she crouches — and issues forth, a turd.

An anxious moment, do I have a poo bag? If not,the dog owner’s dilemma. What to do? Is anybody watching? A deft kick with the side of my boot, or if my conscience gets the better of me, a delicate manoeuvre with a used tissue or a Covid mask.

But all is well. I pull out a green bag, retrieved yesterday from the Government House dispenser, the very best of poo bags, vice-regal quality, and bend down, hoping for the best.

This is an anxious moment too. Quality, consistency, ductility, malleability, solidity. Position: sometimes the turd is wedged between the blades of grass, impossible to retrieve intact. (One of the joys of walking your dog in the prairie winter is embracing the turd in a handful of snow.)

But this morning, all is well. As I pick it up, firm, she scratches, scattering the sod with atavistic vigour upon the earth beneath, and me as well, if I don’t dodge out of the way.

We turn around. She understands. Not a longer walk so early in the morning. And so, back to bed. Or coffee. 

For more articles, see Table of Contents.

Canadian Spelling

As Winston Smith said with unconscious irony, the best books are those that tell you what you know already, and the same goes for opinion pieces in the Globe and Mail, such as this one by Galadriel Watson, “At the ‘center’ of a controversy: a defence of Canadian spelling”.

Like her, I’ve inwardly railed at “Health Center”and similar signs. “Centre”, apart from the fact that it’s spelled that way everywhere else in the English-speaking world, made etymological sense. Why should Noah Webster change it on a whim? Besides, the spelling is the same in French, and better suited to Canada.

The article covers other Canadian spellings which have survived the American influence, such as the “-our” words like colour, the “ll” words like counsellor and traveller, and the verb-noun distinction in practice(n)” and “practise(v) and licence(n) and license(v). The author is concerned that our schools do not always promote Canadian spelling.

[E]ducational settings must be careful – including a child-care facility being built by the school district itself. A habit set in childhood is a habit set for life. My own daughter, as she was about to graduate high school, wrote an essay using “practice” as a verb. I tried to persuade her to change it to “practise.” She declined. She said that spelling it like that would be weird.That’s the point. If becoming Americanized makes us “normal,” I’m all for being weird.

On word that didn’t survive the American influence is “aluminium”, which is, of course, the original Latin. One story has it that current spelling results from the carelessness of an early American typesetter. Fortunately, his negligence didn’t leave us with “sodum”, “potassum”, “barum”, etc.

And now for the most pernicious American influence of all — on the punctuation of quoted words. You will notice how, in the previous paragraph, for example, the quotation marks do not include the comma, for the comma is not part of the quotation. That is how the rest of the English-speaking world, and the Oxford Canadian English Dictionary, would punctuate it. It’s also how the person in the street would do it, because it’s common sense. But look at the quotation from the Globe and Mail, which, like other Canadian newspapers, continues to do it the American way. This malpractice, too, is said to have resulted from the act of an early typesetter who thought it looked neater if the comma or period were tucked inside the quotation marks. So much for tradition and meaning and common sense!

I will conclude with the last sentence from that quotation, correctly punctuated!

If becoming Americanized makes us “normal”,  I’m all for being weird.

For more articles, see Table of Contents.

Flush

I’ve railed a lot against ugly words like “fulsome” and “behaviours” and “precarity” and “incentivize”, so perhaps it’s time to share some of my favourites. To my mind, the best words have a sound about them that evokes their meaning. They are onomatopoeic, or what I call pseudo-onomatopoeic. The word “crag” is an example of the latter. But recently, in a loo in North Saanich, I came upon a truly beautiful onomatopoeic word:

Flush

Say it, and feel the tongue moving around your mouth. Four distinct sounds which perfectly convey the process of flushing.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember “pulling the chain” in the old lav back in Perth where the water was stored in a concrete trough above the seat. A chain descended from a lever which released the valve at the bottom of the trough, whereupon the water gushed down a pipe into the bowl, carrying all before it. No sophistication. No meaningful swirl around the bowl. Just a torrent of water. It was effective too. No floaters reappeared. But it could be finicky, not always engaging on the first pull. I can hear it now. You always knew when someone was in the lav.

Clank, clank, clank, gush!

For it wasn’t a flush at all. More of a gush of water down into the bowl. In fact, I don’t think we ever flushed the toilet. “Don’t forget to pull the chain,” my mother would say. 

But back in North Saanich the other day, it was a flush. F-l-u-sh. The water issued forth, swirled around and around, and disappeared with something between a cough, a splutter and a sigh.

Flush. What a beautiful word!

For more about lavs see Dunnies, or consult the Table of Contents.

The Old Man and the Leaf-Blower

I saw a solitary leaf 

Blown across the lawn,

I gazed in disbelief,

Just one! Its fellow leaves forlorn

A mottled heap across the way,

A mouldering mass, already in decay.

Back and forth it flew, in vain. 

The victim of an owner’s scorn.

There was no way it could remain

A blemish on a pristine lawn.

Up and down in hot pursuit came Stihl, 

A blast from hell, snarling, roaring like Smaug, 

Farting foul fumes, pollutants worse by far,

Three-hundred-fold, than a gas-guzzling car.

And in a humbler part of town, 

Across the street from me, an old man stoops,

Battling the leaves as well, employing not

The devil’s tool, but from another age

An implement almost as old as time

Itself, that serves its master well — a rake.

The one, a sad reminder of our former state,

The other, foul and potent symbol of our fate.

(These Satanic machines are permitted to operate in a city which several years ago considered suing Alberta oil and gas companies for their contribution to climate change. For other topics, see Table of Contents.)

Comprises or Comprised of

This is not going down well on the left of the Democratic Party, which is clustered in cities and increasingly comprised of the well-educated. (Globe and Mail, 14/10/21)

Spare a thought for Wikipedia editor Bryan Henderson, who would have had a minor apoplectic fit on reading the sentence above. He detested the phrase “is comprised of” so much that he dedicated much of his life to removing it from the dictionary, replacing it 47,000 times with the simple verb “comprises”. He would have corrected the Globe as follows:

The Democratic Party increasingly comprises the well educated.

Surely, his Sisyphean effort deserves our support. Why? It’s shorter. It’s active rather than passive. It is also logical, etymologically, coming from the old French comprehendre, via the feminine past participle, comprise. And it’s the preferred usage of style guides.

A whole comprises its parts. “Comprise” functions grammatically in the same way as “include”. However, after “comprise” all the parts making up the whole are named, while after “include” only some need be mentioned. “The set comprises 12 volumes; the 12-volume set includes an index.” (Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage)

A few days later, the Globe gave us another disputed usage of the verb. Here the subject and object of the verb “comprise” are reversed.

In the oil and gas sector around the world, women comprise 27 per cent of positions that require a college education, 25 per cent of mid-level positions and only 17 per cent of positions of leadership, according to the report. (Globe and Mail, 17/10/21)

No, Women constitute (or make up) 27 per cent of positions that require a college education.

Two days later, the verb crops up in the Globe again, this time used "correctly".

The Rogers Control Trust, which, along with other family holding companies it controls, owns 97.5 per cent of the company’s voting Class A shares, is overseen by an advisory committee comprising 10 people. (Globe and Mail, 19/10/21)

For more topics, see the Table of Contents.

The Missing Apostrophe

All hail to thee, apostrophe. Prithee,

Why dost thou stray from where thou dost belong

Within a word considered rather long,

Where once, it seems, a  letter used to be?

Or from thy cherished spot before the S

To show a noun in the possessive case?

Forsooth, stray not, poor mite, but know thy place

Within the lexicon. Do not transgress!

Certes, ‘tis true, when there is more than one,

After the S thou findest thee a gig,

But never on a verb, that’s infra dig,

A solecism grave, that thou must shun.

Of all the marks of punctuat-i-un

Thou causest the most grief, to all and sun’.

The omission of an apostrophe in a Facebook post is likely to prove expensive for an Australian real estate agent, according to a ruling by a New South Wales judge. More on that later.

There are many apostrophe errors. Like the Oxford Comma, one even has a name: the Greengrocer’s Apostrophe, the apostrophe applied erroneously in front of an “s” indicating a plural, not possession, as in 

ORANGE’S  $2.29 a lb.

You don’t find many greengrocers these days, but the error is widespread. 

Other apostrophe errors can be named as well.

Pupils who listened to their teacher saying "put the apostrophe in front of the 's'", but missed the rest of the lesson, will put the apostrophe in front of every "s", as in the greengrocer's apostrophe error, or even worse, in the present tense of a third person singular verb, to commit the Verb Apostrophe Error.

The snail crawl's across the room.

The Cottage Sign Apostrophe Error is common in cottage country, where proud owners have erected a sign in front of their cabin, such as

SMITH’S HAVEN

when in fact the dwelling belongs to more than one Smith.

Then there’s the Boy’s Gym Error, which I have observed in schools, where a large facility is frequented by only one person, or the official perhaps has corrected this error, and now always places the apostrophe after an “s” with plural nouns to commit the Mens' Washroom Error. Unfortunately, if the unfortunate official is forced to correct his Mens’ Washroom error then he may go further and come up with Ladie’s Washroom.

The Boy's Gym error is ubiquitous. Many an institution is limited to having only one member. For short time, in the seventies, I was the only teacher in the Manitoba Teacher's Society.

In the Possessive It’s Error, the writer has forgotten that only as a contraction does “its” require an apostrophe, as in “It’s a nice day”, but not as a possessive, as in “The dog sat on its tail.” Possessive pronouns don’t have apostrophes, except in the King James Bible in the Sermon on the Mount. 

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.

Now the unfortunate official, and others who have not had the benefit of a solid grounding in the correct use of apostrophes, might be tempted to leave them out altogether. After all, it’s usually good advice: if you don’t know what you’re doing, do nothing. But not in the case of a foolish Australian realtor who in a post on Facebook accused his competitor of cheating his employee, or was it his employees?

Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation” (Guardian, October 10, 2021).

In the absence of an apostrophe before the “s” to indicate a singular employee, a judge concluded that the Facebook accusation suggested that the practice of withholding contributions to the employees' superannuation funds was widespread, and refused to dismiss the case. Even if the damages awarded were minimal, the court costs were likely to be at least $160,000. 

I feel a bit sorry for the poor fellow. What provoked this folly? Had his rival called him a horse’s arse, with the apostrophe in the right place? And surely the post in question was more likely to do damage to the reputation of the writer than the rival. 

For more on these punctuation errors, and to see other posts, consult the Table of Contents.

 

The Endangered Adverb

“Breathe easily,” I said to the sign erected by an institution that cared not for the adverb. But the battle was lost 48 years ago in the ParticipACTION campaign which shamed us all into getting fit by equating the health of a 60-year-old Swede with a 30-year-old Canadian. And the slogan for this campaign?

Breathe Easier

It rankled us at the time. I was horrified. Here was I trying to teach grammar and the Federal Government was promoting this error. Was it not possible to use the comparative form of the adverb? Didn’t the government care about the grammatical health of the nation!  “Breathe more easily,” they might have said, and given comfort to beleaguered adverbs everywhere, already on the endangered parts-of-speech list.

Now the adverb is threatened more than ever before. Act responsible! Eat healthy! Shine brighter! Book easier, travel happier! But some of us refuse to give up. My friend Paul has a driving manual on his desk, entitled, “Drive Smart”, on the cover of which he has inked in the “ly”. 

That Ugly Word Again

 And the Vancouver School Board said in a statement that the new curriculum mandates “an inclusive model of education,” so “all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely”. (Globe and Mail, 16 June, 2021)

In these words, the school board attempted to justify their cutting of programs for gifted children. Anyone who speaks like that does not inspire confidence in the claim he is making, does he? Full of jargon, it’s the kind of vague and general answer a politician gives to a specific question. But especially loathsome is the use of the word “fulsomely”.

The adjective “fulsome” instead of “full” is ugly enough, but the use of the adverb instead of “fully” is even worse. As an adjective, in a cliché like “fulsome praise”, for example, the words might have slipped out from the speaker’s ready vocabulary of hackneyed phrases, but the adverb on its own must have been deliberately chosen. Why?

There are many reasons never to use the word in any form.

It is used frequently by politicians and others who are trying to impress.

It is confusing. Is it being used in its commonly misused sense of “full” or its original meaning of “excessive” or “cloying”?

It is not plain language. Its use is disrespectful to an audience hoping for clear answers.

To delve more fulsomely into the misuse of this festering sore of a word, but at your own risk, see A Fulsome Consultation.

Jagmeet

The wonderful thing about Jagmeet

Is Jagmeet’s a wonderful thing!

His top is made out of rubber

His bottom’s made out of a spring!

He goes bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bouncy

Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!

But the most wonderful thing about Jagmeet is

He’s the only one.

(Adapted from the lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman) 

Ever since I watched the post-election speeches and saw the NDP leader bouncing around the stage with his followers, the jingle from the Walt Disney film of Winnie the Pooh has been bouncing around in my head. The leaders gave predictable speeches with rhetorical flourishes and mounting passion, but I felt that only Jagmeet really meant what he said. If only Trudeau had kept his important promise to replace FPTP with preferential voting, then many of us would have voted NDP without the risk of splitting the liberal vote and being governed by a party that doesn’t believe in climate change.

The original song is about Tigger, a wonderful character who can’t stop bouncing around, much to the concern of Piglet, who worries about being bounced upon, and Eeyore, who is bounced into the river and mistaken for a Poohstick. If Jagmeet is a tigger, then perhaps Erin is a leopard trying to change his spots.

Knitting

A fine cartoon appeared in the Globe and Mail a night or two after the English debate of the Canadian party leaders. Obviously, the viewers in the pub found the debate boring. 

The cartoon evoked a response from a reader:

Re The Knitting Channel (Editorial Cartoon, Sept. 10): Who is The Globe and Mail calling boring? We knitters take offence that our craft was used as a foil for a perceived lack of interest in the debate. Perhaps if the leaders stuck to their knitting, we’d all be in a better place! (Joe Schwarz Penticton, B.C.)

Indeed! During the debate M. Blanchet urged his Anglophone counterparts to stick to their knitting and not interfere in Quebec politics. Mr. O' Tool  is knitting his brow as he tries to stitch the extremes of his party together, and the Greens are certainly not a close-knit group. Mr. Singh is constantly needling his opponents, and Justin Trudeau has certainly dropped a stitch or two.

For other idioms and metaphors, see Nautical Metaphors and It's Not Cricket.