Career and Careen

Endeavour Careened by Kevin Charles Hart

It is pleasing when someone uses a word precisely and correctly. It happened like this. My friend Paul was recounting one of his nautical yarns. Paul has happy memories of sailing around Vancouver Island and across the Salish Sea. He enjoys a coffee at the Oak Bay Marina, overlooking the boats that bring back these memories. That is where we were when he told me this story. 

He was moored for the evening in a bay on San Juan Island, settling in for his tumbler of scotch, when his tranquility was disturbed by another boat heading for the shore. Towing a dinghy, it cruised in gently,  dropped anchor, and stopped short as the anchor held, but before the the motor was cut, the dinghy drifted on towards the boat. I cannot convey the sound as the rope wound around the propeller, but Paul did a pretty good job with a series of whirrs of varying pitch followed by a clunk.

Much consternation and dismay! Ever the gentleman sailor, Paul offered to help the inexperienced boatmen, who were at their wits’ end. The next morning he towed them to shore. And in Paul’s words:

“Using a winch and a line fastened high up the mast,” he said, “we careened the boat on the sand, exposing one side of the hull and some of the propeller, so we could get at the rope and remove it.”

Now these were hapless, but not reckless, Americans. Their boat had not careered towards the shore, swerving from side to side as they wrestled with the wheel. No, they had approached the shore slowly, not realizing the danger as the dinghy rope slackened. This was an edifying tale of inexperience and a helping hand, and Paul’s skill in careening the boat was equalled only by his correct use of the nautical word.

Nor were they the first sailors to careen their boat. Before the age of steam and steel, it was not uncommon for vessels to be careened to scrape away the barnacles or repair the hull. Captain Cook careened the Endeavour after striking a coral reef in North Queensland.

Conversational Fillers

“I’ll be leaving in, like, half an hour,” said my grandson. 

I refrained from responding, “When, exactly, will you be leaving?” as I might have done, a generation ago, pedantic parent that I was.

In my generation, “you know” had become the common interruptor. What once was a parenthetical phrase to emphasize a point, or invite the listener to agree, had become a filler for an awkward pause, or even, in extreme cases, a tic, of which the speaker was completely unaware. Sometimes, one could, you know, count a dozen or so, you know, tics in a paragraph. But at least in the beginning, “you know” made some sense, either as a statement or a question.

Not so the ubiquitous “like”, which has now replaced “you know” as a conversational tic, particularly among younger people. And yet, consciously or unconsciously on the part of the speaker, “like” may be performing a grammatical function. In an article in Time (May 21, 2014) entitled “Here’s What to Say to That Jerk Who Corrects Your Grammar”, Katy Steinmetz quotes from the book Bad English by Ammon Shea.

Shea explains that while "like" may be  staple of the Valley Girl caricature, the word is actually performing useful linguistic duties:

• In the sentence “She was like, ‘Get out of my face,” the word signals the beginning of a quote and is known as a quotatative compartmentalizer.
• In the sentence “It’s going to take me like forever to get there,” it functions as an approximative adverb, signaling how strongly to interpret the following word; "almost" and "barely" play similar roles.
• In the sentences “I stole a panda. Like, I couldn’t live without him,” "like" is a discourse marker, a word used at the beginning of a sentence indicating that a clarification of what has just been said will now be given; one might similarly use "I mean" to introduce more information.

Quotatative compartmentalizer, approximative adverb, or discourse marker.

Was my grandson using “like” as an approximative adverb, or was he exhibiting a verbal tic?

The redundant “like” was around long before the Valley Girls. I first encountered it in the north of England in the sixties, when a Yorkshireman or Lancastrian might say “Where are you going today, like?” Or, “There was once a coal mine over there, like.”

This usage would perhaps fall into the third of Shea’s categories, a variation of the discourse marker, a kind of emphasis at the end rather than the beginning of the sentence, meaning, “I’m asking you,” or “I’m telling you.”

And as for the quotatative compartmentalizer, here are a few snippets from the reaction of some rural Australians who thought the world was coming to an end when they witnessed an eerie glow in the sky rising from a marijuana factory. From one speaker:

"But in my head I'm like, what the hell is that?"

"Mum's on the phone and Dad's in the background going: 'I better hurry up and eat my tea because the world's ending.'"

"And Mum's like: 'What's the point of eating your tea if the world's ending?’”

And another:

"I was having a big Stranger Things moment - I'm like, Vecna? Is that you?" she said, referencing a villain from the TV series. 

To read the full story on the BBC and see the eerie glow, visit https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-62261094

Sic transit gloria mundi

Yesterday, I visited the cosmetics department at the Bay. Not willingly, I assure you: I had been given the task of picking up some Christian Dior nail cream for my wife. As I would be travelling in a foreign country, my thirteen-year old granddaughter kindly offered to navigate for me.

I have the fondest memories of the Hudson’s Bay and Eaton’s Department Stores in Winnipeg. The latter fell prey to the wrecker’s ball some years ago, but the name lives on in the Canadian collective consciousness in recollections of the Eaton’s Catalogue and its utilitarian function in outdoor biffies. The Hudson’s Bay Building still stands, a sentinel on Portage Avenue at the beginning of Winnipeg’s downtown, but is now abandoned and fallen into disrepair. The Bay survives in some of the city’s outlying malls.

We entered the Bay at Polo Park and made our way to the cosmetics department. Well, it was no longer a department, of course, but rather a series of kiosks. (Navigating them reminded me of swerving around Winnipeg’s roundabouts).

My granddaughter led  me to the Christian Dior kiosk. Alas, the nail cream was not to be found. However, there was another product we might like to try.

We moved to the Chanel kiosk. This particular product was guaranteed to banish cuticles forever. Would we like to try it? I declined, but my granddaughter agreed. “Perfect,” she said. We made the purchase.

Joanne was our consultant. The French have an expression: une femme d’un certain age. Joanne was a woman of an uncertain age. Her face was a smooth white mask and she wore a wig of long black hair. She had difficulty manipulating the credit-card-reading machine.

“I’m older than you,” she said.

“Bet you’re not,” I replied.

“I’m 82,” she retorted.

“Ah,” I said. “Just.”

This was her fourth stint at the Bay. Her first had been as a schoolgirl in the nineteen-fifties, in the glory days of the Bay. We reminisced about those times and I recalled my visits to the Hudson's Bay Company in the seventies, wandering from department to department and dining at the Paddlewheel restaurant on the sixth floor. Good for the Bay for employing such an interesting character! The store today may be a slick, sterile version of its former self, but here, at the Chanel counter, was a link to its glorious past.

Sic transit Gloria mundi.

The Smartphone

 The Smartphone

When and why and what I need to know,

And how to get to where I want to go

And who is dating whom, the so-and-so,

Just ask the bloody phone, go with the flow.

I have come to realize that the smartphone is a curse. 

It is so convenient and informative. It tells me the time and the weather and my whereabouts and what everybody else is doing.

But it’s a sordid boon. I am addicted to it. As a child I read for hours on end, uninterrupted. Now, when I read a book, I pause every few pages to turn on my phone and read the news, or even, I’m embarrassed to admit, my Facebook page. Chess, Wordle, crosswords, texts, and the mundane things that other people do: it’s all on the phone. And much worse.

The picture of our age - a score of people standing on a platform waiting for a train, all looking down at their phones - is no exaggeration. When I first saw it, I laughed in derision, but now I am one of them.

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.