Remember this post, from back in Avril? It had a certain point to it and was able to precipitate a short flurry of posting by certain siblings here and there. Inactivity is piling up though, if it's possible for Inactivity to do anything at all.
Come on O my friends and brothers (and sisters). Let there be posting.
posted by Ghang! @ 16:33
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(Note that this post has nothing to do with either the band or the thing I said the other day about Tool not being a band but a genetic defect... If you want to read about the band, go somewhere else!)
I caught myself the other day using -- in speech, and to a literate person -- a plural pronoun where a singular pronoun was most definitely called for. You know the scenario: having said something about a noun of no definite gender, wily Impatiences lures you into making its replacement by the terser single-syllable pronoun. That's well and good if the noun represents a thing; however, if it's a person, one ought arbitrarily to choose one of "he" or "she": this gives you both syntactic correctness (the grammar is right) and semantic correctness (the meaning is right given what is known so far, even though one is picking the value of an unknown with less than total certainty). One ought to go with "she" or "he" but oft instead one chooseth "their" and the consequent descent into grammatical barbarism may spell the end of the world as early as tomorrow afternoon.
All this is hardly news to the elite cadre of linguistic pedants who actually care about this stuff (NB: the swollen membership count of this vibrant academe is at least seven, worldwide) and that is why I'm stepping into the breach to fend off an even more insipid attack on the hallowed grounds of Language, an attack of which no one I know has taken any notice...
The thing that's been killing me for years (the psychological damage it inflicts multiplies daily as I learn how widespread it is) is the conjugation of verbs whose subject is singular as if that subject were a plural noun. For instance, for those riding the packed bandwagon of FIFA World Cupdom, a Sportsnet telecaster could be heard to say,
France have won their semifinal match...
France have won, have it? Well Canada haven't won anything because our team suck.
I understand where people are trying to go with this: there's more than one player on the team so they think words that denote, roughly, the same thing can be used interchangeably with "they" to mean, "all the members of the team". They can't. How many teams were in the World Cup? Many. How many teams does France constitute? One. France is one team among many teams; one group among many groups; one nation in a world full of them. The French may have lost the final in embarrassing fashion, but France haven't. It has. It makes as much sense to refer to a house in the plural because it is made up of many bricks, or a car for its many parts.
The car have come to a stop outside the house which have remained in substantially the same condition these many year.
France, through a combination of shorthand and personification for the purpose of national Romance, means "the French football team", a singular entity.
It's the same with companies, folks. Sony Corporation is a company. A company is an entity, a thing, one. That it may be comprised of employees, of creditors and equityholders and fixed and variable capital and so on changes nothing: it's still one thing. Like a quarter, whose many component cents don't make it two or four or any more than one silvery unit of coin.
The absolute kicker is that this linguistic evil is ancient, finding its way from the esteemed pen onto the esteemed tongues of the characters of no less a writer than Jane Austen. Mansfield Park is from 1814 and that's a lot of years for one didactic hairsplitter to erase. Compounding the problem are hockey teams that obligingly name themselves with plural nouns (Toronto Maple Leafs[sic! sic! sic!]) so that "have" makes sense with them, co-residing in the same league as teams with such asinine names as the Minnesota Wild. Is it one Wild, many Wild, as in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish? If that's the case then "the Wild have beaten the Leafs[SIC, damnit]" is correct. Maybe we should ask Jack London?
The English language won't last the night at this rate! The final herald of our Doom will be some dolt screaming in the street tomorrow around noon amid quaking earth and crashing meteorite: "Oh God! The world have ended!"
P.S.: Media is still a plural noun, and don't EVER forget that!
posted by Ghang! @ 16:24
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Interest rates are an interesting area of, hem, interest, for two classes of people: those who have some wealth squirreled away and those that wish they did (I am firmly seated in this latter category, though hopefully not forever). At least, they ought to be, as the prevailing levels of interest determine both how much we earn on our lendings and how much we pay on our borrowings. Interest rates can affect -- in theory (and to be taken, as with all economic gospel, with a grain of salt) -- the rate of inflation, and the interrelation between interest rates, inflation, and taxation determines whether a lender of a sum sees its actual buying power increase or decrease over the life of the loan.
The Federal Reserve System in the United States (founded by the Federal Reserve Act, 1913) and the Bank of Canada in Canada (established by the Bank of Canada Act, 1934) control the prevailing interest climate in their respective countries by tinkering with a number the Americans call the Federal Funds Rate and we Canadians refer to as the Overnight Rate. These rates directly influence mortgage rates, bond rates, and what I'm chiefly concerned about right now: interest rates banks pay on deposit money.
Inflation in the United States seems to be very high (we can posit that some of this derives from the consistent devaluation of the United States Dollar since the inauguration of the first Bush 43 administration) and on Thursday June 29, the Federal Reserve again raised the Funds Rate by 25 basis points, to 5.25%. This seems to be little more than a percent ahead of the total advance of the Consumer Price Index experienced in the US in May 2006 versus May 2005.
However, it's the Canadian rate that's more interesting because the next policy announcement is fixed for Tuesday the 11th and nobody knows what they're going to do! The current overnight rate is 4.00% and the last announcement, on May 24, was for a hike of 25 basis points -- as was the prior annoucement on April 25. The highest available interest rate on a bank account in Canada is presently 3.75%, so here we require a little arithmetic. We're given the latest official estimates of inflation, courtesy of the nice bureaucrats at the Bank of Canada and we find that the latest result, for May 2006 over May 2005, to be 2.8%. Consider $1000 in a bank account earning 3.75% annually (compounded annually for simplicity) and losing purchasing power as inflation advances at a rate of 2.8% annually:
- $1000 worth of goods at the beginning of the year x now costs $1028 at the beginning of year x + 1, so that the purchasing power of the $1000 at the beginning of year x + 1 in terms of year x dollars is ($1000 * 1000) / 1028 = $972.76.
- However, during the same year, the sum in the account grows due to interest from $1000 to $1037.50. However, to get its purchasing power, in year x dollars, we must multiply by (1000 / 1028) and we get the result $1009.24.
In other words, the effective interest rate before taxes (which depend on your tax bracket) is a whopping 0.924% in a bank account paying the highest available interest rate. Wow. So a bank's not a great place to put your money. However, for many people it's the best alternative and that is why we should be hoping that on Tuesday, David Dodge and his co-conspirators follow the American lead and up the rate by another 25 basis points. I'm crossing my fingers... Are you!?
OK, so change of topic. I want to drop a few comments on the makeup of my favourite NHL team, the Ottawa Senators. Since their ignominous defeat by Buffalo in the Conference semis, I temporarily transferred my allegiance to the unlikely heroes of Edmonton who, in their turn, went (not too Gently) Into that Good Golf Course as the Carolina Hurricanes, formerly the Hartford Whalers and née the New England Whalers, went on to abduct Lord Stanley's Cup and flee with it to the States once more.
Since then, Ottawa has signed former Hurricanes starter Martin Gerber to a multi-year contract. Gerber went 38-14 in 52 games started for Carolina last year but was replaced by the new favourite son, Cam Ward, for the 'Canes' playoff run. By the numbers, he's a solid middle-of-the-road goaltender with at 17th-ranked .906 save percentage and an 18th ranked 2.78 goals against average. In both categories, the 31-year-old is ahead of 23-year-old Ray Emery by a hair's breadth. No one knows that the final goaltending situation will look like or who will be the starter, but it's an interesting situation. One thing is nearly certain: while signing Dominik Hasek would be (more) insane (than signing him last year), neither Emery nor Gerber is likely to turn in the same kind of performance that Hasek gave the Sens in 43 games last season. More's the pity.
With Spezza and Redden re-signed, another interesting question is what is to become of the defense. Ottawa has many solid blue-liners and, though Zdeno Chara is now dearly departed, his replacement by LA Kings veteran Joseph Corvo may turn out to be a great success. Corvo is old enough to have some experience without being washed up (at 29) and has great numbers: +15 with 40 points in 81 games and Kings leader in ice time (this last attribute may help fill Chara's shoes as well, since he generally led the Sens in ice). Chara may be a huge hulking beast with great reach and superhuman strength, but he's prone to inconsistency and gaffes. How Corvo, Volchenkov, and Meszaros play this coming season are all question marks, but the Sens D looks pretty strong. There are more developments to come as we count down, slowly, to exhibition time.
I went to see a Second City performance of sketch comedy in Toronto on Sunday with a wonderful person. I recommend it: there's a little crudeness and, especially, those cheap anti-America jokes that Canadians are supposed to laugh at merely because we're morally superior beings or some such (and they're not funny... They're just like trigger buttons for a laugh track) and one wishes the comics would just cleave to a less political, less self-conciously "virtuous" path sometimes BUT taken as a whole, the show was hilarious and I laughed a lot. I like that good comics can achieve a sort of purity of form so that -- even though they pander to the prejudices of the audience, and their own -- someone with a wholly different viewpoint can still laugh a lot. That makes me happy!
posted by Ghang! @ 12:16
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