Esteemed colleague Michael Erard wrote way too many words about the tremendous obstacles he faced fact-checking an article with deaf and hearing informants:

Reading back the piece to Kate and Hilaria would be easy enough. But what was it going to mean to “read it back” to Lynn? The obvious option: Send her the text of the story.

The actual obvious option: Use the relay service.

The only way this could work is because Lynn had arranged for a real-time captioner named Rabin´ Monroe, who is contracted through the university

There is no way in the world Rabin’s name ends with an acute accent. Even if it allegedly ends with an apostrophe, we don’t have to abide by that orthography. (Quick: Make it possessive.)

I’m not going to say that our execution was perfectly frictionless, but it’s worth noting that 20 years ago this conversation would have been cumbersome to the point of impossibility. Even if the telecommunications had been cheap, we didn’t have accessible, quality keyboard and screen technologies. The real-time text channel wouldn’t have been so easily available, either. Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, people didn’t have the leverage to get institutions to pay for accommodations like real-time captioning. Without captioning, the article would have been translated into ASL by an interpreter.

As Erard knows, this is complete bullshit. I was using the relay service in 1987. The ADA required relay services everywhere in the United States, and they were available before that anyway. “20 years ago” Erard could straightforwardly have used the relay service. Today he still could: In Maine, dial 711 or (800) 457‑1220 (better for voice-to-TTY – I called and asked).

Going to all that trouble and being hyper-aware of how much trouble you’re going through makes, I guess, a good story. It does not prove you ever had to go to all that trouble. (I wrote to Erard twice pointing out his error about the relay service and did not hear back.)

Further, his method of fact-checking the article is improper, even ethically. You can’t read back quotes to sources, and you can’t show sources your actual copy. Sources then attempt to rewrite their own words and rewrite your copy. Where did I learn that? Well, in part by getting fact-checked by the Atlantic for the article Erard wrote about me.

Regretters (Ångrarna), the Swedish documentary about what we would now call detransitioning, is available in samizdat form.

I see an eternal truth wordlessly expressed in Toast and The Long Day Closes. Eternal truths are the hardest to believe.

You the young boy need not be afraid to gaze upon a beautiful man beyond your reason. You don’t know why you need to look, but nothing makes you happier. There is no why. As you learn the world around you and its fears become yours, you feel bashful and ashamed. You stop before you drink in the man before you.

But go right ahead. He doesn’t know or care – or he’s just open to you and your happiness. You can’t imagine how, but he is. He’s happy that you’re happy.

As you grow up, learn that if you expect men to accept you they will. Even if they know how happy they make you. The loveliest men are the ones who can accept the most. They’ve got nothing to lose. They can afford it. You can too.

It takes a lifetime to learn this lesson and you might not get there. It’s hard to believe you could be safe with your own kind, even among princes. But who else can you be safe with? Whatever else we need, we need men.

6′8″ (or, debatably, 6′9″) British black former NBA player/psychologist John Amaechi appeared on the charmingly named Hoopsfix podcast, which itself concentrates on the almost absurd proposition of British basketball.

• There he reveals – surely for the first time – that his oddly-spelled surname is actually pronounced Amaychee, though he is OK with the common mispronunciation Ameechee. Since the day he blasted onto the scene (“John Amaechi Comes Out as Former NBA Player”), my internal reading voice has dyslexically plowed through his surname as though stabbing each letter with a finger: Ahh-mahh-ee-chee (with equal vowel lengths). I resist the temptation to render it as Amæchi.

• In the Canadian sense of the word, he’s one of those British middle-class blacks we never hear about, really. (His mom was a doctor.) I associate that social class with the insufferable British graphic designer Eddie Opara, who was granted the equivalent of a peerage, a Pentagram parnership. I don’t know why I do not associate it with British black actors like Idris Elba and Lennie James.

• An hour or so into the interview, I finally realized that Amaechi was in fact spending the entire time talking about basketball. His teenage project to get himself into the NBA is a great story, but yes, he actually really and truly did like playing basketball and is quite happy to talk for two hours about it on a podcast run by a punter (en-UK). I enjoy obscure topics and, further, I defend actual sports and actual sportswriting and the like, but what he was doing and its effect on me both took me by surprise. John Amaechi actually was a basketball player. Unironically.

  I found this baffling not just because he was and is homosexualist but because he wanted to be a psychologist since boyhood. Now he ostensibly is one, though what how he allegedly makes his living is in advising the corporate world on something or other. His professional Web sites are such ugly collations of bland boilerplate I don’t know why anybody would hire him. (That’s because his sites do not clearly state what he does. They’re appalling – and par for the course.) In the back of my mind, I guess I just figured that a gay British psychologist could not actually have been serious about basketball.

  Further, I think we clutch at all non-sports characteristics of gay athletes in an active denial of their true interest and ability. It’s another manifestation of the insistence by word people, like journalists, that the body is merely a vessel, if that. It should not be surprising that a gay basketball player was a basketball player and is still interested in basketball.

• Amaechi’s value proposition is surely his statement that it is not the gay athlete’s sole responsibility to come out. Being openly gay in sport(s) requires by definition support from the back and front offices and owners – who, also by definition, are rich. (Chris Rock: Shaq is “rich.” The white man who signs Shaq’s check is “wealthy.”)

John Amaechi is an army of one and, despite the fact his sites are such bullshit they undermine his integrity, he remains a fascinating personage.

Some of my best friends are lexicographers. The other month I took it upon myself to define and antedate the word caron in the specific sense of “haček.” I found the first reference, in a WordPerfect user manual I still have. I submitted that to the OED.

Then I wondered why the hell I was wasting my time on a weird typography/Unicode sense of a synonym for an existing word. Shouldn’t I be antedating gay speech before queers and LGBTs and trannies get all of it banned, as they are trying to do with tranny? They are literally defining us out of existence and literally rewriting and denying our history. Over my dead body. (I shouldn’t tempt fate there, given that eldergays are dying, often at their own hands.)

Using only the OED as a definition source, and with frequent reference to the online archive of OutWeek (which I wrote for, and which archive I have downloaded and OCRed), here is what I have so far. (Permanent updated location.)

Not defined at all

1. ACT UP
2. bareback (not in that sense); also need bug chaser, gift giver, creampie, cum bucket, and similar
3. basket
4. baths
5. beard
6. bent
7. BJ
8. butt plug
9. chicken
10. circuit party
11. confirmed bachelor
12. cut, uncut
13. diesel dyke
14. dinge queen; rice queen; X queen
15. fag hag
16. French active, ～ passive; Greek active, ～ passive
17. friend of Dorothy
18. Gaysian
19. GWM and all variants; must avoid the tendency to lie, as in the title of the film Single White Female
20. HAART
21. hanky code
22. helium-heels
23. husbear
24. invert
25. labyris (ambiguous in OutWeek)
26. load
27. light in the loafers
28. marriage equality
29. meat rack
30. Miss Thing
31. molly house
32. MSM
33. nancy
34. PNP
35. poppers
36. positoid
37. read, v.
38. same-sex marriage 
39. seropositive, seronegative, serocloseted
40. shemale
41. sister
42. spousal benefits
43. switch
44. tearoom
45. Tina
46. top, bottom, versatile (the last ambiguous in OutWeek)
47. trade
48. tranny
49. trick
50. tubs
51. undetectable
52. Uranian
53. VGL
54. viatica*

Fully or somewhat defined

1. antiretroviral
2. bear (1989–2004)
3. combination therapy
4. fisting (including cite by Andrew Nikiforuk)
5. fuck buddy
6. gay marriage (huge number of gay * phrasal entries)
7. leatherman, leather bar
8. lover [weakly defined, but with gay reference: “Chiefly with possessive adjective: either member of a loving couple; a person in an (exclusive) sexual and romantic relationship with another”]
9. PCP, KS (but they do have K/S), OI
10. positive (weak indirect definiton), negative
11. poz (inadequate definition)
12. PWA, PLWA, PWARC
13. rainbow flag
14. safe(r) sex
15. viral load
16. well-hung

The reasons, as always, are many, but at root Glaswegians have poor health because their identity has been erased.

Harry Burns, who until recently was the country’s chief medical officer, has his own theory. He raised a few eyebrows when he compared Glaswegians to Australia’s aboriginal people. Yet he believes deindustriali[z]ation in a city where tens of thousands once worked in the factories and the shipyards has deeply wounded local pride. As a result, people here have much in common with demorali[z]ed indigenous communities.

“Being a welder in a shipyard was a cold and difficult and dangerous job,” he says. “But it gave you cultural identity in the same way as native peoples in Australia once had a very intense history and tradition.”

Glawegians do not have to be compared to aboriginals in Australia. Glaswegians are the aboriginal people of Scotland. Scots are the indigenous population of Scotland. Indigenous populations can be White; Whites are not always colonists. Nobody in the BBC article seems willing to admit this fact, and actually any claim of equivalency between the two indigenous populations is directly undermined in the article (because it “raised a few eyebrows”).

(Radio segment.)

Without warning, typographers have suddenly learned deception and bullshit.

• Matias Duarte and the Google complex snow gullible journos that the unremarkable and undifferentiable (also unreadable) Grotesk sansserif Roboto is the first custom font for user interfaces or that spending a year and a half to update a single typeface is somehow unusual.

• FontShop sells out to Monotype for no obvious or defensible reason. Despite not also being Mormons, this makes now-perilously-employed FontShop mandarins touchy enough to suppress my aperçu “FontFont Has Never Been More Independent and Has Always Been at War with Eastasia.” So much for the brotherhood of type.

  (I find it coïncidental that Spiekermann’s [“quasi‑”] retirement from the entire industry occurred days before that takeover was announced. This could explain why the kind and generous mentor, who was kind and generous to me and my designer friend at ATypI Vancouver but is essentially impossible to contact, ignored a postal letter I sent as a last resort.)