Back this week are an exaggerator and a retail proprietress with a heart of gold.

Donovan Steyl malaprops again

Yes, the man behind the myth of the pink rand is back. (Here “myth” means “factually unsupported assertion” or “lie.”) Writing for some kind of Sithifrican marketing Web site – I think it’s MarketingWeb; that name appears four times in the URL – Steyl trots out the lines he hopes advertisers will believe. They shouldn’t. (Various grammatical errors sic.)

The ABNSA Gay Consumer profile that was commissioned in 2008 is the largest of its kind in South Africa, its findings showed that roughly 10% of the South African population is gay. This amounts to just over 4.8 million people.

Wrong.

Of the 15,000 respondents that completed the survey,

Actually, 15,000 was the number circulated.

The term ‘DINK’ (Dual Income No Kids )was coined for this demographic. This means that the gay community tend to have more disposable income. They are also early adaptors, eager to try new brands and set trends. The ‘Pink Rand’ is a considerable segment of the South African market and is known for its superior spending value.

The survey Steyl quotes didn’t poll respondents for the presence of children (nor did it poll hetero couples for comparison). The term is early adopter; we aren’t turning DC power into AC. There is no “pink rand,” let alone a capitalized one. There are a few wealthy white gays whom Steyl tells would-be clients are a customer bloc.

I complained to the editors of MarketingWeb, who refused to respond.

Boing Boing Brooklyn: Still peddling a myth of lesbian poverty

Listen, I’m not saying lesbian moms in Brooklyn aren’t low-income. But the proprietress of Boing Boing Maternity, the increasingly notorious Karen Paperno, isn’t saying that either. She’s saying that gay males have lots of money and lesbians don’t. And she’s still saying that.

“Women still only make 77 cents on the dollar, and two women together have less disposable income than married folks and gay-male couples,” she said.

Well, the disparity between women’s and men’s earnings is largely accounted for by occupational choice and childbearing and childrearing. There’s very limited evidence that women are paid 77% what men are for the same jobs. (One study of new MBAs found something similar.)

But the actual facts aren’t what Paperno is trying to get across here. She’s just trying to say women are oppressed. Her proof is the 23% pay cut she says they suffer from. It doesn’t exist, but it works nicely as a rhetorical argument for some feminists and some activists who insist women are always under threat.

“Two women together” tend to make as much money as two men together, studies have shown quite consistently. That figure is less than hetero married couples make in nearly all cases, yet often is more than unmarried hetero couples make. Again, facts aren’t Karen Paperno’s stong suit.

She can offer any discount she wants. She can even repeat factual inaccuracies to the press. But she won’t go uncorrected.

By the way, Paperno never responded to my E-mail or hardcopy letter. Why should she? She’d have to admit her facts are wrong. This would in turn admit that women and lesbian moms aren’t as weak and disenfranchised as she claims. Though this would affect her store not one jot, it surely would bruise.

Today’s hero: Joseph Hagelmann

This New York City politician told the Daily News (single-pager):

[A]lthough some may believe that we are all white Chelsea boys earning lots of disposable income to spend on exotic Atlantis cruises and haute couture, the reality is that most LGBT New Yorkers are not on the A-list.

If you are, that’s fine – but what about the Latina lesbian single mother from the Bronx who struggles to put food on the table and keep a roof over her kids’ heads?

Indeed.

Social networks for rich gays

I’m going to have to do a real story on the death of Fab and the invention of Distinc.TT, but that’s gonna take a lot of work.

Never Let Me Go depicts a dystopia of England’s past. An imagined one, as distinct from the dystopias actually lived there over the last century and right up to the present.

In the film, the young people, to the extent that they are viewed as people, exhibit a sexlessness. The picture makes this characteristic overt enough that you could probably talk about it over coffee after seeing the movie, assuming you still had any will to live at that point given what happens. Christopher Hitchens once witnessed an actual state-sanctioned execution, which he said “unmanned” him. Though that happened in his beloved United States and the movie happens in England, I appreciate that one is supposed to be appalled to the core at the inhumanity of which the British have always been capable.

What I doubt anyone else will bother talking about is the complete lack of masculine characteristics among the boys, and how this may be a harbinger of the future.

A lack of masculine characteristics manifests itself as an affect largely indistinguishable from feminine characteristics. The Venn diagram overlaps considerably, as it does with a conceptually distinct circle, that of human characteristics. But it really is three circles, not one.

These kids slot themselves down right next to each other like month-old puppies (or Gaysians on the subway – observe for yourself). There’s no effort to assert personal space. There truly aren’t any differentiating features, save for wardrobe, that identify boys or girls. As befitting their role in the story, they are interchangeable. And, on the whole, they are happy with their lives.

This is indeed the future I see for today’s children aged ten and younger. Their hovercraft mothers, their teachers (easily four out of five, and essentially all those teaching Grade 5 and lower), their university TAs, and their office-job bosses will be female. Except for tough dykes and trannies, girls and young women will flourish in this environment, which will view as natural the suppression of instinctual male differences. Those will be sanded down to a glossy shine so that boys and young men will look, talk, act, move, and behave like women – not, I clarify again, like people generically conceived.

They’ll view each other as equal in every way and will be proud of having many friends of the opposite sex and of any sexuality. Having spent no time alone or disconnected save for actual sleep, they will hunt in gumtoothed packs and crowd themselves into restaurant booths and the like as though they were conjoined.

And nobody, at all, will think anything is wrong with this outcome, because it just stands to reason that the way women look, talk, act, move, and behave is better. Except for those of us who think it sometimes isn’t. How beastly of us, you might say. But in Never Let Me Go, yesterday’s models of future comportment are clones we cut up for their organs. Quite possibly the whole thing, whatever the era, is something to be avoided.

Last month (2011.05.11), I wrote Tom Wright, director of Canadian operations for UFC, the following letter.

If, as UFC’s marketing campaign has relentlessly told reporters to say, the company considers Toronto some kind of Mecca for the sport, let me strongly suggest that UFC do something that would never occur to gentle, unassuming Dana White: Market to the gay community.

Of course I mostly mean gay males. The whole idea will be counterintuitive for any straight male or even any actual gay or lesbian person under 35, who just can’t imagine how the two worlds could overlap. Nonetheless (and let me get the edge case out of the way first), quite a few lesbians are found in the female component of the audience.

Of greater interest are the guys, who, very much like straight males, are looking for something resembling a masculine cultural outlet. I am personally not wild at all about mixed martial arts; I’m Dana White’s worst nightmare for a dinner date, a gay vegan pacifist. But I understand the appeal. UFC and its derivatives are the culturally-acceptable expression of mainstream masculinity, whether anybody likes it or not. That means you’ve got a responsibility to include everyone. That’s what we do here.

I would like to see three things happen.

• Out gay contestant on The Ultimate Fighter. Yes, I – we – watch the show. Your pickings are slim: I know of only two remotely qualified candidates, both of whom are American and have curiously similar names (Shad Smith and [REDACTED]). Someone, however, is out there.

  Now, forgive me for letting my imagination run wild for a moment, but I envision a scenario in which this out gay contestant puts up with a lot of verbal abuse from the other guys in the house, who (let’s be honest) are all from the wrong side of the tracks. I imagine Dana White pulling our contestant to the front of the room and giving the whole house ferocious shit that UFC is meant for any men who can do it, including gay men, “and if anybody here’s got a problem with that or got a problem with this guy here, then they’ve got a problem with me.”

  For this to work, White would have to believe what he’s saying. I told you it was imaginary. Still, a place to start.

• Advertise in legitimate gay media. I mean spend real money – full-page ads in Xtra, commercials on OutTV. Everything has to be customized for that readership; it can’t be off-the-shelf.

  A gay night at a fight, the sort of thing MLB and the NBA do all the time, is another strong option. Nobody here is naïve enough to think there won’t be loud lusty booing from the audience. Do it anyway.

• Make Nick Ring a spokesmodel. Almost forgotten from two (or was it three?) seasons back, this Ultimate Fighter scrapper is a raging hetero but has exactly what the gay audience wants and needs – self-awareness and a sense of humour. (Seriously, [re]watch “Did Your Dizzle,” among other episodes.) And he’s just out in Calgary.

Is Canada really a UFC Mecca? Well, Muslims don’t like gays, so the parallel is not apt. But Mecca serves all Muslims. UFC has to serve all its fans. I assume your guys are tough enough to sell to gays.

At this point I assume I’m never going to get a response.

This list, assembled by Benoît Denizet-Lewis, is as atrociously presented as one would expect from a site run by incompetent Web developers/SEO whores.

• The whole thing’s split over four pageview-inflating pages; even Readability can’t assemble them into one.

• The markup is so atrocious it can’t even wrap around contributor photos properly.

• There is an obfuscation of Amazon affiliate links that is one step away from cheating.

• Some items are simply misspelled.

• Even the slugs suck, but these people are too stupid to understand why slugs matter.

Because you, like me, want only the merged and deduped list and nothing else, here it is. And these are manifestly not the best “LGBT” books of all time, since, as we know, LGBT is a lie. No, I’m not going to look up links at LibraryThing. [continue with: So-called best gay books of all time →]

I believe I was able to feel not alone at last night’s 4 Pounds/52/Masculathon screening party.

I keep being told Mr. JOSH LEVY (q.v.) is a kindred spirit. I see ample evidence this claim is correct. Unlike with his oft-troublesome onliné friends, last night you had to move big, strong guys to sit down, and a lot of them were heterosexualist. In point of fact I often could not tell. In further point of fact I think I had an enjoyable conversation for quite a long time with an FTM.

That banking loan manager/actor/comedian who wears the Last Fauxhawk Standing is a doll. But I think if he were hot for aging homosexualists he would have snagged Bellini while he was still on the market AMIRITE?

On Wednesday (2011.06.08), I attended a presentation by novelist/Globe and Mail style advisor/grammarian Russell Smith. He presented “Grammar Wars” at the MagNet Canada industry conference.

Of course he looked great in his grey suit (angled breast pocket), white shirt, and floral (not paisley) tie. He wore brown wingtips without socks.

I was concerned enough to wear my nicest shirt, a reasonable linen pantalon, and highly shined shoes. No match for what he had on, but I tried. Also, if I understand this correctly, Smith can count only to 19, or more accurately to 17 and twin 18s.

I took my usual well-paraphrased notes. You need only a taste of what he said to understand the whole lecture.

You’re very much not linguists, he told the room, who very much dislike copy-editors like you. Scientists don’t judge this mollusc or that mollusc as “wrong”; linguists take themselves to be scientists and apply the same thinking, he said. “Linguists do not believe in correct and incorrect.” They believe there are many dialects of English, a fact Smith acknowledges. There is a dialect called Standard English, they say, and it is the dialect used by his newspaper.

Smith spent the next half-hour in a genteel rail against the faux-objectivity of linguists. Throughout, his suggestion was that there is a viable role for grammarians or anyone who dares to correct grammar and usage. While he did cover Strunk & White and Fowler, the opposition he set up was one between informed pragmatists in the audience and linguists in some isolated academic perch.

To do this, Smith read extensively (and time-paddingly) from Language Log; attempted to run a Stephen Fry YouTube video that, of course, did not work on Firefox his terracotta Wintel laptop; and rehashed, sometimes verbatim, his own column of two weeks prior on Stephen Fry.

With a few days to think about it, I cannot decide if he should have recognized me in the front row, but in any event he should have reasonably foreseen the presence of actual linguists in his audience. I have a degree in the field and, like my esteemed colleague Michael Erard, did not cripple myself with a Ph.D. Like my colleague, I try to apply knowledge, training, and experience to real-world problems. I don’t impose descriptivist ideology on my work or others’. I get the impression Smith thinks Linguists are like Objectivists, misapplying or overapplying a simplistic code that thrills teenage boys but can’t be applied to the real world.

Smith’s own examples (and later the audience’s) could have benefitted from the lessons of linguistics. He quoted linguists in a maxim he agrees with: Usage determines grammar. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The real maxim is usage eventually determines grammar. Over time grammar can change with usage. Part of him is fully onboard with this philosophy: He really doesn’t see any useful distinction between its and it’s, for example. But the father of a two-year-old surely has to know he can’t be a little bit pregnant.

Q&A

After his presentation was over, giving his jittery nerves a chance to settle, we began audience Q&A. Whaddya know: A session on grammar became yet another voicing of pet peeves. Everybody has their own list, and airing this soiled laundry has all the entertainment value of somebody else’s vacation photos.

But even with their own scattered examples, we soon found ourselves on the same boat, captained by Smith and aimed right at an iceberg. I watched from a liferaft as HMS Grammar Wars ran aground on singular they (“Everyone should wash their hands before eating”).

Even after stating that linguists are unanimous that singular (actually numberless) they has been used for centuries and is completely accepted, Smith and editors in the room grasped for one fig leaf after another to cover up this dangle. They used his or her, rewrote the sentence (even in a direct quote?) so it was plural not singular, or just used he. Oh, no, no, no, Smith said in response to that and a question on it. There are people who really do take offence to that. (And they should: He refers to males, not to people or humanity in general.) Smith uses a generic she (I’ve seen him do it) that’s so hypercorrect it loops back around to straight-up incorrect.

Someone in the audience defended generic he because their readers are firemen or engineers and are mostly male. The discussion kept on going from there. These people will do anything to avoid using the obvious. What skin is it off their ass?

If these prima donnas could get over themselves for half a minute, they’d accept that descriptive linguistics provides a wealth of information they can use to make intelligent decisions. Singular or numberless they is an open-and-shut case and there is no rational argument against it. Precisely all the facts are marshalled in favour of singular or numberless they. And Smith lambasted linguists for their intransigence.

tl;dr

There was another question about when it becomes OK to use Internet-derived abbreviations like WTF and LOL in print. The real answer is “as soon as everyone knows them,” which in those two cases was very long ago. (LOL dates back to 1990, WTF to 1985.) In some cases, you can use new terms immediately, as when they describe a new thing there is no other word for – e.g., podcast, coined by the redoubtable Ben Hammersley (q.v.; q.q.v.).

Smith gave the example of tl;dr (too long; didn’t read). Except he claimed – insisted – it’s actually tl;dnr, because tl;dr means too long, did read. It doesn’t. Well, you can see instances of that, like on MetaFilter, he said. “You can find an instance of anything,” I shot back.

Russell Smith excessively cribbed from the Wikipedia article on l33t, tried to take credit for recognition of woot, and can’t save a Unicode file. He really should not be lecturing a 20-year online and ten-year MetaFilter veteran (I’m user 250) on what Internet abbreviations mean and how they’re used on MetaFilter.

Let’s apply some computational linguistics. MeFi admin Cortex and I found tl;dr (case and separators irrelevant) used 2,929 times, plus 11 more times in tags. tl;dnr was used 19 times, plus in one extra instance meaning “do not resuscitate.” Every other use of either abbreviation meant “did not read.” Usage is a popularity contest. Being 150 times as popular makes tl;dr right and tl;dnr wrong. “Its” as simple as that.

Past and future work

Since Smith bases so many of his language columns on blog posts, God help us if he finds out about the tempest in a teapot over quotation marks. He’ll find something in there to pronounce upon and claim to have championed all along.

I had planned to walk up to him afterward, hand him my card (yes, but blue card or red card?), and tell him he should read my book on Canadian spelling. (“After all, you’re in it.”) This plan quickly became a non-starter.