Bisexual chic is back already
I'm afraid that I couldn't find myself disagreeing more strongly with
Geoff, who
criticizes
the claim that the word
bisexual is usually followed by the word
chic in the mainstream press. Of
course, the facts are on his side, as usual. There is, as it
happens, a single word that follows bisexual over half the time in the
news, and it ain't
chic. Any
idea what it is?
And.
Yes,
and. If you do the
search
"bisexual
and|&" in Google news (
gee,
I didn't know you could use disjunctions in the middle of Google string
searches. Well, you can, and it's pretty damn useful. E.g. I've recently been looking
at there-insertion using queries like "there
s|is|are a|1..1000 * linguist|linguists", which matches e.g.
"There are 8 indiginous linguists in Columbia". Gee, I didn't....)
you'll find that simple conjunctions account for 498 of 990 hits on
bisexual. Like so many frequency
counts, this represents another dull triumph for function over content.
So yeah, it's true that Geoff is factually correct. Totally. 100%.
Again. But what a boring world this would be if we listened to Geoff
all the time just because he's right. Pullumizing the article in
question, the crucial sentence would read:
It's
difficult to find a piece of writing in the mainstream press which
mentions the word bisexual
without finding that it is immediately followed by the word and or possibly transgender(ed), or, man/men, gay,
people/person, woman/women, who, community/communities, but,
character(s), or any of a few hundred more words or an item of
punctuation.
Yawn. I stand with Bi-Victoria newsletter writers and BBC science
commentators here: let us not allow mere facts to stand in the way of
good journalism. Animals can
talk,
eskimos' brains are so warped by the gazillions of
snow
words in their heads that they have to take an extra long nap after
lunch, and bisexual chic is in.
By the way, there is a charming footnote at the end of the
newsletter
piece Geoff linked to, which begins:
Footnote
* A reader of this article pointed
out that monogamy and racism are not morally equivalent.
Nooooo? Really? Geoff, you nit-picker, will you please leave the poor
journalist alone?
Posted by David Beaver at September 7, 2004 04:38 AM