changing my mind

[mellowtigger]

There has been some evidence in recent years that our language affects our thoughts.  I want to be pro-active in this matter, so I've decided to make a stronger push in my life to include 3 specific changes.

metrics:  As philbutrin pointed out recently, the USA looks rather silly as a holdout on officially adopting the metric system.  America has been in the process of converting since 1975.  I remember attending classrooms where we talked about the new system and our conversion to it.  I also remember 1982 when President Reagan defunded and closed the office that was supposed to be helping the nation make the conversion.  We got stuck with liter Coke bottles but gallons of milk and gasoline.

I've been in the habit of posting temperatures in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.  That practice ends now.  I will post only in Celsius.

I have an easier time (because of the aforementioned school classes) thinking of small units of distance in terms of meters and centimeters.  Harder, however, are long distances.  It doesn't help that roadway signs are no longer posted in dual metrics.  Thank you again, President Reagan.  It will be difficult to figure out my vehicle mileage.  I'll still call it "mileage" rather than "kilometerage".

history:  Calendars, in addition to helping us predict future events, are supposed to help us relate current events to past ones.  I've never been able fully to wrap my mind around our current year-counting system.  Enough of that silliness.  I've grown lax in adhering to my Recorded Human History timeline.  I'll work harder at posting dates in this RHH format.  Oversimplified, just add 4,000 to the current Gregorian year and you'll have your RHH date.  Welcome to the year 6010!  *cheer*

Signing/dating my checks will be confusing to me, since I'm guessing that banks would not appreciate or adopt the new and more sensible calendar.  I'll have to convert to Gregorian years when I pay debts.

gender:  I'm glad that English doesn't insist upon gender for every single noun.  Pronouns, however, are an obvious holdout to older ways of thinking.  I dislike "s/he" which is readable but unpronounceable.  I dislike "they" as a neutral singular.  I have not found a consistent usage among transgender folk yet, but I'm going to choose one now.  I'm selecting a modified Xe vocabulary.  This option probably feels more natural to me only because of prior exposure.  This language was proposed by Jim Sinclair (genderless autistic human), and I spent a few years reading xer email communications.

The letter "X" is pronounced like the letter "Z", as in the familiar corporate name "Xerox".

• xe (plural they); replaces he, she, and it
• xem (plural them); replaces him, her, and it
• xer (plural their); replaces his, her, and its

I am changing the official "xir" or "xyr" spelling into "xer" just to maintain vowel consistency.  I very much prefer that every vowel be either "e" or "i" instead of being mixed.

Comments

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the metric thing is way easier. It's fine if some country still uses their old measuring system for internal affairs but the people should be schooled in what the rest of the world uses or they'll be the oddballs when they travel. Americans can no longer rely on being dominant anymore to just strut into any country and have everyone conform to them. They're going to have to learn other ways and other languages. At least enough to get by for the length of their travel.

In Canada we call it fuel efficiency. People still say mileage and then use how many kms they get per litre.
There was an attempt to describe how little you use it for a fixed amount of fuel. As in: this car uses only 5 litres per 100 kms whereas this other car uses 10 litres per 100 kms. It didn't catch on. Car culture doesn't care how little it uses, it cares about how much they can get out of something so people say it gets 30 k per litre.

Most asian languages don't have a separate he and she and you can hear it when they make mistakes speaking English. "That man there, she is... oh he is... tee hee."
Mandarin Chinese says "ta" for "that person". I agree that "they" isn't quite suitable since it's a plural thing but it is pretty common though.
Xe pronounced zee (or is it zeh?) is a bit awkward to my ears at this point. I wonder what Ze Frank thinks of this.
http://www.zefrank.com

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Just wondering if you considered Spivak pronouns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) - and if you did, what about them you found less desirable than the Xe set?

Of all the genderless pronoun sets I've looked at, ey/em/eir seems more "natural" to me, being derived from the plural pronouns. And because of that, I have an unsubstantiated feeling that if someone unaware of the concept ran across them... they'd be more understandable in context. I think someone unfamiliar with them would probably see them as an odd typo and get the intended meaning.

[litch.livejournal.com]

there are quite a few places that are only partially metric (england, canada, hong kong, hell much of the old british empire/commonwealth), I think once the baby boom dies the generations who have grown up with it taught at a young age will be much less obstinate. If nothing else the multi-national corporations will demand it to ease their packaging and logistics.

So what kind of change in yourself are you trying to make by changing your language?

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

I've always found it odd that when I'm working as a chemist, much of what I do uses SI units, but I don't use them at all outside of work. And I can't really translate between the two. I know that you can't run a GC lower than about 35 C without some sort of coolant (CO2 or LN2), but if you tell me the current temperature outside in "C" I'll just give you a blank stare.

Besides, in general, units of measure are completely FUBAR. Yes, switching to SI would help, but it would hardly "make things easy." E.g., pipe "sizes" are determined by the inner diameter. Which is nice for being able to quickly estimate flow through a given piece of pipe, but it also means that the outer diameter for "half-inch pipe" varies quite a bit depending on the material of construction of the pipe. (Conversely, tubing--which is merely really tiny pipes--is named by the outer diameter.)

Then there's the land of IT, where one kilobyte is 1024 bits, and to convert from Mbps to KBps you multiple by 128 (or maybe 125, or perhaps 122--no, no, really, I've found references for all of those).

While I have always admired your will power to stand on principle, I don't think the SI thing is a great idea. The next time you walk into a hardware store, your head will explode. Hell, mine does, and I'm not trying the least bit to encourage SI usage.

PS: Weird trivia. The Fahrenheit scale makes more sense than it appears to at first. The freezing and boiling point of water are 180 degrees apart--which is reasonable, given clocks and degrees of angles, and other base-60 units. (<yakkowakkodot>Thank you Sumeria! (http://www.metafilter.com/65751/Why-did-Sumerians-use-base-60-mathematics)</yakkowakkodot>) And 100 F was originally set at normal body temperature. Unfortunately, everyone's normal body temperature isn't exactly the same, and the early thermometer technology wasn't very precise, so now it's around 98.6.

PPS: Indeed, C isn't that great either, since it has negative numbers. How can you have a negative temperature? If you're going to switch to SI, go for Kelvin temperatures. Then your calculations will always work out properly.

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

I remember some neo-pagan types who were using the year of the Goddess. Pretty well adding 10,000 years the Christian year as they say the Goddess worship in Europe started approximately that amount of time before.