Et in arcadia ego...

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Et in arcadia ego...

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1thorold
Jun 19, 2013, 8:38 am

Quote from the footer of an email I just received:
You’re receiving this email because you’re an alumni, retired staff or friend of the University of ---- (name deleted to protect the guilty)

So, the Development and Alumni Relations office apparently doesn't know that "alumni" is a plural (a suspicion confirmed by the mention elsewhere in the mail of "your fellow alums"), and that indefinite article gets them into a mess further down the line. "A ... retired staff" suggests disused walking-sticks.
As it happens, I'm a former staff member, but not retired: I suppose that makes me a "friend"?

The use of the present tense is interesting, too. By the time I get around to reading the footer of the mail, I'm well past the instant when I received it: they seem to have got mixed up between "you have received" and "we are sending".

2pgmcc
Jun 19, 2013, 9:27 am

University of ---- (name deleted to protect the guilty)

The errors you describe validate the message you provide in the quote from your post.

3dtw42
Jun 20, 2013, 4:49 am

Mark it up and send it back. :-)

4timspalding
Editado: Jun 20, 2013, 4:58 am

There's a deep, deep fear of alumn* misuse. Alumnus, alumna, alumni, alumnae. It's like who and whom times ten!!!!

Now, what does Pedants Corner feel about "alumni/ae"? Is it "Damn straight!" or bad Latin, because -i is the normal ending for groups comprised of both men and women?

5ed.pendragon
Jun 20, 2013, 5:23 am

You’re receiving this email ...
Possibly intended as "You're receiving emails (from us)...", which would make more sense.
Personally I think you should name and shame the Arcadian institution.

6thorold
Editado: Jun 20, 2013, 9:54 am

>4 timspalding:
Hmmm. If you start getting worked up about alumni/ae, I think you also have to deal with another deeply sexist conceit and start using "alm(a/us) (m/p)ater". (The breast-feeding metaphor has always seemed a bit artificial anyway, when you consider the major role that bottles play in higher education...)

I'm on the mailing lists of three (UK) universities. The one that does not teach either Latin or Greek is the one that addresses its prospective donors in the American style as "alumni"; the other two seem to prefer to avoid getting into those murky linguistic waters and stick to expressions like "Graduates" and "Old Members".(*)

BTW: It's interesting to see that the OED has managed to find an example that uses the words "alumna" and "whiptease" in the same sentence. Sadly, there isn't an entry for the latter, yet...

ETA: (*) But my old school recently went over from "Old Boys" to "alumni", presumably because some fund-raising consultant told them that alumni give more money.

7krazy4katz
Jun 21, 2013, 8:23 pm

>6 thorold:

My...former institute of higher learning...would never get any money from me if they called me an "old member."

8Osbaldistone
Editado: Jun 21, 2013, 9:51 pm

>1 thorold:
You weren't "receiving this email" when you read it. Nor were you when they wrote those words.

I cringe at some of these common uses of the wrong tense. Often, I'll get a phone call and the caller will say "I was calling to ask...". I suppose it depends on what you mean by calling. If 'calling' is 'dialing', then I guess this tense is correct. But if calling is making and completing a phone call (dialing, conversation, good-byes, and hanging up) then "I am calling..." would be correct.

And then there's the occasional novel where the writer will switch from the present to the past tense from one paragraph to the next. Makes me nuts.

Os.

9thorold
Jun 21, 2013, 11:16 pm

"I was calling..." - This might be linked to the odd notion some people have of making an indirect request by describing their own past state of mind: "I was wondering if you might like to go out for a drink..." somehow seems more polite to them than "Come out for a drink!" (I think of that as an Irishism, but maybe it's just that I associate it with one particular Irish acquaintance.)

10PhaedraB
Jun 21, 2013, 11:21 pm

8 >

"I was calling to ask..." you about one thing, but now I've decided to ask you something else...

11rolandperkins
Editado: Jun 22, 2013, 3:13 pm

And, in cases of asking WHO
is/was calling, we Americans
ask "Who is THIS?" Whereas the British ask "Who is THAT?"
Iʻm not sure why, but I trace it to a British feeling of
being remote from the other speaker (which geographically is usually the case), and an
American feeling that the other person -- whether you know them or not -- is right in the same room with you. Iʻm American and favor "this?" but I can see the logic of calling the other person "that".
In the days when all the phones were land lines, and not everyone had one, Americans spoke of ʻHAVING a telephone" while the British spoke of "BEING ON the telephone". As if it was, to the British, more membership
(as in a subscription) than
ownership.

12CDVicarage
Jun 22, 2013, 3:43 am

#11 In the olden days in Britain you rented your line from BT and it included the telephone - one model only, which was fixed to the socket, so, yes it was a subscription. These days you buy your own telephone and can plug it in to any socket in your house. I can't remember when the changeover happened.

13Osbaldistone
Jun 27, 2013, 12:23 am

>12 CDVicarage:
Same in the US until sometime in the '70s. My grandmother paid a monthly rental fee (for a phone supplied by the telephone company) from 1945 until her death in 1973. I'm sure she paid for that phone 10 times over.

I sure would like to have gotten that phone when they cleaned out her home, though. It probably weighed 10 pounds and the case was Bakelite.

Os.

14trishpaw
Jun 30, 2013, 7:04 pm

>13 Osbaldistone: I have one. I dropped the headset and chipped my hardwood floor. I am very glad it didn't land on my foot...

15thorold
Jul 1, 2013, 1:03 am

>11 rolandperkins:
Perhaps it's a question of tact. A lot of British people didn't have a telephone (until well into the 60s at least) because it was rather expensive. It's rather bad manners to push someone into saying "No, we can't afford it" - maybe "Are you on the phone?" was better because a negative answer left open the possibility that the GPO simply hadn't got around to installing the service in your area yet.

I think telephone sockets and phones you could buy from third-party suppliers came in some time after Mrs Thatcher took the telephone service away from the Post Office and sold it off as a private monopoly, so it would have been in the eighties.

Other British telephone oddities include the original recommended way of answering - "Are you there?" - which didn't last long, but does appear in some novels of the early 20th century, e.g. P.G. Wodehouse. Later we were encouraged to answer the phone by stating our telephone number, a convention that demonstrates a touching lack of faith in the efficiency of the machinery, and was very annoying. It has fortunately disappeared in the last few years. Also odd is that you weren't supposed to say "nought" or "zero" on the phone, but had to use "oh" for 0.

16timspalding
Jul 1, 2013, 3:37 pm

but had to use "oh" for 0.

I always so "oh." I think maybe that's counter-recommended in the US.

17jbbarret
Editado: Jul 1, 2013, 4:05 pm

>15 thorold: And the recommended way of saying the number was to split it into pairs, never threes.
So 222345 would be said, "double two - two three - four five". The word "triple" was especially discouraged. Too easily confused with "double", given the quality of the connection.

18rolandperkins
Jul 1, 2013, 4:11 pm

One of the few things I learned in h. s. Math was that
two 2-digit pairs are easier to remember than 4 one-digit
singles. E.g., remember
5638 as "fifty-six/thirty-eight"
not as Five-six-three-eight.

19pgmcc
Jul 1, 2013, 4:17 pm

When French people give telephone numbers they give them in pairs just as rolandperkins describes, i.e. 748790 would be seventy-four, eighty-seven, ninety.

It throws me every time.

20Amtep
Jul 1, 2013, 4:25 pm

Two-digit pairs are normal in the Netherlands too and it always utterly confuses me, because two-digit numbers are said the wrong way around in Dutch. So 748790 would be "four-and-seventy seven-and-eighty ninety". And I start writing 4 and 7 and then give up.

21timspalding
Editado: Jul 1, 2013, 4:31 pm

My mom still knows and to some degree thinks in the names for all the local exchanges "Montgomery 0432," etc.

22Collectorator
Jul 1, 2013, 4:33 pm

This member has been suspended from the site.

23pgmcc
Jul 1, 2013, 5:14 pm

#20 Numbers used to be spoken that way in English. Read some of the period novels and you will read such things as, "She was four-and-twenty years old".

24thorold
Jul 1, 2013, 5:42 pm

>19 pgmcc: 748790 would be seventy-four, eighty-seven, ninety.
...or rather sixty-fourteen, four-score and seven, four-score and ten. On the whole, the digit-reversal in German and Dutch is probably a lot less confusing than the French refusal to use septante, huitante, and nonante.

25jbbarret
Jul 1, 2013, 5:48 pm

>23 pgmcc: That's because she was four before she was twenty.

26pgmcc
Jul 2, 2013, 4:05 am

#25 That explains it. Thank you!

27oldstick
Jul 2, 2013, 7:22 am

When someone asks for my mobile (cell) number I always give it in fours and threes because the middle three is 123, but as there are eleven numbers the first and last group have to be four. Until recently I always said 'oh' for 0 but I have begun to say zero. I'm not sure which is more popular in the UK.

28pgmcc
Jul 2, 2013, 8:55 am

I strive to say "zero" as it avoids ambiguity.

29CDVicarage
Jul 2, 2013, 10:29 am

Before we introduced a scanning system at the school where I work, the students had to recite their log-on numbers to be issued with equipment, and it surprised me how often their poor diction, or my poor hearing, confused 0 for 8 and vice versa so I have come round to zero instead of oh

30andejons
Jul 2, 2013, 12:36 pm

>24 thorold:
The Danes, of course, do both.

31Osbaldistone
Jul 2, 2013, 3:14 pm

>27 oldstick:
When I give my home phone number, I break it up so as to emphasize the '666' in the middle. If freaks out my more conservative Christian friends. :-)

Os.

32JerryMmm
Jul 3, 2013, 5:38 am

having 4 pairs of numbers in my mobile number makes it really easy, and I haven't had anyone ask me if I was stuttering yet..

33CliffordDorset
Jul 7, 2013, 3:41 pm

>21 timspalding:

I had to smile, Tim, at your parental memory. Thirty years ago (i.e. before my memory started to fade) I relocated to an area in which one of the important roads had the number '353'. For weeks I wondered why the word 'fleet' kept coming to mind - until I recalled that during my life in London, the telephone exchanges lost their three-letter appellations. '353' was the new number for what had been the Fleet Street exchange - 'FLE', which becomes digital in the form '353'.

34pgmcc
Jul 7, 2013, 6:00 pm

...and 353 is the international code for Ireland.

35HarryMacDonald
Jul 11, 2013, 6:57 am

Going back to the original heading of this title, Mark, I am trusting that you wish us no untimely demise by quoting the TOMB-INSCRIPTION from Poussin's masterpiece. Yes, yes, I know Wodehouse uses it, but at the risk of seeming -- ahem -- terminally pedantic, he actually uses it (uncharacteristically) inaccurately. Still, I DO forgive you (and him), as I recall with great delight the revelatory moment of shared experience btw Bertie Wooster and Sir Roderick G.

36Osbaldistone
Jul 11, 2013, 10:26 pm

>35 HarryMacDonald:
Ah, Goddard. That reminds me that I intended to pull a volume of Jeeves & Wooster from the shelves to read again. It's been too long. Guess I'll have to put off something on my 'to read' list for a few extra days. Besides, Wodehouse is better summer reading than Brendan Behan.

Os.

37thorold
Jul 12, 2013, 5:51 am

>35 HarryMacDonald:
For once, I was not thinking of Wodehouse, but of the first part of Brideshead revisited. Waugh uses it correctly in the Poussin sense (the skull on the mantelpiece), but, largely because of the popularity of Brideshead, the phrase has also picked up an association with idyllic student days.

38thorold
Jul 31, 2013, 7:07 am

>8 Osbaldistone:,9,10 "I was calling...", "You are receiving..."

Another oddity is the way some people are fond of sending out emails dealing with their past desires. I received one from a prominent Luxembourg bookseller this morning: "We wanted to let you know that your Amazon gift voucher..."
Apparently the impulse had already passed by the time they actually wrote the mail, so why bother sending it? Very odd.

39thorold
Nov 27, 2013, 8:35 am

>1 thorold:
Apparently there's a limit to the linguistic errors you can get away with in mailings to your former students: in the latest one they've changed the footer to read:
You are receiving this email because you are an alumnus/a, retired staff, friend or donor of the University of ...

So they've fixed one of the issues, but introduced the ugly "alumnus/a". Better than nothing :-)

40pgmcc
Nov 27, 2013, 8:46 am



I noticed the following sign as I passed the Internet today:

"Every time you make a typo, the errorists win."