Banned words in court

From Language Log:

The latest development is that a number of courts in the US are now forbidding lawyers and witnesses to use certain words during trials. Words like "rape," "victim," "crime scene," "killer," "murder," "drunk," "homicide," "embezzle," "fraud," and "robbery" are now not allowed in some courtrooms. Language engineering like this usually has a social or political basis. In this case it's more a problem of trying to treat the accuser and the accused fairly. District Attorneys want to keep on using words like these as they prosecute alleged criminals, while some defense attorneys claim that using such words violates the presumption of innocence that has been held dear by the legal system. They call the forbidden words, "loaded terms."

If I were testifying in court and I was forbidden from using my first choice words, I would very much want to the judge and jury to know that the words I was using aren't my first choice because my first choice words were banned. I can do this when I'm speaking comfortably and confidently. (A side-effect of translation brain is that half the time I think there's a better word for what I'm trying to say, so indicating that the words I'm using aren't the best words to describe the concept has become a natural part of my speech patterns.) But would I be comfortable and confident in a courtroom? Given that I'm shy and I've never been in court before and I'd know that I'm under oath and my words would be recorded for public record, I seriously doubt it.

From later in the article (bolding is mine):

"Using your own words" isn't all that common in trials I've experienced. Among other things, you can't introduce your own topics, you have to answer the opposing lawyer's questions according to the form in which they are asked (usually yes/no questions, or worse, tag-questions), and you have to be ready to be interrupted at any time. Testifying requires a witness to learn a new set of communication skills, many of which can seem counterintuitive. Doing this can be daunting for anyone not trained in the special culture of the courtroom.

I've seen this on TV, when the lawyer very loudly and in-your-face-ly insists that the witness answer with a simple yes or no. But in the oath you take at the beginning, you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So what happens if answering with a simple yes or a simple no does not tell the whole truth, or does not meet the nothing but the truth condition? What do you do then? Does this mean I should find out if perjury or contempt of court gets you in bigger trouble before I'm ever called upon to testify in court?

Do fire sprinklers come with an off switch?

They either just passed or are about to pass legislation requiring fire sprinklers in residential highrises.

I have one question: can the people in the apartments turn off the sprinklers if they start going off in a false alarm?

When your smoke detector starts going off for no reason, you can turn it off by removing the battery or flipping the circuit breaker, depending on how it's set up. In my apartment, I have a mute button for the fire alarm (I can still hear the alarm coming from the hallway) so it doesn't make me go deaf when there's a false alarm and I don't have to evacuate. I would very much like something similar for anything that might be installed in my apartment.

I've been googling around to see if this exists, and all I'm finding are reassurance from sprinkler companies that they don't produce THAT much water, and that they really won't go off unless there actually is a fire, honest, we promise, coupled with loud trumpeting of the fact that insurance companies will give you discounts if you have sprinklers.

But that's not reassuring. I've never been in a fire, but I've been in plenty of false alarms. Several times I've been in buildings where the fire alarm went off because of plumbing problems. I can't trust that sprinklers will work more reliably than that. The fact that insurance might compensate me for any damage is immaterial; insurance money won't make my mattress dry and fit to sleep in that night, it won't save irreplacable-because-of-sentimental-value stuffed animals that live on my bed when no one else is there, it won't replace the data on my computer, and it won't make a suitable assortment of size 11 narrow width shoes commercially available.

I'd be happy to sacrifice any of these things to water damage if the alternative was being burned down in a fire, but to lose them to a false alarm would be unacceptable. Please don't anyone install sprinklers in my apartment unless you can also give me an off switch.

Gee, he was just here a minute ago

We love you George!



(Returning to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.)

Tits.

The Globe and Mail thinks that La Senza's dropping sales of the ITEC bra and rising sales of cotton bras are a sign of poor economic times.

This is interesting to me, because last year I tried on the ITEC and the cotton and ended up buying the cotton. (Unfortunately, because La Senza changes its styles so frequently, the style I blogged about there is no longer available.)

This wasn't because the cotton was cheaper, but rather because it gave me a better shape. My issue is that I do have the resources, but their distribution is suboptimal. The ITEC seems to work on an equalization model, where all affected areas are allocated an equal amount of resources. However, the cotton leverages the resources available by assigning them specifically to areas where they can best serve their mandate of mitigating worrisome inflationary trends to the south. I'd have been happy to spend more on the ITEC, but the cotton simply did the job better.

And now apparently La Senza is trying to take the next logical step in this alleged trend by making cotton bras fun and interesting-looking. But the problem is that this year t-shirts are very thin, so if the bra is anything but plain solid nude it shows underneath the t-shirt. Even a plain black bra shows underneath a plain black t-shirt. And I'm not talking about straps sticking out, I'm talking about people can see straight through the shirt and identify the colour of your bra and any decorations on it. (Q: Why don't you just wear last year's t-shirts? A: I do, but I go through shirts too fast so I need to buy a few new ones every season. Q: Why don't you just wear last year's bras? A: Because the elastics either just have or are about to die a horrible death. They are cheap bras.) I do see the point of fun bras, but we do need underwear in addition to lingerie, and I think they're doing themselves a disservice by making all their cotton bras fun and colourful with whimsical patterns.

Motherfucker.

There's a sort of conventional wisdom that having a present father is good for a child, and you tend to hear this most and loudest from people who didn't have an involved father. But if you ask people who do have an involved father, some of them appreciate it, others wish he would STFU. It's like people feel more disadvantaged by the lack of a father than they actually are advantaged by the presence of a father.

The other two things that work this way are siblings and university degrees. I've often heard people who don't have siblings wanting to have more than one child so their children can have siblings. IRL you will find siblings who are close friends, but you will also find siblings who don't get along at all. And people who don't have university degrees often think they're panacea, employment-wise, but those of us who do have degrees know this isn't the case.

I think what people need to remember about relatives is that any relative, even a parent or sibling, is just another person in your child's life. They may or may not be a positive influence, just like any other person may or may not be a positive influence. Even if you, personally, like both of the people involved, they may not still like each other.

And I think what people need to remember about university degrees is that there are employers who don't want to hire people with degrees for jobs that don't strictly require a degree, and employers for jobs that do require a degree often don't want to hire someone without experience. So if you don't have a degree and make a living, say, waiting tables or doing customer service you might pressure your child to go to university so they can have a better job, but then your kid may graduate and find themselves in the position of not being able to get a degree job because they haven't had one before, and not being able to get a job waiting tables or doing customer service because they have a degree.

Cocksucker.

Two years ago, I issued a Pride Day challenge for factual use of "That is SO gay!" (And no less an authority than The Onion has taken it up.)

I didn't issue a challenge last year, so this year I'm issuing two:

1. Negative use of "That is so NOT gay!" First usage that comes to mind is things that are aesthetically displeasing, but feel free to broaden usage as it occurs organically. Same tone of voice as negative adolescent use of "that is so gay". Usage: "Fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror? That is so NOT gay!"

2. Let's start using "queer" as the generic. The LGBTTTIQQ2 (and perhaps some letters I've missed) abbreviation is getting ridiculous, and I think everyone falls within a broad definition of "queer", oui?

Bonus link: a relevant article from America's Finest News Source

Cunt.

So Catholic bishops in Alberta are opposed to the cervical cancer vaccine because they think it will encourage girls to have casual sex.

You know, I got Gardasil last year - got my last shot in the fall - and now every time someone propositions me, I don't give a moment's thought to a single thing except pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, gonnohrea, syphillis, chlamydia, herpes, crabs, yeast infections, urinary tract infections, heartache, emotional drama, the durability of friendship, the possibility of unintentional adultery, penises that are too small, penises that are too big, inopportune latex allergies, recent advances in candid digital photography, the effect of readily-available pornography on certain individuals' sexual expectations, and my own personal sexual preferences!

Piss.

The bathroom at work has automatic flushing toilets - very enthusiastic automatic flushing toilets that sometimes flush when I've just shifted position.

So it's very odd that sometimes I walk in and find a toilet full of urine and toilet paper.

It occurred to me that maybe someone with a penis is peeing in the toilets, so I started going through a mental list of all the women on the floor to try to figure out if any of them could be trans, and started going through a mental list of all the men on the floor to try to figure out if any of them might be motivated to pee in the women's washroom for some bizarre reason.

But when you pee with a penis, you don't use toilet paper, do you?

So my latest theory is that we have a ghost who has to pee sometimes. Or perhaps someone has an invisibility cloak.

Shit.

I wonder why laxatives always market towards women? I've never heard of constipation as a "female problem". I've had a number of girl-talky relationships over the years where you talk about personal shit (loonie in the pun jar) like that, but no one has ever said anything about constipation. I thought maybe it was a getting older thing, since the women in the commercials are generally cast as "older", but my mother doesn't know anything about it either.

Or maybe the mental image of someone's hairy old father straining on the toilet to take a dump is just too unappetizing.

Fuck.

George Carlin died

But but but...but...but we still need him!

I wonder if battery sales have dropped with the advent of the iPod?

I was just changing the batteries on my Scrubbing Bubbles, and I realized this is the first time that I have used batteries for anything in the whole year I've lived in this apartment.

When I was in high school I used batteries a lot, for my discman. Most people carried extra batteries with them for just that purpose, and it wasn't uncommon to hear people asking if anyone had any extra batteries. But the iPod is recharged by hooking it up to the computer, so people don't need batteries for their portable music needs any more. I wonder if that has been enough of an influence to affect overall battery sales?

Best bikini wax soundtrack ever of the day

Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler

This is a fun song to sing. It makes you feel kick-ass. (I know that's not quite the message of the song, but that's how it feels.) So that sense of kick-ass is multiplied if you sing this song while ruthlessly and unflinchingly pulling out your own body hair.

Just try it!

Things They Should Invent: topsoil transplant

One thing we were told repeatedly in school was that Southern Ontario has some of the best farmland in the country, but it keeps getting used up for development and urbanization instead of farming.

So what if, as they develop things down here, they took all the topsoil and carted it away and took it somewhere further north that isn't going to be developed any time soon, and let people farm up there? Would that work?

When everyone has kids at once

I was poking around on Facebook, and saw that a bunch of people I went to high school with have had babies (or at least they were holding babies in their pictures).

I understand intellectually that a lot of people have children, but because I can't identify with the need to have children it's very strange to me to see such a huge number of people have all made that decision. I think I'm subconsciously processing it as an obscure, expensive and time-consuming hobby that some people have, and it's strange to see a bunch of people all suddenly doing the same obscure, expensive and time-consuming hobby. It would be like if you poked around on Facebook and found that half a dozen people you went to high school with all quit their jobs and bought land way out in the wilderness and are now planning to live off the grid and support themselves through organic farming. If one person did that, you'd say "Hey, cool!" But if half a dozen people, all from your high school, all did that your first thought would be "What kind of weird trend is this? Do they know what they're getting into?"

Things They Should Invent: temporal localization

Sometimes when I read a book that was written in the past and set in what was then the present (but is now the past), there are things or ideas that I don't fully understand because they are no longer current. I might not understand what a particular piece of clothing is, or why a character is shocked or surprised by something.

They should adapt books set in the past like this so modern audiences can understand "cultural" references. It would work along similar lines to what a translator does when the target audience isn't going to get all the references. To give an extremely simplistic example, a translator of a book set in Toronto for an audience who isn't going to be familiar with Toronto might slip in the word "subway" the first time "TTC" is mentioned. If the target audience is unlikely to be familiar with bras (why? I don't know) and it's important to know that bras fasten in the back, the translator might refer to someone doing up their bra by reaching behind their back rather than just doing up their bra.

If they did something similar with older books, i tmight make them more accessible to the reader. Still have the original text available, of course, but add this option for casual readers who just want to get the story.

Is Google Ontario-centric?

I just google for the population of Manitoba. I got three relevant results, then I got one of those "helpful" little Google suggestions saying "See the results for "population of Ontario" and three results for Ontario. Then underneath the three Ontario results were more Manitoba results.

Is this happening because I'm in Ontario, or does it do it for everyone?

Help me out here please. If you're outside of Ontario, go to Google and type in population of Manitoba (no quotes or anything) then post in my comments here and let me know whether it suggests population of Ontario, or population of wherever it is you live. Anonymous posts are welcome, although I'd appreciate it if you'd post your province or country, especially if in your results Google replaces "Ontario" with wherever it is you live.

Make me a t-shirt

Demetri Martin has a t-shirt that says COMEDY.

I want a similar t-shirt that says TRAGEDY.

Girl-shaped (preferably v-necked) and dark or deep colour please.

How to write a new Hockey Night in Canada theme

You know how the Simpsons changes existing numbers from major musicals just a little bit, so they're still easily recognizable but (presumably) don't violate copyright? (e.g. Be Our Guest becomes See My Vest) Do that to the HNIC theme.

Why is rape used as a weapon of war in the first place?

From a perspective of pure heartless military strategy with no consideration for human decency whatsoever, why is rape worth using as a weapon of war? It seems really inefficient to me. Even if everyone has premature ejaculation issues, it's still faster and easier to just kill someone than to rape them.

At first I thought it was just to satisfy the soldiers' sexual needs, but if you read about it in wretched gory detail, they're actually putting way more time and energy and effort into war-crime rape than they'd need if it was for their own sexual satisfaction.

I also thought it might be for the purpose of terrorizing the population, but again, you can terrorize the population by killing large numbers of people, and that would be a far faster and easier.

So who decided, and on what basis, that war-crime rape was a good use of time and resources and manpower from a military strategy point of view?