Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Briefly, since there are no Beijing Sounds in this at all. The boilerplate WARNING in the blog sidebar has sufficed to keep most of the lawyers out of the messy back yard here at BJS, where we do indulge in full-monty writing behavior that would get us banned from any reputable venue.

But since the warning occasionally gets some attention in its own right, I thought others might be interested in Mark Liberman’s recent post on Language Log, which analyzes more scientific approaches to the question of whether “singular them” actually slows people down when they’re reading.

Good stuff. Much more satisfying than prohibition by intuition and prejudice. A scientific approach is unlikely to solve any debate, as the core questions — is it important that a particular kind of usage slows readers down? … and what kind of readers? — will probably never get agreed upon. Still, I’ve always got hope in my heart for logic, even when experience has proved time and again that it has no bearing on the course of any argument.