The Tin Lizard

Maybe Mother Nature Knows Best

For many years, health experts, physicians, and nutritionists have been urging people to cut down on fat by moving to low-fat dairy products.  Many people have responded, to the point that in some cases (yogurt, especially) it has become difficult to find the "real" stuff in some stores.

But a lot of the dietary advice we've been getting for the past couple of decades always seemed a little suspect to me.  Specifically on dairy products, I thought the low-fat idea was ridiculous.  In part, that's because dairy is a relatively small part of my diet - if I eat a couple of tablespoons of yogurt a day, the calorie "savings" of using low-fat just isn't that significant.  The other and more important reason is that there's no case I can think of where the low-fat version tastes as good as its regular parent.  (One possible except is milk, which I have never liked - there, I find 2% more tolerable.)

Now "experts" are getting to the "not so fast!" stage, and may even be modifying earlier advice.  Some current studies suggest, for example, that people who ate more full-fat milk actually had a lower incidence of heart disease.   I suspect it may take quite a few more years before the dietary guidelines are really changed but in the meantime, it's always possible to ignore them. 

"Is" Media Or Are They Not?

In a recent post on Morning Fog, I used the verb "is" with the subject "media."  This is a practice you can observe every day in your reading, even though those of us who were taught English at a young age (I'm not sure - do they STILL teach English in school?) learned that "media" is a plural form, as is "data."   And it still rings foreign to my ear to hear that the media "is" to blame for something, or that "the data shows" such-and-such.  But I have resigned myself to the fact that native speakers of the language I sometimes call "Merkin" can't conceive of a plural if it doesn't end in "s."  (Conversely, confusion arises when a singular word just happens to end in "s," e.g. "kudos.")

I recently heard an old friend of mine speak at a public event. He is a writer who has authored and published many nonfiction books. In his presentation on writing professionally in the modern world, he threw in an occasional side remark about usage. For example, he insisted that 'one cannot convince someone to do something, you persuade them'.  That particular argument is lost on me, because the use of convince to mean persuade is not exactly new, but I think we all have our own pet peeves when it comes to the rules of usage that we learned in school, or even later.

Like most of us, I was educated prescriptively:  the language is written (or spoken) this way, that way, and no exceptions.  But over the years, having observed what is actually happening in English, and having learned to speak several other languages, I've found that even in my own lifetime, there are no immutable rules.  As linguists recognize, any language is constantly in flux; usage changes, grammar shifts (who remembers "whom"?), and even pronunciation has no solid ground to stand on (in my childhood we knew about "diabetes" and "cerebral palsy," which we pronounced respectively as "die-a-BEET-us" and "ser-EE-bral," yet now these are "die-a-beadies" and "SERribral."   Go figure.

It's not strictly "an age thing," but as I get old and crochety, I'm striving, not always successfully, to avoid getting too prescriptive.  It took a long time to learn those rules, and maybe that's why I'm so attached to them, but the general trend in language is toward simplification.  So if the meaning remains intelligible, it may not matter so much.  The media agrees - it's singular!  (But I'll leave the matter of journalistic egos for a later post.)