Can you buy macarons here?

Google sometimes asks me questions, via my phone, about places I've been to so that it can improve its information about businesses when people search for them. These are very revealing about what people search for, Google's insistence on not Britishising its communication, and the way that search data translates into queries.

Let's take the straightforward non-British terminology first. Google knows that these are places in the UK, and that I am a UK user. I've been annoyed before by how my phone's autocorrect only seems to know US places and spellings, and even the grammar is American (certain contractions that are more used in the UK don't come up in the suggested words, for instance). In its common questions are the following:

Is there a restroom here?
Is this place popular with travelers?
Is there a parking lot or structure?

The last one is specially for my friend and colleague Christina, who is very interested in who uses 'structure' to refer to what we (British people, I guess there might be variation but I don't know about it) would call a multi-storey (or underground) car park. A 'parking lot' is just a 'car park'.

This is lazy. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Google to translate 'restroom' to 'toilet'. It's not like it doesn't know. I included the 'travelers' one here too because I just felt that it struck slightly the wrong note. I think the word 'travellers' is too associated with the Traveller community (Gypsy or Romany people) and I would use 'tourists' in this context.

Some of the questions reveal differences in the kinds of places people might want to go. One of the questions asked me,

Does this place offer an all-you-can-drink option?

I think the last time I was somewhere with an all-you-can-drink option, with the exception of package holiday type places, was the Tuxedo Princess, a nightclub on a boat in Newcastle, where you paid a tenner entry and could drink rubbish alcopops all night. It's not really a thing in normal places. Similarly, another common question is this:

Does this place offer musical entertainment as well as dinner?

Apart from being a difficult question to answer because of the presupposition that it does offer dinner (how do you answer this about a place that offers musical entertainment but not dinner?), I don't think that dinner-plus-music is much of a thing. I certainly have never searched for it nor seen it offered as a tempting prospect anywhere except for a hideously old-fashioned restaurant that has since closed down.

Other questions, like the one above, pose problems because of the way they're asked. Take this one:

Does this place only serve vegetarian food? 

I was asked it about a pub that doesn't do food. So technically, it doesn't only serve vegetarian food, and the answer is 'no'. But that implies that it does do non-vegetarian food, as 'only' implies a sub-set of all kinds of food.

Then, take this one:

Can you drink outside on the street here? 

Well, at this pub that doesn't do food, no, you can't drink outside on the street. But it does have a really nice, big beer garden. Are people that ask this question just interested in drinking on the street, or do they more generally want to know if they can drink outdoors? That's another question, so I've been answering this literally, but I'm not sure it's the most useful thing to ask.

My favourite kind of question is the ones about weirdly specific products at random shops. I was asked of Morrison's (a low-end supermarket):

Can you get carpets here? 

And I was asked of Aldi (a cheap European supermarket):

Can you get macarons here? 

I... don't know. I suppose sometimes people ask where they can buy macarons or carpets and that translates, via algorithm, into a question for me.

They's using singular verbs as well now

There's been a bit of a flurry of discussion about the use of pronouns for nonbinary people in linguist twitter lately, because of a blog post by the well-known Geoff Pullum on the well-known platform Language Log (so, a person using their position of power and privilege to complain about something that is far less onerous than constantly being misgendered). Kirby Conrod has written a good response and it was posted on Language Log, so no need to add my own comments here, especially as I'm cisgender and so don't really have anything to contribute to the debate.

What has been interesting to me is something that I hadn't seen before: people using they+3rd person singular verb, so They is joining us later. I would have always assumed that singular they took the unmarked verb form, same as all the other pronouns apart from the third person singular he, she and it, and crucially, the same as the plural they. Then the verb form follows the pronoun form, and in this sense it's the same as you, which takes the same form in singular and plural. Similarly, in German the polite form of you is identical to they and takes the same verb forms. Using the -s form, is, is logical if we think that verb form is attached to the semantic (person and) number, rather than just the form of the verb, so it shouldn't be so surprising, but nevertheless I was surprised by it. I think we haven't settled down on this yet, so I will watch developments with interest.