So few female cellists

I like a quiz programme, as I'm sure you know, more or less regardless of what the theme is. So I listen to Counterpoint despite never being able to answer any questions. In a recent one, there was an example of gender-neutral they, still relatively unusual on a mainstream media source like the BBC. The question began like this: 

Which cellist made their debut...

Of course, they is intended to obscure the gender of the cellist so as not to give us any clues. But then it interacted with centuries of gender inequality (meaning that classical composers and musicians are nearly all men) and the Gricean pragmatic principles that say you should be appropriately specific, and resulted in me getting an answer right for once, because it implied that the cellist was not a man, and I know precisely one not-male cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, and she was the right answer. 

Why did it imply it wasn't a man? Well, if the gender would have been a clue, then that more or less tells us that the gender was not male, because maleness doesn't narrow the field much. If you google 'famous cellists', the pictures are all men apart from du Pré. Even this article from Classic FM, where they probably tried to include a couple of women, has 13 men and 3 women. So the gender being a giveaway meant it had to be a distinctive feature of the person, so it had to be not male. 

Here is a really interesting article by Kirby Conrod on how this same principle works to sometimes implicitly misgender people, if you use they inconsistently or when you could or should have been more specific. And here is an old post about the contrast that becomes implied when Mrs and Ms are the only two options to choose from on a drop-down menu, because Mrs ought to be a subset of Ms, but has to be interpreted as distinctive if they're the two available options. 

There is no doubt in my mind

Today, most schools in England (and I think maybe other parts of the UK, but I'm less sure about that) were due to go back. Some are closed, like in our area, because of high rates of the coronavirus. Others are supposed to be open but the teaching unions are advising teachers that they should not go in, and that schools should not open, because it's not safe. This is going to be an interesting day because the Conservative government *hates* unions - they consistently work to disempower them, and pursue a rhetoric of unions as troublemakers and working against the interests of the public, which I suppose plays well with their voters, who are less likely to be in unions themselves. So we'll see how it plays out when those schools don't open today despite the Prime Minister saying on television yesterday that parents should send their children to school. 

He said 'There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe'. I would say that this is untrue, but actually I can't say that: what is untrue is the embedded proposition Schools are safe. His utterance, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe is an assertion about his belief, and it may well be true. Maybe he has convinced himself that schools actually have loads of space for social distancing and children are capable of not being tiny infection-spreaders, in the context of a new variant that spreads especially well among children. If pressed, I'm sure he would utter the statement that Schools are safe, and then the truth of that utterance would be a matter of fact, not his belief, and it would be true if schools did not present an increased risk (or any risk? what does 'safe' really mean?) of contracting the virus, which at present is not the case. Teachers have been saying all through the holiday that there is not enough space to provide enough distance, and in any case it's not at all clear that such distancing measures are effective. Scientists are also advising that schools don't open. 

It puts the statements from my own employer into perspective, anyway. The message from them is that 'Campus is 100% safe' and 'Campus is covid-secure'. This is also not strictly true: there is no way at all to ensure that it's covid-secure, as you can't control what people do, and it's totally possible that someone could catch the virus and then come to campus and run up and cough in people's faces, or that people might not follow the rules and then come and sit in a classroom for two hours the next day. What they mean is that they've put processes in place to make it *as safe as possible*. Nothing is 100% safe, of course. '100% safe' in this context means something like 'We have done 100% of the things in our power to make the campus comply with government advice'. And for us, that does mean that we can use bigger rooms to teach, and we can open windows and doors in many of those rooms, and we are able to teach remotely if need be. Schools don't have any of those things (many can teach remotely but they point is they're not being allowed to), so if it doesn't seem quite true that my campus is safe, then it's definitely not true that schools are safe. But the fact remains that Johnson's statement, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe, may well be true, because he is capable of believing (or convincing himself he believes) utterly outlandish nonsense.