Recently I went to the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. I had a look round their shop and saw this iPad cover designed to look like the jacket of Charles Darwin's book On the origin of species.
The trouble is, as you can see, it says Origin of the species. This is a reasonably common mistake: the content words are present and the 'little words' get mixed up or left out. Doesn't matter? Well, maybe not, but maybe it does.
The way Darwin wrote it, it's clear that it refers to the process by which there are lots of different species (natural selection). The way it's written on this cover, it might do, because the plural of species is species. But it easily might not, and I suspect that it doesn't in the minds of the people who make this mistake. After all, one of the major ideas in this book is the idea that humans are descended from apes, so it's natural for people (self-centred as we are) to think of it as being about the origins of the human species.
Does it matter? Well, I think so, because humans are not the most important thing in the world, no matter what we may think. To us, though, we are. It would just be nice if people designing (quite expensive) products to sell could take two minutes to make them accurate.
Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts
Saturday, 30 November 2013
Friday, 5 August 2011
Learning about monkeys
Today I'm cracking on with this index I'm compiling for an edited volume (not my edited volume, one of the professors at university's). It's really slow going. I've got 40 hours to do, and I'm doing the easy ones first in order to maximise those 40 hours and get the most done I can. It took me a whole afternoon to do the 'learning' entry, with all its sub-entries, so now I'm focussing on the ones without sub-entries because with those you can basically just list all the pages they're on without having to read too much. There aren't that many of them though.
I'm learning quite a lot doing it, because for so many of the entries you do have to read the context. The volume is on language evolution, so there's a lot about early hominins, chimps, birdsong, stone tools, brain size, etc. etc.
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