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. 

Not all moths

I host a quiz night in our local micropub (it's cosy). Recently, in the 'insects' round, I asked whether insects are warm- or cold-blooded. They are cold-blooded, of course (this is not a technical term: they are actually ectothermic, which means they don't regulate their body temperature internally). One quizzer challenged me, because there are in fact three species of moth (out of maybe 10 million species of insect - we don't know exactly) that are warm-blooded.

Leaving aside the fact that rounding this off to, say, 3 significant figures is 0.00%, we have a question of genericity. Now, either my statement 'insects are cold-blooded' is an absolute statement meaning 'all insects are cold-blooded', in which case a single warm-blooded insect is enough to prove it wrong, or it's a generic statement: 'insects in general are cold-blooded'. I meant the latter, of course, and in the context of a quiz question where two options are given, this should be clear. One of the things Steven Pinker said, actually, was that to avoid the hedging ('almost', 'in general', etc) you find in bad prose, you should allow your reader to assume the generic interpretation. In academic writing there is a place for the precision afforded by hedging, but for much other writing I agree.

There's limits though. While researching my quiz, I read the supposed fact that 'babies are born with blue eyes'. That, I thought, was astonishing. It turned out that what the author meant was 'white babies who will have blue, green, hazel or grey eyes', not 'babies in general' - there is a very high proportion of babies in the world who have dark brown eyes, and are not born with blue eyes. If you're going to make generic statements you do have to be clear about what the universe of discourse is and your generic statement has to actually apply to the majority of things in it. (In this case, the author had made the very easy mistake of forgetting that not everyone is exactly like them.)

Another of my quizzers challenged another question. In the picture round I had asked for the name of the species of fish pictured. One was a goldfish, and the team had written 'carp'. I didn't allow this, and the challenger wanted to know why, when a goldfish is a carp. It's true that goldfish are carp, but not all carp are goldfish. 'Goldfish' is therefore a hyponym of 'carp' (and 'carp' is a hypernym of 'goldfish').

I am clearly not strict enough with my quizzers. If I keep blogging about their complaints perhaps they'll stop.

Vocabulary quiz

I found this vocabulary quiz. It's by Merriam-Webster Online and quite good fun, though a bit too easy. Points for getting it right, and more points for getting it right quicker.

If we do be clever

I have a pub quiz team, and one of the quizzes we go to has a bonus question which is worth five points if you get it right, but you lose five if you get it wrong. You can also choose not to play, and not take the risk.*

We were deliberating this one week, as we had an answer but it was risky, and we wondered if we should try to be clever or just play it safe. My team-mate said to me,

If we do be clever...

Copula be is not normally a verb that can take an emphatic do in Standard English. (It can in some dialects - it sounds kind of West Country to me, I think.) However, in this instance, it was required. If she had said

If we are clever...

then our cleverness is an attribute that we have, not a temporary behaviour. Be in this utterance is a dynamic verb rather than a stative one, but that doesn't quite explain it. Other verbs that can be stative and non-stative can take do:

She has two children.
She is having a baby.
If she does have a baby...

I think this might just be a lacuna, a gap in the language. There's no grammatical reason, as far as I can see, for be to act like a stative verb even when it isn't.

There are other tests for whether a verb is stative and be in this sense has mixed results:

We are being clever [progressive]
??They forced us to be clever [complement of force]
??Be clever! [imperative]
??What we did was be clever [pseudo-cleft]

*In fact, that's a linguistic issue in itself. The wording of the instructions is:

Five points for a correct answer, five away if you get it wrong or don't play.

This is ambiguous, with the scope of the disjunction not clear. Is it that there's five points off if you get it wrong OR you can choose not to play, or is it that you lose five points IF you either get it wrong OR don't play? In other words, is the structure this:

...[DisjP [DP 5 points off if you get it wrong] [Disj or [CP don't play]]]

or this:

...[CP if [DisjP [TP you get it wrong] [Disj or [TP you don't play]]]