Lesbian anti-lesbian group ordered to pay court costs

A Greek court denies the petition of three residents of Lesbos to restrict the adjective “Lesbian” from being applied to gay women, and orders the complainants to pay court costs. I’m sure almost everyone has heard about this case by now–it first hit the news quite a while back–but I thought that while I’m posting links today, I might as well hit this one as well.

These residents were apparently upset that some gay people were using the word “lesbian” to refer to themselves, and decided to do something about it. Of course, they didn’t decide to do something constructive about it–I’m sure the fact that it has absolutely no power over global speech habits had something to do with the court’s decision. Note that the identification of gay people and Lesbos has led to a protracted upswing in island tourism.

One cannot help but call to mind the recent flap over the American Family Association’s policy of globally replacing the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” on their “news” site OneNewsNow. At least, one cannot help it if one is Jane and has a lively sense of the absurd.

Orthographic regularity? In my essay?

It’s less likely than you think, especially if you’re a first-year college student.

Ken Smith, at Bucks New University, is only the latest to suggest that orthographic regularity and good grammar are things of the past, and should be treated as such. This old chestnut pops up every few years and is promptly shut down again, thankfully, unlike such grammar-school atrocities as teaching reading through word recognition, which comes into vogue like very slow clockwork every fifteen years or so.

Many of the English spelling conventions decried by the spelling-challenged come directly from my beloved Greek (the word phonetic itself cannot be spelled phonetically, as wags often note, because it’s based on φωνη). However, even were I not a classicist, as someone who has had the duty of grading hundreds of first-year essays every year, I cannot see the virtues of accepting phonetic spellings for commonly-used words as clearly as Professor Smith does. I cannot imagine how much longer it would take to decipher my students’ essays if I did not hold them to ordinary spelling and grammar conventions. The amazing misspellings I have sometimes seen in essays, despite the ready availability of spellcheck, attest to that. Orthographic regularity is not an old-fashioned constraint on modern freedom of expression: it is a kindness to your readers.

I will, however, admit to an awful joy in first-year malapropisms. The drop-down thesaurus, coupled with an insufficient grasp of the nuances of vocabulary and an unwillingness to look up words in the dictionary, provides a great deal of amusement during a long night of grading.