Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Wearing your peevology on your sleeve

This t-shirt is available now from Signals (here):

I'm not exactly sure why, but this somehow looks like a shirt that women are far more likely to wear than men. (The missus confirms that.) Maybe the purported tendency of women to be more invested in Standard Language Ideology?

I'm way too old to remember the days of being single, when social settings were opportunities to meet potential romantic interests. (John Cowan makes appropriate guesses about my age in a comment here.) But this is the exceptional case where I would have taken motherly advice about such matters very seriously.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Someone should tell them to lose the capital on "grammarian". :P

Sasha said...

Perhaps the gendered nature of the shirt is due to the increased likelihood of women to be English teachers? "Hi, my grammar conforms better to an arbitrary standard than does yours - NYAH!" is not a message I generally want to send. As a former English teacher, however, I would have gleefully worn that shirt to class. And my students would have pointed out that there's no good reason for "grammarian" to be capitalized. And we'd have all had a good laugh.

Mr. Verb said...

Thanks to both of you. Yeah, the cap is funky for sure. But it fits the mindset, right?

Sasha, you have a better sense of irony than I do! (But it would be hilarious.)

fev said...

I blame the font. This is a job for Times New Roman.

Mr. Verb said...

Good point ... the font is part of it for me too, I think.