[Ads-l] [Non-DoD Source] "Niger" or "Niger"?

[Wilson Gray]

> the given name "Ryan" is now unisex

This sort of thing has been around at least since Tatum O'Neal. In the
'70's, a buddy dated a woman with the first name, "Stewart." A female
upstairs neighbor had the first name, "Mason." I once Googled my own name
and discovered a woman living in Dallas, Texas, who was named "Wilson Gray,"

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 9:22 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> April Ryan, award-winning White House correspondent.
>
> BTW, the given name "Ryan" is now unisex: (Ms.) Ryan Manion (b. ca.1977?):
>
> <goog_153042178>
> http://www.travismanion.org/our-story/tmf-staff-and-board/
> board-of-directors/ryan-manion-board/
>
> JL
>
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 3:59 AM, Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > I've never encountered "Nigerian" for "a native of Niger", only for "a
> > native of Nigeria"; I would think trying to use it for both would be
> > fatally ambiguous, thus "Nigerien".
> >
> > I've lately heard (in the US anyway) a lot of radio and TV people taking
> > extra care to try (often farcically) to approximate French and Spanish
> > proper name pronunciations, starting in the 1990s (and probably radiating
> > out from the American Southwest).  This has included pronunciations of
> the
> > names of some other former French colonies, e.g. Montserrat without the
> "t"
> > sounds and with a nasalized "n".  I would think that eagerness to avoid
> > anything like the pronunciation of the N-word is behind rapid re-adoption
> > of "knee-ZHAIR" in English, but it's actually part of a broader pattern
> > (cf. someone else's comment about Côte d'Ivoire).
> >
> > See also ready Western adoption of Beijing, Mumbai, and other changes to
> > some Asian placename transliterations to be more accurate, and increased
> > appearance of the proper diacritics on many names in modern newspapers
> > which used to eschew them entirely or almost entirely (I remember one
> > journalism style guide permitted them for Spanish and French but no
> > others).  Also been seeing a lot of Dao De Jing (even Daodejing), Mao
> > Zedong, Laozi, etc., where once we had Tao Te Ching, Mao Tse Tung or Mao
> > Tse-tung, and Lao Tzu or Lao Tze.
> >
> > All of these proper-naming shifts seem to have happened over a single
> > generation, from the 1980s to 2000s, and are being pushed top-down by
> > publishers, not bottom-up by "the common folk". Most of the shifts I
> notice
> > are bottom-up ones, like turning "e-mail" into "email", inverting the
> > meaning of "comprise", accepting "less" as applying to count nouns ("15
> > items or less"), and treating "bad" and "good" as synonymous with "poor"
> > and "well", respectively, in the performance senses ("She speaks English
> > really good").
> >
> > On the other hand, the British war against punctuation, especially the
> > period and comma, is a two-way affair, pushed aggressively by the UK
> > newspaper industry and also loved by youths, who hate all those fiddly
> > punctuation rules and were already ignoring them. It's resisted by
> British
> > academic publishers and by regular people over about 35.  But I digress.
> >
> > --
> > Stanton McCandlish
> > McCandlish Consulting
> > 4001 San Leandro St
> > Suite 28
> > Oakland  CA 94601-4055
> >
> > +1 415 234 3992
> >
> > https://www.linkedin.com/in/SMcCandlish
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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