English - The Real Deal

经常使用Facebook的人最近应该会注意到一个“低级错误”：

我的第一反应：肯定不是相关人员不懂基本语法，而是程序设置出了问题。果然，很快看到了Language Log给出的分析：

You can see how it came about: there’s a program that pulls the sex item (called “sex”, and not “gender”, by the way) from the user’s profile and then plugs in she/her/her, he/him/his, or they/them/their according to what it finds there. So if someone with no sex specified checks one or more boxes in the “Looking for” item — Friendship, Dating, A Relationship, and Networking are the choices offered — that will be reported as

[Pronoun] is looking for …

with the program supplying the “appropriate” pronoun, in this case they. Result:

They is looking for …

This is akin to those annoying reports like

You have 1 messages.

对最后提到的那个电话录音的例子特别有感触。“You have 1 messages.”也让我浑身不自在，但因为电话录音还没先进到可以根据中间的数字来自动切换message/messages，所以只好不去理会。看样子Facebook的“低级错误”也属于这种情况，只好尽量无视了。

没想到，Language Log很快又有了更新：

For the Facebook case Arnold Zwicky just noted, all we need is a replacement of “is” by “are” when no sex specification is available. For heaven’s sake, even I, who cannot program in anything fancier than the Unix C shell language, can program that.

It’s still a bit ugly to use singular they with a proper name antecedent, but don’t tell me the programmers couldn’t have set things up to do what the above piece of code does. This is not about verb agreement complexities; this is about not giving a damn.

既然如此，希望Facebook赶快改掉这个离谱的错误吧。不然就真的不是“技术上不可行”，而是“根本不在乎”了。

不由想起TVB的电视剧，里面涉及英语的低级错误也屡见不鲜。印象最深的是《冲上云霄》和《隔世追凶》。《冲上云霄》里，万浩聪（陈键锋）在海边用石头堆了一句话对童希欣（叶璇）示爱（角色的英文名我已经忘记，就当是Samuel和Michelle吧），这句话竟然是： Samuel love Michelle. 《隔世追凶》里也是类似的错误。有一次，爸爸在地上写字，说自己很爱儿子（角色的英文名也已经忘记，就当是Roger吧），出来的英文是Daddy love Roger. 我当时就在想，如果我是演员，肯定尴尬死了，怎么也得叫工作人员把s加上去再拍吧。

Bonus video: Daughtry - Over You

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.