Really, my headline pretty much says what I mean to say. But of course, I’ll elaborate a bit.
The above ad was in an email I received this morning from The Boston Globe. And I’ve had it with these. I’ve been seeing such ads for a decade or two now, and I’ve reached the end of my tolerance.
First, do any of you refer to what you’re wearing between your waist and ankles “a pant?” Or has a friend asked, “Hey, what do you think of my new pant?”
No, you don’t. And no, no one has (I hope).
This is exclusively something that comes out of the clothing industry, or perhaps the advertisers who tout clothing for that trade. It’s not anything any of us out here who wear the things say, near as I can tell.
We call them “pants.” And Italians say i pantaloni. Plural. Speakers of Spanish say los pantalones. Again, plural. OK, so the Dutch for some reason use the singular form (de broek). Fortunately, when I was in Amsterdam, everyone refused to speak Dutch to me, so I was spared the pain of hearing people say such a thing in real life. Maybe they do it because of the influence the textile industry once had on the country.
As for the industry, I suppose they say it because to them, a pair of pants is a singular product more than something they wear. It’s one item, and if they used a plural term it might confuse their accountants.
But I don’t know, and I don’t care, why they do it. I just want this to stop. Now. Before somebody starts wearing “an underpant” beneath the aforementioned….
Amazon occasionally does the same…
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At least, in refering to “the golf pant,” they didn’t use “golf” as a verb. So we can be grateful for that.
People don’t “golf.” They play golf…
Another fault of the Dutch: We say “the glasses” in describing the spectacles many of us wear on our faces.
The Dutch call them de bril. Singular.
Again, I don’t know why. But I found it an obstacle in trying to learn the language last year…
Here is the explanation on the Britannica website: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-we-say-a-pair-of-pants
It being singular in Dutch probably has to do with it being a single garment, just as glasses are a single item.
Yeah, I know. You don’t care. Well, I don’t care that you don’t care; to me, this is a frequent irritant.
After a certain number of years working long hours as editor, you read all words with an intensely critical eye, anxious that nothing wrong gets by you.
Trouble is, I’m not in a position to correct those ads. They just continue to be wrong. This causes one to have an itch that cannot be scratched.
We’re all pedants. Even sports editors aren’t immune to this. There was a guy on the sports desk who frequently punctuated the long night with loud complaints to the whole newsroom about all sorts of things. Not necessarily the copy in front of him. In his defense, he generally did it for comic effect. For instance, when other editors started to get on the elevator — which was in his line of sight beyond his terminal — a little after 6 p.m., he would cry out bitterly, “Have a nice NIGHT!” Everyone understood that like me, he would be there until close to 2 a.m.
One night, he was listening to headphones one night when he felt compelled to denounce the lyrics of Sade’s “Smooth Operator” (this was the mid-’80s):
“‘Coast to coast, LA to Chicago?’ Hey, look at a MAP, why don’t you?…”
I thought, Hey, the beautiful lady singing is Nigerian, so give her a frickin’ break. Besides, I don’t think the phrase “LA to Chicago” is meant to define “coast to coast;” it’s more a separate statement, elaborating on the idea that the guy was always running this way and that, in every direction…
But I didn’t argue with him. I was busier than he was….
When I was writing that, this part made me smile: “Trouble is, I’m not in a position to correct those ads.”
My first job after college was as a copy editor at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun. It’s not the job I wanted — I wanted to write — but those couple of years were great training for the rest of my career. I had the chance to master, or at least come in contact with, every skill needed to publish a newspaper. I had to learn it all, and I was really shocked when I worked at larger papers, where most people only knew one, narrow part of the process.
Anyway, part of the daily routine was that, when most of the copy had already been edited and sent back to composing by the copy desk, one or two of us would head back there to observe as the compositors cut out and pasted (with molten wax) the strips of cold copy onto the page. When a page was ready and we’d looked it over, we’d approve it by initialling the corner with a light blue pen (which the camera in the next step of the process couldn’t pick up). Then, the back shop guys would pick it up and take it to the camera room, the step before platemaking and the presses themselves.
Signing our initials was the ONLY time we ever touched the physical page. Anything more than that would cause a union walkout. I never saw that happen, but I believed it would happen, indefinitely postponing publication of the paper. No one wanted to be responsible for such a disaster. So we read over the fully-pasted pages with our hands clasped behind our backs, and pointed carefully at things that needed changing. Then we stepped out of the way while the union guys did the work.
Sometimes, after working hectically all morning, I’d find myself bored by standing waiting for the copy to come back. I’d stare at a page that had nothing on it but the ads — which were the first step in pasteup — and I’d read them for lack of anything more interesting. Newspapers used to carry ads that might interest me — such as one from a restaurant where I often ate lunch, showing that day’s specials (this was a p.m. newspaper, so the first edition was out by noon — but still, maybe it was the next day’s specials).
And they always contained typos — sometimes a surprising number. So I’d call over one of the backshop guys (and yes, I think they were all guys), and point out the problems. That would cause him to have to contact the advertising department to authorize a change. Then, he’d have to change it on the page.
I couldn’t do a thing beyond that — not only because of union rules, but because the line between news and advertising was absolute and inviolable. I couldn’t be involved in what they did, and they certainly had no say in what WE did. But at least I could point out a bald error. What to do about it was up to them.
I’d drift over and start looking at another page. At that point, Henry Cambron — a crusty (but actually quite kindly) old man (he was at LEAST in this 50s!) who had landed in Normandy on D-Day — would pull out the foot-long pair of scissors that he kept in a holster on this belt, snap it menacingly in the air and say, “STOP READING THE ADS!”
But as I say, he was a great guy. This was just his little way of keeping us wise-ass college kids in line.
I don’t know where he got those huge scissors, which come to think more about it, were probably LONGER than a foot. The blades alone were a foot. They were much longer than those the other guys used. There were as different as Wyatt Earp’s fabled Buntline Colt was from an average gunslinger’s six-shooter.
Wherever he got them, he was a real artist using it. In the merest second, he’d cut a foll column of type from the sheet that came out of the printer, so close that there was never any noticeable border, and he never clipped a letter of the copy. He was just as good with the xacto knife, his other main tool. He could cut one letter out of tiny body copy and replace it with a letter cut from discarded type, or slash between each line in a column to stretch the type out a bit, with impressive speed. Saved a lot of time it would have taken to send new type to the printer.
All those guys were good at those things. And their jobs are disappeared 15 or so years before mine did. Pagination did that.