Apropos of International Women's Day...

[alexpgp]

When I scrawled "Happy International Women's Day" on the white board in the store this morning, I was faced with the question: "Is it 'International Woman's Day' or 'International Women's Day'?" It's perhaps a minor point, but the kind of thing I can't leave alone, so despite my suspicions that the proper version was the former, I turned to Google, and searched for:

international woman's day

This turned up about 5.9 million results (and up there at the top of the list was a page with that title from the United Nations, apparently a typo, as we'll see below).

Now, most people, faced with almost 6 million results and a URL that points to the UN might decide, at that point, that they'd found the flow and that the best course would be to go with it. However, for better or worse, I'm not most people. On some kind of mad roll, I searched for

international women's day

This showed 5.6 million results (and - surprise! - again, up at the top of the list, was another page with that title from the UN).

I was momentarily confused at the fairly even distribution of results, until I realized I was searching for individual words. When I enclosed the phrase in quotes, the results were a lot more lopsided (and indicative):

"international women's day": 451,000
"international woman's day": 4,500

I would venture to guess that the even distribution when searching without quotes was caused by the common use of both singular and plural forms of "woman" on any page where either form appears.

Having done this exercise, Happy International Women's Day to all for whom the holiday was instituted!

Cheers...

Comments

[brenk.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

And for what it's worth, you don't *really* expect international organisations to take a consistent approach with their documentation, do you?

I know many try. I've been part of it all. But if you only knew the strife and tears that had been shed over 'shall we put a hyphen in bioterrorism'...

And, y'know, it still varied despite huge attempts to make the staff consistent (with one version or the other and dammit I can't remember which). As in there were the two versions in the agenda, the press kit, the speeches by the General Secretariat...

My favourite incident, however, was the title of another conference (which will remain nameless). The Arabic translators took great pains to get it right, as there were issues of a similar kind to the woman's / women's thing, apparently (I have an ear to the ground for translator-issues, as do you). Finally, all was well. Things were printed and distributed. Except whoever sent the text to those who made the big, big banner outside the conference hall had sent it on a transparent background, which had not only got turned around but turned upside down as well. The Arabic-speaking delegates were *so* not amused.

A bit like the Americans getting the Olympic rings interlaced back to front on ALL the pins, etc. made for Lake Placid 1980. Heh. Lèse-majesté, that was.

Errarum humanum est (and my Latin is non-existent, so I could be wrong).

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Yep. I think more blood has probably been spilled over questions of "style" than anyone really cares to think about.

Cheers...

P.S. Let us keep in mind the immortal words of someone-or-other: Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur!

[brenk.livejournal.com]

I confess to looking the Latin quotation up in Google. But yes. Current Supercops favourites are 'inter alia' and 'a priori'. These things tend to be contagious, I think...