Can't We Just Watch the Movie?
So this weekend I was unwrapping some DVDs I purchased over Thanksgiving weekend - Forrest Gump, Legally Blonde, and the ever-classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and I noticed that several of the zebra codes had an ISBN on them. An International Standard Book Number on a movie? What is the world coming to? Enough kids don't read books anyway; now do we give them some sort of rationale that "The movie has an ISBN on it, so it's kind of like a book, right?" (Kids don't need any more excuses than they already have; they are very good at coming up with them on their own.)
Periodicals have ISSNs, books have ISBNs, so why can't movies and other digital media have their own cataloging systems? How about ISMNs (International Standard Media Numbers)? This is probably a losing battle, but that's okay. I need to get a non-gendered 3rd person singular pronoun into the OED first. Then I'll work on ISMNs. This was really just a curiousity that I wondered if anyone else noticed or if anyone knows the reason why movies have ISBNs.
posted by KBush @ 3:35 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
So you found my blog and I found yours. I actually laughed like 5 times while reading through your posts. Being a teacher must be fun. And linguistics is always cool.
okay, i think (if i understand correctly -- and that's a BIG if) that the french have this third person non specified whatever you're looking for.
it reads "on" but you say it like you're being punched in the stomach. (sarah, help me out here!!!)
maybe english could adopt it?
actually, Shan, many other languages have the 3rd person singular non-gendered pronoun. I'm looking for something to fix the "Somebody left their book on the desk" besides "Somebody left his or her book on the desk." English is just weird that it doesn't have one.
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