Keeping Up – On eternal youth, ‘elegant variation’, and the perils of gender-neutral language

Travelling by bike on Dublin’s quays recently, I stopped at a red light (I swear) alongside a more serious cyclist. I knew he was more serious because, apart from his clothes, he also managed to avoid dismounting even while stationary, wrestling with the handlebars a little but keeping both feet on the pedals until the light changed.

I understood instinctively why he was doing this. In fact, I try it myself sometimes, except that I’m usually on a Dublin Bike: one of the chunky free-rental ones that weigh about as much as a four-wheel vehicle but don’t have the balance. My record for staying upright on those while stopped is about 1.5 seconds.  At that point, you need to make a quick decision about which side to step down on before the bike decides for you. Once, unforgettably, I tried to put my right foot down just after the bike had lurched left and I landed painfully on the (rock-hard) saddle with a part of my anatomy I know to be the perineum, although its existence and sensitivity had largely eluded me until then.

Anyway, with one foot safely down the other day, I marvelled at my neighbour's determination and skill in remaining airborne. Then it struck me that he was thinking of Oisín, who could stay forever young as long as he remained on horseback and didn't touch the ground of Ireland. Oisín forgot, of course, but the cyclist didn't. He was still aloft when the lights changed again. Then he sped off like the wind, while I wobbled back into first gear, feeling suddenly older.

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Exercise in Rinkmanship – Frank McNally on contrasting figures who did the skates some service

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Coarse Notes – Frank McNally on the drunken parrots of ancient Rome and other surprise language lessons

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Fighting Words – Frank McNally on the best and worst songs of the Northern Troubles

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End of the Line – Frank McNally on the dubious legacy of the last Earl of Clanrickarde

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I don't know if Lionel Messi has heard of Oisín – maybe they have a similar story in Argentinian folklore. But his recent travails reminded me they have something in common. It's not that Messi doesn't touch the ground: on the contrary, if anything, he touches it more often than players with longer legs.

His secret is that he touches it only lightly and for much shorter periods. This allows him to change direction at the speed of thought, constantly wrong-footing defenders. I just hope his so-far eternal youth survives the journey from Tír na nÓg to Paris. As Oisín found out, these late career moves can be dangerous.

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I have mentioned before here the tendency of some journalists to engage in “elegant variation”: finding different ways of saying the same thing to the point where it becomes a distraction.

It’s especially prevalent in sport, and can be downright confusing at times, as for example when radio reporters outline fixture list. As one of my correspondents has complained: “They say that Rovers ‘play host’ to A; that Rangers ‘entertain’ B; Wanderers are ‘at home’ to C; while United ‘take on’ D. Then, like Ronaldo doing a step-over, they throw in the ‘City travel to’ variant.”

Some local GAA reporters go similarly far out of the way in describing goals. Only the first of any game will be a “goal”. Thereafter, players will have “rattled the net”, “scored a major”, “raised the green flag”, and so on through an increasingly complex series of euphemisms. It’s as if the reporters fear some sports-journalism equivalent of Oisín’s fate if they use the same phrase twice.

But while we could do with less of this in sport, we could use more in crime reports. Those could benefit from elegant variation on, for example, the word “man”. This might relieve the monotony of the typical crime story in which one “man” does something to another “man”, while investigators want to speak to a third “man” who escaped on a motor bike.

Maybe henceforth the first reference could be to a “man”; the second to “a member or the male community”, the third to a “suspected owner of y-chromosome”, and so on.

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Then again, that’s a fraught subject too these days, as a recent news story in Oregon reminded me. It was about a controversial new education ruling that a spokesman said would help “Latino” and “Latinx” students, among others.

This sent me looking up “Latinx”, a gender-neutral term to avoid the Latino/Latina dichotomy. But as I found out, that is controversial too for various reasons, including the fact that “Latinx” is hard to say in Spanish. Some prefer “Latine” or just “Latin”. It’s all very complicated.

As readers know, I have been studying the language called Latin of late. That used to be dominated by declensions, so you had to learn all the different endings for each case: mensa, mensae, mensam, mensis, etc. But in Oregon and elsewhere now, personal and ethnic identifiers are the new grammar. It’s your “Latin, Latino, Latina, Latine, Latinx” lists you need to learn now.