If you thought the tampon taser was too tacky… January 10, 2008

Rest assured that you can now have your taser in leopard print:

And if you’d like music to drown out the sounds of pain you are causing, what better than the Taser Music Player holster?

Or maybe the Tampon Taser is still your choice?

We’re grateful to Slate Magazine for keeping us up to date on our personal protection devices.  The pictures are from the Taser Company.

UPDATE: A letter today to SWIP-L calls attention to this article, which is about the use of tasers and other security measures on US ‘homeland security campuses.’

Gender neutral pronouns

The lack of an obvious third-person singular, gender-neutral pronoun in English is a familiar feminist topic. So it’s fascinating to read that a new one may be evolving. Apparently, some younger speakers are using the word ‘yo’ in this way, as in “Yo looks like a freak” (via The F-Word). But there’s also a very old alternative, singular ‘they’, of which I’m a great fan. This one goes way back, as this web page documents (and as Anne Bodine documented in a nice paper from the 1970s). It continues to thrive in spoken, and even written English despite all the best efforts of prescriptive grammarians. Now I’ve learned (thanks, Sally!) that this may be due to divine sanction. And a lovely mug commemorating his fact has been proposed (though, as you can see, ruled out at the same time).

If someone were to manufacture this mug, their efforts would not go unappreciated. Though I’d be grateful if yo could insert some quotation marks.