The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning 191
HughPickens.com writes: "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example, Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
Who would have guessed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who would have guessed (Score:5, Insightful)
Lightning stike victims and Multiple Sclerosis (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who would have guessed (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, I had a massive stroke at 35. Treated within a couple hours (at the hospital within 15 minutes of the first symptom), and the only effects are the very subtle ones. Nobody guesses that I had a stroke, let alone that was one of the biggest the stroke specialists had ever seen. But I know the difference. It does affect energy levels and patience.
I had a 2-year MRI, and 25%+ of my brain was still "darker" than the rest. At least with a stroke, the MRI will show exactly where the damage is, years later. The lightning would affect random connections spread to where there's no identifiable damage area. We aren't smart enough to be able to see brain damage as minor and random as the effects reported here.
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Happens all the time when relying on the multi-plug surge arrestor for one's delicate equipment. They sell a much better unit that takes the place of two breaker spaces in the main panel, for under a hundred bucks.
Oh. And wouldn't you know it? There's no surge arrestor in your organic brain.
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Whole House Surge Protector is not enough (Score:5, Informative)
Many thinks erroneously that after they installed a Whole House Surge Protector everything else would be fine
That Whole House Surge Protector might be able to clamp a sudden surge from the outside, but the respond time often isn't fast enough to save the delicate electronic devices connected to the wall sockets
What you really need is a layered approach --- getting a Whole House Surge Protector to clamp a _lengthy_ surge from the outside, while still attach your delicate electronic devices to surge protectors with fast response (something like in the nano-second range) that plug into the wall sockets
Three links that might be able to assist you:
http://techomebuilder.com/inde... [techomebuilder.com]
http://www.electronichouse.com... [electronichouse.com]
http://www.us-tech.com/RelId/1... [us-tech.com]
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Just install a power conditioner at your intake and call it a day if your power is that shitty. Or you live in Florida.
Found two more links (Score:2)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
http://www.cepro.com/article/t... [cepro.com]
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Power is usually described as going in or out.
Re:Who would have guessed (Score:5, Funny)
Resistance is futile.
Bummer... (Score:5, Funny)
And here I was hoping for special powers like instant genius or telepathic abilities, and it turns out that the best we can hope for is instant Alzheimer?
Re:Bummer... (Score:4, Funny)
Super powers. Check.
But it still didn't get me out of having to do community service.
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Ah, to be naive again.
People always speculate they would like to return to an earlier version of themselves, if they could know what they know now, but forgetting the the awesome sauce of youth is inexperience.
striking distance (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for a lightning research lab in college. From what I remember, lightning can strike up to 60 miles (?) from the host cloud if the internal charges of the cloud are "right" for it. My take away was if you can see bolts of lightning then you're (possibly) within range.
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I worked for a lightning research lab in college. From what I remember
Well, if you were hit by lightning during that time, you probably won't remember!
That's the whole point of the article . . . or don't you remember what the article was all about . . . ?
Re:striking distance (Score:5, Informative)
This is /. We don't read the articles. We maybe read a sentence from the summary and the title of the post then say whatever comes to mind first.
Re:striking distance (Score:5, Funny)
Doctor, he's fine. He still skims through Slashdot articles; you'd be better off checking his responses to ACs or goat.se links. Don't cut him loose on e-bay, not yet.
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Sorry, Karma is not listed anymore. I cannot make a diagnosis of this patient.
Re:striking distance (Score:4, Funny)
Either that, or we all read the articles but then are struck by lightning and forg....
*ZZZZAAAAPPP!!!!*
What was I posting about again?
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But this is one of the few times when the article is actually more interesting than the comments here. Worth reading, even if that is breaking the unwritten rules around here.
Not guaranteed memory problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I was struck as a kid, probably 11 or so years old, when a thunderstorm rolled in during a little league baseball game. I happened to be opening a car door, so was grounded when I was hit. My forearm turned black and blue, like a massive bruising, but I didn't feel any pain in my arm. I was blinded for a short time, my eyes were not closed when the lighting struck. Outside of a headache from the flash, I had no short or long term damage. Yes, I was extremely lucky to have been mostly grounded.
The Guinness record holder was struck 7 times, and lived to 71. Hard to say if the long term effects led to suicide, but an interview of him I heard long ago seemed to indicate a pretty normal guy.
TFA also indicates that not all incidents lead to permanent damage, physical or psychological. As with most events dealing with electricity, there are a massive number of factors involved making each event unique. For example, when I was in the military I saw two people guy get popped by a 550KW generator. Both guys mishandled the same coupling, both were in Texas and on similar training grounds. The primary different was weather and luck. One guy's clothing caught fire and he suffered only minor burns as they put his clothing out, the other guy died almost instantly. It was winter so rainy and wet when the first guy was popped, making its likely that his wet clothing caused a grounding effect which saved him. The second happened in the summer, extremely dry and hot.
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grabbing a car door does not make you grounded, it makes you a bigger target yes, but there's seveal inches of isolation tween the car and ground, as if that mattered at all, lightning travels several miles though the air to get stopped by a 4 inch rubber sidewall lol yea sure
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out of interest, what's the propagation speed of an AG lightning bolt? I've heard various figures bandied about from 35 to 90 miles a second. Care to weigh in as more of an expert than a lot of people who have ventured a guess?
Re: striking distance (Score:2, Funny)
An African or European lightning bolt?
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how does a 4th grade hearsay make it as informative on slshdot, my god are all the nerds just stupid code monkeys now?
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In August 2009, a boy was hit by lightning and later died in hospital. Witnesses said the sky was blue above them, and there was no thunder or rain.
Link [thestar.com]
I wasn't fundamentally altered by it. (Score:5, Informative)
The main change is that when I hear people say "You're more likely to get hit by lightning than to have X happen" I can say "I've already been hit by lightning."
Back around 2000, I was with a group of people at an observatory up in the mountains, which we'd reached by ski-lift-gondola, after some discussion about whether the weather was turning thundery and we should cancel it because we might get stuck there for the day which would mess up our schedule. The thunderstorm decided to show up, and I was outside the observatory looking at the mountains. A few raindrops started to fall, and a bolt of lightning bounced off the building and hit me on the head. The impact wasn't very hard, maybe like dropping a pen onto a hard floor from 5 feet. My wife yelled at me to get in out of the rain. And we did in fact get stuck up there for a few hours - the gondola system shut down when the lightning struck, leaving a gondola full of kids hanging about 100 feet from the observatory for a while before they could restart it, and once they had them safely unloaded they left it stopped until the storm was over.
The other effect was that I had to tell my wife about the previous time when the group I'd with had almost been hit by lightning, hiking at the top of Colorado mountains when the early-afternoon thunderstorm set in. We'd sat down in a low rock shelter, and some of the folks were having sparks from their fingers to the wet rocks, which were making a bit of a sizzling noise.
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This is a serious question: Did you notice any impact on your ability to obtain and maintain an erection after you were hit by lightning?
Years back, I worked with one fellow who survived a lightning strike. He said it was actually the best thing that had ever happened to him. Before being hit, he suffered from extreme difficulties obtaining an erection, and even when he managed to get one he couldn't sustain it for more than a minute or two. But after being hit, he said those problems went away. As he descr
Re:I wasn't fundamentally altered by it. (Score:5, Funny)
In other words, did you gain any screw-per-powers?
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Years back, I worked with one fellow who survived a lightning strike. He said it was actually the best thing that had ever happened to him. Before being hit, he suffered from extreme difficulties obtaining an erection, and even when he managed to get one he couldn't sustain it for more than a minute or two. But after being hit, he said those problems went away. As he described it, he was then able to get the "fattest throbbing fatties" (I think those were his words, or something along those lines) that he'd ever had, and he'd talk about how he could "screw his wife for hours" before ejaculating.
So basically, super powers.
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Son, 4Chan is thataway ....
Re:I wasn't fundamentally altered by it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago when I was in junior high or early high school, my father was taking my younger brother and I to go shopping. I could hear a thunderstorm outside as we were shopping, but we lived in south Florida, so that was nothing out of the ordinary.
As we were heading out to the car after our shopping was done, something occurred that never happened to me before or since: I heard a crack at the exact same time that I saw a flash of light. I didn't see a source for the flash, just the light, seemingly all around. I had been standing next to my dad, who was holding my brother's hand while we were in the parking lot, but when I turned to see what their reactions were to what I assumed was a REALLY close strike, my dad was on the asphalt on his knees with his hands gripping the top of his head. The umbrella he had been holding had fallen to the ground, my brother and I were getting soaked, and my father wasn't responding to us when we asked him if he was all right.
After about a minute, my father was finally able to respond, and was actually rather embarrassed by the whole thing, since he could see and hear us, but was simply incapable of responding. We didn't know exactly what had happened, since none of us had actually seen the lightning strike, but we knew it had to have hit close, given that none of us had ever heard the crack of the strike happen at the exact same time that we saw the flash of light. My brother mentioned that his heart was racing oddly as well.
When we got home, sure enough, we found a little scorch mark on the top of my father's head that was hot to the touch, and over the course of the next week or so, he discovered that his sense of smell had been damaged, with things smelling differently than they should. It ended up being about a year before he could smell things correctly again. We figure that my brother may have also gotten some of it through him, given that he was holding my dad's hand at the time that it happened.
It was probably a good 5 years before the three of us stopped being skittish when outside in a lightning storm, and even to this day I treat them quite a bit differently than I used to, despite having grown up with them around all the time and generally having practiced good habits around them (even at the time of our strike, there were tall poles and trees (that we weren't under) all around us, so it always seemed odd to me that the strike landed where it did).
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Oh, I'd agree. It had a nice, blunted metal spike on top and a metal shaft. To say the least, that umbrella quickly got relegated to non-thunderstorm rain duty.
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I've had a near miss. I was standing nearby when there was a ground strike. I didn't see it though - I was facing the wrong way. I did see the sky flash white as the light was reflected from raindrops, and it was so loud it set off a couple of car alarms.
The Last Sentence of the Summary (Score:5, Funny)
The last sentence of the summary explains a lot:
"Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired or made Slashdot editors (if they are really unlucky)," she writes."
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It sounds a lot like chronic fatigue. Something breaks and your body just doesn't deliver energy to the muscles properly any more, including the brain. As well as being tired you can think straight and become forgetful. There is no way to fix it.
Sometimes the change is good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sometimes the change is good (Score:5, Funny)
All of them become conductors.
Re:Sometimes the change is good (Score:5, Funny)
It's because they couldn't resist.
Re:Sometimes the change is good (Score:5, Funny)
They should have stayed ohm that day.
Re:Sometimes the change is good (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, I hear they get really amped up about the experience.
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It is after all if not the alpha then at least the omega
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Take this thread to Reddit.
These threads on Slashdot predate Reddit. If you want the old slashdot back, then this is what you want.
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I don't know watt you're talking about -- clearly their lives weren't impeded by the event.
Re: Sometimes the change is good (Score:2)
They were lucky. They could have diode.
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He got a stroke of inspiration?
Re:Sometimes the change is good (Score:4, Funny)
"In 1994, when Tony Cicoria was 42 years old, he was struck by lightning near Albany, New York, while standing next to a public telephone. He had just hung up the phone and was about a foot away when a rogue bolt of lightning struck. He recalled seeing his own body on the ground surrounded by a bluish-white light. Cicoria’s heart had apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated by a woman, (coincidentally an intensive-care-unit nurse) who was waiting to use the telephone.[2][3]"
Holy crap!.... makes me almost want to believe in some sort of higher power.
110 or 220?
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I didn't get my first cell phone until 2000. 1994 was definitely the pagers and pay phones era.
Frontal lobe of the person in example (Score:3, Interesting)
2. it looked to me as if the frontal lobe of the person in story was affected. Frontal lobe is associated with such changes in personality
Dear Hot Chick from High School (Score:5, Funny)
I was recently struck by lightning. I am writing you to renew my request for a date per your stated conditions.
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I was recently struck by lightning. I am writing you to renew my request for a date per your stated conditions.
So, she let you slide on the subterranean ski-lift tickets?
indirect strike in 1983 (Score:5, Funny)
I was part of the ground circuit when lightning struck my house and blew the ring main on its way through - I had the misfortune of happening to be plugging in the TV at the time, got thrown across the room. Only permanent effect as far as I can tell is a marked reduction in tolerance for idiots.
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It doesn't make you more social so much as it makes everyone else at the party more interesting.
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that's where I was going wrong.
Not enough alcohol.
Thanks for that - now I know, I can rectify the deficiency.
Re:indirect strike in 1983 (Score:5, Funny)
Why do you read/post on Slashdot?
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Brain damage.
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selective amnesia also.
thanks for that great information (Score:5, Funny)
the brain an nervous system is a complex and fragile low voltage electrical signaling system
lets zap it with lightning
best we can guess is that "Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago" who by the way retired in 2008 says that lighting fucks shit up
good god damn job
Re:thanks for that great information (Score:5, Funny)
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...every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.
Just to read on and conclude that basically "lightning can damage your brain in many different ways, sometimes". It leaves me wondering, not about this mysterious new understanding of lightning's effects on the brain, but rather, wondering why doctors are left scratching their heads. Obviously they're not electricians, but are they really scratching t
thanks for that great information (Score:3)
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how fragile do I suggest
assumption made
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FIRST POSSSSSSSSSSTZZZZZZZZZ (Score:2, Funny)
reaction time suffers as well
Pretty bad example of a radical change. (Score:5, Funny)
Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****."
Had it been an example where he became a greenpeace or PETA speaker or something, it might be more shocking but this doesn't come across as entirely surprising.
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Self Awareness (Score:2)
Re:Pretty bad example of a radical change. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are absolutely correct.
Successful investment bankers usually have smooth manners and a gift for softspoken vagueness that makes their duplicity harder to spot.
The mean ornery dogchild is just a midlevel henchmen for the really dangerous types.
And I've paid with for the right to say so.
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But... always? (Score:3)
I would assume that most lightning injuries wouldn''t have any observable effects on personality, because more often than not they're not going to hit the brain. But that could be a wrong impression. Maybe a high voltage jolt to the peripheral nervous system always carries back to the brain along nerve fibers and does damage there.
Lightning Rod (Score:3)
Once met with a guy who install lightning rod in 80+ storeys buildings.
He said, grounding the current from above is not enough. When lightning strikes,
the current is ground, but then the many computers in the building would malfunction.
Special technique is required that only few companies can get it right.
I would suspect the current has to be shield like coaxial cable or the circuits along
the current path will got damaged. In this case the victim's brain.
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Extremely Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.
Yes, sure, it has some unpleasant effects, but keep it in perspective. How much resources should we as a society be dedicating to lightning strike victims? Nearly ten times as many people die drowning every year as get struck by lightning (including non-fatal strikes). In fact, you're only about twice as likely to get struck by lightning as to die from a terrorist attack, which a statistical non-risk. And we don't go running around panicking about terrorism... oh, wait...
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Wrong question: fundamentally it's neurological damage. How many resources should we dedicate to helping people who suffer it by some means?
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Wrong question: fundamentally it's extremely rare. How many resources should we dedicate to helping people who suffer it by some means?
That's more like it.
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Very good point, sir.
Lou Christie's Revenge (Score:2)
I was struck by lightning in April of 2004. After that, all I wanted to do was smoke weed and play computer games.
Of course, that's all I wanted to do before I was struck by lightning, so clearly the effects were very subtle. I no longer wanted to play JRPGs, text based adventures or 2D platformers. Plus, there is a strange blue glow emanating from my scrotal sack. It's kind of like superpowers, except not really useful, except at Halloween parties where I go dressed as a partially bioluminescent Michel
i met a guy that had been hit (Score:3)
He seemed like a normal enough guy, but he was adamant about not wanting to get struck again, that's for sure.
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I had an close incident (Score:5, Interesting)
This was 1991 I belive. I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.
As I was sitting there for a bit watching lightning strikes all of a sudden everything went white for a second and when it dissapeared I heard a huge bang and while looking at the sand below my feet, I saw electricity flying around on the ground. Took me a few secs to get orientged again and all I herd was "Holly Fuck", "Holly fuck" "Did you feel that all over your body" from the two guys that were playing in the tennis court.
Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away. I started to get a clod sweat and when I felt my heart it must have been going 400 + beats per minute. Then it slowed down rapidly and all I could do is sit on the couch and go WTF?!!!
So for about a few weeks after that everytime there was a thunder strom and the lightning strikes got close to home I always felt wird electric charge aroung me. Well I never stuck around and booted it home the second I got the feeling.
Can't say it changed me but was a weird experience.
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I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.
...
Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away.
So, you were in your yard, where you have a tennis court? Maybe the lightning did have some effect...
Blast of X Rays? (Score:2)
Emerita (Score:2)
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita
Stop this shit, academia. Learn Latin if you want to use Latin words to make yourself sound special. The word is for soldiers. No fucking professor called themselves "emeritus" until the late 18th century. And now you've got dipshits getting it doubly wrong with gender. Emeritus is specifically a masculine noun.
An emeritus is a retired soldier (noun). Emeriti are retired soldiers (plural noun).
If you want to use it as an adjective it has to agree in with the noun it modifies.
A soldier emeritus is a so
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In current usage, it's now an English, not Latin word meaning "retired, but wishing to use the pre-retirement title". Like how all Presidents of the USA are "president". President Bill Clinton is still "president" by title, even if "retired".
And make no mistake, it's an English word, like so many foreign words, used without great change for a meaning slightly different than the "original".
It's not "wrong". It's language. That's how English works. Much like the ori
Old news (Score:2)
Re:ProfessorA emeritA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ProfessorA emeritA (Score:5, Interesting)
While it is preferable to follow certain rules of grammar for use of Latin phrases, that is within the confines of acceptable English practice. "Profesora" has not, in fact, ever been used--as far as I am aware--in the English language, as an English term. Not, at least, enough to be conventional rather than eccentric. These days, perhaps all the more due to it being Spanish (though being in the Western US where we have a lot of Spanish speakers, perhaps I'm just reinforced given that perception; the east coast, on the other hand, tends not to know jack about Spanish from our POV). I am okay with it to the extent someone would have a Latin or Romance background, but the significations associated with "professor" vs. "profes[s]ora" aren't quite the same, so from that POV I would avoid it myself since it would seem to be a mis-communication, therefore an error.
And "-a" isn't even a solid indication, in English, that a term is actually a feminine for Latin. ("-a" isn't even just feminine in Latin, depending on case!). It *frequently* is in Spanish, but not enough for someone without the prior knowledge. For the last three or so centuries, however, even when Latin was widely taught, been acceptable to mix Latin forms as properly understood or most likely to be, rather than force correctness based on the classical Latin forms (and I have critiques on usage dating back over a 100 years in my personal library), so I don't get the hostility: oversensitivity to "correctness", to me, bespeaks being a poseur--as is often the case in English grammar.
It all seems like the pedantry of correct for case with "I and me" without regard for the actual use-intentions of the personal speaking English, given that the complaints are often applied to usages which antedate the oldest grammars and indicate a different mode of thinking altogether--i.e. evince a feature of English-speakers' mind that doesn't even exist in other classical languages. (Even modern, simplified English, possesses pre-classical features, and actual mixtures of features that span several language families, that ante-date the periods of major influence by Romance and Latin upon the Teutonic, e.g. altering mid-vowels to change tense, not just endings). It's the...gilded age of English armchair philology and grammatical-wishful thinking by the sophomorically over-read and over-credentialed, regarded only for being critics and clever...just not "right."
But in general, critiques of English usage typically proceed out of posing rather than expertise. It's a long-standing tradition in Anglophonic countries, and unfortunate for all the confusion has bred. e.g. I was recently standing in line at a post office and literally stood next to two old women, one who had been warned against the horrific error in saying "dug" rather than "digged", and the other warned contrarily about the error of "digged" over "dug." Both were also pissed I wouldn't take their side...or amused that I could explain the history of that "issue" though a young man, and that the other was so stupid to prefer a "non-word" they had never encountered. I actually found myself in disbelief that either could have suffered such limited exposure.
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You've been here how many years and you don't know how AC posting works?
Or perhaps you were struck by lightning during the course of this thread and forgot how it works...
Re:What the fuck are you talking about? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Professor" is a Latin masculine noun, and as such is correctly paired with the adjective "emeritus". As I said in my post, if you want to refer to a woman as a "professor", which I have zero objection to, then use the correct adjective, namely "emeritus". If you want to refer to a woman by the latinized "professora", then by all means "emerita" is correct as well. However, "professor emerita" is anglicized pig-latin bullshit which merely serves to mark those who use it as wannabes, who never studied Latin but wish to use an exotic phrase to aggrandize themselves in front of their peers.
Now that you know, please feel free to use whatever phrase you prefer, in full knowledge of the various probable consequences.
Re:What the fuck are you talking about? (Score:4, Interesting)
Professor is an English word, albeit one with a Latin origin, and it has been an English word for about 700 years. Most English words do not get inflected by gender. It must be admitted that many occupation-words that can be used as pronouns are inflected (actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.), but professor is not among those words. Professora does not appear in any English dictionary I tried, such as dictionary.reference.com. Professor, emeritus, and emerita all appear in every dictionary I tried.
Furthermore, "Professors Emeriti/ae" is often used as the plural. The 's' plural demonstrates that "professor" is being used in its English-language form.
Surely if a student were to talk about their "professors", you would not lecture them on their ignorant use of plurals. Why, then, do you insist that the professor is "professor emeritus" is actually a different word in a different language and therefore subject to different inflections?
And if that isn't convincing, there's the fact that "Professor Emerita" is an officially-conferred title, and therefore it is correct by definition:
http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gaz... [www.sfu.ca] -- an example from Canada
http://www.ucc.ie/en/academics... [www.ucc.ie] -- an example from Ireland
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/artic... [vt.edu] -- an example from the United States
What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered.
The pot calling the kettle black.