{"id":8727,"date":"2014-06-10T03:32:02","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T10:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8727"},"modified":"2014-06-09T10:46:42","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T17:46:42","slug":"the-birder-in-the-semantic-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/10\/the-birder-in-the-semantic-field\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birder In the (Semantic) Field"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Semipalmated Sandpiper by Rick Wright, on Flickr\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rickwright\/14379830241\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Semipalmated Sandpiper\" src=\"https:\/\/farm3.staticflickr.com\/2920\/14379830241_bf3c3ed72d_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"386\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>A gratuitous and unmotivated picture of a beautiful little\u00a0<strong>semipalmated sandpiper<\/strong>. Just because.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><\/em>But seriously, folks.<\/p>\n<p>I love new birders. And often enough, it&#8217;s not hard to tell when a birder is new. It isn&#8217;t that he makes identification errors, or that she appreciates only the big, colorful birds; it&#8217;s the words they use.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve grown more and more interested in identifying which words are appropriate to a discussion about birding and which are not. We can say, for example, &#8220;pair,&#8221; but we can&#8217;t properly say &#8220;couple.&#8221; We rightly say &#8220;hatched,&#8221; but we really shouldn&#8217;t say &#8220;born.&#8221; We speak of a bird&#8217;s &#8220;parents,&#8221; but less readily, I think, of its &#8220;father&#8221; and &#8220;mother.&#8221; (I forbear any mention of &#8220;Mr.&#8221; and &#8220;Mrs.&#8221; and &#8220;Junior.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>Can you provide additional examples? What makes a word inappropriate in this very precise context? Who decides?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A gratuitous and unmotivated picture of a beautiful little\u00a0semipalmated sandpiper. Just because. But seriously, folks. I love new birders. And often enough, it&#8217;s not hard to tell when a birder is new. It isn&#8217;t that he makes identification errors, or that she appreciates only the big, colorful birds; it&#8217;s the words they use. I&#8217;ve grown &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/10\/the-birder-in-the-semantic-field\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Birder In the (Semantic) Field&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8727"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8727"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8730,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8727\/revisions\/8730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}