One is the boringest number

I've been reading a lot of academic material over the past year and a half at MSR. And I am starting to find I have an almost allergic reaction to a word - the word "one." Specifically, the word "one" used as "a gender-neutral, third-person singular...pronoun." In an attempt to be both formal and "politically correct" by avoiding "he" and the awkward "he/she" or "s/he," the constant intermingling of "he" and "she" (which I always find distracting, too), the apparently suspect "they" as a singular pronoun and the informal "you," many textbooks heavily use the word "one." To the point where it is starting to interrupt my flow of thought as I notice, "There's 'one!' And there's another 'one!' And another! Three 'ones' in one sentence!"


Two examples shall suffice (all emphases mine). The first I have already quoted here before, from a post a few weeks back:

One does not choose one's role as a party to a conflict. One's role results from how one's own interests are involved in the situation. However, one does make a choice to manage a conflict's process as well as to stand for one's own interests. One's role is determined by one's interests. One's ministry of conflict management is a response to one's Christian vocation.- Hugh F. Halverstadt, Managing Church Conflict (Kindle edition)

The second is from my current reading:

What should one do when this happens? First, be aware of its happening, as one undoubtedly will be. Second, one should not be afraid to make a split-second decision as to whether or not to go with it. Sometimes it will not be the best thing to do, since one may very well sense that some dead-end road might lay at the end of an inspirational flight. On the other hand, the advice that comes from the history of those who have preached without notes is that when one is truly inspired, and that inspiration has grown out of one's careful preparation, one must go with the inspiration. Since, presumably, one preaching without notes will have followed this book's advice in thoroughly preparing the sermon, the best advice, then, is to follow the grandeur wherever a sermon's moment leads, in the full understanding that one's outline will bring one back to the trail at the appropriate moment.- Joseph Webb, Preaching Without Notes

Whew.


I don't know about you, but when I read those paragraphs, I end up having a hard time concentrating, and a large part of the cause is the relentless, never-varying use of the pronoun "one." It seems like there should be a limit to the number of "ones" allowed in passage, if just for readability. I propose two metrics:

1. There is a ratio of "ones" to the rest of the "non-trivial" words in a text (not counting articles and conjunctions). Let's call this the "signal-to-one ratio." So, for example, the first quote above has 64 words, total (even counting "a," "and," and "the"). Of those, ten are the word "one." Almost a sixth, almost 16%, of all the words in the paragraph are "one!" That seems like "too many" to me.
2. Another way would be to measure the maximum times the word "one" is used in any sentence. The more times, the more the paragraph's "oneness" ("oneimum?" "oneosity?") In this case, the first paragraph scores a 2 (multiple times), but the second paragraph rates a 3. Again, this seems like "too many" to be readable (at least to me).

One knows these texts are held to style standards by their publishing houses, plus the good intentions of their authors. One faults neither in terms of intention, but one has to wonder if there isn't some better way for one to write in a way that achieve's one's goal of communication while minimizing one's possible offending of one's readers.

You know?

Google Calendar fail

We use Google Calendar - a lot. Between Les and I we have five calendars - one for each of us, one for Erin, one for the twins, one for the .NET user's group I lead. At one point we had seven (an additional one for Morgann and for our old church, which is still being used on their web site). It has a lot of nice features, and if you have Android phones the integration is seamless. All in all, I like it.

But today I hit something in Google Calendar that is quite simply inexplicable. First, I want you to think about Google - what they are, what they're good at. Now, go to Google (just plain Google) and search for a date. The query I used was 10/24/2012. First, it shows you the answer to (10/24) / 2012, which is non-optimal but understandable (0.000207090789, in case you're wondering). But the search results show lots of things about that date. As does searching for "October 24, 2012." Bing, too. Yahoo, too. Wolfram Alpha immediately understands you're talking about a date, not a fraction of a fraction, and gives information about that date (it's a Wednesday).

Now go to Google Calendar and in the prominent search box at the top of the page, try and search for that date, either by digits - 10/24/2012, or by the full date - October 24, 2012.

Nothing.

Really?

...

Really?

...

That has to be the single biggest "miss" I can think of, especially for a calendar, ESPECIALLY for Google. You know, the empire built on search.

It's been twelve hours since I first discovered that and I still can't believe it. Searching for a date, especially a date quite some time away, seems like a completely natural quick navigation technique. Especially for a search engine. But it doesn't work. Bizarre.