Dude reads like a lady…
But not this dude (source)
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society earlier this month, during which Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul provoked fury by suggesting that women writers are “sentimental” and “unequal to me,” he also claimed that “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.” Can you?
Take The Guardian‘s Naipaul Test and see.
As we X ourselves Y he might say such a thing, we might recall that it was o this date in 1868 that Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin received a patent for an invention they called a “Type-Writer” (U.S. No. 79,265). It only had capital letters and fit in a box about 2 feet square and 6″ high. The typists didn’t know if they were making errors because the paper, which was inside the machine, could not be seen as it was being typed.
The Sholes Type Writer (source)