Every man is an island, which is a bit awkward considering that, in my native language, most islands have feminine names.
I often wonder how Greek nouns got their grammatical gender. For example, who decided that a 'chair' should be grammatically feminine but a 'couch' should be masculine? Is a noun's given gender based on some kind of latent connection to human genders? Does it mean that women should only sit on chairs, and that men should sit on couches?
If you ask Siri to disclose its gender, it replies that it ‘exists beyond your human concept of gender’. However, you can clearly set Siri's voice to your preferred accent and gender. If Siri doesn’t know its gender it means that it can’t hear itself, which means its voice is only audible to its owner and that our phones are some kind of a post-modern auditory hallucination.
The most famous auditory hallucination involves Ulysses and the Sirens' song. If you think about it, the name Siren sounds similar to the name Siri, which makes me think that perhaps we should put wax in our earphones to avoid its seduction.
Or is it too late?
The photo above is called ‘Siri’s song’ because it was taken with my iPhone. Like a siren, Siri was calling me to use her and take this picture. A huge wave almost killed me while attempting to listen to Siri's call, which is exactly the denouement that a siren would have wanted. Needless to say, our fates have clearly been decided thousands of years ago by a man named Homer, and Apple’s new operating system will be called Odyssey.