by The anti-vax thing is starting to do my head in. Yesterday I met my landlady to give her two months’ rent, and she joined the growing list of people I’ve met who say they won’t take the Covid vaccine if and when it becomes available. Jeez. If it’s been through all the various phases of clinical trials and jumped all the hoops, I’ll want to be first in line, but if my small sample size is anything to go by, the uptake in Romania will be insufficient for herd immunity.
Another thing – why do some people write vaxx with a double X? I’ve also seen the spelling doxxing for practice of releasing incriminating information, rather than the single-X version I would use. English is full of exceptions, as I don’t hesitate to tell my students, but the “double X doesn’t exist” rule is just about iron-clad. I’ve never used a faxx machine or watched boxxing or got my food mixxer fixxed. And it makes sense that you would never double X, unlike other consonants. (A double consonant shows that the preceding vowel is short, as in hopping, as opposed to hoping. But long vowels before X almost don’t exist, so there’s no need to make the distinction. The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are coax and hoax, where the -oa- spelling indicates the long vowel, or diphthong, to be more accurate.)
The US Open, crowd-free of course, has been quite eventful, despite the absence of some star names. Simona Halep didn’t play. Her compatriot Sorana Cîrstea did, though, and beat top-tenner Johanna Konta in a close three-setter before falling agonisingly to Karolina Muchova. Cîrstea led 5-3 in the final set, then 4-0 and 6-3 in the tie-break, with two of the three match points on her serve. They all vanished, and she went down in the end, 9-7.
The big news though has been Novak, or should I say No-Vax. (Djoković is an anti-vaxer, and he got the virus himself at a stupid tennis party.) Frustrated at losing serve late in the first set against Pablo Carreño Busta, he hit the ball away in disgust, it happened to strike a female line judge, and rules being as they are, he was disqualified. He was unlucky, basically. Some people have attacked him on social media (he’s become a bit of target, sadly), and the line judge has also received a lot of hurtful and idiotic comments.
The Djoković incident reminded me of 1995 Wimbledon, where Tim Henman (who was still relatively unknown then) did something similar in a doubles match, and he and his partner were defaulted. The funny thing about that match was that Jeff Tarango (who had a tendency to lose it) was on the other side of the net. In a singles match almost immediately afterwards, Tarango himself was so incensed with the umpire over a line call that he stormed off the court, ending his tournament, and then Tarango’s wife slapped the umpire!
That 1995 tournament had a few moments, and they’re pretty fresh in my memory still. Greg Rusedski, who had just switched from Canada to Britain, had a good tournament, eventually losing to Pete Sampras in round four. Chanda Rubin played one of her customary marathon matches on an outside court. Boris Becker was up two sets in double-quick time against Cédric Pioline in their quarter-final, but the Frenchman squeaked out two tie-breaks and (if memory serves) went a break up in the fifth, only to be edged out in the end, 9-7, in the match of the tournament, on the men’s side at least. The women’s final between Steffi Graf and Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario had an extraordinary finish. At 5-5 in the third, they produced one of the all-time great individual games, Graf eventually breaking after 13 or 14 deuces. (Google tells me 13. That’s 32 points. Monumental at that stage of the match.) Then Steffi served out to love for yet another title. The men’s final in contrast was a bit of a disappointment. Becker nicked the first set on a tie-break, but after that Sampras dominated and won comfortably in four sets.
That’ll do from me. No let up from this extended summer we’re having. It’s crazy to think what it might be like in just two months, and how that might affect the Covid situation.
