"you guys" revisited: further thoughts on the language police

If you know, you know.

In October 2020, I wrote a post about the expression you guys, and whether or not using guys as a gender-neutral term excludes transgender people:  "you guys": change language, do no harm, but can we please leave space for learning and growing?

In that post, I concluded that, although I didn't understand or agree with this language prohibition, being inclusive and sensitive to other people was more important than whether or not I agreed with the view. 

Now, more than two years later, I have a different take. I've returned to my first reaction: this is too much. This is not necessary. There is no need for this.

However, in some contexts, I continue to subsitute folks (which I hate) for guys. But not because I believe it's the right thing to do.

I see no uptake

In the time since I wrote that post, I've been listening carefully to language on series and movies I watch, in public settings, on social media -- everywhere that I can. I have observed that an overwhelming majority of people use you guys as gender-neutral and inclusive. 

In fact, everyone I've heard uses you guys this way -- except my work colleagues, who purposely do not use the word. This "everyone" most definitely includes LGBTQ+ people. People of all colours and from all communities use you guys to refer to groups of people of mixed genders.

The claim that you guys refers only to men just doesn't track. Of course the words guy or guys does refer to men in some contexts. But our understanding of language is always context dependent. We understand that we bake with flour and give a flower, even though to our ears, the words are identical. We know that we can book an appointment, read a book, or cook the books. That I can chair a meeting and sit on a chair. I could give hundreds of examples. We use identical and identical-sounding words with different meanings all the time. 

People also claim that you guys excludes transgender people, but I see no appreciable uptake of this concept, including from trans people that I know. Since you guys is gender neutral, there's no reason to assume it excludes people who are gender-queer, nonbinary, or expressing any manner of gender identity. Neutral is neutral. 

Some of my peers have said that they find the word age-inappropriate, for example, a server in a restaurant calling two older women you guys. I don't share this view, and I don't know why we would want more people to make judgements based on age. There's enough ageism in this world without asking for more. But the people who shared this preference with me do not hear you guys as sexist -- and most importantly, they are not asking others not to use the expression.

But here's the catch

However, in a work setting, I don't use you guys -- because it would be considered old and outdated language. Using you guys would signal that I am either ignorant, stubborn, or worse, transphobic. So I've taught myself not to use you guys. All this means is that I've capitulated to the language police. I haven't changed my view. I've merely conformed. 

I have found articles dating as far back as 2015 that argue for dropping you guys because it is sexist or excluding. These stories usually quote a transgender person saying they feel the expression excludes them. Since this idea hasn't gotten any appreciable uptake in eight years, I'm wondering how the writer got that quote -- how many people they went through before they found someone to confirm their view.

Someone somewhere is always offended by something. But who speaks for others? Whose point of view represents a population or a community? 

And is there no limit on the policing of language? Must we all follow every new rule with equal fervor, as if every language choice carries the same import? As if you guys is the N-word? Because here's the thing. If there is no limit, there is only blind adherence. There is no critical thinking. There is just this: a self-appointed arbiter of our language speaks, and everyone must follow. 

If there is no limit, there is only blind loyalty

In the past few months, I've had some in-depth conversations with two very close friends. We are all the same age (within two years), are all progressive, and all believe strongly in inclusion. We are all white, two of us are Jewish, and we are not all heterosexual. We have all, at times, been on the receiving end of sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and/or ageism. And we all recognize our privilege in all its forms.

We also recognize the importance of inclusive language, and of using the term for a group or a peoples that does not cause offense. We are not people who insist on using outdated and offensive terms. We are people who understand the importance of language.

All three of us are at times frustrated or horrified by the use of language policing as a weapon, and have the persistent sense that language policing can go too far. 

I'm a big fan of linguist John McWhorter and his views on language. I've enjoyed several of his books (reviews here and here), and read his New York Times column sporadically (the way I read all columnists that I like). I don't agree with all of McWhorter's politics, and that shouldn't contradict or undermine anything I'm writing here. Also, McWhorter is Black.

I always appreciate McWhorter's nuanced view. Here's an example: 'BIPOC' Is Jargon. That's OK, and Normal People Don't Have to Say It. He's not saying the expression BIPOC is silly, nor is he saying we shouldn't use it, if it fits within our context. He explains why the word also can be seen as problematic, and believes that using it should not be a requirement. He cites Latinx as a similar expression.

Punishments are supposed to fit crimes

Last year, McWhorter wrote an excellent column about the over-reaction of the language police: One Graceless Tweet Does Not Warrant Cancellation. He wrote about a (formerly distinguished) professor of psychiatry who tweeted something he meant as a compliment but in fact was a racist remark. The professor apologized without reservation, and demonstrated that he learned from the experience. Even so, his livelihood was destroyed and his career was ruined.

McWhorter writes:

But must Lieberman's career be destroyed because of a tweet that pretty clearly reflects an ignorance of that history but that was, also, clearly well intended? We're often told in such cases that what matters is not the intent of the perpetrator but the impact on the recipient of the message. But impact has degrees, and we have to consider whether some are claiming vaster impact in certain cases than plausibility would suggest. Because we've reached the point that there's no room left to respond to Lieberman with nuance and prudence. To say: "We know you meant it as a compliment, but you should know that there are offensive connotations to using that word in reference to Black women, and an apology is owed." And then — crucially — to accept a sincere and full-throated apology when it is given, as it was here.

For someone to instead, almost instantly, be suspended from one job, dismissed from another and resign from a third because of such a thing is a disproportion of punishment to crime. It is extreme and unnecessary and ultimately lacks reason. There's something amiss if we're now at the point that someone's career is to be permanently tarnished and perhaps ended based on a passing error, which started as a misguided attempt at praise and which has been profusely apologized for. We must assess what the actual purpose of this kind of language policing is. We must ask: What, in terms of combating racism, is accomplished? Will it result in better and more available psychiatric care — or medical care in general — for Black people? Will it make Columbia University, where I am a faculty member, a more open-minded place?

The question that I always get back to is: what purpose does this serve? Are we trying to educate? Are we trying to not cause offense? Or are we just trying to win? To assert power. To punish.

If the goal is education, I suggest that punitive education is never effective. Children who are punished for using "bad" language learn not to use it front of parents and teachers.

If we are seeking to punish, the punishment should fit the crime. 

Are we seeking redress for past crimes, perpetrated by a group to which this person belongs? Meaning: this professor is a white man, and white men have historically harmed Black women, so this white man must be severely punished for this ill-advised tweet? 

This is called scapegoating, and it is always wrong.

Too much policing tends to backfire

For many of us, there is cultural pressure to buy whatever the language police are selling. I will never forget the disgusted expressions directed at me when I mistakenly said "Bradley Manning," very shortly after the war resister changed their name to Chelsea. I had been saying "Bradley Manning" for years -- and although I knew Manning had come out as trans, my speech patterns hadn't fully caught up. 

When people are fired based on one remark, even after they have sincerely and profusely apologized, the right-wingers -- who howl about being cancelled (while broadcasting to an audience of millions), who claim to be persecuted (while stripping rights from those who disagree with them), who persecute a minority people simply for living their lives -- are strengthened. The unyielding and indiscriminate use of language policing only stregthens their cause.

It pains me when progressives mirror the right-wing. When we figurately kill everyone who doesn't speak the way we believe they should, we are behaving like the ignorant bigots do. It doesn't matter how pure our motives are.

what i'm reading: nine nasty words by john mcwhorter

If you enjoy language, and history, and humour, you will probably enjoy Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter -- Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter. A slim book written in a breezy style, Nine Nasty Words is an absolute delight. 

McWhorter takes the reader through a history of English words that have been considered profane in different eras, breaks down their many uses and meanings, and in the process, guides the reader on a whirlwind tour of the incredibly versatile, ever-changing, gloriously inconsistent English language. 

McWhorter shows how the types of words that are taboo -- not the words themselves, but what they refer to -- changes over time. 

In the earliest years of English, "dirty" words referred to religion, thus the multitude of polite substitutions for damn and hell. So people could be named Simon Fuckbutter and George Fuckbythenavel (seriously, those were people's actual names) but neither Simon nor George would have dared to say goddamn in public.

During and after the Victorian era, unsurprisingly, taboo words were those that refer to sex and genitalia. So folks began to loosen up about hell and damn, but started to use expressions like "the male member" and "unmentionables".

In our present time, the once truly taboo fuck is used casually in dozens of ways. In our current world, the only truly taboo words are slurs that refer to groups of people: witness the phenomenon known as the N-word. (I was disappointed that McWhorter missed "NP", a memorable and hilarious character in Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor.)

Nine Nasty Words also debunks various popular claims about word origins, which further serves to illustrate how language is always changing. (See my earlier review of McWhorter's Words on the Move.)

One thing that makes this book so entertaining and enjoyable is the author's wide-ranging references. Wide-ranging is a understatement: more like universe-ranging. Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante are joined by Broadway musicals, Looney Tunes cartoons, movies from every era of filmmaking (including silent film), sitcoms from "I Love Lucy" to "The Jeffersons" to "Seinfeld", Dr. Seuss, blues lyrics, and more. Plenty more! The author references Russian, Mandarin, Igbo, German, French, Hebrew, all forms of English, and likely several languages I'm forgetting. In another episode of Laura's Worlds Collide, there is a reference to the Melville Herskovitz, an anthropologist I first heard of when reading Gods of the Upper Air, only weeks earlier.

McWhorter's love and appreciation of language in all its messy glory is warm, generous, egalitarian, democratic, and for me, utterly infectious. 

"you guys": change language, do no harm, but can we please leave space for learning and growing?

First reactions: the language police

I've recently learned that calling a group of people you guys may be considered insensitive to transgender people. 

My first reaction to this was an inner eye-roll, and thoughts along the lines of, "Oh come on, that's going too far." 

The same reaction I had to learning that the word crazy is not to be used -- in any context -- because it's insensitive to people with mental illness. Why are people policing my language this closely? Is this really important? Who determined this is now inappropriate speech?

I've always thought of guys as gender-neutral, and you guys represents a group of people of any gender -- in the appropriate context. Clearly some people say "guys and girls," and in that context guys means men and boys. But words have different meanings in different contexts, and most speakers of any given language are able to distinguish among those contexts. 

Is you guys really so offensive, to the point where I am hurting people by saying it?

Stuff I believe

I believe language matters.

I believe people have the right to be called by their preferred name, both their personal names and their gender identity.

I believe in striving to be antiracist, antifascist, antihomophobic, antitransphobic, antisexist. 

I believe all black lives matter.

I believe strongly in freedom of expression of all types, and that free expression may have consequences, such as the cancellation of a speaking engagement, a Twitter storm of protest, a decline in sales, or the loss of a job. 

I believe in empathy, compassion, and that all people deserve an opportunity to learn and grow.

Second impressions

So I started to ask myself some questions.

Why am I resistant to this change?

Why do I accept other changes in language, but feel this one is "going too far"?

If I say, "This is going too far, if I want to say you guys and I know I'm not transphobic and I think it's fine if I say this, then I'll say it," how is that different from right-wingers who refuse all language change, who insist it's their "right" to call people whatever they want? 

How is you guys different from the cringey expressions of my youth -- Indian giver, sitting Indian style, Chinese fire drill, Dutch courage, braves and squaws, to Jew him down, I was gypped. Paki shops, and "take-out chinks" and "bull dykes". 

How is this different than faggot or nigger? (And not in any reclaimed sense!) Or words generally considered less offensive, but that I so deeply loathe, like gal and ladies and girls' night out. 

There's only one thing different about you guys: it's my own common practice. 

All those words above once were, too -- and for many people, still are.

So if I'm hearing that you guys makes trans people feel excluded and less accepted, then I should stop using it. 

You guys is very ingrained into my speech patterns. But speech patterns are not inviolate. There's no lack of available substitutes. 

I must point out a bit of irony here. Many people feel folks is a good substitute for guys. I painfully trained myself not to use folks when writing for and about people with disabilities, because it was considered demeaning and infantilizing. No one in the guys discussion seemed to know about this. Perhaps it's old and outdated, but it's something I learned, and I adhere to it.

And please don't tell me about y'all and all y'all. Now we're all going to adopt expressions from the Confederacy? No thonx.

Change -- but give people a chance

My initial resistance to the you guys question also gave me more insight into the thoughts of people who resist language changes. 

People don't enjoy hearing that their ordinary, everyday speech has somehow become tainted and offensive. Often, they don't understand or respect the people who are asking for (or from their perspective, demanding) this change. Possibly they are angry and feel victimized by their own exclusion -- whether we understand that or not.

I'm not excusing the behaviour of people who refuse to change language with the times. I'm just saying that perhaps we could be more patient.

My resistance to you guys also revealed a distinct lack of compassion and empathy on the part of many progressives -- for anyone who uses a word now considered wrong.

If we want people to change -- to accept change -- to enter into the process of change -- we would benefit by understanding their opposition. 

There are no antidotes to raw bigotry and hatred. I don't think we need to walk a mile in a bigot's shoes and feel compassion for their hatred. At the same time, it does no good to blame and shame someone for taking five minutes longer -- or a week longer, or a year longer -- than you did to get to the same point -- say, the point where guys seems anachronistic and inappropriate.

More woke than thou

In progressive circles there can be a mentality of othering, of in-crowd/out-crowd based on language use. People who are More Radical Than Thou use the up-to-the-minute words as exclusionary themselves. 

I rarely use slang, and I'm always a little late to the lingo. One day, we said more evolved, then suddenly people said woke. And if you didn't know what woke meant, you were a Becky, and now you're a Karen. The use of which is sexist, regressive, exclusionary, over-simplified, and everything we say we don't want to be. I don't say woke and can't even think it without air-quotes. If it has meaning to you, then of course you can and will use it. For me there are other words that express the same meaning.

I remember the withering looks I got for saying Bradley Manning five minutes after others were saying Chelsea Manning. I am in full support of Chelsea Manning as a whistleblower, a truth teller, and a war resister, and am in total support of gender expression and identity. But I had been using the name Bradley Manning for a long time and my brain hadn't completely made the switch. Is that really worthy of scorn?

If a diehard leftist like me, who wholeheartedly supports every aspect of human rights and language change, can get caught in this trap, what can we reasonably expect from people who discover these changes somewhat later? 

When people who use the "wrong" word are the other, who does that serve? Who learns, who grows? How does that further the struggle for equity and justice?

If we want people to change, we need to give them the space to do so.

(Posted with thanks to my Facebook friends who made this such a rich and meaningful discussion.)

"use it in good health"

When I was growing up, my grandparents and other older relatives used an expression, "Use it in good health," or a variant, "Wear it in good health". 

This was said when you bought something that you were very excited about, or received a wonderful gift, or made a major purchase. If you brought home a new coat that you loved, and tried it on to show her, along with "It's beautiful," or "It looks great on you," my mother would say, "Wear it in good health." 

Another variant is, "You should wear it in good health." The you should part is a wish or a prayer, similar to the more formal (and religious-sounding) may you. It expresses a desire. In "wear it in good health," the you should or may you is understood. 

Tangent: there is also a sarcastic version of you should. "Maybe the Democrats will grow spines and vote against this war." "You should live so long." This is roughly equivalent to hell freezing over.

Another tangent: there is also the Jewish you shouldn't. "Bring a snack, you shouldn't faint from hunger," meaning, bring a snack so that you won't be hungry. This is often an exaggeration meant to be humorous.

So when I recently told my mother about our new car, she said, "Use it in good health."

I've always assumed this was a Jewish-culture thing, but I actually don't know. Perhaps it's even more specific, a Brooklyn-Jewish thing. Or perhaps it's not Jewish at all, perhaps it's generational. Do you know this expression? Did your family from [somewhere] use it?

I know most people will answer on Facebook and not here. But if you could leave a comment here so it's captured on this blog, I would appreciate it.

About the saying itself, it's one of those idioms I heard without ever thinking about. With my mother now the only person in my life who would use these old expressions, I sometimes hear them with fresh ears. I love this one. It acknowledges the importance to you of this material object, and at the same time, puts it in perspective. The coat is beautiful, but only if you have the good health to enjoy it.

what i'm reading: words on the move by john mcwhorter

John McWhorter is changing my mind about language. And that is no easy thing to do.

I'm a grammarphile. Word nerd, language junkie, spelling nut, stickler -- whatever you want to call it. I appreciate proper spelling and good grammar, and I cringe at all the bad grammar all around us. Apostrophe abuse drives me insane. Same for unnecessary quotation marks. Misspelled words on websites, signs, flyers, and official documents... don't get me started.

Yet I also part ways with some of my fellow grammar-lovers. I believe grammar is important for writing, but not necessarily for speech -- and certainly not for casual speech. I hate seeing knowledge of grammar used to shame or exclude, or worse, as an excuse to not listen. Wmtc comment guidelines warn readers not to correct another commenter's grammar or spelling.

Even further, I believe it's perfectly all right to relax certain writing rules for casual writing. It's not necessary, in my view, to use awkward phrasing in order to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition in a casual email. It's all right to use sentence fragments, or to start a sentence with but. I don't think the English language is being killed off by texting; in fact, I know it's not. And most importantly, I don't think I'm better or smarter than anyone else because I use apostrophes correctly and they don't. But those unnecessary apostrophes still drive me insane!

So perhaps I was pre-disposed to enjoy John Whorter's enlightening and entertaining book, Words on the Move: Why English Won't -- and Can't -- Sit Still (Like Literally). But I do think that anyone who enjoys thinking about language would like this book.

McWhorter's most important message is in the title: language is never still. The meanings of words always change. Meanings have always changed, they are changing now, and they will continue to change in the future.

It isn't that a certain curiosity cabinet of a few dozen words happened to have different meanings hundreds of years ago. Just about all words in any language have different meanings now than they did in the past. Some words' meanings hold on longer than others. Some few even hold on to the same meaning for thousands of years. However, it is they...that are the oddities.

The book presents some illustrations of every day objects such as bread, fruit, meat, and fuel, and the words that have been used to convey those meanings over centuries. Then, the author writes,

Picture this process happening across tens of thousands of words all the time. That is the essence of what words are, and why the dictionary can qualify only as a snapshot of how the film was situated on the grid at one particular point in time.

McWhorter, a professor of English and comparative literature, says this throughout the book, in many different, entertaining ways. One of his strengths is creating lovely little analogies to illustrate his meaning. He's also very adept at shooting holes in the corrections most beloved by correcters, by showing us how inconsistent we all are.

If there's an expression that drives you crazy because it's usually used "wrong," chances are, it meant your particular version of "correct" only for a period of time in between its other meanings and uses. Most likely, the meaning has changed and you need to update your personal lexicon. Whatever your favourite bugaboo -- decimate, irregardless, sink down, used to, literally -- McWhorter has a slew of examples to prove that your objections are inconsistent at best, and might even be ridiculous. Those of us who hate the overuse of literally to mean its opposite may be surprised at how many words now mean their opposite that we never bother to complain about -- because those words changed in a different time and bothered different people. And it's not just English. It's all languages, all the time. Change, change, change.

Some of McWhorter's ideas are controversial. He explains speech tics such as "like" and "you know," and why we shouldn't care about them. He maintains that slang, including shorthands we use online and in text messages, are as old as language itself, and don't hurt the language. He counsels us to embrace "the euphemism treadmill" -- from Colored to Negro to Black to African American -- and explains why cultures make these shifts.

Perhaps most controversially, McWhorter argues that Shakespeare should be cautiously and judiciously translated, to make the plays more accessible to contemporary audiences.

If you love Shakespeare as I do, let me elaborate before your blood pressure elevates. About 10 percent of the words Shakespeare used now mean something completely different than they did when he wrote them. If we read Shakespeare, we can use footnotes, but when we watch a play or film adaptation -- and the words were meant to be performed, after all -- we can often follow the action through context and prior knowledge, and we might get the gist of the language, but we miss a good deal of the meaning. We miss more than we think, something the author illustrates very well. McWhorter believes that Shakespearean scholars should tweak the language for greater understanding.

Yes, I have been one of those people, and have experienced resistance (and even dribbles of vitriol) in response. However, most of this resistance has been based on the idea that the difference between our language and Shakespeare's is only one of poetry, density, or elevation.

The reason Shakespeare's prose sounds so "poetic" is partly because it is. But it is also partly for the more mundane reasons that his language is not, to a larger extent than we might prefer to know, inaccessible to us without careful study on the page.

Many assume that the translation I refer to would have to be into slang. I suspect this is because it can be hard to perceive that the very meanings of even the most mundane of words have often changed so much -- if one thinks the difficulty of the language is merely a matter of "poetry," then it's easy to think that no translation in neutral current English could be at issue, and hence the notion of "Yo, whaddup, Calpurnia?" as a serious literary suggestion.

He gives a few elegant examples, which are "hardly a desecration" -- the language is still "challenging and even beautiful, especially since most of it is the original." I must agree. He explains that he's not suggesting the original plays be withdrawn and never read.

However a world where the usual experience of a Shakespeare play outside universities was in today's English would be one where, quite simply, more people were capable of truly understanding and enjoying the Bard's work rather than genuflecting to it. Seeing Shakespeare shouldn't be like eating your vegetables -- even tasty vegetables. Nor is it much more inspiring for us to treat Shakespeare as a kind of verbal wallpaper or scent that we sit back and allow to "wash over" us. . . . Shakespeare translated into today's English wouldn't be exactly Shakespeare, no. But given a choice between Shakespeare as an elite taste and Shakespeare engaged the way Russians engage Chekhov and Americans engage Scorsese films and "Arrested Development", some may judge Shakespeare that isn't always exactly what Shakespeare wrote as less than a tragedy.

Like the novel, theatre, and baseball, language is something people often claim is dying or already dead. But if no one ever writes or reads another novel, and the great game of baseball is never played again, we will still have language -- because we are human. And language will still be changing, because that's what it does.

a great date

It's 12.12.12! To all my fellow obsessives, enjoy the day!

we like lists: list # 19: more eponyms, subcategory edition

Eponyms everywhere! Who knew?

Our most recent list of eponyms was a smash success. It gave rise to at least three subcategories, as I wrote here:

- Inventor/creator/discoverer, not genericized. These are eponyms, but have not entered the vocabulary as a separate noun or descriptor. Example: Alzheimer's. Compare to pasteurized.

- Fictional characters
--- Mythological names
----- Biblical names

This list is more specific, and more difficult. Allan and I have done this one before, and even with help from a well-read listserv, came up with only a handful. (Idea for new reality show: Are you smarter than Wallace-L?)

When Joseph Heller died, I marveled at how his creation has entered our vocabulary as such a widely recognized generic expression. The often-misused phrase "catch-22" was long ago separated from its origins. I'm sure many people use it who have never heard of Heller's book. I wondered if there were any other examples.

Using a very strict criteria, we came up with very few:
Catch-22
Lolita
Big Brother
Scrooge

Here are the rules. Fiction only. Can be a title or a character. The author must be a known person whose identity is not in dispute. That means no myths, including bible stories, but of course Shakespeare can be used. The word must be recognizable as a generic term, enough that you'd see it used in a mainstream newspaper story.

Thanks to last night's thread, I'll add one that the Wallace list missed:
Romeo

Got any others? You can use our last list, but other than that, no cheating, please.

we like lists: list # 18: words that were once people

I really enjoy learning about the origins of words and expressions. (I included this in our last list.) Several words now part of ordinary vocabulary started out as proper names.

In 1880, a group of Irish tenant farmers organized a labour ostracism against the agent of an abusive absentee landlord. The agent's name was Charles Boycott.


Charles Ponzi was a con artist who promised investors they would double their money in 90 days.


In the film "La Dolce Vita," directed by Federico Fellini, an intrusive photographer is named Paparazzo.

Thomas Bowdler was a crusading editor who published a book called "The Family Shakespeare": the Bard without the naughty bits. Bowdler believed his work made Shakespeare suitable for the delicate sensibilities of ladies (i.e., upper-class women) and children.

So there we have four words - boycott, Ponzi scheme, paparazzi, and bowdlerized - that are derived from people's names.

Can you think of any others?

Adjectives like "Orwellian" or "Dickensian" don't count. Those refer to conditions described by an author. "Freudian" doesn't qualify, but if, say, dream interpretation was called sigmundosis, that would count.

best date i'll ever see in my whole entire life

It's 11.11.11 !!! And I'm posting this at 11:11, of course.

10.10.10 was cool, and 12.12.12 will be cool, too. And I love palindromes, so 12.22.21, if I'm around for it, will be totally kickass. But 11.11.11 is the best.

What can I say? This is the kind of thing you either like or you don't. I like!

if this knish could talk: some language-related thoughts

When I first moved to Canada, I could really hear my neighbours' "accent" - their Canadian-sounding speech. Now I no longer notice it. People still sometimes ask me if I'm from the US, and occasionally someone recognizes my speech as New York- sounding. Recently, though, I've noticed the sound of my own language changing. My "sorry" now sounds more like "sirry" than "sahry". The other day, I said "zed" without thinking. It's interesting to me how this just happens, some kind of linguistic osmosis.

As far as I know, I never sounded like this video, but some of it is irrefutable. "They're not usually quiet people."

I recently read this review of You Are What You Speak - Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene.

Greene makes it his business to dispel popular misconceptions, large and small. (Politicians and pundits, please note: the Chinese word for “crisis” is not composed of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.”) To that end, he visits with the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Liberman, a multifaceted scholar who serves as a one-man truth squad at the Language Log blog, of which he is a co-founder.

In her 2006 book “The Female Brain,” for example, Louann Brizendine reported that women average 20,000 words a day against just 7,000 for men. That came as no surprise to many in the media; as one TV reporter put it: “Here’s a news flash. Women talk more than men. Duh.” But Liberman tracked Brizendine’s figures to an unsourced claim in a self-help book and noted that the empirical research shows both sexes using about the same number of words in a day. Duh! yourself.

And when columnists including George Will and Stanley Fish asserted that President Obama’s frequent use of “I” and “me” betrayed his arrogance and self-absorption, Liberman did the counts and showed that Obama actually used those pronouns far less often in speeches and press conferences than did any of his recent predecessors.

. . .

In his view, the efforts of the French to purge their tongue of English words arise in part from a “dented self-image,” even though French is hardly a threatened language. And while Americans may bristle at the comparison, he sees the same unwarranted insecurity behind the English-only movement. As Greene notes, English doesn’t need protecting; modern immigrants are acquiring the language far more rapidly than immigrants did a century ago and, sadly, are rapidly losing their original languages in the bargain. But that’s unlikely to deter the sponsors of English-only measures, which presuppose that recent immigrants have resisted assimilation.

Greene’s abhorrence of linguistic meddling extends to the “grouches,” “scolds” and “vigilantes” who complain that English is going to hell in a Hupmobile and insist on imposing specious rules and crotchets on a language that is doing quite nicely on its own, thank you. In fact, he argues that the quality of this “declinism” has itself gone downhill over the last century. We’ve passed from the thoughtful homilies of Fowler to the pithy dictums of Strunk and White to the operatic curmudgeonry of modern sticklers like Lynne Truss, whose gasps of horror at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe are a campy cover for self-congratulation.

. . . Most of the usage questions that engage us daily have nothing to do with politics, race or class, and they almost never figure among the score or so of timeworn bugbears that people report as their pet peeves, like “irregardless,” “literally” and “I could care less.” (Doesn’t anybody know what “pet” means anymore?)

Not long ago I did a double take when I encountered the phrase “refreshingly simplistic” in a music review. When I looked it up on Google, I got hundreds of hits. It seemed to have sprung out of nowhere ­— these things always do — but it turns out people have been using “simplistic” for at least 40 years to mean something like “plain” or “unadorned.”

Well, language changes, and speakers in a generation or two will probably find my animadversions over “refreshingly simplistic” as tiresome and fusty as I find those by people who still grouse about using “nauseous” to mean sick. (As Greene succinctly puts it, “Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.”) Yet the prospect of future acceptance doesn’t allay my feeling that the phrase is a pratfall. It’s as if I’d tried to tell my parents when I was growing up that I shouldn’t have had to wear a jacket to a restaurant, since people a half-century later would be showing up in jeans and flip-flops.

I liked this bit because I have my own decidedly mixed feelings on this abomination-vs-rule debate. The avalanche of apostrophe abuse drives me insane. The quantity of quotation marks, same. I'm fond of saying "It's not ironic, it's a coincidence!" This surely makes me, in Lane's eyes, a grammar grouch.

But... there's a but. People who correct other people's grammar and usage bother me almost as much as bad grammar. My comment policy, for example, asks that we not correct each other in comments. We all have different backgrounds, different levels of formal education; what's important is that we communicate, not that we communicate according to a specific set of rules.

I sometimes email with a friend in Peru. My Spanish is abominable. But he encourages me to write him, and he always says my Spanish is fine - undoubtedly because he is too nice to say otherwise, and because he wants me to write. I always encourage people to express themselves, in whatever way they can.

Yet when one of my professors - a woman with a PhD, for crissakes - wrote it's for its, I was embarrassed for her. I wonder if I'm the only person in the class who noticed.

Somehow I subscribe to these two contradictory modes of thoughts at the same time.

another cool date

I had this post scheduled to go up at 11:11 a.m.... but it did not. Thanks, Blogger.

Yay, it's 1.11.11!



Isn't this fun?



No? Not really?

great date

It's 1.1.11!

Or 01.01.11.

Either way, I like it.

Posting this at 11:11, of course

what i'm reading: apex hides the hurt

I'll probably write a combined "what i'm reading" post for everything I read on my winter break. But right now I'm reading a novel I love so much, that I just couldn't wait to tell you about it: Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead.

I don't want to give too much plot away, because I love the way the novel unfolds, but here's enough to go on. A "nomenclature consultant" is hired to help a town re-name itself. This is a man who dreams up the names that brand our world - the popular pharmaceuticals, the cell phones, the toothpaste, household cleaners and video game systems. Now he's going to judge which name best suits an old town with a new look - new money and new computer-related jobs.

But the town already has a name. Gentrification and job growth are important, but what about tradition? Which leads to the question... whose tradition? Turns out, the town's current and historic name was itself a re-naming, not unlike "America" or the "West Indies". History is written by the conquerors - and the definition of "traditional" depends on where we start.

History, race, class, advertising, language, and consumer culture converge. Yet somehow this all happens in a slim, wryly funny, wonderfully readable, little miracle of a book. I am fascinated by - and so envious of - how certain writers can do so much in so little, layers of meaning packed into so few words.

Apex Hides the Hurt skewers marketing, advertising, and contemporary consumer culture. It's a commentary on the pervasiveness of marketing in our lives, and how marketing reduces everything to its demographic parts. It's about language, and how language is exploited to sell - products, ideas, people, history, anything.

The novel also plays with the contemporary penchant (or obsession) for naming every phenomena of the world around us, the kind that Urban Dictionary collects, but perhaps with a biblical reference, as a man continues to name the animals.

What do you call that terrible length of time between when you see that your food is ready and when your waitress drags her ass over to your table with it? He saw Regina emerge from the back of the restaurant. His eyes zipped to the plate sitting on the kitchen ledge. Tantalasia. Rather broad applications, Tantalasia, apart form the food thing. An emotional state, that muted area between desire and consummation. A literal territory, some patch of unnamed broken gravel between places on a map.

Apex Hides the Hurt even contains a wry send-up of libraries and librarians. A town librarian has written the official history of the town.

Winning over the town librarian for sympathetic press wasn't too much of a task, he figured. A set of leatherbound Shakespeare would do it.

Later, the narrator tries to visit the town library, only to find it has been displaced by a big-box clothing chain, a fictional version of Old Navy.

On the rare occasions that he entered libraries, he always felt assured of his virtue. If they figured out how to distill essence of library into a convenient delivery system - a piece of gum or a gelcap, for example - he would consume it eagerly, relieved to be finished with more taxing methods of virtue gratification. Helping little old ladies across the street. Giving tourists directions. Libraries. Alas there would be no warm feelings of satisfaction today. The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers.

Whitehead writes the hipster librarian with a perfect eye for detail. As she chats with the nomenclature consultant, he thinks, "Slimpies: Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don't Have It in You."

* * * *

Before the digital era and the explosion of activist creativity, before YouTube and viral marketing - and before the shelf life of taglines had been reduced to nanoseconds - there were some standard activist slogans you'd always see. The same dozen sayings would emblazon the t-shirts, bumper stickers and postcards sold at demos and folk music festivals. "I long for the day schools have a surplus and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale" and "Why doesn't Crayola's flesh-coloured crayon come in 52 shades?". In those days, there was something called a "flesh-coloured" crayon, a pinkish-beige hue.

Now we live in an era where flesh-coloured crayons come in many shades. Our TV screens are populated by people of all colours. But is that multiculturalism promoting equality, empathy and understanding among all people? Or is the appearance of diversity merely a tool used to induce more people to buy more products? This is a central question of Apex Hides the Hurt. It's about, among other things, what I wrote about here: "you can't find inner peace in a bottle (of iced tea)".

With this brilliant little book, Colson Whitehead becomes one of My Favourite Writers.

* * * *

I've also read Whitehead's wonderful, unusual debut novel The Intuitionist, in which ideas about race and how we perceive the world converge and double-back on themselves in a world of skyscrapers and elevator inspectors. Whitehead is also the author of some of the greatest words ever written about New York City, a collection called The Colossus of New York, the cultural grandchild of E. B. White's classic Here Is New York.

I blogged about Colson Whitehead after a terrific essay of his ran in the New York Times: "I write in Brooklyn. Get over it." And I included him in a trio of Great Writers on the Great City: please go here and especially here. (New York City fans: click on that last link.)

I have not read his novels John Henry Days (2001, shortlisted for Pulitzer Prize) or Sag Harbor (2009), but I will.

excellent date

It's 10/10/10! I will schedule this post for 10:10 a.m.

I see I did this last year in September. This date is even better. Something about those ohs and ones.

changing the world, armed with white-out and a black sharpie

Last time I declared someone "my new hero," she turned out to be an actor doing a hoax. I don't care. I still loved the video of the fake assistant pretend-quitting her imaginary job.

These guys are my hero of the moment, and they really did this, and wrote a book about it. And they had a sense of humour about it, too. Maybe on that cross-country trip I dream of making, we'll arm ourselves with white-out and Sharpies and help stamp out the scourge of apostrophe abuse.

Incensed by a "no tresspassing" sign, Jeff Deck launched a cross-country trip to right grammatical wrongs.

He enlisted a friend, Benjamin D. Herson, and together they got to work erasing errant quotation marks, rectifying misspellings and cutting unnecessary possessive apostrophes.

The Great Typo Hunt is the story of their crusade.

In 2 1/2 months, Herson and Deck traveled the perimeter of the country, exploring towns and cities in search of typos. They found 437 typos and were able to correct more than half of them.

I'm very surprised they found only 437 typos. I saw half that number on a menu in Santa Fe last summer.

Check out the website: The Great Typo Hunt.

i'd rather be blogging

I love today's Daily Dose of Imagery. Some of those "kids today" who don't read anymore. Publishers and booksellers know it's not true. Youth librarians all over the country know, too.

This future youth librarian has to prepare a presentation on two chapters of this book, due tomorrow morning. Allan has a post in the works, so I'll turn wmtc over to him* later today.

Another important note about today: it's a palindrome. 011110.





* Never!

great date

Hey, I just realized today is 09/09/09. Think of me tonight at 9:09. See you later.

heroes and vandals, hero's and vandal's work

From the Daily Mail (UK): Punctuation hero' branded a vandal for painting apostrophes on street signs.

This man's efforts, while noteworthy, leave the more pressing work untouched: wiping out the unnecessary apostrophes littering our visual landscape.

Get out there and do your part. Erase an apostrophe today.

Stamp out apostrophe abuse in our lifetime.

Thanks to Fred for thinking of me.

say it aint so!

The whole world is adding apostrophes where they aren't needed. Tire's for sale, hundred's of item's available, the Liberal Party announces it's decision. (Wrong, wrong, wrong.)

But the city of Birmingham, England, is going in the other direction.

Its a catastrophe for the apostrophe in Britain

On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English.

England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.

"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it."

But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.

"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.

A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary's Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

"If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data," said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. "We've never heard of any confusion arising from their existence."

To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.

British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's," or pubs offering "chip's and pea's." [Emphasis added.]

In her best-selling book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice," insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."

"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote.

Sticklers? Sticklers??? Using correct punctuation makes one a stickler? Grrrr.

[Thanks to Frederick for thinking of me when he saw this story.]

perhaps they should have hired a proofreader

This just in from AW1L.

Our friend Alan With One L knows that Allan and I share his teeth-grinding annoyance and mystified incredulity at the misuse of apostrophes for plurals.

Not that I've never confused its and it's. That's a tough one for many people. And non-native speakers of English, especially if they've been through the US's lousy public education system, are to be congratulated if they grasp the possessive apostrophe.

However, the use of apostrophes for plurals is beyond rampant. It's pandemic. The pen has already been pulled, but I hope it enjoys renewed life on the tubes.

Background here.