When my sons were beginning elementary school, they liked to while away a rainy Saturday afternoon playing school. They wanted me to play the teacher, but apparently I didn’t do it right. “You have to be meaner,” they’d say. “You have to yell a lot.”

I always wondered if their teachers really were shrieking meanies who toned it down when a parent appeared, or if they’d gotten this notion of the harridan-as-schoolteacher elsewhere. I’ve had a similar response to the recent case of the “graded breakup,” in which Nick Lutz, a student at the University of Central Florida, thought fit to mark up his ex-girlfriend’s apology note with a red pen and then tweet the results. The case has achieved notoriety both because the tweet has received hundreds of thousands of hits and because the university initially suspended Mr. Lutz. While he apparently found his “joke” “hilarious,” the university found that the tweet’s “offensive” and “harmful” implications violated the student code of conduct.

The student appealed, the suspension was lifted, and the case has been dismissed. But what interests me here, more than whether this is an example of cyberbullying or institutional overreach, is the actual correction and grading of the apology note. Most media outlets have characterized Lutz’s red marks as “fixing the grammar, spelling, and syntax errors” of the note, which he awarded a D−. But they do little of that — in fact, Lutz commits a few errors of his own in his marginalia. Rather, the knee-jerk criticisms of the young woman’s “essay” and the ad hominem responses make me wonder whether Lutz is really seeing comments like these on his papers, or if his notions of how a professor “grades” come from some other cliché.

A few examples. His ex’s opening apology is marked Too long of an introduction, lots of repitition [sic]. Actually, the sentences use a certain amount of repetition, particularly beginning with I know and interjecting maybe, to some rhetorical effect. But the no-no of being repetitive, along with the worn advice to omit needless words, may be prompting countless instructors to chide students simply for allowing introductions to run on past three sentences and for employing anaphora.

Lutz also hits his ex hard on what appear to be issues of critical thinking. He asks her to explain her reasoning at one point; twice he knocks her for failing to provide details. But looking at the sentences he marks up, I find he’s using terms like reasoning without quite understanding how they apply. To wit, the ex’s confession, “I ended up failing on my part” is castigated for lacking reasoning, though a confession of failure is not an argument. “No matter if you believe me or not, I never cheated on you” is dinged for requiring details to support your hypothesis. Leaving aside the absence of a hypothesis, one would be hard put to find details that support a negative claim. So details and hypothesis likewise seem to be terms empty of meaning to this student. When they run dry — as, perhaps, they do for Lutz’s instructors — he resorts to the cavalier comment What is this? in reference to the young woman’s staccato narrative, “Trying to move on. It was the hardest thing to do. It still is.”

If, indeed, instructors’ exhortations to employ reasoning and details, to keep repetition to a minimum, or to support one’s hypothesis are dealing in rhetorical jargon that students fail altogether to grasp, we shouldn’t find it surprising that a student attempting to parody such criticisms throws the terms around with their content more or less empty. But then, as Lutz makes his way through the four-page handwritten note (lackadaisical handwriting is a final criticism, with lackadaisical misspelled and crossed out twice), he cannot maintain the posture of the mean teacher. Look at the progress of the following three marginal comments:

• If you have decided to keep reading this, all I’ve had to say, you would realize that this isn’t a joke. No reason to tell dude to stop. Useless filling sentence.
• I have no reason to hide, lie, or hold anything back from you. If there is no reason to lie, why isn’t the truth being told?
• I just hope to God you have thought about me. I have not.

None of the comments makes sense in terms of “correcting” a paper. More to the point, they move from dismissing (and misinterpreting) what the writer is doing, to questioning the writer’s adherence to “truth,” and finally to a direct response in first person. Insofar as the marginalia are revealing, not of the letter’s author, but of its recipient, we see in this series how Lutz himself is resisting his ex’s appeals, sticking to his version of whatever transpired between them, and hardening himself against any emotional response. It’s a sad story — and not, whatever one might think of the university’s response, “hilarious” or innocent in any way. But again, I wonder if Lutz views his instructors as free to impugn student writers’ legitimacy or engage in ad hominem attacks.

Finally, in the summary by which he defends his “grade,” Lutz writes, You need to stop contradicting yourself and pick a side. There, surely, we catch a whiff of the sort of harangue that may help students perform well on the essay portion of the SAT but that dooms them to any sort of nuanced or interesting argument. Choose a position; be consistent; stick to your argument, come hell or high water. It’s a Custer’s Last Stand approach to writing an essay, and I figure that Lutz’s instructors beat it into him, or he wouldn’t be deploying it in this supposed joke.

Meanwhile, Lutz’s ex, for what it’s worth, I think you’re well out of it. And your handwriting beats his by a long chalk.

Recently The Economist’s “Johnson” column (named not for its author, but for the dictionary pioneer Samuel Johnson, who lived three centuries ago) ruminated on the frustrations and obscure consistencies of hyphenation. Apparently the magazine’s style book carries on about hyphens for eight pages, which to my mind leaves plenty to be said.

As they rightly point out, the path of hyphenation runs generally toward its disappearance: good-bye becomes goodbye, to-day becomes today, e-mail has widely transformed into email. Joining compounds as it does in so many ways, English distributes its hyphens not only by parts of speech but also by word origin, length, newness, and ease of reading. For instance:

Blue-green (two adjectives)

Kitchen sink (two nouns)

Darkroom (adjective + noun)

Slate-blue (noun + adjective)*

Fishlike (short, Germanic)

Piranha-like (long)

Whale-like (odd-looking without a hyphen)

Archangel (easy to read)

Arch-rival (hard to read if not hyphenated)

Johnson also gets into the subtleties of syntax when considering the hyphen, e.g., “I have a zero-tolerance approach” (tolerance used as part of the adjective) versus “I have zero tolerance for that” (tolerance as a noun modified by zero). These differences really can matter, as in the example of “a third-world war” rather than “a third world war.”

But the most vexed hyphenation issue I run across did not pop up in Johnson’s article. I’m referring to spelled-out numbers followed by a reference to a measurement (age, time, distance, etc.). To wit:

A five-year-old boy

A twenty-five-year-old car

A twenty-five-year warranty

A one-and-a-half-year-old boy

A two-and-a-half-hour trip

Though most style guides call for all these hyphens, in practice many of us skip one or two, e.g. a twenty-five year-old car or a twenty-one month-old toddler. Insofar as hyphens exist to forestall confusion, it’s hard to see any confusion sown by either of these choices. I suspect, rather, that the convention exists more to create consistency between Arabic numerals and numbers spelled out, so that a 25-year-old woman is punctuated the same as a twenty-five-year-old woman. (And yes, we do spell out numbers greater than 10 at the beginnings of sentences, so these cases aren’t all that extreme.)

More interesting, and potentially more confusing, are instances where the noun is absent or implied. The following might seem weird in their hyphenation unless you assume a missing noun (suggested in parentheses) or take the latter part of the phrase to be itself a hyphenated noun. You can see here the differences in meaning:

A twenty-five-year-old (horse)

Twenty five-year-olds

Twenty-five year-olds

A twenty-two-hundred-year-old (fossil)

Twenty two-hundred-year-olds

Twenty-two hundred-year-olds

Twenty-two-hundred year-olds (I would hate to be in charge of them!)

In long number combinations, even when we restore the nouns being modified, we can see what a difference a hyphen or two can make:

Twenty-two-thousand-year-old fossils

Twenty two-thousand-year-old fossils

Twenty-two thousand-year-old fossils

In internet discussions, the most vexed hyphenation question in this category seems to arise when we add fractions. Thus we have no problem with the difference, say, between twenty-five years old and two hundred years old. But is it three and a half years old or three-and-a-half years old? The Corpus of Contemporary American English gives the nod to the former, but many people object to a long string of connected words absent hyphens.

It’s all very well to say, as Johnson does, that “this is one rule that need not drive anyone mad: a group of words used as a single modifier should be hyphenated.” But I suspect I am not alone in pausing, just about every time I need to spell out a number, to check my hyphen logic. What about you?

*Johnson gives this combination as hyphenated, but I imagine many of us distinguish between a slate-blue sky and a sky that appears slate blue.

When my brother and I were teenagers, we liked to practice non sequiturs, irrelevant statements that seemed to beggar any attempt at response. One of our favorites was “My father drives with both feet.” (This happened to be true, to the detriment of our car’s brakes.) Another was “I had a ham sandwich for lunch.” For reasons that elude me now, we found it hilarious to lob these tiny verbal grenades into conversations, particularly with elders.

The ham sandwich has made a recent appearance, thanks to Robert Mueller III’s recent impaneling of a grand jury, on the president’s favorite TV show, “Fox & Friends,” where Jeanine Pirro said, “Look, I was a prosecutor for 32 years. You can indict a ham sandwich.”

That particular expression, indict a ham sandwich, was coined in 1985 by Sol Wachtler, the later disgraced chief judge of New York State. Wachtler was in favor of scrapping the grand-jury system. District attorneys had so much power, Wachtler argued, that “by and large” they could get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.” His remark was made famous just two years later by Tom Wolfe, whose Bonfire of the Vanities quoted Wachtler in discussing the poor chances of its guilty protagonist, Sherman McCoy.

Why a ham sandwich? Wachtler later told columnist Barry Popik that he wished he’d made it a pastrami sandwich. But pastrami has had nothing like the slang career of ham when it comes to sandwich expressions. Urban Dictionary lists more than two dozen of them, most unfit to print here. But among the non-vulgar expressions it features, we find:

• In police lexicon, an untainted handgun ready to plant on an unarmed suspect who’s been shot;
• In frat-bro lexicon, a series of shots — dark, light, dark — drunk in succession and followed by the cry “Ham sandwich!”;
• In street lexicon, a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, ham apparently taken from Brougham;
• In bullying lexicon, an overweight girl who has lost all her self-respect;
• In stereotype, a thing to be attacked and inhaled, e.g., Willy was on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich.

My own sense is that it’s the half-rhyme of ham with the sand of sandwich that makes the phrase attractive as an idiom. After all, See you later, alligator never had anything to do with the tendency of alligators to depart; it had to do with the rhyme. Ditto Whatever floats your boat, Cruisin’ for a bruisin’, and the use of morning glory to mean a horse who fades out by the end of the day.

It’s possible that the ordinariness of a ham sandwich has something to do with its slang ubiquity also, but while ham is generally inexpensive, I suspect bologna and peanut better occupy lower rungs in sandwich-world. Maybe the word itself is fun to say — think about ham it up (traceable to “The Ham-Fat Man,” an 1863 minstrel show); ham radio (shortened from amateur); ham-handed (another half-rhyme). When Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird, dresses for Halloween at school, she’s actually supposed to be representing one of the county’s agricultural products, and the teacher attempts to call her to the stage by yelling “Pork!” But her awkward costume is helpfully, and humorously, labeled ham — and that very humor sharpens the subsequent scene where the children are attacked on their way home.

And though not kosher, a ham sandwich, like Scout, is by its nature innocent. That’s the point of Wachtler’s comment — that a grand jury could indict an entity that lacks even the agency to commit wrong. That wasn’t the case for Sherman McCoy, and there are plenty of bets being laid that such will not be the case with whomever Mueller’s grand jury may indict.

As with my colleague Ben Yagoda’s post last week, I fear that unpacking the peculiarities of an expression used by or about an administration that seems to be barreling toward Armageddon may be missing the more Orwellian aspects of the language to which we’re all subjected these days. But ham sandwich is still fun to say. I had one for lunch.

What a world of difference lies between adopting your own moniker and having one thrust upon you. I had never heard the term alt-left before the president used it in his third iteration of comments on the horrific events in Charlottesville, Va. Figuring out what he meant wasn’t exactly rocket science: Just as the alt-right is not really some alternative to right-wing positions but rather an extreme, purist force on the right, so the alt-left would be considered an extreme and purist form of left-wing politics. As a corollary, any invective hurled at the alt-right — radical, violent, bigoted, dangerous — could boomerang, with equal effectiveness, on the so-called alt-left.

The key difference, as Emma Grey Ellis recently pointed out in Wired, is that “no left-wing group has ever called itself the alt-left.” The term may have been used, as Molly Roberts claimed in The Washington Post, by some supporters of Hillary Clinton to describe certain rigid Bernie Sanders fans (the evidence for this claim is scant), but in any case it uniformly labels a group of people with whom someone disagrees, with the intended effect of demeaning, not legitimizing, them. The same cannot be said of antifa, shorthand for antifascist, a term that traces its roots to bands of leftists in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, as fascism rose and spread. Plenty of autonomous groups that consider themselves socialist, anti-capitalist, and possibly anarchist, like NYC Antifa, proudly claim the label along with preferring, as Peter Beinart observes in his forthcoming Atlantic essay, direct action: “They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.”

While the huge majority of counterprotestors in Charlottesville would not consider themselves antifa, one suspects that those who do are more concerned with the accurate portrayal of their goals and techniques than with how they are labeled. But the alt-left label, having been invented exclusively by the “other side,” can only be understood as a pejorative term. I was not in Charlottesville, but it would not surprise me if most protesters, hearing themselves described as alt-left, would respond that they are simply on the political left, or even in what we once knew as the political middle.

A strange thing happens, though, to some — not all — terms that get thrust upon others. First used derisively by Mitt Romney to delegitimize the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare became such a negative term that some people in Los Angeles, asked about federal health-insurance initiatives, responded that they hated Obamacare but were in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Rather than fighting the label, President Obama actually adopted it … and now the majority of Americans don’t want Obamacare taken away.

Similarly, after Trump referred to Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman,” a slur too many women had heard when they tried to assert themselves, nasty-woman T-shirts and slogans sprang up overnight. Pretty soon, I expect, some individuals will begin pointing out that snowflakes are not only made of a malleable substance essential to life on earth, but are distinguished by a structure of infinite beauty and variety.

Already, we see some of the same coopting going on with alt-left. As one Twitter user put it, “WTF is #AltLeft? Opposite of #AltRight? Opposite of bigotry, hatred, violence, group supremacy? If so then COUNT ME IN!#ProudToBeAltLeft.” Given that, as several commentators have pointed out, the political struggles convulsing our country at the moment don’t break down readily into right-versus-left dichotomies, maybe the alt prefix will end up giving us a new way to express a set of opposing forces that conventional labels have failed to capture.

Not every term admits of cooptation. Rhetoric labeled politically correct, regardless of how often people observe its similarity to rhetoric that is kind, respectful, or sensitive, carries a stigma. Even though my friend Cathi Hanauer has edited collections of insightful, entertaining essays titled The Bitch in the House and The Bitch Is Back, I know no one who likes to be called a bitch. I suspect that most of the self-proclaimed alt-right protesters in Charlottesville abjure the term Nazi or even neo-Nazi: Even if those terms are accurate, they are employed largely by people opposed to what those folks were marching for. The term progressive rose in popularity largely out of the successful discrediting of the term liberal.

In other words, we cannot predict whether alt-left will stick at all, and if it does, whether it will remain an insult or become a new claim to identity. For right now, unsexy as it may be, I prefer what the University of Virginia professor Nicole Hemmer called the huge majority of counterprotesters in Virginia: good people.

The word totally has grown so overused that I was struck, last week, by the power of its near cousin, totality, describing the two or three minutes, along the arc of the much-heralded solar eclipse, when the sun was blanked out except for its flaming (and dangerous to look at) corona. At first I thought the media had invented the term. But no, it has been in the astronomy lexicon for 185 years to indicate “the moment or duration of total obscuration of the sun or moon during an eclipse.”

When the eclipse happened, I was stuck in traffic along the Cross-County Parkway just outside New York City. As my car crawled forward, I saw a few people along a bridge over the highway who seemed to be watching the sky, but the sun was behind me and I couldn’t get out of the car. When the sluggish river of traffic finally reached the horrible accident that had precipitated the slow-down, I wondered briefly if the driver of the totaled car (total as a verb meaning “to damage beyond repair,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, having first been used about a car in 1954) had been trying to eclipse-watch while driving. Then the bottleneck opened up, and I was on my way.

Many pundits remarked on the healing power of last week’s eclipse, pointing out that “the movement of the heavenly bodies remains independent of Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, or any other elected official” and calling the event “a solar love-in.” Harmony was not always congruent with totality. Just about every culture, it seems, has a story about angry gods causing eclipses. A couple of ancient Chinese astrologers may have been executed for failing to predict an eclipse. When England’s King Henry I died just after the eclipse in 1133, the solar event was taken as an evil omen. In various places today, people believe that eclipses can cause miscarriage or food poisoning.

So there’s something to be said for, you know, science. It’s easy to imagine how terrifying that black-out would be if you didn’t know anything about the laws of motion causing it. As Annie Dillard points out in her classic essay, “Total Eclipse,” “You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have never seen the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is as completely invisible as the stars are by day.” Dillard goes on:

The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. … The white ring and the saturated darkness made the Earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. With great effort we had remembered some sort of circular light in the sky — but only the outline. Oh, and then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on Earth, nobody knew it.

I have a strong memory of an eclipse when I was at summer camp in the Ozarks, and we were only allowed to look at the sun through one of those pinhole contraptions. Looking up that event, I find it occurred on July 20, 1963, and totality was far north, in Canada. In Missouri, perhaps 70 percent of the sun was obscured. As Dillard writes, “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him,” so I guess that, in terms of eclipses, I remain a virgin. I do know that it constituted one of my first intimations of mortality, as the slow diminution of the sun made me feel my own smallness, my own briefness.

It certainly would not have occurred to me then, as it has not occurred to most people throughout history, to go seeking the eclipse, like the so-called umbraphiles who chase the event around the globe. Much has changed since Carly Simon sang, “Then you flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia/To see the total eclipse of the sun,” as damning evidence in “You’re So Vain.” These days, we thirst for totality rather than hiding from it. I’d like to believe that such collective longing has nothing to do with politics.

Farhad Manjoo is of the mind that mockery of Donald Trump’s spelling mistakes exhibits elitism. It’s a vexed question that I’ve addressed once before in this forum. There’s no doubt that making fun of people for frequent spelling mistakes, not to mention numerous typos, can prove to be an unkind jab at a dyslexic person, or a crass implication that poor spelling equates to stupidity. It is also true that an exceptionally bright, well-read person can be a lousy speller, often because of one of several problems that fall under the umbrella of dyslexia. At the same time, those of us who are good spellers generally attribute our ability to having read a lot. And those of us whose published work, whether in an article or a tweet, contains few typographical errors will generally report that we proofread before releasing the material into the world.

So the question, when looking at poor spelling by someone not considered dyslexic or physically challenged, is whether the converse holds true: Can we attribute the poor spelling to lack of reading and the typographical errors to sloppy or absent proofreading? This question gets further complicated, of course, by the blunt axes of spell checkers and autocorrect functions that can leave even a gifted speller scratching her head and wondering if the past tense of lead really is lead rather than led. Manjoo writes, “You simply do not need to be able to spell as well as people once had to, because we now have tools that can catch and correct our errors — so it’s just not a big deal if, on your first draft, you write ‘heel’ instead of ‘heal.’” Maybe not — but he’s failing to account both for autocorrect bloopers and for a sloppy proofreader’s tendency to leave a word as is despite that red squiggle underneath it.

Another problem with Manjoo’s argument is that, as he writes, “Abraham Lincoln misspelled pretty much everything.” Mid-19^th-century spelling was far from standardized; the texts Lincoln was reading were as apt to have variant spellings as his own writings. So while one can argue that rote memorization is an ineffective way to teach spelling, the fact remains that most of what we read today conforms to standard spelling norms. So if we’re trying to decide whether wide reading is not simply correlated with good spelling but actually results in it, the example of Lincoln proves little.

Manjoo also focuses on so-called textese, the kind of typing that we all perform when sending text messages or posting on social media. Again, his argument seems just slightly off the point. He writes, “There’s little evidence that how one types on electronic media has much to say about how one functions otherwise. One study, in fact, showed that kids who frequently used ‘textese’ tended to be better at grammar than those who didn’t.” I read the study to which Manjoo links, and its conclusion makes common sense: to be able to elide words in a sentence and get your point across clearly, you need to be on top of the ways in which grammar and syntax function. But that’s an entirely different argument from the claim that neither spelling nor typographical errors are meaningful.

If a nondyslexic, nondisabled, educated person spells abominably and lets stand ridiculous typos (“covfefe”), should we conclude that they are either ill-read or sloppy or both? Despite disagreeing with most of what Manjoo claims, I’m not prepared to make this assertion. I’m suspicious, first, because it awards points to me that I doubt I deserve. (Who doesn’t like to think they’re well-read and meticulous?) Second, so much of how we process and retain information remains unknown; there could be other issues with spelling that we’re not aware of. Finally, Manjoo is right that the ways in which we produce and consume text may be changing our relationship to standardized spelling. (I have referenced this shift obliquely in terms of the one- or two-word expression alright/all right.)

At the same time, I don’t think howls at Trump’s spelling are elitist. They signal the disconnect between what he is producing (generally on Twitter) and how he engages with the staff who are supposed to be advising him. More eyeballs, as we all know, mean fewer errors. Yes, there were bloopers in the Obama era too — but fewer, and generally of the sort that even many eyeballs could miss (Franz Fanon, anyone?). People laugh at Trump’s spelling errors because they conjure the image of the 3 a.m. president alone in his gilt bathroom, tweeting madly away without the sense or humility to ask for help when he doesn’t know or doesn’t spot something.

They laugh, too, because if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, and many of us are all cried out.

Following close on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, as Hurricane Irma leaves devastation in her wake that now awaits Hurricane Jose, more than a few of us are talking about the relationship of climate change and extreme weather events.

Oops. My bad. I meant to write, “More than a few of us are talking about the relationship of resilience and extreme weather events.” There. All fixed.

Or is it? As Slate’s Henry Grabar noted in March, resilience has become the term of choice in a political atmosphere where climate change is the truth-that-shall-not-be-named. “Why resilience?” Grabar asks. “In part, because no one knows quite what it means.”

What it means — literally — has become “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties,” though that meaning evolved after several centuries of the more technical use of the term to indicate a kind of elasticity or rebounding quality. Even more interesting, given its current popularity, is the etymology suggesting that resilience originally denoted recoiling or avoidance. Does the supplanting of climate change by resilience serve the purely political purpose of enabling communities to adopt effective strategies to cope with climate change, without using the term itself? Or might our willingness to shift vocabulary indicate that we’re recoiling from, or avoiding, the crisis so clearly spelled out by this year’s hurricane season?

There are, it seems to me, several cautionary flags to observe when we think about resilience. First, writing not about the political adoption of the term but about the psychological capacity to overcome adversity, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk, in the Harvard Business Review, point out its “dark side.” Resilience, they write, develops by way of hardship; “too much resilience could make people overly tolerant of adversity,” and, by extension, could lead those who want to develop the trait to court that same adversity. Extreme resilience “could drive people to become overly persistent with unattainable goals” and to lose “the ability to maintain a realistic self-concept.” Resilience and leadership, they observe, can make strange bedfellows, since a particularly resilient leader can get in the way of team effectiveness, and “grit” can easily be mistaken for real leadership potential. It’s not too much of a stretch to apply these cautions to talk of resilience in terms of what some of us persist in calling climate change, e.g., the “snapshots of a resilient Houston” taken by The New York Times would not be possible had Houston not been put to the test by its own poorly designed infrastructure’s collision with Hurricane Harvey.

Resilience is also a moral quality. By calling the response to a changing environment resilience, we can easily adopt a pattern of blaming the victim. Islands too close to sea level to withstand its rise? They’ve failed at resilience. Drought brought on by climate change resulting in civil war in your country? Not too resilient, are you? Resilience, in other words, is the privilege of wealthy countries and communities that can afford to build sea walls, relocate industries, filter water, import their food from elsewhere, install air-conditioning that contributes to climate change. Global warming may be anthropogenic, but its consequences bear no taint of moral judgment. Resilience allows the wealthiest among us to give themselves a pat on the back.

Finally, though resilience may be a moral quality, the adversity that reveals our resilience is more or less taken for granted. A recent editorial by a former FEMA official made a number of strong points about building resilience to future “climate-related disasters” but uttered not a peep about mitigating climate change itself, thus skirting the entire “controversy” about the relationship between our continuing activity and the root cause of these disasters, and much more.

Indeed, there are groups, like the Post Carbon Institute, which are using resilience as their term of choice to motivate people to educate themselves about the long-term consequences of climate change and how we might still take action to avoid the worst. But in keeping with the mutability of resilience, the language on the institute’s website is so opaque as to leave the naïve reader clueless as to whether the group comprises climate-change alarmists or deniers, e.g.: “Post Carbon Institute provides individuals and communities with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated ecological, economic, energy, and equity crises of the 21st century. We help build resilience to withstand these crises, and support social and cultural change to make society more ready to take decisive and appropriate action.”

I’m ready to confess my own lack of resilience. I understand that we’ve gone too far down this path to avoid the hurricanes, droughts, and other crises that are on their way in the coming years. But I’d like to test my resilience as little as possible. I’d much rather we do something to arrest human-caused climate destruction, so we can save our resilience for all the other challenges of life on this precious Earth.

I’ve been thinking, this week, about daydreaming and fiction.  A recent article in The Atlantic estimates that people may daydream through nearly half their waking hours. That seems like a lot to me, but I readily admit to my mind “wandering” during weddings, funerals, classical-music concerts, long drives, and the line at the DMV. The relationship between dreaming — the REM sort as well as the daydream — is one that writers have evoked many times, from John Gardner’s notion of fiction as “a vivid and uninterrupted dream” to Freud’s assertion that “every child at play behaves like a creative writer.”

This claim, that fiction is like dreaming, and mental wanderings are fertile material for fiction, may be one reason that the first three student stories to land on my desk this fall comprised flashbacks. In each of them, as in so many student narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, the protagonist is sitting somewhere — often in a psychiatrist’s office, or at a funeral, or in a car. Sometimes they are standing on the bridge from which they plan to plummet to their doom. Their mind wanders; the screen goes wavy, like a pond into which a stone has been dropped; and we are back in the insane asylum, or in the kitchen with an evil parent, or at the frat party where it all began. We get the backstory that explains the protagonist’s anorexia, psychosis, homicidal tendencies, or unrequited love, and then we are back in the psychiatrist’s office, at the funeral, on the bridge.

I once read a review of a novel that began by noting that the first chapter contained no fewer than 10 flashbacks. Neither I nor, I suspect, anyone else who read that review was tempted to run out and buy the book. Why? Because narrative moves forward. Because we want to know what happens next, not what happened before we entered the picture. Because even if daydreaming is a big part of everyone’s experience, what we’re doing when we’re daydreaming is … thinking. Our thoughts may be fascinating; the fact that we are thinking them rarely is.

I have pondered the flashback for many years. So many apprentice writers, and so few published works, rely on it. The term, as far as I can tell, became popular after the advent of cinema. Its references, in the Oxford English Dictionary, begin with references to film. And in films, when a character thinks back to an important scene or moment, the camera cuts away and then homes in on the prior scene, rendering it as vividly and “presently” as the rest of the action in the movie.

Not so in literature, where the mediating consciousness of the daydreamer remains the filter by which we reach back into the past. But literature has methods and effects that film lacks. Take Chekhov’s famous story, “The Lady With the Dog,” where on the first page we begin at a resort where “It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.” Gurov, whose point of view controls the narrative, notices this woman, meets her in the public gardens, and reflects that the absence of her husband makes her ripe for his attentions. Then we read:

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant. … He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago.

We’re getting the backdrop to Gurov’s interest in the new lady and probably a few of his actual thoughts as well. No flashback required, because the story’s in third person, past tense. That is, the narrative can move in and out of present action according to the art and craft of the author without relying on the device of Gurov’s “wandering” mind.

Or take a first-person, present-tense example, like Junot Diaz’s “Drown,” where the protagonist has taken his mother to the mall with a lot else on his mind:

I wander through the stores, staying in sight of the cashiers so they won’t have reason to follow me. The circuit I make has not changed since my looting days. Bookstore, record store, comic-book shop, Macy’s. Me and Beto used to steal like mad from these places, two, three hundred dollars of shit in an outing. Our system was simple — we walked into a store with a shopping bag and came out loaded. Back then security wasn’t tight. The only trick was in the exit. We stopped right at the entrance of the store and checked out some worthless piece of junk to stop people from getting suspicious. What do you think? we asked each other. Would she like it?

Is the protagonist thinking about his days with Beto? No doubt. But we don’t need the drift of mind pointed out. We don’t need the screen to go wavy, or for Beto to enter the story like a ghost brought back to life. We can move fluidly from the mall circuit to the looting days; and in Diaz’s story, never even return to mom at the mall but move on to the protagonist’s evenings — “Nights I drink with Alex and Danny. The Malibou Bar is no good”—without breaking away from or altering the speaker’s consciousness.

Our minds are fantastically complex. Rarely do we “drift off” to the point where we reinhabit the past at the expense of the present. Driving on that long trip, we may relive some childhood experience, but we also hear the news on the radio and exit the interstate where Google Maps instructs us. Flashback serves its best purpose when the reader is hungering, almost desperate, for a glimpse of the past, as in Charles D’Ambrosio’s story “The Point,” where a preternaturally poised adolescent boy walks his mother’s drunken friends home night after night, and only at the very end — where he can see, as it were, the whites of our eyes — does D’Ambrosio deliver to us the catastrophic scene from the past that explains everything about this boy and why he acts as he does.

Beginning writers use flashback because it’s safe, in terms of craft. What drama there is has already taken place. You don’t need to deal with the terrifying prospect of moving time forward, of enacting on paper the unpredictable combustion of cause, free will, and consequence. But that’s where the action is, where we step off the ledge of thinking and into the dangerous air of the dream.

You know something’s amiss when American social media wax gleeful over a North Korean dictator’s chosen insult for the American president. Last week, Kim Jong-un’s choice of the word dotard to describe Donald Trump prompted a moment of confusion followed by a rush to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s Twitter feed had a field day.

Before we get to etymology, it’s worth observing some cultural background. On the one hand, Korean culture puts great emphasis on respect for one’s elders, for whom one uses a different “level of language.” On the other hand, North Korean officials have been imaginative in their insults toward U.S. leaders for some time. They’ve called Barack Obama “a monkey in a tropical forest,” Nikki Haley “a political prostitute,” and Trump a “frightened dog,” “a gangster,” “that mad guy,” and “bereft of reason.” Apparently, an elderly person who indulges in schoolyard taunts himself (“Rocket Man,” “nutjob”) loses his claim to any elevated level of address.

English speakers have not generally shown such great respect to the elderly. As early as 1430, John Lydgate had one of his animal characters, in “Horse, Goose and Sheep,” say “I trowe he be falle in Dotage” — dotage being the state of being intellectually impaired, generally through old age. But the noun form, dotard, apparently peaked during Shakespeare’s time, and its continuing decline has tracked the decline of dotage generally. Perhaps we’ve grown more polite over time, or perhaps the term has grown increasingly pejorative.

But now that Kim Jong-un has reintroduced the term and applied it to an individual who seems to many of us to come from central casting’s call for an orange-haired dotard, it may regain some of the currency it had in, for instance, a 1726 translation of The Odyssey that noted, “The dotard’s mind/to ev’ry sense is lost, to reason blind.” Already, the media have exploded with the term; as Alex Clark pointed out in The Guardian, “It’s easy to find an insult clever when you agree with it.”

I’ve found myself wondering if some of the other terms by which we insult mentally and generationally challenged people could be related to dotage. Doddering, it turns out is not; it comes from the same roots as chatter, titter, and totter. Dotty does comes from dotage, as does dote. If Kim Jong-un decides to double down on his derision, he might deem Donald a doddering dotty dotard who dotes on Vladimir Putin, but he would be drawing on at least two different etymological strains.

Meanwhile, I for one am happy to have the word resurfacing. And perhaps the Donald considers himself to be in good company. After all, his hero Andrew Jackson was called “a credulous, blind, dotard old man” by William Seward. And perhaps the president can reach back to that same source to apply to Kim Jong-un the epithet Seward applied, in the same breath, to Jackson’s rival, Martin van Buren: “a crawling reptile.”

Remember jacks? It’s one of those rare games that lasted a couple of generations. My mother played jacks as a girl, and so did I. I still would, if I could find anyone to play with me. And I’d play it the way I always have: left-handed.

Left-handedness has a long history of being vilified, including its being sufficient evidence to condemn a person of witchery. Even today, 150 years after the first theories emerged on brain lateralization, we use left-handed to describe actions that are clumsy, awkward, or suspect in some way. Sinister literally means “left-handed.” Gauche, the French word for left-handed, has been adopted into English to imply awkward or impolite behavior, synonymous with maladroit, literally, “bad at right.” No one wants to have two left feet, or to receive a left-handed compliment, whereas if you’re one of the rare folk who can do things with both hands you’re called ambidextrous, or “right on both sides.” The snowboard stance that puts more weight on the left foot is called goofy. The use of right to denote entitlement isn’t accidental, but etymologically connected. If you’ve ever driven in France, you’ve surely noticed that the road sign Tout droit, or “all right,” means to go straight.

We’ve tried to redress these wrongs. Slowly, in the 20^th century, as research showed the potentially crippling effects of forcing left-handed children to work from the right, we eased up on those sometimes abusive methods. In my own case, just after I had learned to write, my parents became convinced that “switching” me could cause one of an array of problems, including dyslexia and stuttering. So they stopped … and left me in the middle. I write with my right hand, but when I broke that arm, it took little time to come up with a legible cursive from the left. I play sports right-handed, but jacks left-handed. Given directions to turn right or left, I often have no idea what to do. When I was taught the etiquette of fine dining, I had no truck with the apparent convention of holding the food down with the fork in the left hand, cutting it with the knife in the right hand, then switching the fork from left to right hand in order to eat. What a lot of extra movement! I just used my left hand to shove the food into my mouth.

Which brings us to the left-handed quote of the season, from The Economist, which wrote on August 24: “The difficulty of pleasing different factions within the party has in the past caused Labour to make cack-handed interventions on immigration that manage to annoy supporters and fail to win over voters.” Cack-handed? If you’re wondering whether that prefix originates where you fear it originates, you are correct. Lack of adequate sanitary facilities prompted the custom of eating with the right hand and performing functions like cleaning one’s nether regions with the left. A left-handed person was seen, quite literally, as a dirty person. The custom persists today in countries like Pakistan, where I spent some time a few years ago. In the homes where I ate, napkins were nonexistent, and much food was eaten with the right hand, or with utensils held in the right hand. Sanitary practices were meticulous, usually involving water, but those actions were all meant to be taken with the left hand. I frequently caught myself lifting a spoonful of rice to my mouth with my left hand, and as I hurriedly switched I saw my hosts averting their eyes.

But really, Economist writers. Calling clumsy interventions left-handed is already an insult to millions of people (10 percent of the population, according to most studies). Replacing left with a colloquialism for feces adds insult to injury. One of the few advantages of having been partially “switched” (another advantage being the privilege of blaming any personal failings on having been left floundering in the middle) is that the world is easier to navigate. My hand doesn’t smudge my writing as it moves from left to right. Almost all scissors and knives work for me. Student desks work. Computers trackpads work. And so on. But my younger son was born left-handed and never switched, so I’ve seen up close how biased the world is against southpaws. He works in sports, where his leftie forehand and leftie pitch have proved an advantage, but elsewhere he always had to fight the tide — remind the teacher that he needed a different desk or accept brutal criticism of his maladroit cursive and use of scissors. When he was just a year old, just starting to reach for things with his left hand, I was chagrined to read new research “proving” that left-handed people lived shorter lives.

I’m not one to claim that left-handed people are more brilliant, artistic, or creative. But we no longer believe that the Devil works from the left hand, and regardless of how you clean yourself up, Purell is available. We can’t change everything about language — gauche isn’t going anywhere — but vivid writing doesn’t require gratuitous putdowns. My thesaurus lists about 20 synonyms for clumsy. Let’s retire cack-handed for good.

Since reading the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent New York Times essay on historical markers of African-American women’s history in New England, I’ve been mulling over her use of enslaved. There’s been a debate about the language of slavery — or slaving, as some writers prefer to call the institution — for several years. The changes that many have proposed, and that Greenidge embraces in her essay, put the emphasis on the humanity of people who were brought to this continent against their will and forced to work in bondage for generations.

Thus, in her essay, Greenidge refers to enslaved people rather than slaves; to a woman the Royall family enslaved rather than a Royall family slave; to a previously enslaved man rather than a former slave. The difference such language choices make became starkly apparent to me the day after I read the essay. I’ve been doing research for a novel set at the turn of the 20^th century. In the biography of a Missouri governor, David Francis, I read that Francis’s father “sold the farm, the horses, the cows, three of the slaves, and both the gold watches. … His meager possessions included one slave, an 8-year-old mulatto boy. Five years later, [he] owned no one.” The point of this biography (published in 2001) is not the plight of those who were enslaved by the senior Francis, yet I’m struck by the objectifying language that allows the reader to feel only the plight of the fallen white family.

Are we ready to write and read biographies that might word this information as “sold the farm, the horses, the cows, three of the people he was enslaving, and both the gold watches. … His meager possessions included one enslaved, mixed-race 8-year-old boy. Five years later, [he] lacked the means to enslave anyone.” The debate continues. Nick Sacco, a park guide at the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Site, has written both about the question of replacing slavery with slaving and the logic of using enslaved person rather than slave. He writes:

I like the idea of bringing enslavement into the present and using active verbs and language to highlight the “historical process” of slavery [but] it seems like this “slavery vs. slaving” debate needs to be played out first at the academic level before public historians introduce a concept like “slaving” to their audiences. . . . While I think that “enslaved person” more precisely acknowledges the humanity of those forced into slavery’s chains, the term is unavoidably presentist. We today acknowledge the humanity of these people, but the institution of slavery was horrible precisely because it made humans into pieces of property.

Sacco’s solution, as a park guide, is to use terms interchangeably, though he notes that he has been using enslaved more and more. In fact, the academic discussion he invites has been taking place for several years, as this summary of a discussion thread on H-Net, the website of an organization of humanities and social-science scholars, points out. More recently, Thomas Pulido’s cover story in The Atlantic, “My Family’s Slave,” received a great deal of pushback from readers. The debate here hinges not just on language but on syntax. If a person is enslaved — e.g., “My Family’s Enslaved Woman” — someone is doing the enslaving (even though Pulido found no way to free Lola, the woman he writes about). And the most startling change in my recasting of those sentences from the Francis biography, for me, is “he lacked the means to enslave anyone.” Whatever we think of slaveholding families in the antebellum South, we tend not to consider them enslavers; we tend to see the enslavers as only those who ripped human beings from their homes, brought them across the water, and sold them as chattel. But the fact is that, even in Pulido’s case, the status of slave is one that is assigned, every day, by the person in power — and that assignment is, arguably, enslavement.

Sometimes the change seems more salient than others. Even a hardened reactionary would hardly go on about “the happy enslaved people down on the old plantation.” But I doubt the film title Twelve Years a Slave would be changed substantially had it been Twelve Years Enslaved.

While writing this post, I asked Kaitlyn Greenidge about her preference for the term in the New York Times piece. She pointed out, “Enslaved person is an accepted term in U.S. history. … I prefer it because I think the root of our current mess of a country is the valorization of those who committed genocide … It also reminds the reader that slavery didn’t just exist in a vacuum — it was enforced and upheld through the cooperation and indifference of the majority of white people in this country, only a few of whom were actual slaveholders.” Indeed, the writings of notable abolitionists of the early 19th century, like Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, brought the choice of words to bear on their argument: “We deny that an enslaved man is property by the constitution, and we might deny that any man can be enslaved under our constitution, and consequently, that he could be chattelized. . . . Things may be appropriated — persons may not. … [The Constitution] prohibits the slightest approaches to enslaving, or holding in slavery, which is continued enslaving.”

So perhaps the term is not “unavoidably presentist.” Perhaps it’s the language of abolition. And we are all abolitionists now. Aren’t we?

It’s been years, now, since I stood up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. Mine has not been a protest akin to the controversial kneeling that’s got right-wing pundits’ knickers in a twist. Colin Kaepernick and the hundreds who have followed his examples are using the occasion specifically to call attention to the ways in which police brutality against black men is evidence that our country is falling far short of its goals. Fair enough, in my view. My own actions have attracted a few glares from symphony-goers at the opening concert of the season, but no one’s ever put me in the media spotlight or asked my reason for not standing. Here it is.

I don’t like the words.

We’ll start with the third verse. In case you’ve fallen behind in the discussion, here are the lyrics:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As several writers have now observed, during the War of 1812, the British adopted the policy of offering freedom to enslaved men who escaped and fought on the British side as the Corps of Colonial Marines. They also used mercenaries. Two main lines have formed to defend lines five and six of this verse. The first claims that “slave” “is a direct reference to the British practice of impressment (kidnapping American seamen and forcing them into service on British man-of-war ships).”  This argument makes no sense. Impressed men were forced against their will to fight on the enemy side; surely Francis Scott Key is not lumping them in with mercenaries and condemning them to “the gloom of the grave.” The second line, propounded by Mark Clague of the Star-Spangled Music Foundation, argues that “for Key … the British mercenaries were scoundrels and the Colonial Marines were traitors who threatened to spark a national insurrection.” This makes more sense to me. At the same time, insofar as the Colonial Marines had attained their freedom in siding with the Brits, they were no longer slaves — except in the mind of the poet, to whom their free status was illegitimate and they were therefore still slaves who deserved the worst punishment for having bargained for freedom. (And that “insurrection” would sure be a slave insurrection.)

But the third verse is no longer commonly sung. Once we patched things up with Britain, we effectively expunged it. Do we condemn the rest of the song simply because its author also penned that verse? Well, to some degree, I do. But then I’ve always had trouble teaching D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, two of the greatest writers in the English language, because of the vileness of some things they wrote. I wouldn’t want them expunged from the curriculum, but I would not stand up for one of their poems, either.

Let’s move back to the verse we all know:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Apparently it was an enormous flag at Fort McHenry, one that remained standing, in the end, because the bodies of dead soldiers were holding it up. But the war in which they died was a problematic one, as most historians today acknowledge. The personification of the flag as “gallant” stirs the heart, but rather than being a noble war, the conflict’s lasting effect was the beginning of the modern American navy. Most people singing (or mouthing) the words today have no idea what battle is being fought in what war. What they do hear about is the rocket and the bombs — and while these were cannons and artillery in Key’s day, our associations now are much different and not ones I care to celebrate.

Finally, in the last verse — which is often sung — we have these lines:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto —”In God is our trust”

That motto, apparently coined by Key, found itself enshrined in 1865, when Congress allowed it to be inscribed on coinage. As a nonreligious person, I’m not fond of it. But more bothersome to me is the notion of “having” to conquer. To fight for a just cause is one thing. To conquer for a just cause seems a contradiction in terms. Many have argued that the War of 1812 itself was not so much about defending American freedoms as about conquering part of British North America (now known as Canada) to expand our territory.

I understand that I am reading these words and lines of Key’s famous poem anachronistically. He was a slaveholder and hardly alone in accepting that institution in America. He was writing in the midst of a great battle in a war that threatened his homeland. Conquering and imperialism itself were both politically and morally acceptable. Anyone who wants to stand for the song and even try to sing along with it is fine in my book. But I don’t care to, and if you think that’s un-American of me, then your concept of America stands on another shore from mine.

To many of us, it seemed John Kelly took a tangent in his recent speech defending the content of Donald Trump’s phone call to a Gold Star widow. After complaining about recent political debate, Kelly segued into nostalgia: “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred and looked upon with great honor.”

I’d like to take some space, here, to womansplain the shock waves these words sent through the feminist community. It’s not simply that Kelly works very closely with a man whom we have witnessed denigrating women again and again. It’s not simply that the initial protest against the content and tone of the president’s phone call was issued by both the widow herself and a black female congressional representative. It’s not just that the recent executive orders on health insurance and workplace protections will hit women harder than men. It’s the words themselves: sacred and honor.

As many who have responded to Kelly’s speech have pointed out, the childhood about which he’s reminiscing would have been in the 1950s and early 1960s, when, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observed in a blistering rant against Kelly,

You know what wasn’t sacred when he was a kid growing up where he was growing up? Black women or black people. And, oh by the way, women were not sacred either. They were not honored. In John Kelly’s neighborhood in the Catholic parish he grew up in, women were getting beaten by their husbands, their drunken husbands, as a normal weekly occurrence. And their parish priest would tell those women, you can’t get divorced or you’ll be ex-communicated. You are just going to have to bear it and bear it for the children. It’s nothing you can do about it.

You find discussions of sacred most often in conversations about religion. It’s distinguished, for instance, from the term holy in being used primarily for objects, places, or happenings: sacred space, sacred relics. Saints may be holy, but they are not sacred. Philosophers like Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade have discussed the notion of the sacred at length, opposing it to the idea of the profane, not as some good-versus-evil dichotomy, but as a way to understand the complementary nature of religious and mundane experiences. To be sacred, then, is not to participate fully in the human experience, to be a symbol or an object more than a person. To experience something (or, in this case, someone, since we are talking about women) as sacred is not to experience them as individual and quotidian.

I’m hard put to think of this status as being appealing to anyone. There are movements, led by women, that generously employ the term sacred, but for the most part their aim is to reduce violence in the lives of indigenous women. The term sacred in American Indian communities, according to the Lakota writer Vine Deloria Jr., “is a profoundly difficult concept for many people to understand, especially from an Indian perspective. … Sacredness, in its first and deepest encounter, requires that a boundary of respect be drawn around our experience and/or knowledge of this personal energetic presence.” It’s fair to say, I think, that Kelly’s use of sacred has little to do with an essentially political plea by writers like Deloria (and, by extension, the indigenous activists who claim the term for women) to forge respect for and within native communities.

The second part of Kelly’s statement on women is an agentless passive: “and were looked upon with great honor.” Presumably the agent here is men. But Kelly’s leaving that out, and his going on to talk about “the dignity of life” and “religion,” implies that we are the ones failing to look on women with honor — that women are not themselves part of this we, this body politic.

The word honor itself reinforces what many feminists would call this “othering” of women. Several years ago, doing research in Pakistan, I learned that according to traditional Pashtun tenets, honor was a quality reserved to men. Women carried with them the honor of the family, generally lodged in their namus or sexual chastity. But women could not themselves possess honor. Instead, what they possessed was shame. And their shame, presumably, would keep them from giving away the honor of their family, the honor that belonged to men.

We’re not quite so doctrinaire about the term in the west. Yet according to Google’s N gram viewer, even today, the term honorable man appears 15 times as much as the term honorable woman. There is nothing wrong with our all honoring each other — honoring our humanity, our decency, our efforts to do the right thing. But to be looked on with honor is to accord honor itself to the men who are doing the looking. I can’t say that’s an entirely comfortable feeling.

Finally, let’s not even talk about switching the genders to make the sentence “Men were sacred and looked upon with great honor.” No one says that. If anyone did, it would sound distinctly weird. Which is exactly how it sounded, to some of us, when General Kelly made his statement.

I can’t remember how, on a recent drive to New York, my husband and I got started on a discussion of the phrase strait and narrow. But I do know that, absent a dictionary to straighten things out for us (neither of us being fond of checking Google while roaming), we determined that both the traditional spelling and the more common contemporary phrase, straight and narrow, made no sense.

On the one hand, with strait meaning “narrow or cramped,” strait and narrow seems redundant. The phrase is most used for someone who has strayed from a conventional path and needs to use willpower to stick with the program. Certainly it makes sense to assume that, especially for someone used to a certain amount of lifestyle or moral latitude, such a path seems narrow. Why must it be strait also?

On the other hand, who decided that the correct path forward would be straight? Most often, it’s not. Metaphorically, it’s easy to picture someone stumbling straight on ahead, perhaps over a cliff, when they need to pay attention to this narrow path as it twists and turns.

When we got home, of course, I looked it up, and discovered that the origin is the Book of Matthew as translated in the King James Bible:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

There are two items here, a gate and a path, which our idiom collapses into one. Thus the apparent redundancy of strait and narrow. The more popular version today, having more than traded places with strait and narrow, as this Google Ngram shows, may have other roots. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of straight to denote bold or steady dates back to 1540; to mean frank or honest, to 1530; to mean well-conducted, to 1853. The meaning of straight as conventional or respectable (and, by extension, heterosexual) is more recent – since 1941, per the OED — but it fits the pattern. The image that always comes to my mind when I hear straight used in these ways is of an individual with exemplary posture, the straightness being more vertical, if you will, than horizontal. Still, I expect it is the accumulation of these meanings that makes straight and narrow sound logical even if it’s untrue to the original sense. Tellingly, checking the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I find no matching strings at all for strait and narrow, whereas there are 226 for straight and narrow.

Strait, then, would seem to be on the ropes. It still wins the day, according to both Google and COCA, with dire straits and geographical terms like Straits of Gibraltar — in other words, where it’s used as a noun, since straight’s use as a noun is relatively rare. Straitlaced, on the other hand, is gradually giving way to straightlaced. Here again, there’s a modicum of sense to be found in the idea of laces (presumably for a corset) being pulled so tight that they not only narrow the torso of the poor soul within, but also come closer to a straight line than to a zig-zag pattern. And Merriam-Webster gives us a good explanation of the evolution of straitjacket into straightjacket.

I can’t find any logic in another malapropism, straightened circumstances rather than straitened circumstances; I’d welcome any suggestions on that one. What I do note is that for all these substitutions of straight for strait, the source is not some self-published romance novel, but venues like NPR, Academic Questions, The New York Times, and Newsweek. My prediction is that we’re on our way to an additional meaning for straight, in which it is a synonym for narrow or constricted. And the only shame of it is the insertion of yet another unnecessary gh into an otherwise perfectly good word.

I like to think I’m not fussy about honorifics. I don’t tell my undergraduate students how to address me. The current convention seems to be Professor X, though friends who teach at research universities report that they are often addressed as Dr. X, and frequently undergraduates used to boarding schools will default to Ms. or Mr. X. One colleague, whose last name is difficult to pronounce, goes by Dr. Dan, which students seem to love. Once students have graduated, I usually encourage them to switch to a first-name basis. I am a little affronted, though, when an incoming first-year student (or her parent) presumes to start with Lucy.

Though I know others who have set “rules” as to how they are addressed, I suspect mine is a common approach.

Outside the academy, unless I’m told otherwise, I refer to my physicians as Dr. I kind of like it when they respond with an honorific — after all, I am not their student — but it doesn’t bother me if they don’t. I am placing myself in their care; even if they are younger than I, they are the experts in those situations and I am the neophyte. I don’t use an honorific with my auto mechanic, though he always uses one when addressing me. He’s my car’s physician, not mine. I’m on a first-name basis with the person who cleans my house, though; perhaps it’s a more personal relationship.

Finally, when I first entered the working world, the question of when to use and when to refrain from honorifics fascinated me. My summer job during college was at a pastry shop in France, where the head proprietor was Madame Pellisson, but her son, who really ran the place, went by Monsieur Pierre, essentially the equivalent of Dr. Dan. In full-time jobs that ensued, I was mostly pleased, and surprised, to find that my bosses expected me to address them by their first names. There was one exception, when I was employed as a report writer for a branch of the State Department. My boss was Mr. Little. All the project managers were men, for whom everyone there used the honorific. All their secretaries — and we two report writers, who worked for the organization as a whole — were women; and the men referred to all of us by our first names. The hierarchy was unmistakable.

Which brings me to the president. Even before he was inaugurated, I noticed the frequency with which he referred to those with whom he wished to assume a certain familiarity by their first names. This applied — and still applies — whether he bestows contempt or affection on them. Some of this may be a recent shift in custom. In the Obama-McCain debates of 2008, both candidates largely referred to each other as Senator; in the Obama-Romney debates, it was President Obama and Governor Romney. In the Clinton-Trump debates, which were far more acrimonious, both candidates made a point of referring to the other by first name — a sort of barbed familiarity.

Since President Trump was inaugurated, the trend has grown more noticeable. Past presidents, as far as I can tell, may be on a first-name basis with professionals in other branches of government. But in public, I always heard them refer to senators, congressional representatives, and judges as Senator X, Representative X, Justice X. A typical clip has President George W. Bush referring to Nancy Pelosi as Congresswoman. Even within the executive branch, past presidents have generally referred publicly to Cabinet appointees and other professionals with an honorific.

Not our current president. When he reports on a meeting with the minority leaders in the House and Senate, it’s not Representative Pelosi and Senator Schumer. It’s Nancy and Chuck. The majority leader of the Senate is Mitch. Yet as far as I’ve heard, no one in the administration or the legislative branch of government calls Trump anything other than President Trump or the president. This imbalance in honorific usage seems new to me. President Obama usually referred to McConnell either by his full name or as Leader McConnell or Senator McConnell. Ditto John Boehner or Speaker Boehner. The same has not yet held true for the president’s references to Supreme Court justices; even while disparaging John Roberts, Trump took care to refer to him as Justice Roberts.

Many in the media have noted that Trump acts as though legislators work for him, rather than belonging to a separate and equal branch of the government. Referring to legislators by their first names, as they continue to use the honorific with the chief executive, subtly reinforces this impression.

There’s some flexibility here, surely. Barack Obama and Joe Biden referred to each other interchangeably as Barack and Joe and as President Obama and Vice President Biden. But the reciprocity reinforced the impression that they worked together more or less as partners. For all the absence of daylight between Vice President Pence and President Trump, the president repeatedly refers to his veep as Mike, but I cannot find a single instance where Mike returns the favor and calls the president Donald. Or is it Don? Interesting. No one knows. Because no one seems to call him by his first name. Mrs. Trump? Help us out here.

The Académie Française

When I spent a year as the George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1979-80, my title was the subject of innumerable ribald comments. Was I the fellowess or the fellowette? I suspect that this year’s GB Fellow no longer contends with these unfunny jokes. Our usage has shifted, over almost 40 years, such that fellow, in the sense I’m using it here, can apply equally to men or women. Ditto actor and shepherd; with other professional names, we’ve changed the appellation itself, hence server rather than waiter or waitress; mail carrier rather than postman. This is all old news. But now the French are onto it, and there lies a kerfuffle indeed.

Like dozens of other languages, French accords gender to all nouns; adjectives agree with the gender of the nouns they modify, as do pronouns with their antecedents. Thus it happened that an exchange student in my creative-writing class was enlightened to discover that her narrator was not identifiably male or female for the first two pages of her story. In French, her descriptions would have indicated the sex, e.g., I was a serious student would have read J’étais un étudiant sérieux or J’étais une étudiante sérieuse. At the same time, as the language advocates at the “agency of influential communication” Mots-Clés make clear, the push for “inclusive writing” in France is wrestling with inequality in a language where change faces a great deal of resistance.

No, they are not trying to rid French of gender markers, despite the Académie Française’s cry of alarm that with such proposed changes, “the French language will henceforth find itself in mortal peril.” Rather, they are trying to elevate (or, when necessary, invent) the feminine forms of all references to persons. To safeguard against the feminine form’s being seen as somehow accessory to the default masculine form, they propose listing references like elle and il in alphabetical order, but for the most part, the alternative endings (signaled by a “mi-point,” or dot between endings) tend to place the masculine first. Thus, for the sentence “The actors are beautiful, but those who sing look silly,” you would have:

Les acteur•rice•s sont beaux•elles, mais ceux•elles qui chantent semblent idiot•e•s.

Proponents of inclusive writing put forward other changes. The capitalized Homme, traditionally used to refer to humankind, should be replaced with la personne humaine. For professions, like writer (écrivain) or plumber (plombier) currently lacking a feminine form, one can be invented, (écrivaine, plombière). But I suspect it is the orthographical proposal that has most incensed the Académie. “The multiplicity of orthographic and syntactic marks that it induces,” write the defenders of French, “leads to a disunited language, disparate in its expression, creating confusion that borders on illegibility.”

Proponents have a response to this objection at the ready: “Many months of such usage,” they point out, “have shown us that the eye adjusts very quickly and that some of these automatic gestures were easily written.” We’ve seen this in English with the slash, which is spoken as well as written, e.g. “Dear Sir/Madam.” So, although the mi-pointed sentence above looks awfully clumsy to me, I suppose the language would adjust. The subject gets knottier, though, when it comes to keeping or designating feminine versions of nouns, especially job titles. We’ve been there, in English, and the French is markedly similar in that most female versions include a longer ending that can easily be seen as diminutive. The obsolete term comedienne, for instance, is literally the French female version of comedian, and I know no funny females who would opt for it. My caution comes with no other solution, because the convention that modifiers and pronouns accord with the subject’s gender more or less demands a subject that is either masculine or feminine. The neutrality available in English is simply unavailable where gender is knit into the very structure of the language.

I will note an irony that I suspect was intentional on the part of the autocratic Académie. In their adamant refusal even to consider inclusive writing, they refer to their own body, in all its power, as elle, since Académie is a feminine noun. Likewise, they make a point of using the terms langue, générations, and promesses, all of which are likewise feminine, as antecedents for feminine appositives and pronouns. “There, you see?” they might as well be saying. “The female has plenty of power in language already.”

That doesn’t solve the problem, of course. Aux barricades!

A couple of times a month, it seems, a new blog post or article comes out with advice on grammar for people entering the business or professional world. Since that group includes most of the seniors who will be graduating from my institution this coming spring, I occasionally check in on what advice is being proffered. The latest list, from the advice website Work + Money, comprises “ways of saying certain words and phrases” that will help readers “strive for impeccable speech.”

To spare you the “slide show,” I list here the alternatives this site chooses, in the order in which the original compiler lists them. Color coding explained below.

“for all intensive purposes” vs. “for all intents and purposes”

“I could care less” vs. “I couldn’t care less”

“One in the same” vs. “one and the same”

“on accident” vs. “by accident”

“fall by the waste side” vs. “fall by the wayside”

“self-depreciating” vs. “self-deprecating”

“irregardless” vs. “regardless”

“jive with” vs. “jibe with”

“tongue and cheek” vs. “tongue in cheek”

“make do” vs. “make due”*

“nip it in the butt” vs. “nip it in the bud”

“shoe-in” vs. “shoo in”

“piece of mind” vs. “peace of mind”

“peek interest” vs. “peak interest” vs. “pique interest”

“do good” vs. “do well”

“mute point” vs. “moot point”

“nerve wrecking” vs. “nerve wracking”

“buy in large” vs. “by and large”

“proceed” vs. “precede”

“shade light on” vs. “shed light on”

“down the pipe” vs. “down the pike”

“doggie dog” vs. “dog eat dog”

“flush it out” vs. “flesh it out”

“physical year” vs. “fiscal year”

“deep-seeded” vs. “deep-seated”

“sneak peak” vs. “sneak peek”

“bemused” vs. “amused”

“anyways” vs. “anyway”

“escape goat” vs. “scapegoat”

“without further adieu” vs. “without further ado”

“step foot” vs. “set foot”

“should of” vs. “should have”

“try and” vs. “try to”

“beckon call” vs. “beck and call”

“hone in” vs. “home in”

“case and point” vs. “case in point”

I have color-coded this list according to the way I explain these so-called mistakes, understanding that some examples could be coded at least two ways and that others might sort the list differently.

Blue phrases entail an original expression that is, as one commenter remarked the other week of strait and narrow, a legal doublet — that is, the two words linked by and mean essentially the same thing, so one can understand why a young speaker might think the expression should be something else. Green phrases suggest a trending change; my son began saying on accident to match the phrase on purpose at an early age, and since then I’ve heard it among many young people — and why not? Red phrases suggest to me a prejudice — perhaps class-based, perhaps prescriptivism-based — against certain locutions, some of which actually involve mistaken ideas about the meaning of a word (proceed/precede) and others of which suggest regional or class-based idiom. In phrases coded purple, though the distinction may be significant and the “wrong” phrase even nonsensical, I find no audible difference — and the list begins with the goal of “impeccable speech.” (Granted, the author also mentions the importance of using “the right spelling and phrasing” in emails, but when she writes, “Keep in mind, too, that some of these common phrases you’ll won’t be able to hear the difference,” I tend to remember that old adage about glass houses.) Brown phrases are those wherein it seemed to me that the original expression uses a word so fallen into disuse among young adults that it makes sense for them to start reshaping the phrase — even if the result falls wide of the logical mark. Finally, orange phrases are those I think the author invented. I mean, seriously? Has anyone else heard nip it in the butt or escape goat from a business newbie or an intern? And isn’t piece of mind a spell-checker typo? (And yes, they should proofread. That’s a different subject.)

My point is not that enforcing the “right” use of phrases in the professional world continues a sorry tradition of setting idiom in stone. It may do that, but the business world is also a conservative and unforgiving place, perhaps not the best context in which to be playing with language. My point, rather, is that by creating a grab bag of so-called errors — which, as far as I can tell, is what all these lists do — the author gives her willing listeners 36 tricky items to memorize, probably a useless task. We’d do better to understand what constitutes an expression and why it changes — over time, in certain contexts, by region or class, through repeated verbal use (a norange, anyone?). Armed with that understanding, the professional novice can find her way, even if, on accident, she sometimes gets it “wrong.”

*The author here lists the “correct” phrase first and the “wrong” one second, which suggests how difficult it is, sometimes, to tell them apart.

I’ve just learned a new bit of shorthand for internet communication: /s. As a fiction writer and nosy person generally, I like to read the comments that follow particularly controversial articles and opinion pieces in the news. When I started noticing the “/s” following a number of these comments, I looked it up. Apparently “/s,” or the sarcasm switch, began with the XML closing tag </sarcasm>, always used after the statement so as to trick the reader before admitting the “joke.”  Other terms and marks have prevailed, both recently and in earlier eras —

the percontation point or reversed question mark
<< (sarcasm, look left)
(!)
:/ (crooked smile)
LOLZ (laugh out loud with sarcasm)
SNH (sarcasm noted here)
˜
;/
Fe (the symbol for iron, denoting irony)
#sarcasm

But “/s” is the one that caught my eye and got me thinking, both about sarcasm and about our need to signal it.

While I haven’t found hard evidence that people are using more sarcasm these days, my lived experience is echoed by experts like the neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin, who told Smithsonian magazine that “our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm.” When it comes to personal relationships, studies show that sarcasm is largely a “male thing,” which may be why I’ve never been fond of it, much as I think I appreciate, say, dramatic or situational irony. Sarcasm is associated with aggression, but it seems to me also (perhaps not coincidentally) that it is associated with feeling disempowered. That is, when neither a logical argument nor a truly witty remark seems available to a speaker, they will fall back on sarcasm, on puncturing whatever their interlocutor is saying rather than engaging with or refuting it. (One study, interestingly, revealed women as self-consciously using sarcasm to vent frustration, whereas men using it for “humorous aggression.”) And if there’s one thing a lot of people on both the left and the right are feeling these days, it’s denigration.

When it comes to internet discourse, the issues with which sarcasm tangles interpersonally may recede in favor of the self-protective or aggressive tactics of group allegiance. One researcher found that sarcasm use soars when people are communicating in an anonymous computer chat room as opposed to face to face. And of course, that’s where we mostly find ourselves in comment threads, Twitter threads, and sites like Reddit, which comprises nothing but posts and comments. Reddit, in fact, is the source for the recently compiled “Large Self-Annotated Corpus for Sarcasm,” because users of the site so often employ “/s” at the end of their comments. That study, whose theoretical constructs are way above my pay grade, weighted “positive” and “negative” n-grams according to the strength of their indication that the comment is sarcastic, since without context and an understanding of sarcasm generally, comments lacking the “/s” indicator could be misread, particularly by a nonhuman “reader.” Terms weighted most heavily toward sarcasm included obviously, clearly, so fun, and totally; terms weighted most toward nonsarcasm included :), lmao, and :( . (Positive n-grams, the authors note, “are more important for linear classification of sarcasm.”) In other words, you can hardly use a word like obviously in an internet comment and be perceived as sincere.

And yet. That we are using an indicator like “/s” to denote sarcasm suggests that to human as well as machine readers, sarcasm is no longer obvious on its face. I first noticed the term in a long thread wherein a dozen or more respondents vilified the original commenter before someone weighed in with “Didn’t you guys see the ‘/s’ at the end of OP’s comment?” If sarcasm has become ubiquitous and yet we’re still unable to recognize it, I suspect it’s because statements made sarcastically by someone at one end of the political spectrum could easily be read as sincere by someone at the other end. To wit:

Roy Moore loves children because he is a man of God.

That Al Franken is such a funny clown.

Vladimir Putin would never lower his honor by interfering in another country’s election.

But Democrats never play dirty politics.

Since sarcasm, like irony, is meant to point out absurdity, it’s a little frightening to think that one group’s absurdity is another group’s plain truth. Just a couple of days ago, I ran across a thread in The Washington Post that read, in part:

Now, the fourth commenter, “the-b-side,” is incorrect in calling the original post satire. Although, like sarcasm, satire can sting, satire is a genre, not a tone or type of statement. But his “hope” that the post was meant sarcastically points up the difference between the first and second response to “davken.” The first, lol, seems to accept that davken is being sarcastic; the second seems to criticize davken for opining nonsense. The “satire” that the-b-side offers feels like sarcasm for the first three sentences, which mock the position of someone who would support a child predator over a Democrat; but the next two sentences seem sincerely to lash out at hypocritical “Nazis.” Neither of these responses makes sense if the-b-side thinks he is addressing a sarcastic liberal commenter; rather, they serve as mockery and criticism of people who have sincerely expressed views not far removed from davken’s post.

Reading through threads like this one, I begin to see the usefulness of what the sarcasm-corpus aggregators call sarcasm detection systems. If, in this era of manufactured “news” and ferocious tribal allegiances, sarcasm is on the rise, I’d like to know it when I see it. Until such time as those systems are developed, though, I’m grateful for the /s. I still don’t like sarcasm — call me Ms. Sincerity — but I can’t steer clear of it if I can’t even be sure it’s there.

I love it when the comments to these blog posts prompt another discussion. That’s the case this week, when I’ve been thinking about one commenter’s response to the list I compiled from Work + Money’s “impeccable speech” recommendations. The original list included advice to say nerve-wracking and not nerve-wrecking. I classified the distinction as one wherein the original word (in this case, wracking) has so fallen into disuse that one can’t blame language innovators of any age for replacing it with a more familiar term (wrecking).

As one commenter observed, “If we’re being strict … it should be nerve-racking.”

Good point! Percy Bysshe Shelley coined the phrase in an 1812 letter to a friend saying he is glad to be away from “the nerve-racking and spirit-quelling metropolis.” The image, of course, is of one’s nerves being stretched upon a rack, that medieval instrument of torture. It’s an image echoed by a similar complaint, that one’s nerves might be stretched thin as wire.

Metaphorical racking isn’t confined to the nerves. One’s wit or brains have been racked since 1583, when William Byrd advised, “Racke not thy wit to winne by wicked waies.” Joints are racked, as are souls and nations; they are racked, moreover, by God’s judgment, fever, jealousy, the length of hours, and various other metaphorical torture devices.

But here’s the thing. They are also wracked. The Oxford English Dictionary defines wrack variously as “punishment, vengeance, damage, disaster, ruin,” etc. As a verb, it’s seen as an alternative spelling of wreak, with examples like “the utter wracking … of the holy lambes of Christ,” from 1642. But couldn’t that just as easily be “the utter racking” of those lambs?  (Rack of lamb, anyone?) In the OED’s various definitions of rack, we also find references to injuring, damaging, and punishing. And even racking examples, like Robert Burns’s “Let … crabbed names an’ stories wrack us,” are actually spelled with that initial w.

Add to this confusion the area of meaning jointly occupied by wrack and wreck, and you have a brain-racking wreck of spelling and definition that wreaks disaster on anyone who tries to draw completely clear distinctions. When Shakespeare’s Mortimer says, in Henry VI,

Euen like a man new haled from the Wrack,
So fare my Limbes with long Imprisonment,

it’s hard to say if he means a man relieved from being stretched on a torture device, a man saved from a drowned ship, or a man saved from vengeance represented by the dungeon.

All of which makes me wonder: What are we doing with those w’s in the first place? Yes, there is some difference between wrack and rack, but nothing that context wouldn’t supply. (Ditto other wr homophones, like wrap and rap, write and rite, wring and ring.) Unlike the potential to aspirate the “silent” h in where or rhubarb, the w in these words is entirely silent. As Anatoly Lieberman of Oxford University Press has observed, trying to sort out the origin of some wr words (his example is wrap) is devilish business. But where we have some evidence, it seems that, like the g in gnaw and the k in knee, the w in wrack was once pronounced — and still is, according to some, in Scots Doric dialect. German cognates either pronounce the w, as in the German noun Wrack (“wreck” or “wreckage”) or drop it, as in reissen, the etymological source of write. But we have left these w’s “fossilized” and available for any persnickety gradgrind to use as a club with which to beat those ignorant business interns over the head.

It racks wrecks messes with my soul.

P.S. To follow up on my post last week about “/s,” the symbol for sarcasm, I can’t help noting the consequences just in for MSNBC commentator Sam Seder, whose sarcastic tweet apparently provided such fodder for those taking it at face value that he has now lost his job.

In three weeks, I am heading off to France, where I will be teaching for the spring semester. So I’m getting ready to say “Bonjour” to just about everyone I meet. I speak French fluently, but to brush up, I’ve been listening to Madame Bovary and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on audiobook. (A recommendation: They are both much funnier and sadder in the original language.) All this anticipation made me sensitive to a headline that popped into view a few days ago — not from France, but from the Canadian province of Quebec, which is possibly even more language-obsessed than its mother country across the pond.

I’m not sure when bonjour-hi began as a greeting in Quebec. A 2012 study of almost 400 businesses in downtown Montreal, though, disclosed that the greeting was being used in 13 percent of businesses, as opposed to only 1 percent in 2010, so the popularity of the greeting was on a rapid rise. (They also found 13 percent greeting customers in English only.) Already, then, the Office Québécois de la langue française saw the greeting as a potential “irritant.”

And now? Two weeks ago, the National Assembly of Quebec voted unanimously to ask merchants to greet their customers with bonjour only. In other words, not only Francophones but also Anglophone members of that governing body voted to purify the ways shops say “hello.” It was seen as a victory for the more accommodating Premier Philippe Couillard that the word irritant was removed from the language of the motion — but despite spinning it as “inviting people to say bonjour,” the legislators are apparently feeling the heat.

All this comes out of a trend that should be no surprise, given the predominance of English not only in North America but around the globe. Recent census data show that bilingualism is increasingly common in Quebec, especially in Montreal. This isn’t all bad news for French purists; apparently Anglophones are increasing their use of French just as Francophones are increasing their use of English, at least in the workplace. But it does suggest that bonjour-hi isn’t so much a gimmick as a natural outgrowth of a society where the languages increasingly mix and mingle.

On the eve of my residence in a Francophone country, I find myself reflecting not just on this political squabble, but on my own reaction to a greeting like bonjour-hi. First, its being a political football at all stems from the fact that retail establishments in Quebec, as in France, greet their customers and anticipate a greeting in return. Years ago, I taught a summer writing seminar in a small “book village” in the south of France, a place I recommended to several other writers’ groups. One year, I was back in the village and chatting with the proprietor of the local épicerie. “Those people you sent here,” she told me, “were so rude. We would say ‘bonjour’ to them, and they wouldn’t even answer!” I explained to her that the custom in America was to enter shops silently in order to browse undisturbed, and to speak to shop clerks only when you wanted to buy something. This mollified her not at all, but the exchange prompted me thereafter to encourage any neophyte travelers with me to be sure to return the bonjour, without fear that they will be hounded to purchase. It’s a tiny bit of diplomacy we can all practice.

Second, I notice that bonjour-hi, beside putting the French first (which, in Quebec, should be no surprise), matches a standard French greeting with a casual English one. When retailers do greet us, in English, it’s usually with “Good morning,” “How are you?” or “Hello.” Hi works as a response; it might also be the greeting if you already know the shopkeeper well. But not only would those standard greetings make a bilingual version impossibly clumsy; they also seem more, well, bilingual. Bonjour-hi feels like French with an English nod, as it were.

Finally, thinking of the customer’s experience (for which I don’t find a study on this point), I suspect bonjour-hi accomplishes its purpose. Yes, I have heard Americans, greeted with bonjour in a Francophone country, respond, “Hello.” I think it’s weird. Bonjour is not that hard to say, and it’s easy enough to follow with a request for English if you actually intend to continue the conversation. But for the most part, bonjour invites a French response, and hi an English one. Bonjour-hi allows the respondent to answer in either language. Perhaps that’s exactly what the language gatekeepers in Quebec are afraid of. After all, they have already lost the battle on grilled cheese, cocktail, drag queen, and pasta. On hi, they want — and will probably fail — to hold the line.