I may have wasted a perfectly good hour engaging with an interactive study that, by its author’s own admission, has no place on his CV. And perhaps my cynical enjoyment of the results I produced has to do with confirmation bias; for all I know the basic design of the study was similarly affected. Still, sometimes it’s fun to play around with statistical results, and who knows? What you discover may have some validity.

I’m referring to Ben Schmidt’s interactive study of gender markers in reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, that notorious site for disgruntled and (very occasionally) rhapsodic students who take the trouble to do more than fill out their class evaluations at the end of the term. Schmidt’s website allows you to type in a word or expression and learn whether it applies more to male or female teachers, including whether the usage is positive or negative. The assistant professor of history at Northeastern created the interactive a few years ago, and he points out that a crucial element in a study like this is surely the gender of the reviewer, which is missing. I also don’t know whether the site itself is frequented more by male or female students. Various other caveats apply, like Rate My Professors’ censorship of words like sexist.

But a study’s having limited value doesn’t make it uninteresting. Thinking of the words I’ve heard students use, I typed in hot; mean; tough; strict; easy; fair; unfair; funny; smart; stupid; ugly; old; exciting; interesting; boring; best; worst; sweet; sarcastic; great; terrible; idiot; and genius. I paid some attention to field of study; as Schmidt observes, the largest percentage of reviews go to female English and male math professors, and certain classes (gender studies; military history) tend to fill largely with students of one gender or the other. But mostly, I looked for trends.

If I came from another planet and had only this study and its attendant raw data to depend on, I would conclude that female professors are hotter, meaner, tougher, stricter, sweeter, less fair, less funny, stupider, uglier, and more idiotic than their male counterparts. Male professors, I would figure, are more likely to be exciting, sarcastic geniuses who teach great classes and give easy grades.

More interesting are the negative and positive connotations of words like tough, strict, or funny. Male professors are supposedly funnier than female ones, but when funniness is a downer, more female professors fit the bill than otherwise. Toughness seems to be a trait fairly equally shared among members, unlike strictness, which is largely female. But toughness is a good thing for a male teacher to possess, whereas for a female teacher it can often be a negative.

The good news is that men and women are neck and neck in the runnings for best teacher. Change that to best professor, though, and the men pull ahead. Worst teacher and worst professor tend to align with female professors. (One really wants, at this point, to know the gender of the reviewers.)

All of these conclusions confirm, sadly, my own expectations. They do not match my own experience in the classroom or on student evaluations. In more than 30 years of teaching, I’ve seen genuine shifts in attitudes toward female professors. The gender balance of the cadre of students who have requested me as an adviser has shifted from largely female to almost 50/50. There are, of course, proportionally fewer male professors for male students to choose, particularly in my field; from 1988 to 2004, the percentage of male professors in the humanities fell from 63 percent to just over 50 percent, and has surely continued to fall. Still, my sense is that the young men I teach and advise not only have an expectation of studying with female professors but also have parents who studied with both male and female professors back in, say, the 1980s, when I entered the profession.

The gender-cliché labels that attach to descriptions in Rate My Professors probably don’t align with widespread student experience of and response to the gender of their college instructors. Rather, they may reflect the extreme interest that the site manifests on the part of a relatively small subset of students. What marks a professor to such an extent that someone finds it worth going online to announce his or her opinion to the world, as if the semester-long course had been an evening in a special restaurant or a nightmare Caribbean cruise? For male professors, that stand-out attribute seems to be genius; for women, it seems to be hotness.

No honest accounting of a teacher’s gifts and shortcomings is to be found on a site like RateMyProfessors.com. And no reliable, peer-reviewed statistical analysis is to be found in Schmidt’s interactive study. But one of these admits its shortcomings. The other suggests that easy grading may be a sign of (male) genius, whereas a female professor’s strict grading policy proves her idiocy. That most of us experience our students’ responses quite differently is a positive sign of the times. That certain students go out of their way to provide fodder for the conclusions I reached after my hour with Schmidt’s study means stereotyping persists.

To my own delight, my name seems to have disappeared from the ratings website. I’ll have to make do with my favorite student evaluation, turned in on a handwritten form when there remained space for such comments:

Hip hip hooray!
Hoist the petard (whatever that means)!

Petard doesn’t turn up in Schmidt’s study. I suspect it would prove a gender-neutral term.

When you slip inside the skin of a language, you absorb not just its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but also its particular tics and pauses, its discourse markers. In English these are the filler words that many older people decry in younger people’s speech — sounds like umm and uh, and words like so, like, and you know.

We all employ these markers, of course. I’ve argued in my creative-writing classes that the word yes in Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy is her particular discourse marker, a word Joyce inserted whenever he was tempted to interrupt stream of consciousness with punctuation.

Living in France these past several months, with sojourns to other countries in Europe, I’ve grown aware of the discourse markers that set these languages apart. To begin with, there is the vowel sound peculiar to French, as uh is perhaps peculiar to English — a sound I try to reproduce in writing as euh, a sound made — usually after a word like mais (“but”) or alors (“then”), both discourse markers themselves — by thrusting forward the lower jaw and tongue and trying to say uh.

To finish off my semester, I took a brief trip with my family to Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic, and I heard euh in none of these other countries. If I were to hear it in English, I would immediately suspect a French person was speaking. Euh, in other words, is just about the most French sound I know, even more than the back-of-the-mouth r or that hard-to-squeeze-out French u.

In addition to euh, mais, and alors, my favorite French filler is Voilà. Literally, it means “There it is,” but I hear it used (and have started to use it) as a way of completing a thought when there ought to be a more elegant completion but you don’t have it in hand. You might say, for instance, in French, “So Macron is going to Washington, euh, voilà“ — and presumably the person you were speaking to would understand your general disgust with international politics. If you were to add more emphasis, you might replace voilà  with alors là, which turns “there it is” into “then that,” with implications that your interlocutor should presumably pick up on.

Not infrequently, what sounds like a whole sentence can be created purely out of discourse markers, e.g.:

Mais écoute enfin, effectivement, alors, voilà. (But listen already, really, then, so there you go.)
Si non, euh, dis donc, bref, c’est ça, hein? (Otherwise, uh, you know, in a nutshell, that’s the thing, right?)

Discourse markers evolve, of course. Ten years ago, when I was here, I heard comment quite a bit and was interested in this French version of the discourse marker that pains many American professors, like. My young friends in France would achieve sentences like this one:

Je veux dire que, comment, il est beau, comment, mais il n’a rien, comment je veux dire, tu sais comment, il n’a rien à offrir …

which translates as “I want to say that, like, he’s like handsome, but he has nothing, how do I want to say, you know, like he has nothing to offer.”

I hear comment much less now. I don’t know if the use of like has similarly receded among Americans. I hear bien, or to be more precise, b’en, as in eh b’en, which translates into the English discourse marker “well,” as in the filler sentence, B’en, je ne sais pas, écoute.

Though we tend to think of liberal use of discourse markers in our own language as indicating lazy speech patterns or poorly formed thoughts, they’re among the hardest factors of informal speech to master in a second language. I’ve found them slipping into my conversational French only in the past month or so, and I’m relieved not to be hearing sniggers.

Finally, I noticed while traveling that I tend to mentally erase discourse markers in languages where I’m struggling. My Italian is rudimentary and my German rusty as an old bicycle wheel. So while I know that Italians use words and sounds like eh, ma, senta, and so on, I let them drop away so that I can get to the bones of the sentence I’m listening to. Ditto in German with ach, so, eigentlich, and the like. I certainly don’t try to allow such filler words into my own discourse, as I completely lack the required finesse. And I know I’m missing, not just something about the personality of the speaker, but something about the way those languages dance.

As to Czech, which of course I heard plentifully in Prague . . . well, I know there are filler words. They exist in every language. To other Czech speakers, they probably convey various nuances, hesitations, judgments. To me they sound the way French discourse markers sound to non-French speakers: like more words that aren’t mine, a code I will never break.

I said that I was almost done with French language posts, but I cannot leave this country without writing about flourishes. For a variety of reasons, I have been party to a number of email exchanges in French these past few months. We who think about such things in America have wondered about the punctuation in email greetings (or about the need for a greeting at all), as well as the style of the send-off. Now it occurs to me, as I receive and send emails in French, that our letter-writing rhetoric in English had already slipped quite a ways from its heights before email took over.

Take, for instance, a typical bit of correspondence from the 19th century. It might begin (after Dear X) with “It gives me pleasure to inform you” or “I take up my pen to write.” It would most likely end with “Yours faithfully,” or “Awaiting your reply,/I am/Yours respectfully.” By the time I was sending my weekly letters home from college, such salutations and sign-offs had gone the way of the quill pen. Informal letters might begin with “Busy day here” and end with “XOXO.” Business letters would launch right into the subject, e.g. “Dear X,/The arrangements you propose look fine to me.” They would end with “Cordially,” or “Yours truly.”

I don’t know about French letters from the 19th century, but I can attest to at least some French emails of the 21st century. They begin with Bonjour, which is much like the English Hi but without the uncomfortable question as to whether Hi is too informal and should therefore be Hello or Good morning – or what the heck, let’s just go back to Dear. They proceed with a certain flourish of politesse, e.g.

• Nous vous remercions pour votre intérêt. …  Je serais ravie de vous rencontrer.
  (We thank you for your interest. … I would be delighted to meet you.)
• Merci beaucoup pour votre email, je vous confirme avec plaisir notre rendez-vous.
  (Thank you so much for your email, I confirm with pleasure our meeting.)
• C’était un grand plaisir de vous rencontrer.
  (It was a great pleasure to meet you.)
• Le plaisir était partagé.
  (The pleasure was mutual.)
• J’ai l’honneur de vous présenter Mme Lucy Ferriss.
  (I have the honor of presenting Mme Lucy Ferriss to you.)

They tend to end with Bien cordialement (Very cordially), En vous remerciant,/Bien amicalement (With thanks to you,/Very amicably), or Bien à vous (Best to you).

These are not grand flourishes. In many cases, punctuation has been dispensed with, as it often is in our emails and texts. Sometimes, when my French correspondents write in English, the politeness translates to Thanks a lot for your email and Best regards. Other times, what I think of as the opening and closing curtsies are left off, as if the writer has switched codes as well as languages.

I must say, I rather like the relatively simple verbal bouquets that adorn French emails. I know that a word like ravie, which comes from the same root as ravishing and connotes a deep thrill, probably doesn’t apply to arrangements for an introductory meeting with a fellow professor. There’s an abundance of pleasure and honor that’s probably more than these occasions actually warrant. But at little trouble to the writer, the recipient of such emails feels invited into the conversation. She feels she is not necessarily a bother, but perhaps a welcome correspondent. My American emails aren’t harsh or impolite; they’re simply more direct, e.g. “Thanks for this” or “That’s good to know” followed by “Best” or perhaps only the sender’s name. Frenchifying our emails won’t quite do; even considering using some of the phrases I’ve translated above, I feel silly. Still, after some months of experiencing both versions, I think we could do with a dollop of  finesse.

In a few days, I will be leaving France for Airportland, whose delights I will savor for about 11 hours before I find myself once again in the United States.

Most readers have spent time in Airportland. We know its particular wan light; the general flatness that makes the incline of jetways such a shock; its salty, sugary, and alcohol-infused cuisine; its detached social ambiance; its modes of travel (the long slog down the moving walkway, the hum of the people-moving carts, the standing-room-only shuttles, the escalators, the diddly-dup diddly-dup of roller bags, and — oh, yes — the airplanes); its fauna (emotional-support animals) and flora (plastic ficus); its mysterious system of governance; its language. Now and then, in Airportland, you spot a first-time visitor — confused by TSA rules, late for her flight, burdened by too many carry-ons. If you think the French are rude to those who don’t speak their language, you haven’t been paying attention in Airportland. We Airportlanders give these newbies no quarter. We sigh in exasperation as they’re sent back through security check for all the things they neglected to remove from their person. When they’re wandering Concourse E looking for their plane, because they thought they were in seat E68 (you know, like in a theater), when actually their flight leaves from B12 and their ticket class is E, we may take pity. But we hardly remember being that person, because once you’ve inhabited Airportland a handful of times, you’re a native.

Airport gate, 1950s

And like native speakers, we don’t think much about the strange lingo we speak in Airportland. Take Gate. Some years ago, flying out of Peshawar, Pakistan, I passed through a dark set of catacombs inhabited by ruthless security guards and intelligence personnel with perhaps five checkpoints all lit by flickering overhead bulbs. Finally, like C.S. Lewis’s Lucy passing through the wardrobe into Narnia, I emerged into what I thought at first was a harshly lit bus station. It had the requisite faded plastic chairs and desultory counter offering stale packaged snacks and room-temperature soft drinks. Then I saw the sign over the doorway leading outside: GATE. I breathed a sigh of relief. Unlikely as it seemed, I had found my way to Airportland. But why Gate? Well, apparently there once was an actual gate, which stayed closed until the propellers of the plane were safely tied down and the passengers were free to pass through and board from the tarmac. (There were, of course, no “Jetways” — once a trademark, now generic — back in the day.)

Other terms of art abound in Airportland. Take concourse. It’s from the Latin, meaning “flowing together,” and outside Airportland it generally refers to an open area where passageways meet and people gather. In French, concours means “contest.” At the airport, the concourses are simply wide corridors, usually designated by letter, but if you like you can think of them as flowing, since they’re usually filled with a stream of humanity, and it often feels like a contest simply to reach the gate without incident.

Then there’s the baggage carousel. I recall an episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper comes up with the term carousel to refer to Kodak’s new slideshow device. It’s a huge hit, because of course everyone thinks nostalgically of carousels, merry-go-rounds, the innocence of childhood. Perhaps something of the same thinking applied in the 1950s when a company named Teleflex came up with the first rotating baggage delivery system for the Aéroport de Paris. Watching that same set of golf clubs swing by while you wait for your suitcase can make you hate carousels, but those who remember baggage-delivery systems that consisted of haphazard lines of luggage spread across the airport floor remain grateful. And if you want to join the cheaters — er, Airportland natives — you can label your luggage “fragile” to ensure that it’s placed on top of other bags in the airplane hold, taken off first, and probably loaded first onto the carousel.

Finally, on board, you hear the truly arcane lexicon of Airportland. There’s the flight deck, which is of course not a deck at all (that would be on a ship), but the cockpit. Figure for yourself why they don’t like to say cockpit. There’s the holding pattern, a circling motion above your destination, guaranteed to bring on airsickness if they keep you there long enough. There are all the terms for doors on a plane — 1R, 1L, 2R, 2L — which simply refer to the right and left doors as they proceed from the front, which are locked and “armed” for departure and “disarmed” for arrival. (That, for you uninitiated, is All Call.) Finally, there’s cross-check, which always sounded to me like a peculiar chess move, but in fact is the double-checking of this arming/disarming process by another cabin crew member. That reference to the interior of an airplane as a cabin is one I find particularly homey. And in fact, hate Airportland as much as you want, but much attention has apparently gone into the psychological effects of décor in the cabin. Blue, for instance, is the color of choice for seating because of its calming effect. Lighting has moved from harsh fluorescent to softer LED that reflects nicely off the fabric, and a fair amount of attention has gone into noise-canceling walls to reduce the noxious thrum of the engine sound in the cabin. So we should all be grateful. That’s what I’ll tell myself as I unwrap the sandwich I’ll need to buy beforehand and place it on my tiny tray table. Airportland is special and familiar to its inhabitants, and soon enough, I’ll be home.

It makes sense for movies shown on airplanes to be appropriate for most if not all ages. That limits the selection, needless to say. On my flight home from France, I chose Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, of which none of the reviews had reported any sexual component or aspect of violence that would warrant cutting, and I wanted a grown-up film that hadn’t been butchered.

But wait — language. At the beginning of the film, there’s the announcement that it has been modified from the original, “edited for content.” Grown-up movies are laced with spoken obscenities, what was once called blasphemy, and insulting terms. Not all of these would earn the film an R rating, but once you start substituting terms in order to get a showing on a long-distance flight, you might as well go the distance, so to speak.

You hear the substitution within the first few minutes of the movie, when Woody Harrelson explodes with “Oh, fudge!” From that line onward, fudge and flip and freak get plenty of play, as do shoot, gosh, and darn. Several things about these substitutions, which ran through the dialogue, struck me. One was that all the substituted lines were in the actors’ voices. So now I know a little secret about the movie industry. Presumably sometime before the film completely wraps up, these actors have to record versions of their lines — and sometimes it seemed as if these changes applied to more than half the spoken dialogue — with words very few adults in their situations would use. I can only imagine the fits of giggles into which Harrelson and his costar, Frances McDormand, were tempted to fall.

Another striking feature of the euphemisms was how inappropriate they came to feel. Not just because the characters in question would not be speaking this way, but also because the terms used as substitutes would never fit that way into the syntax of the sentence. A very few examples:

What the shoot you saying to me?

What the flip!

Do it to the motherlovers!

Give me my fudging gun.

Don’t be a witch.

Freak ‘em.

I’ll go out to dinner with you but I’m not gonna freak you,
Well, I don’t wanna fudge you either.

It’s all quite weird. Which brings me to my third observation: To understand what these people are on about, you sort of have to know the original words that have been dubbed over. When Woody Harrelson, speaking heatedly to his wife during family dinner, says, “Gosh darn motherlovers! Sorry, kids” — no kid innocent of what Harrelson’s character was supposed to be saying could understand what he’s apologizing to his kids for. Saying darn? And when Harrelson’s wife, after an afternoon of lovemaking, says to him, “You’ve got a nice car” and he responds, “I’m glad you like my car” — with no body language cueing, for instance that car is some kind of code for this couple — the innocent listener would be wondering what this has to do with an automobile. Aren’t these people married? Don’t they own their vehicles jointly?

Finally, it’s interesting to note the dubbing that eliminates not just vulgarities but blasphemies; as far as I know, you can exclaim “My God!” not just in the pages of The Chronicle but also in a PG-rated movie — but you won’t find the Lord’s name taken in vain by any of these fudging and flipping characters in Three Billboards. And when one of the local cops is accused of racism, there’s some discussion of how he ain’t allowed to say he’s Negro-torturing anymore; he has to say he’s people-of-color torturing. That he’s torturing seems damnable enough, but a certain bite goes out of the characterization when he uses an outdated term rather than what we call the n-word.

I’m not condemning any of this. While I’d like to see more emphasis on graphic violence in movie ratings, which sometimes seem fixated on obscene language and sexuality, it’s perfectly reasonable to adjust films that children may choose to watch while Mom and Dad sleep off the last day of a whirlwind vacation. Adjusting them in a more realistic way — having a character say, for instance, “I’ll go out to dinner with you, but then I’m going straight home,” isn’t practicable when the character’s lips are already moving to form a different sentence. But the distractions involved in watching and listening to the airplane-movie version of Three Billboards gave me new respect for the power and efficacy of certain expressions in their original form. Sometimes, there just isn’t a substitute for profanity.

Kevin Lamarque, Reuters, Newscom

Readers who wax impatient with language minutiae should really skip this post. The news this past week has been full of the message on the back of Melania Trump’s Zara jacket, worn in the muggy Washington heat en route to a shelter, in Texas, run for children taken from their asylum-seeking parents at the border. For the record, the jacket read, in all caps, “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” You’ll be grateful to learn that I don’t care whether that slapdash mark after CARE is a comma or a period, or about the use of U for YOU. What interests me is the placement of the adverb really.

Both in casual conversations and in the headlines I’ve seen about the jacket, really and don’t have sometimes switched places, as in The Hollywood Reporter‘s roundup, “Melania Trump’s ‘I Don’t Really Care’ Jacket Mocked on Late-Night Comedy Shows.” Misplaced modifiers are among the pesky so-called grammar lessons we ignore in sixth grade. In the famous example of John’s hitting Peter in the nose, we get these four possibilities —

1. Only John hit Peter in the nose.
2. John hit only Peter in the nose.
3. John hit Peter only in the nose.
4. John only hit Peter in the nose.

— but everyone knows that the last one is the one you would use to describe the incident, even though, technically, it implies that John’s action was merely hitting and not, say, stabbing. The same applies to sentences like “She practically annoyed every customer she encountered,” where the annoyance itself isn’t in question so much as the percentage of customers annoyed. Or “I just want a tiny bite of your ice cream,” where you may want a roast-beef sandwich as well and should (properly) have said, “I want just a tiny bite of your ice cream.”

So switching really to modify care rather than don’t seems like not that big a deal. Yet, given that this may become a catchphrase in this fall’s elections, I’d like to pause over it. Let’s imagine the conversation:

Me: You don’t care, do you?
Melania: I don’t really care.
Me: But you’re making a gesture.
Melania: Yeah. I have a heart, after all.

or

Me: You don’t care, do you?
Melania: I really don’t care.
Me: But you’re making a gesture.
Melania: Yeah. I’m pretending to care, but I really don’t.

In other words, if you really don’t care, as the jacket announces, then you haven’t a shred of caring in you, and you’d like to emphasize that fact. If you don’t really care, then you have a shred of care that isn’t fully engaged. The former phrase is emphatic. The latter often suggests fatigue; it’s the sort of thing you might say after a debate has gone on for hours and you’re ready to concede.

Another way to look at how meaning differs depending on adverb placement is to state the sentence in the positive: I really do care versus I do really care. The former seems to be asserting your caring nature against a challenge; the latter emphasizes the degree to which that caring nature is applied.

I take the jacket statement as written. What Mrs. Trump really doesn’t care about remains open to question. But if strategists decide to use the phrase this fall, they should think about how the question is posed when they give their answer:

Melania: I don’t really care, do you?
Slogan: Yes, we really care.

Melania: I really don’t care, do you?
Slogan: Yes, we really do.

Or as Stephen Colbert put it: “For the record, we do.”

Note that my directive at the start was “Readers who wax impatient with language minutiae should really skip this post.” Perhaps I should have written, “Readers who wax impatient with language minutiae really should skip this post.” Might have saved you a few minutes and some irritation. Oh, well.

Remember favorite numbers? Mine was seven. I liked how it combined the magic numbers three and four; how it was prime; how it looked, especially when my first-grade teacher executed it in Palmer script; how there were five sevens in our family’s seven-digit phone number; and how, when doubled, it became the date of my birthday.

Numbers have always worked, like words, as symbols. Think of the nine muses, the seven deadly sins, the 10 commandments, the Trinity, the four directions. I remember a camp song (not from a religious camp, mind you) that culminates:

I’ll sing you twelve, O
Green grow the rushes, O
What are your twelve, O?
Twelve for the twelve apostles
Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,
Ten for the ten commandments,
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
Eight for the April rainers,
Seven for the seven stars in the sky,
Six for the six proud walkers,
Five for the symbols at your door,
Four for the gospel makers,
Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the lily-white boys,
Clothed all in green, O
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be it so.

Other numbers are not so heavenly. I first became aware of 666 from watching the 1976 movie The Omen, when Gregory Peck discovers it on his adopted child’s scalp and knows he is the Antichrist. The number itself, however, was apparently political in origin and referred to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was considered a vicious devil by the Hebrews who wrote the Book of Revelation.

Then there’s “420-friendly,” a phrase I ran across while helping my college-age son look for apartments on Craigslist. I knew it referred to April 20, which may one day appear on your Google calendar as Pot Smoking Day. (Hey, Groundhog Day, April Fools’ Day, and the Hindu spring festival Holi are already there.) What I learned only recently is that it began as the magic moment after school let out in San Rafael, Calif., where marijuana aficionados would gather in front of a statue of Louis Pasteur, affectionately known as Louie.

I started thinking about these number codes last week, when NPR, purveyor of eclectic news, announced a feature about a license plate recalled by the State of Illinois for bearing the number 1488. Apparently that number or its variants — 14/88, 14/23, 88 — refers to white-supremacist beliefs. The 14 refers to the 14-word white-supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The 88 nods to the eighth letter of the alphabet, hence HH or “Heil Hitler.”

The Anti-Defamation League features a page devoted to numerical hate symbols, which might leave you worried that you could inadvertently signal hate just by choosing a cellphone number. Fewer numbers seem devoted to benign propositions like love or peace. There’s the iconic V sign, which originally signaled victory in World War II, with a nod to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It evolved into a sign for peace in the 1960s and continues as such, though I’m not sure anyone thinks of it as referring to the number 5. (Be sure, by the way, to make this gesture palm outward, especially in certain countries where forming the same V with your palm inward is taken as an insulting gesture.)

Also in the 1960s, we learned from Three Dog Night that

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one

Sheesh. Let’s get some love going in the numbers, folks. I propose starting with seven. Who’s got other magic combinations to recommend?

Château François 1er, in Villers-Cotterêts, France

For some time now, we have seen this as English’s moment. Greek had its turn, as did Latin and French, to be the so-called lingua franca, or global language. When I lived and taught abroad this past spring, I urged my students to keep trying their French, even when shop owners responded in English; but pretty much every nonnative speaker I met agreed that English is now an essential skill for anyone working in business or the sciences or with the public. As Marcus Schulzke of the University of Leeds summed things up recently, “The popularity of English as a second language, as well the ubiquity of English in business, science, mass media, and other fields, indicates that English will increasingly become the world language over the next century.”

But among the problems Schulzke lists within this development are “whether global English will suppress non-English-speaking cultures, whether it will unfairly disadvantage those who learn English as a second language, and whether English’s dominance will be considered legitimate by nonnative speakers.” Chiefly, Schulzke argues, “There is a serious risk that the benefits of global English will be realized unevenly, benefiting those in core English-speaking countries more than nonnative speakers.”

Enter the pre-Brexit Emmanuel Macron, who has awarded €200 million (about $235 million) to refurbish a castle in Villers-Cotterêts, northeast of Paris, as a global center for the promotion and study of French. The French president has called the domination of English at the EU headquarters in Brussels “not inevitable,” and he should know — for centuries French was the language of Western diplomacy, and before 2004, it was arguably dominant for the European Union. Now it’s the sixth-most-spoken language in our increasingly connected world, with Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic ahead of it in sheer numbers of speakers. With fewer countries for which English is the official language in the bloc, why shouldn’t the members of the EU choose a tongue that belongs to one of them? And why shouldn’t that tongue be French, which is after all an old hand at being a lingua franca? The European Court of Justice defaults to French; why shouldn’t other Continental dealings?

The answer is purely practical, as the French CEO of the international PR firm Burston-Marsteller pointed out in response to Macron’s call for boosting French internationally. Not only do more than half the citizens of the EU speak English as a first or second language — a statistic that cannot be claimed by another European language, however fluently it is spoken at home — but also 90 percent of schoolchildren in Europe are studying English as a second language. This is sort of like forms of voting that give the nod to the candidate who ranks either first or second for 51 percent of voters, as opposed to the candidate who racks up 13 percent of first-choice votes (France’s percentage of the EU population) but can claim only 24 percent of first- and second-place votes. In fact, if we were going solely by the percentage of the EU population, German would get the nod — a development that, as any German-speaking traveler to Eastern Europe can attest, would rouse the ire of several countries for whom the Second World War is not a distant memory.

OK, so French may be celebrated, but it’s not about to win the struggle for global language dominance. More interesting are the difficulties Macron began having even before his announcement of his project. Turning toward Francophone African countries last year, he called on young Africans to promote the language and help turn it into “the No. 1  language in Africa and maybe even the world.” Given that French began its linguistic inroads on that continent because of the inroads made — often brutally — by French colonists, not everyone thought expanding French was the natural purview of native Congolese or Cameroonians.

The same has been said, not unjustifiably, of English. And if the French were to have any success with their language-expansion project, they could run into two other thorny issues familiar to people who study the growing hegemony of English. The first is so-called corruption. The French are famous for tossing out foreign words and phrases they don’t like; the Académie française recently rejected words like le buzz and fashionista. But English, as a lingua franca, has had to adapt to the influence of widespread nonnative use. As Schulzke observes, “Those who speak Standard English are in an ever weaker position to use it as a means of exclusion, or to dictate the methods of English language education. … Multiple Englishes [are] challenging the standard language ideology that attacks the legitimacy of nonstandard varieties of English.”

The second and even more interesting challenge is the much-debated question of language neutrality. Macron quite deliberately names French as a “language of freedom” and sees the diffusion of it as carrying French “values” around the world. While many see English similarly, there are robust arguments for English as a so-called neutral language. Because its recent, rapid spread has been the peaceful result of travel, immigration, and the opportunities the language provides for social and economic mobility, English purportedly lacks the baggage associated with, say, Spanish (“conquistador Catholicism”), Chinese (Maoism), or Arabic (Islam). This neutrality, if it exists, is a good thing for a global language (and thus doesn’t bode well for France’s bid). If it doesn’t exist, though — if English is more like French in its association with past colonialism, repression, or imposition of values — then Schulzke’s remarks on what global English provokes would surely apply to global French. He asks, for instance, how “the power asymmetries reinforced by English use or the political ideologies associated with English” will be transformed by the huge number of nonnative speakers. Might “the power asymmetries created by English language dominance … be renegotiated and restructured in more inclusive ways”? And if these questions are worth applying to English, I ask you, distinguished members of the Académie française, what will happen to those French values when its new speakers start renegotiating?

Retired Senator Jon Kyl is now a Sherpa. As The New York Times writes, “In Washington, a Sherpa is an informal but widely known term for a nominee’s guide to the political tundra in the Senate.” Widely known inside the Beltway, perhaps. But although the Times lists Sherpa several times in a search for the term over this last month, if you go back to 2009, the year of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Sherpa gets hardly any play.

I first heard the term in this sense only this past week, when National Public Radio’s Ailsa Chang interviewed former Senator Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican who accompanied Neil Gorsuch on his rounds of the Senate. They had this exchange:

CHANG: So what does a Sherpa exactly do? What is your role?
AYOTTE: Well, it’s kind of a funny name, right…
CHANG: Yeah.
AYOTTE: …’Cause a Sherpa means bringing someone up a mountain. And I guess often the…
CHANG: (Laughter) And carrying all the bags.

As many readers know, the Sherpa are an ethnic group who live on the borders of Nepal and Tibet. The name means “eastern people.” Sherpa are known for their extraordinary skills in mountaineering, and as a result the family business for many decades has been to lead hopeful climbers up the dangerous slopes of the Himalayas. The first Sherpas were hired in 1895 to help a British expedition scale the 26,600-foot peak Nanga Parbat. Both guides died on that climb, setting a pattern that has resulted in an industry with one of the highest rates of injury and mortality in the world. And neither the Sherpas’ extraordinary expertise nor the risks they take always find their proper due in the global climbing community.

As the Sherpa Norbu Tenzing Norgay puts it, “If somebody in America climbs Everest 19 times, he’d be all over Budweiser commercials. Sherpas don’t get the same recognition.” Death and disability benefits for Sherpas, who take the greatest risks on the mountain by setting the ropes and breaking trail, are rarely enough to support their families. Then there is the simple matter of respect. Following an ugly brawl between foreign climbers and Sherpas on Everest in 2013, the veteran guide Norbu Sherpa said of outsiders’ attitudes toward Sherpas: “Many think Sherpas are just porters, which is not true. Sherpas are a community and a cultural entity.” Scientists have learned that after so many years of living at high altitudes, the Sherpas’ mitochondria have evolved to use oxygen more efficiently. As Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, explains, “The work Sherpas are paid to do — carrying loads, installing the aluminum ladders, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope — requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Khumbu Icefall. … high-altitude climbing Sherpas [serve] an élite profession that deservedly commands respect and admiration from mountaineers around the world.”

Given this background, how appropriate is it to call Kyl, an Arizona Republican, a Sherpa — or, as many publications would have it, a sherpa, rendering the term as a generic descriptor? I suppose you could liken Brett Kavanaugh’s tour of Senate offices to scaling a mountain. The loose rocks and crevasses are perhaps labeled Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade, and veteran political operators know their way around those high-risk zones. The summit, presumably, is Scotus. But Jon Kyl, at 76, is not about to shoulder Kavanaugh’s baggage. In fact, the way both Chang and Ayotte describe a Sherpa makes the expert guide sound like what Norbu Sherpa objected to: a porter.

Western prejudice may account for this condescending description. So might the genericizing and name-branding of the term elsewhere in our culture — mama sherpas, parking sherpas, sandwich sherpas, cocktail sherpas, the Sherpa 50 solar panel, Sherpa Adventure Gear, Sherpa Pet Trading. I also wonder if we Westerners sometimes get confused about certain words’ ethnic origins. The individual described by Chang and Ayotte sounds to me less like a Sherpa than like a schlepper, a Yiddish term for a porter. Additionally, a schlepper denotes a person so worthless or stupid that he has no choice but to fetch and carry for others. I don’t know if we collapse the meanings of these terms when we talk about Sherpas in general, but when we talk about, say, doggy carriers, I suspect we do.

As to Jon Kyl — he may know a lot, and Brett Kavanaugh may depend on him for survival as a prospective Supreme Court Justice. But I don’t see him risking his life as he takes the nominee through the ice fall.

Those of us who learned about double negatives in grammar class understood them as grammatical no-nos. You were not to say, “I don’t have no bananas,” because, by denying the absence of bananas, you were confirming their presence rather than (as you presumably intended) confirming their absence.

The issue of double negation has arisen in recent decades because African American Vernacular English uses double negatives frequently. Other languages, as many have observed, regularly employ what would translate literally as double negatives. For instance, the standard French sentence Je n’en sais rien literally translates as “I don’t of it know nothing.” We all understand Mick Jagger when he croons, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Another type of double negation is useful rhetorically, as when Barack Obama said of the window for resolving Iran’s nuclear issues, “that time is not unlimited.” This very example suggests another truth found mostly in discussions of logic. When a double negation involves a so-called contrary, rather than a contradictory, we cannot annihilate both the “nots” and come up with a positive statement. To wit: If I write, “No apples are not red,” then we can cross out both nots to conclude that apples are red, because, as the logician Alex Scott writes, “The statement that ‘apples are not red’ is contradictory to the statement that ‘apples are red,’ because both cannot simultaneously be true and both cannot simultaneously be false.” But if I write, “She is not unhappy” or “I wouldn’t say he’s not angry,” we cannot form a conclusive statement by removing the negatives. We cannot conclude, that is, that she is happy or he is angry, because one might be neither happy nor unhappy, neither angry nor devoid of anger.

In his statement about the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is making rhetorical use of this logical nicety. While it’s surely true that time cannot be both limited and unlimited, it’s possible also that time is neither limited nor unlimited, because no one has set limits yet. The statement works as an implied threat that’s not yet showing its teeth.

OK, we all know where this is going. Last week, after his infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin, the President of the United States was asked about Russia’s involvement in election interference in 2016. He responded, “My people came to me. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Two days later, he tried to walk back that statement, saying, “The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.”

Pundits have seized on this denial. Most have pointed out the absurdity of shoehorning the “corrected” statement into a larger context that clearly meant to disparage claims of Russian interference. The Economist speculated on the possibility of Trump’s engaging in so-called misnegation, a tendency to misspeak because of the number of negatives in a sentence. Referring us to Mark Liberman at Language Log, they point to former CIA chief Michael Hayden’s confusing statement, “I would not be surprised if this were not the last indictment we see that doesn’t mention an American.” Clearly, with Trump’s original sentence containing exactly one not (as opposed to Hayden’s three), misnegation is an unlikely explanation.

But I’d like to point something else out. Let us suppose, absurd as it seems, that Trump meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” Can we flip this sentence, as we can with the red-apples sentence, to read, “I see a reason why it would be Russia”? I don’t think we can. I don’t see any reason is itself equivocal; it’s not at all the same as claiming there are no reasons. Trying to resolve the sentence by eliminating the negatives is no more possible than it is to claim that She is not unhappy means that she is happy.

Why does this matter? Because neither the sentence Trump actually said — I don’t see any reason why it would be – nor the sentence he claims to have intended — I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be — confirms the findings of American intelligence agencies: that robust evidence points to Russia’s interference in our election. Say you are indicted for murdering your wife. A video you claim to be fake shows you stabbing her multiple times with a kitchen knife. In the courtroom, you say, “I loved her. I don’t see any reason why I would be the killer.” When someone points out the existence of the video, you say, “Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be the killer.’”

Have you confessed? Well, not quite yet. Give the investigation time.

One of the many astonishing developments, for language mavens, in the unfolding drama of the Mueller investigation has been the casual use of the term fixer. Mainstream media outlets have taken to calling Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, Trump’s fixer. Several times, I’ve heard that Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, has replaced Cohen as Trump’s attorney and fixer.

I’d always thought of the term as more pejorative than descriptive, so I went looking. One of the most famous uses of the term, of course, is Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel, The Fixer — which, if you ask a typical literate person, is about a guy who gets into legal trouble for making illicit arrangements for his client. Wrong. It’s about a handyman, a guy who fixes things in a brick factory. A similar sense is embodied in the Marvel Comics hero Fixer, who’s a technological genius now turned to a life of good deeds. But the Yiddish term macher, or “maker,” generally does translate as “fixer,” notably in last year’s Richard Gere vehicle, “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer,” where Gere plays an aspiring, amoral confidant to the powerful.

Though the term doesn’t even make it into my ancient (1967) Random House Dictionary, it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in the sense of “one who arranges or adjusts matters (often illicitly)” as early as 1909, when Will Irwin wrote in Confessions of a Con Man: “At the head of the outfit stood the ‘fixer’, whose job it was to bribe or stall city officials so that the gamblers could proceed with reasonable security.” A reference to a “fixer of elections” is even earlier (1889), but that meaning seems slightly different to me. An election fixer, like a fight fixer, fixes the election or fight much the way that fixative fixes a charcoal drawing, or a statue is affixed to the floor: He sets the result so that it cannot be changed.

You might argue that the fixer played by George Clooney in the 2007 film Michael Clayton fixes situations much the way that Malamud’s fixer tries to fix his broken wagon wheel. Something has broken or gone wrong, and the fixer’s job is to make it whole or functioning again. But functioning, in Michael Clayton’s case, means operating the way his firm, not any objective standard, means for it to operate. Malamud’s Yakov is an upright man; George Clooney’s Clayton is not.

Full disclosure: I do not think Michael Cohen is an upright man. As my colleague Ben Yagoda put it in his April prediction of Cohen’s “flipping,” Trump’s former lawyer is “a fixer of the old school.” But as recently as 2014, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the term fixer failed to carry opprobrium only in its handyman connotation, or when referring to practical necessities in corrupt regimes. For instance, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” the journalist Matthieu Aikins described the tragedy of James Foley in part this way:

It’s not like the magazines that I write for have bureaus overseas or security consultants or anything like that. Places like Rolling Stone do give you a good expense budget which helps a lot ’cause you can hire the right fixer and pay for, you know, things that bring more security as compared to, you know, freelancers really on a shoestring budget. And actually, you know, that was one of the reasons why James Foley was kidnapped, was because he wasn’t — didn’t have, you know, proper fixer and transportation, and they were stopping in an internet cafe in Syria. You know, the problem of inadequate support for freelancers is a tricky one.

It’s true that Anthony Bourdain referred unabashedly to his Detroit “fixer” on CNN in 2014, but Bourdain was always one to sling argot. Otherwise, fixers are bad-boy characters on TV shows and in movies, or gangster associates now doing time; often, they are “fixers,” the term contained within quotes so we can all identify it as a euphemism … until you get to 2018.

Granted, an early 2017 reference by none other than Sean Hannity, talking about the Women’s March, reads ambiguously:

I’m talking about women because I was acutely aware of the, quote, “women’s march” this last weekend, and I thought of all the things that we can count and quantify, all the items that they could have listed on their list of grievances from the podium about President Obama, who was president for eight years. President Trump has been here for about eight hours. And you know, if this is your list of grievances, then at least help is on the way. At least you’ve got the greatest fixer and rescuer and brilliant businessman in Donald Trump to help fix it.

Presumably Hannity means fixer in the sense of repair person, though you never know. But with the rift between Trump and Michael Cohen making the news, articles regularly refer to Cohen (and often Giuliani) as Trump’s fixer — as if every president has had a fixer, just as he’s had a secretary of state. As Ben Zimmer recently observed, The Wall Street Journal set the trend. Since then, at least six news articles in The New York Times have simply named Mr. Cohen as the president’s fixer; only one, by way of the Associated Press, puts the term into quotation marks as if it’s something to hedge about. The Washington Post logs 14 uses of fixer in the past 10 days, with only the AP stories putting the term into quotes. Fox News’s use of fixer is confined to the canceled TV show “Fixer Upper,” but CNN is not only replete with ordinary references to Cohen as Trump’s fixer, but also to Bill Shines, the new head of White House communications, as having been Roger Ailes’s fixer. This isn’t to say that a mainstream media outlet like CNN has abandoned the notion that fixer is a pejorative term; this past May, it ran a piece about the spokesman for the family of the slain Democratic consultant Seth Rich, in which CNN said, “Conspiracy theorists portrayed Bauman as a fixer forced upon the family by the DNC to cover up a supposed crime. In the lawsuit, Bauman says he was never hired nor paid by the DNC.”

So maybe it’s legitimate to be a fixer these days. Or maybe there’s so much illegitimacy in the air that describing someone as a fixer, plain and simple, no longer raises eyebrows.

Next up: bagman?

French dancer Micheline Bernardini modeling the first bikini

I have only recently started using emojis, and I often choose the wrong ones — the other day, for instance, I meant to send an "astonished" face (😲) and instead sent an "embarrassed" face (😳). Circumstances that would cause me to include something like "cute tiger" (🐯) have thus far eluded me.

So I don’t know when I might want to use the female-swimsuit emoji, but I can still appreciate how exercised Florie Hutchinson of Emojination has become at the sole depiction of this attire, a pink bikini with yellow polka dots shaped for a D-cup bra size (👙). Hutchinson and her co-founder, Jennifer Lee, have proposed to the Unicode Consortium the alternative of a pink maillot in the shape of a normal woman’s body.

We can all imagine the directions this argument might take. If a maillot, why a pink maillot and not black or red? Why not a burkini or a skirted suit? But since this is a language column, I’m more interested in two curious aspects of this kerfuffle. One is the polka-dot bikini itself; the other is the female-slanted language of emoji clothing.

First, to the bikini. Its name originally came from the Bikini Atoll, most famous as a site of nuclear testing in the 1940s — the idea being that, like the atom bomb, the scanty outfit would be explosive. (My own favorite play on the word comes from Beany and Cecil’s cartoon encounter with "No Bikini Atoll.") The suit itself was apparently conceived by the French designer Louis Réard, who worked in his mother’s lingerie shop in France during the postwar global textile shortage. The history of swimsuits had mostly been one of modesty. While Esther Williams had worn a two-piece in the 1940s to show off her Olympic-quality abdominal muscles, and Réard convinced a nude dancer to model his four patches of cloth, the bikini remained banned from many public pools and beaches in the U.S. even after (or perhaps because) Brigitte Bardot starred in Manina, the Girl in the Bikini in 1952.

I’m fairly certain that the current emoji swimsuit owes its particular design to Brian Hyland’s 1960s hit "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini," which is actually about a shy girl who slowly emerges from the locker room and onto the beach, only to seek refuge in the cold ocean, which is where the song leaves her. The yellow polka dots contribute little beyond meter, but polka dots, like bikinis, take their name from an item in the news — in their case, the 19th-century craze for the polka dance that led manufacturers to add the word polka to just about anything (dotted fabric, for instance) that needed extra marketing.

So much for the polka-dot-bikini emoji that we are apparently stuck with until and unless the Unicode people grant another emoji. As I started to think about this post, though, I wondered what color they had assigned the men’s swimsuit emoji. But for "men’s swimsuit" or "swim trunks," you get nothing. "Swimwear" brings up the bikini. Finally, frustrated, I searched the emoji dictionary for women’s and men’s clothing. To my perhaps naive astonishment 😲, I found that men’s wear comprises a kimono, jeans, and T-shirt, all of which can be "worn by women or men." Women exclusively get a blouse, a dress, and the bikini. For shoes, women get a boot, a sandal, a high-heeled shoe, and (recently, thanks to the Emojination women) flat shoes; men get a shoe; both sexes get a running shoe. I strongly suspect that the ballet shoe now being considered for inclusion will be a pink women’s toe shoe. My point being that, so long as we’re expanding the emoji lexicon to include less sexist imagery, let’s open things up on both sides. Give the guys Speedos or trunks, and maybe some sandals that fit their feet. And give us all bow ties, while you’re at it.

When Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky announced that he opposed public funding for humanities curricula, citing the study of French language and literature in particular as a discipline he’d like to take off the table, a hailstorm of criticism ensued. “The study of world languages, literatures and cultures is a valuable pursuit that has led countless college students to successful careers,” wrote Jeffrey N. Peters, a professor of French at the University of Kentucky. “At this moment of rapid globalization, majors in our department learn to become well-rounded citizens of the world.”

In fact, Bevin wasn’t suggesting that studying French can’t lead to a successful career. He argued that preparation for those careers, or working toward the goal of “understanding the world around us,” as one local columnist put it, is not the purview of public education. “The purpose of public education and of public dollars going into education,” he said on July 26, “is to ensure that people who need to hire people to do work actually have the skills necessary.”

(Bevin’s wording suggests that employers, “people who need to hire people to do work,” are the ones in need of skills offered by taxpayer-funded education. No doubt he meant those being hired; let’s proceed on that basis.)

What strikes me about Bevin’s position is how carefully he distinguishes between those being educated publicly and those being educated privately. Bevin himself, as several critics have pointed out, majored in East Asian studies, but he did so at Washington and Lee University, a private institution. So when he says, “All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so; they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer,” he’s disingenuously enforcing a class distinction, since “all the people in the world” clearly can’t study French literature unless they have the funds for private education and foreign travel. (Yes, I know, there’s Duolingo. Enough said.)

Plenty of studies have been done on the advantages of speaking a second language, many of them demonstrating that “people who speak more than one language fluently have better memories and are more cognitively creative and mentally flexible than monolinguals.” But that’s the “well-rounded” argument again. Lots of advantages accrue to those who grow up in financial comfort; why shouldn’t the pluses of language learning be among them?

My own answers hinge not on French, a language I happen to love and speak fluently, but on English. With the blinkered attitude available only to those for whom the world’s lingua franca is their mother tongue, we insist on the essential requirement of learning English even as we downgrade the importance of Americans’ learning other languages.

Note, for instance, that while Governor Bevin talks about public education generally, the responses to his derision of French-language learning have come from higher education. Even though we know that the most effective language learning takes place at a young age, Kentucky (like most states) does not require any foreign-language credits for graduation from high school; only to enter or graduate from a public four-year university in the state. But anywhere in the United States —and elsewhere, too — woe betide the student or aspiring employee who cannot communicate in English. The head of Japan’s leading ecommerce company has ordered that all business within the corporation would henceforth be conducted in English.

English clearly is considered to be of practical use, like electrical engineering — one of Bevin’s favorite examples of a worthwhile subject to teach. French is not. But the elegant and forceful deployment of English, the sort of facility that enables the speaker or writer intentionally to invert syntax, consult a wide vocabulary, pepper speech with literary or historical references, use rhetoric to advance argument — that level of English is no more encouraged for the worker bees envisioned by the governor than French is. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the study of a foreign language and the mastery of one’s own often converge at this very point. It’s possible to speak and write English at a level that leads to advancement in the working world without knowing a foreign language, of course. But I’ve yet to meet any speakers of a second language who have not found their study to enhance an understanding of their first language.

So maybe it’s not learning French that bothers Governor Biven. Maybe it’s the ability of language itself to open doors beyond those that lead to one job description or another. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Henry Higgins’s mother warns of teaching Eliza Doolittle “the manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living.” As it turns out, she was wrong. Eliza, Shaw tells us, “grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.” She becomes successful, not as the HR department’s dream candidate for a skilled slot, but on her own terms.

A friend asked me the other day about the origin of the phrase the worm has turned. I was too embarrassed to admit that not only did I not know the origin, I wasn’t even sure what the proverb meant. “It probably started with Shakespeare,” I said, hoping to sound more learned than I felt.

My friend’s husband got in on the discussion with the idea that worms were turning as they chewed their way through old books — that we were, in other words, talking about bookworms.* Challenged, he looked up the phrase on his phone and announced that the worm will turn came not quite from Shakespeare, but close. A 1546 book of proverbs by John Heywood, he said, contained this gem: “Treade a worme on the tayle, and it must turne agayne.”

“But that’s not the same thing,” my friend said.

“Not at all,” I said — still unsure what the same thing would be, much less its origin. I promised to check the Oxford English Dictionary. Before I did, though, I asked another friend what he thought the worm has turned meant. Revenge? he guessed. Someone nefarious has changed tack and is seeking revenge?

Sort of like Michael Cohen, I suggested.

Exactly, he said, and I immediately thought of Trump’s former lawyer waking up one morning to find himself changed into a giant worm, pace Kafka.

Confusion over the expression’s meaning, variations, and origin, I suspect, begins with the word worm. Like the association of bug with anything vaguely insectlike, worm has referred not just to “a member of the genus Lumbricus; a slender, creeping, naked, limbless animal, usually brown or reddish, with a soft body divided into a series of segments,” but also to just about any creeping, crawling, slippery thing. And these creatures don’t just live underground; sometimes they climb, run, or fly. When Lord Clifford opines, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 –

The smallest worm will turn being trodden on,
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

– he clearly refers to a lowly creature who will twist around … and do what? Not having a mouth, it can hardly bite you on the toe. Still, symbolically, the phrase does suggest a reversal of fortune for those who have been treated badly.

But Nancy Sherer of the Salmon River Gazette takes worm in its sense as dragon, an admittedly archaic meaning but one that could still spark fear in medieval readers with lines like this, from Romans of Partenay (1475): “The serpent fill don dede … Which worme was ny ryght ten hole feete of lenght.” The worm was often also configured as the Devil. Per the OED, Milton refers to the serpent in Eden as “that false Worm,” and, as late as 1867, William Morris wrote of “a fearful battle betwixt worm and man.” In this sense, Sherer argues, the worm has turned betokens good fortune, since you might have been in the dragon’s path had it not thus veered off course.

Judging from actual uses of the phrase — the worm has turned or the worm will turn – we either haven’t made up our minds what it means or we bend the meaning as needed to fit the situation. Six recent references in the Corpus of Contemporary American English use the worm has turned to mean, variously, an ironic change of fortune (“George Bush intended to turn this campaign into another mud-toss rather than defend his awful domestic record. Now the worm has turned and he cries foul”); a moment of revenge (“Honeycutt races onto the stage to pull off the still tap dancing Mantan as the Harlem natives BUMRUSH the stage. THE WORM HAS TURNED”); the start of good things for the underdog (“‘You have to think the worm has turned,’ [Cubs] manager Lou Piniella said after [the Cubs beat the Astros]“); victory for the bad guys (“Whether they are dismayed by the way things played out in Egypt or by the growth of Al Qaeda in Syria, the worm has turned in the Middle East in the minds of American foreign policy makers”); or stool pigeons (“Renko’s illicit connection to the mayor would’ve trumped any charges. Not to mention, not a single worm has turned.”).

Google’s N-gram viewer provides more evidence of confusion. While the worm will turn has been on a sharp rise since the turn of this century, those who have looked closely at the proverb have come away with analyses like this one, from Shankar’s Weekly:

If you meet a worm somewhere and try to scare what you think is its anterior, it promptly takes a head start from its posterior. Thereby proving false the proverb “the worm will turn.” It just does not need to turn. You are then left wondering whether the interior, i.e., the middle part, also has anything to do with decision making or direction.

Seems a little clinical to me. Perhaps we can start by agreeing that these turning worms are not, strictly speaking, earthworms. But then what are they? What comes to your mind when you hear that the worm has turned — other than, say, a crowd of Yankees fans on Rudy Giuliani’s birthday?

*Maggots, actually, but let’s not get fussy.

Last week, I read two provocative articles about women and speech. One concerned how women talk, the other how women are talked about.

The first article, by Rachel Thompson, on Mashable, noted the stream of criticism for women’s use of so-called uptalk, vocal fry, and filler words. Various linguists consulted by Thompson pointed out that men exhibit these same tendencies but receive far less criticism for them. The most surprising statistic, for me, was the the “generation specific” finding that, in women’s voices from the 1990s compared with those from 1945, the “fundamental frequency” of women’s voices “dropped by 23 Hz” over 50 years. To my ear, older women’s voices are now higher and lighter than they were in my mother’s generation, simply because so few of us smoke. But the criticisms — of “shrillness,” “Valley Girl” talk, and the like — are too familiar. I can attest that in professional meetings where I am the only woman, I sometimes catch myself speaking more slowly and at a lower pitch than I do when in a meeting with other women.

I will also, if the meeting is informal, use the expression you guys to refer to the (male) others in the room. As Allan Metcalf observed just a few weeks ago, you guys is replacing y’all in some regions of the country. But last week, Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic wrote of efforts to replace you guys with y’all as a less gender-specific way to refer to a group of people. As Pinsker writes, “Guys is an easy-going way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion — a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves ‘guys.’” Women use the phrase among themselves almost as much as men use it, so it’s fair to claim, as some of Pinsker’s contacts do, that the term has evolved to be gender-neutral. Certainly, in my regular tennis matches with other women, I’ll hear “You guys!” fairly frequently. Other previously male terms have evolved to include women — actor, for example, or fellow. In 1980, when I was the Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, I was frequently teased for being a “fellowess.” I doubt that would happen today.

Others, though, still find guys exclusionary, especially in male-heavy professions and customer-facing industries. Without having formed a firm opinion, I do find that I avoid the term with mixed or women-only groups. I would never use it with my students, for instance. Lacking a plural second person, English doesn’t have a ready gender-neutral equivalent, but I find myself using folks, people, andall (that’s in you all, not y’all, which to me still sounds distinctively Southern). When I have an exclusively female group of students, as I did last spring, I tend to say you ladies, for which I apparently developed something of a reputation. Here again, the alternatives are less than satisfactory: you gals sounds a bit 1950s or Western; you girls seems condescending; you women, while the choice of one of my tennis partners, to me carries a ring equivalent to you men, drawing more attention to womanliness or manliness than the situation warrants.

When it comes to gender, we live in an imperfect world, armed with an incomplete vocabulary and prone to prejudicial judgments. For feminists, the instinct is to correct the blinkered views of the other. When people remark of female candidates for office that they’re shouting or peppering their speech with “like,” we want them to consider how critical they would be if the candidate were a male with a baritone. When they jocularly call out you guys to a mixed or female group, we want to remind them that we are not, strictly speaking, guys. But if we do so, we open ourselves to a charge of policing speech, of which women have been the victims for centuries. Let’s go a little easier on ourselves by proposing alternatives, imperfect though they may also be. When he says that Candidate X talks like a Valley Girl, let’s point out her refreshing candor or the practicality of her policy position. And when they say, “Hey, you guys, let’s get going,” let’s propose that the ladies — or gals, or women, or double-X chromosomes — get going, too.

I am once again teaching Gertrude Stein in Paris. Struck anew by the modernity of her sentences (of Ezra Pound: “She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not”), I ran across this recent essay on the sentences of Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is by now a well-known feminist political writer, who originated, for many, the term mansplaining. But Neiman Storyboard’s analysis focuses not on her political views but on the length and shape of her sentences.

I’m increasingly aware of the steady march toward shorter sentences. Writing fiction, I find myself knocking out what 30 years ago would have been a semicolon and replacing it with a period. Then I knock out a comma followed by and and replace them both with a period. I entertain fragments. Words. You get the idea.

The only long sentences we’ve been looking at recently have been the word salads composed by Donald Trump. Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, these aren’t really sentences but conglomerations of words — self-interrupting, running on, creating collage more than idea. You don’t read them so much as you read through them.

A sentence, we’re often told, conveys an idea. Often, though, it also conveys , or creates, an emotion. T.S. Eliot, speaking of poetry, calls this the objective correlative: the creation in the listener, not of understanding the encounter you are writing about, but of the feelings you experienced in the original encounter. In Solnit’s 88-word sentence opening her recent essay on presidential impeachment, the Neiman critic observes, “the effect … is to make me feel overwhelmed and crazed – manic – just as the news does today.”

Such sentence writing comes with risk. I sometimes give writing students the opening pages of Flaubert’s chapter on Yonville-L’Abbaye, in Madame Bovary, and ask them to respond to the description of the village. Trying to be respectful of the great French writer, they proffer weak, strained comments on how complete and detailed Flaubert’s word picture is. Finally, I ask them if they did not feel a little bored by descriptions like this one:

At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge and then a wheelwright’s, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way.

Yes! cry the students. We were bored out of our minds!

Then, I say, you have some idea of what drove Emma Bovary to adultery and suicide.

Nieman focuses on the opener of Solnit’s essay, but its second sentence is even more striking:

The commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another crime, but if they keep them coming, it’s hard to keep your eye on any one or keep track of them all, or so it seemed on that day last week when the president had tweeted out some white supremacist bullshit about South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people from the fact that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named him as a co-conspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist dogwhistles and shouts he’d broadcast while some people waited for evidence that he had said the n-word as though his constant insults to black people from Maxine Waters to LeBron James to Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on Latinos and immigrants and voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day that the White House had, with a tweet, turned the murder of a young white woman into an attack on undocumented immigrants even though the alleged murderer’s immigration status was unclear and there had been a more recent and more spectacular murder by a native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant wife and daughters and dumped the little girls’ bodies in oil tanks belonging to his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment of that murderer’s category, because collective punishment is never for straight white men (and should not be for  anybody).

This is, I would argue a sentence, unlike Molly’s soliloquy or the oft-quoted word salads. The point Solnit is making, about the way distraction works as coverup for certain crimes whereas attention turns other crimes into broad indictments of whole groups, requires both evidence and comparison. True, one might argue that in a paragraph (which the sentence constitutes), such an argument could be made using several sentences cheek by jowl. But as the Neiman piece points out, the rush of the one long sentence echoes the very rush of news that distracts and confuses us; by being chary with her periods, Solnit demonstrates how “the news emanating from the White House never stops.”

Other writers use the long sentence to other useful effects. The Nieman piece cites Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O’Brien, and Ken Fuson, but one could just as easily cite Stein. While “Alice” begins her “autobiography” with “I was born in San Francisco, California,” by the end of the book she is writing like this:

[Hemingway] came to the house about ten o’clock in the morning and he stayed, he stayed for lunch, he stayed all afternoon, he stayed for dinner and he stayed until about ten o’clock at night and then all of a sudden he announced that his wife was enceinte and then with great bitterness, and I, I am too young to be a father.

Hemingway himself, supposedly the godfather of today’s short, terse sentences, often wrote long:

I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watch the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors.

What we too often forget, in the move toward concision and clarity that has affected so much contemporary writing, is that sentences have effects. Words are never transparent. Read short sentences and you breathe often. Shorter sentences? Hyperventilation. But when you begin a longer sentence, sensing that a larger idea will get its play, much in the way that George Eliot once wrote, in Silas Marner, a sentence that my seventh-grade geeky self took seven blackboards to diagram, your breathing mellows and goes deeper, as if you’re plunging into dark water, and just as your lungs begin to press against your ribs, you let the air in them pull you back up, until you see the world above the surface in a whole new way.

Each time I stay in France for an extended period, I become aware of a new expression that’s infiltrated the language. Just as the occasional sojourner in America might be surprised to discover woke or the ubiquity of like, I’ve found myself suddenly hearing a phrase I thought I understood, used with almost alarming frequency in contexts that don’t quite add up.

This time, the phrase du coup, which technically means “at a blow” or “suddenly,” most familiar to French language learners from the expression tout d’un coup, now echoes from sidewalk cafés, métro trains, meeting rooms, and hallways.

On ne sort pas ce soir. On fait quoi du coup?
We’re not going out tonight. So then what do we do?

il ne veut pas manger de salade, du coup je fais des haricots.
He doesn’t want to eat salad, so I’ll cook green beans.

Je suis hors du coup.
I’m out of it.

Du coup je suis responsable.
So now I’m in charge.

Et donc, du coup, j’ai terminé le projet.
And so, in effect, I’ve terminated the project.

Du coup, on va pouvoir planifier un rendez-vous.
In that case, we’ll be able to plan a rendezvous.

It was a relief to discover I wasn’t alone in suspecting this once-meaningful phrase had become a discourse marker. The French, so often devoted to prescriptivism (I’m looking at you, l’Académie Française), have had a field day recently with the proliferation of du coup. Writing in Le Figaro, Quentin Périnel, the “bureaulogue,” suspects that his readers screamed at the sight of a headline proposing to examine du coup:

To face great evils requires great means. I would say even more: very great evils, very great means, since the language tic inspiring me this week feeds your daily anxieties in the office. “Du coup” at the beginning of the sentence, “du coup” at the end of the sentence … The greatest champions can use it three times in the same sentence or a hundred times during the same meeting. Du coup, it was high time to stage a coup. First observation: by ear, it’s not so easy to know what we are talking about. By the neck (le cou)? Unless it’s cost (coût)? Or maybe suddenly (du coup)?. . . It’s a language tic that stifles conversation and prevents any possibility of debate. Du coup, it makes you seem a boor with a high opinion of himself.

Writing from Canada in Brain, Vincent Glad observes that widely sprinkled du coups are the sure sign of a French traveler.

This improper expression that’s contaminated our language for several decades has become the symbol of the French in Quebec. In the streets of Montréal, people sometimes mockingly call us “the du coups.” That’s certainly better than “the whores,” another distinctive label for the French, but in the end it’s not something to be proud of.

As one of his Quebecois interlocutors put it, “They [the French] don’t know exactly what they mean and still they use it all the time. That amuses us because we never say it. When I was young, if you wanted to imitate a Frenchman, you used a sort of pig Latin or you repeated expressions from French films. Now it’s easy to imitate a Frenchman: It suffices to say du coup.”

In 2014, du coup had already become so ubiquitous that the Académie Française did indeed weigh in, writing:

The adverbial phrase “du coup” was once used in its proper sense: A fist hit him and he fell “from the blow.” Since then, we have used it to introduce the consequence of an event: A tire burst and “all of a sudden” the car skidded. But as usage guides indicate, the term expresses “the idea of a cause acting suddenly,” and to its causal value is thus added a temporal value conveying quasi-simultaneity. “Du coup” is thus very close to “immediately.” We must not, then, use “du coup,” as we often hear, in place of “therefore” or “consequently.” We must also avoid making “du coup” a simple adverb of speech without particular meaning.

Good luck with that. Even though, as the French writer Claudine Chollet has observed, the expression poisons intellectual discourse because it “has the appearance of a logical expression but hides any real argument [as to cause and effect] in order to win approval from others,” du coup is not going away. I’ve decided to treat it much as I do the omnipresent sound of pigeons tucked into the recesses of Paris’s old buildings. Du coup! they call. Du coup, du coup, du coup, du coup!

This fall, I am not only teaching in Paris but temporarily directing a program of study abroad. Among the many other changes this shift has produced in my daily life, I find myself no longer on the sidelines of students’ acquisition of French. I am now in charge of the French classes, or FLE (Français comme langue étrangère), that the students take through a branch of the Sorbonne.

As many Lingua Franca readers know, American programs of study abroad divide into two basic types: those that require a working knowledge of the local language before coming to the country, and those that accept English speakers and teach their courses in English. The program I am directing falls into the second category, but all students are required to study French here, and several are sufficiently fluent to take university courses in French. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on the balance between grammar, or structured learning, versus a more conversational approach in learning a language.

Our partners in the French-learning business are most adept at teaching classes at the “B” and “C” levels, according to the European Reference Framework for Language Learning. Students who arrive in Paris hoping to take classes at the Sorbonne or other institutions need generally to get their expertise up to the B2 level, so they tend to arrive with the basics already under their belt — not to mention that most Erasmus students or students from former French colonies often arrive speaking at least two other languages. But American students, even those with a couple of years of college French, often do not attain a B2 or even B1 level. In our case, the French program was game to initiate classes at A levels, and so I have been able to witness the built-in tension between formal and conversational language learning — or, put another way, between beginning with grammatical structures or beginning with casual modes of communication — that seems to haunt language learning. I am not a teacher of French, or any foreign language, so mine is only a bystander’s view, but I suspect that the problem for American students is compounded by their confusion about grammar in their native tongue.

Here’s the issue, I think, in a nutshell. On one side, you have language teachers and learners who point out that babies don’t learn their mother tongues by learning grammar first. They acquire the language by being immersed in it, and the grammar follows naturally; later on, perhaps, they can learn to make sense of why they use several different forms of past tense or when fewer is preferable to less. On the other side, you have those who point out, like one Swedish blogger, that “we, as adults, do not learn foreign languages the way babies learn their native language. And hence, speaking without any grammatical backbone whatsoever can only get us so far.” I’ve experienced this frustration myself, in trying to learn Italian via phone app. The program with which I experimented was happy to teach me the phrases Voglio un bicchiere di vino and Vorrei imparare l’italiano, but only because I know the difference between indicative and conditional do I understand that voglio and vorrei are different forms of the same verb, denoting the difference between “I want a glass of wine” and “I would like to learn Italian.” Understanding that the root verb exists makes learning its other forms far easier than trying to memorize several dozen different words.

My students in beginning French classes are generally having an immersive, conversation-based experience — following the philosophy, articulated on the website Fluent in 3 Months, that “Grammar acts as a wall between you and fluency – holding you back from the language rather than being a vital part of it.” Like most people thrown into a foreign language, they spent most of their first couple of weeks chaotically confused. Now, I find that their response to their mode of learning depends on how they have studied other languages and the extent to which they have refined their knowledge of English grammar. Those who learned, say, Spanish in American schools find the French language classes frustrating, inefficient, and less than helpful. “I need a structure,” one student complained to me, “or it’s all just a jumble of words.” Those who have had little interest in English grammar and little experience with foreign-language study tend to find, as one student put it, that “I can just go out and speak in the shops. I can order in restaurants. That’s all I need. The rest can come later.”

But what is “the rest”? In French, it entails the difference between the perfect and the imperfect, with no simple past tense to bridge the gap; if you don’t know what perfect means in English, you have a concept to learn before you can start using the structure to help your French learning. Ditto conditional, subjunctive, possessive pronoun (which, importantly, becomes possessive adjective in French), reflexivity. Whether we like it or not, very few high-school students, and only a minority of college students, grasp these ideas in English. Should the foreign-language teacher, then, be tasked with introducing the concepts themselves as well as conveying vocabulary, accent, useful phrases, and so on? Or should they skip all that, putting at risk their students’ ability to build on the structure of the language? To these questions I have no answer — but this fall has shown me more than ever that teaching a foreign language to 20-year-old American students is a daunting, even confounding task.

The term Lingua Franca, as many readers know, stems from a 16^th-century Mediterranean reference to the language used between speakers of different tongues as “the language of the Francs,” the Francs being all Western Europeans – that is, all non-Greeks. Since then, the Francs has come to mean the inhabitants of France – though most would agree that English, not French, is the lingua franca of our era throughout much of the world.

The gist of the title of this blog, which we are laying to rest at the end of this week, has been, in my view, that whatever we as writers are examining in terms of language crosses frontiers – frontiers between pedagogy and common usage, politics and rhetoric, rule-makers and rule-breakers. Because we are a blog that encourages commentary, we also reach through the distance that otherwise separates authors from reader. And our readers, in their responses, have been remarkably frank. That is, like the Franks in Frankish Gaul, they are free, without hindrance (except by way of Chronicle guidelines) in how they respond. They are not, to reference another aspect of “frankness,” always sincere, and occasionally they have been ungenerous. But for the most part, I have deeply appreciated the contribution made by you, our readers, to the discourse in Lingua Franca. Your contributions, criticisms, encouragement, and even tangential argument have kept us inspired and on our toes for more than seven years.

Here are some of my favorite responses. I’ve gone through all my posts, but for the sake of brevity have limited the selections below to posts that garnered more than 40 responses, since, as the commenter “dank48″ once noted, “Sometimes the effect of an article can be measured, in a sense, by the comments it provokes.”

My most commented-on post, on “manspreading,” got a whopping 159 responses, including the following:

• In the past, if you wanted to nag a man, you had to marry him first.
• There’s a big difference between the comfortable “hang” of standing versus the “scrunch” of sitting, & it’s very much more pronounced with age & weight (I won’t go into the details).

The runner-up, on professors’ pet spelling peeves, received 82 responses, among them –

• If I see “loose” one more time, I’ll loose my marbles. Then everybody will suffer.
• “Wierd,” without doubt. It’s just weirdly spelt.

Retired Senator Jon Kyl is now a Sherpa. As The New York Times writes, “In Washington, a Sherpa is an informal but widely known term for a nominee’s guide to the political tundra in the Senate.” Widely known inside the Beltway, perhaps. But although the Times lists Sherpa several times in a search for the term over this last month, if you go back to 2009, the year of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Sherpa gets hardly any play.

I first heard the term in this sense only this past week, when National Public Radio’s Ailsa Chang interviewed former Senator Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican who accompanied Neil Gorsuch on his rounds of the Senate. They had this exchange:

CHANG: So what does a Sherpa exactly do? What is your role?
AYOTTE: Well, it’s kind of a funny name, right…
CHANG: Yeah.
AYOTTE: …’Cause a Sherpa means bringing someone up a mountain. And I guess often the…
CHANG: (Laughter) And carrying all the bags.

As many readers know, the Sherpa are an ethnic group who live on the borders of Nepal and Tibet. The name means “eastern people.” Sherpa are known for their extraordinary skills in mountaineering, and as a result the family business for many decades has been to lead hopeful climbers up the dangerous slopes of the Himalayas. The first Sherpas were hired in 1895 to help a British expedition scale the 26,600-foot peak Nanga Parbat. Both guides died on that climb, setting a pattern that has resulted in an industry with one of the highest rates of injury and mortality in the world. And neither the Sherpas’ extraordinary expertise nor the risks they take always find their proper due in the global climbing community.

As the Sherpa Norbu Tenzing Norgay puts it, “If somebody in America climbs Everest 19 times, he’d be all over Budweiser commercials. Sherpas don’t get the same recognition.” Death and disability benefits for Sherpas, who take the greatest risks on the mountain by setting the ropes and breaking trail, are rarely enough to support their families. Then there is the simple matter of respect. Following an ugly brawl between foreign climbers and Sherpas on Everest in 2013, the veteran guide Norbu Sherpa said of outsiders’ attitudes toward Sherpas: “Many think Sherpas are just porters, which is not true. Sherpas are a community and a cultural entity.” Scientists have learned that after so many years of living at high altitudes, the Sherpas’ mitochondria have evolved to use oxygen more efficiently. As Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, explains, “The work Sherpas are paid to do — carrying loads, installing the aluminum ladders, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope — requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Khumbu Icefall. … high-altitude climbing Sherpas [serve] an élite profession that deservedly commands respect and admiration from mountaineers around the world.”

Given this background, how appropriate is it to call Kyl, an Arizona Republican, a Sherpa — or, as many publications would have it, a sherpa, rendering the term as a generic descriptor? I suppose you could liken Brett Kavanaugh’s tour of Senate offices to scaling a mountain. The loose rocks and crevasses are perhaps labeled Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade, and veteran political operators know their way around those high-risk zones. The summit, presumably, is Scotus. But Jon Kyl, at 76, is not about to shoulder Kavanaugh’s baggage. In fact, the way both Chang and Ayotte describe a Sherpa makes the expert guide sound like what Norbu Sherpa objected to: a porter.

Western prejudice may account for this condescending description. So might the genericizing and name-branding of the term elsewhere in our culture — mama sherpas, parking sherpas, sandwich sherpas, cocktail sherpas, the Sherpa 50 solar panel, Sherpa Adventure Gear, Sherpa Pet Trading. I also wonder if we Westerners sometimes get confused about certain words’ ethnic origins. The individual described by Chang and Ayotte sounds to me less like a Sherpa than like a schlepper, a Yiddish term for a porter. Additionally, a schlepper denotes a person so worthless or stupid that he has no choice but to fetch and carry for others. I don’t know if we collapse the meanings of these terms when we talk about Sherpas in general, but when we talk about, say, doggy carriers, I suspect we do.

As to Jon Kyl — he may know a lot, and Brett Kavanaugh may depend on him for survival as a prospective Supreme Court Justice. But I don’t see him risking his life as he takes the nominee through the ice fall.