Don’t Thank Me?

March 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

Satire can be so subtle. That’s what I thought at first when I read Nick Bilton’s column on digital etiquette in The New York Times. When Mr. Bilton wrote, “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says ‘Thank you’? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google? Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?” I waited for my laugh cue. Surely the “you” whose time was being “wasted” by thank-yous and voice mails was being held up for mockery. Right? Here I am, Mr. Bilton. Ready to get the joke.

But the laugh moment never arrived. Not even when Bilton went on about the difficulty of accessing voice mail. Not even when he wrote—in what I was sure was a send-up of some tech-snotty persona—

My father learned this lesson last year…

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Dueling Titles

May 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: The Battle[']s Joined

≪ Previous: Don’t Thank Me?

Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the terrific British novelist Kate Atkinson. This book is Life After Life by the terrific American novelist Jill McCorkle. A galumphing typo by the compiler of the table of contents at NYTBR? Nope. There’s the review, glowing about McCorkle’s book much as the reviewer of Atkinson’s book had glowed a mere two weeks earlier.

You cannot copyright a title, and good thing too. Otherwise, the dozen iterations of Forever that have appeared in print in the last two years alone (romance, fantasy, werewolves, YA—name your own genre) would have to resort to the thesaurus for Evermore, Ever and Anon, Till Hell Freezes Over, Semper Eadem. But although McCorkle’s and Atkinson’s publishers are…

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The Battle[']s Joined

May 28, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: 1ce Upon a Txt

≪ Previous: Dueling Titles

Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that the United States Board on Geographic Names has clamped down on the efforts of citizens in Thurman, N.Y., to name a nearby mountain Jimmy’s Peak. They[’]ve been removing (in what, misheard, might sound like a different form of mutilation) “the genitive apostrophe and the ‘s’” since 1890, after all, though “the Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.”

I was surprised, however, to discover that there are warring groups devoted on the one hand to the apostrophe, genitive or otherwise, and on the other to its defeat. Of course, the apostrophe hasn[’]t been around all that long—only since the 16^th or 17^th century, depending on its…

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1ce Upon a Txt

June 6, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Silence in the Mind’s Ear

≪ Previous: The Battle[']s Joined

As usually happens when anyone in the academy takes seriously the kinds of communication that happen outside the academy, John McWhorter’s recent TED talk on texting as a new language has prompted a storm of controversy and a rush to the barricades. On the one hand, the promoters of new expressions, code-switching, and the democratization of language; on the other, the defenders of clear, concise prose written in standard English, on which the effects of texting become clear as soon as a student writes “1000s of yrs ago” or puts three exclamation points together in an academic paper.

As a novelist and nonlinguist, I had a slightly different reaction to McWhorter’s presentation. It drove me back to fiction. “Texting is fingered speech,” McWhorter said at one point. “Now we can write the way we talk.” Thus emerges the argument for texting, not just as a handy way of…

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Silence in the Mind’s Ear

June 10, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Who Says Tomato?

≪ Previous: 1ce Upon a Txt

“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is telling audiences like the one at the Hay Literary Festival that Google will be changing our spelling habits. This development, he predicts, will be all to the good for the English language—not because we will start spelling with as iwth, but because we will drop all those irritating, unnecessary silent letters cluttering our orthography.

Maybe, maybe not. I’m no prognosticator. What interested me about Professor Crystal’s forecast was not so much the observation that commonly misspelled words receive an autocorrect from Google’s search engine, but rather his first example of a spelling ripe for change: rhubarb. My partner is Canadian, and as we were on a long drive, I me…

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Who Says Tomato?

June 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Hilary Us Autocorsets

≪ Previous: Silence in the Mind’s Ear

I’ve just wasted a perfectly good morning scrolling through my own pronunciative history. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has produced a series of visualizations of the Cambridge linguist Bert Vaux’s online survey of English dialects, as applied to the continental United States. There are various pretty patterns of blue, red, green, yellow, and the blends in between, and you can check 122 maps showing regional differences in pronunciation, word choice, and syntax according to the questions posed by the survey.

Now, clicking on the maps—and trying to guess, ahead of time, at the four most popular answers to each question—is fun all by itself. I couldn’t guess, for instance, at No. 83, “what do you call an easy course?” but I was all over No. 36, “how do you pronounce the c in grocery?” But more interesting, for me, was …

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Hilary Us Autocorsets

June 23, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Coinages of the Realm

≪ Previous: Who Says Tomato?

It’s not often I have to hold my legs together to contain myself laughing at some language goof or other. Usually it’s just a know-it-all smile or a forced chuckle. But “The 30 Most Hilarious Autocorrect Struggles Ever” had me weeping with giggles. At the risk of ruining the humor by dissecting it, I’m going to speculate on why.

It’s not the occasionally sexual or scatological results of the autocorrections. (Most of those are not printable in this blog, so you’ll have to click the link.) When you grow up with a brother and then have two sons, you tire of potty humor pretty quickly. And like most of my female friends, I’m an eye-roller when it comes to jokes about sexual organs.

For a while, I thought the humor resided in the effect of what’s known as coprolalia, the involuntary uttering of socially inappropriate words or phrases that we simplistically associate…

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Coinages of the Realm

July 2, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: How to Heart

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(Image by Flicker user Payton Chung)

I’m calling it neolohunger: the yearning—to which Calvin Trillin recently confessed in The New York Times and from which I also suffer—to, in Trillin’s words, “slip a phrase into the language.”

The phrase he holds up for envy is Tom Brokaw’s “the greatest generation,” referring to those who fought World War II and went on to rebuild America and Europe. Indeed, the phrase is now instantly familiar, even to those who don’t consider that generation to be so very great. For me, the gold ring was nabbed by Stephen Colbert when he came up with truthiness, which went on to become the 2005 Word of the Year.

Note that we’re not talking here, strictly speaking, about coinage. Surely someone had called some group of people the greatest generation before Brokaw,…

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How to Heart

July 11, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Mind Your Commas, Justin Bieber! Kisses.

≪ Previous: Coinages of the Realm

It began as a logo, designed by Milton Glaser, for an advertising campaign for the City of New York. The heart shape is a rebus, a picture used to replace a word, like the early-reading books that insert pictures of the main characters, their house, their pitcher of milk, etc. The word being replaced is “love.” Now, that metaphor deserves a slight pause before we proceed. The heart has not always and everywhere stood for love. As Robert Erickson pointed out in his brilliant book The Language of the Heart, much Enlightenment thinking was given over to debates between aligning the heart with language, writing, and thought or with sex, passion, and gender (women have heart, men have mind, and so on). Partly as a result of those debates, we have come to associate the image of a heart—particularly a red, beating one of the I Love Lucy variety—not simply with affection or kindness,…

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Mind Your Commas, Justin Bieber! Kisses.

July 15, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Grading Congressmen, Grading Students

≪ Previous: How to Heart

Many years ago, a guy I’d known when I was in school in Brussels came to the States, and I was astonished to discover that he was fluent in English. During my time in Belgium, we had spoken only in French. Why hadn’t he let me know—especially since my French, though fluent, was not exactly native? “You know, I’m a funny guy,” he said, “or I like to think I am. But in English, I cannot play with the language.”

That’s exactly my experience in the two other languages I speak passably, and it informs my response to the news making the rounds, complete with video, of Brazilian schoolchildren correcting celebrities’ tweets. The children are adorable, of course, and the celebrities seem mostly to be dimwits. (That is, assuming they are celebrities. Whether these glitzy folks are actually tweeting or the 140 characters are coming from their minions or their fan clubs is an…

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Grading Congressmen, Grading Students

July 24, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: The Internet, That Old Scapegoat

≪ Previous: Mind Your Commas, Justin Bieber! Kisses.

Every now and then, in academic departments where I’ve worked, faculty members have exchanged graded papers and met to compare and contrast approaches to marking and grading student prose. There’s always an element of anxiety to this otherwise useful exercise: am I missing important points? injecting my own prejudices? failing to grade according to my own rubric? missing or overemphasizing mechanical errors? grading too harshly or not harshly enough? All credit, then, to Representative Mark Takano (Democrat of California, henceforth known as “the Teacher”) for making public his markup and grading of Representative Bill Cassidy’s (Republican of Louisiana, henceforth known as “the Student”) circulated letter opposing the U.S. Senate’s immigration bill.

Now, both the letter and the “grade” are political theater. Still, there’s an impressive amount of red ink between…

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The Internet, That Old Scapegoat

July 28, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Money and Dames

≪ Previous: Grading Congressmen, Grading Students

A new Pew study is out, reporting the effects of the digital revolution on student writing. It’s a broad study with dozens of both thought-provoking conclusions and what strike me as flawed equivalencies. For now, I’ll focus on just two points.

The first is that I learned of the study through an article on Atlantic Wire titled “The Internet Is Making Writing Worse.” Well, dog bites man, I thought. But I clicked on the link to learn that the Pew study reaches no such conclusion. It opens with the statement, “A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.” How did we get from that opener to the Atlantic Wire headline? Well, the reporter focuses on what he calls “academic…

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Money and Dames

August 15, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: What’s Greek About It?

≪ Previous: The Internet, That Old Scapegoat

A good piano tuner can tell when a note resonates perfectly. Such was the feeling in some circles when The New York Sun came up with female dollar as a description of the imagined state of things if President Obama were to appoint Janet Yellen as the head of the Federal Reserve. So right-on was the term that The Wall Street Journal, no slavish admirer of the Sun’s journalistic standards, picked it up right away, defining it, in regard to Ms. Yellen, as a “default policy” to “keep spiking the punchbowl.”

Women, of course, are usually in charge of the punchbowl, and I suppose spiking it makes everyone happy. But being in favor of quantitative easing doesn’t altogether explain the ring of female dollar. It sounds like a term we’ve been carrying around inside us for a long time—and indeed, though a Google Ngram shows almost no use of it in the last two centuries, there are…

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What’s Greek About It?

August 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: You Never Even Call Me by My Name

≪ Previous: Money and Dames

As many of us return to campus this fall, we’ll be passing by various buildings adorned with Greek letters that fewer can identify every year. I’m talking about the fraternity and sorority houses, of course—what’s known as Greek life and causes an annual tug-of-war at many institutions. Alumni/ae wax nostalgic over the lifelong bonding that marked their Greek experience. Faculty complain of the hungover frat members they see on Friday mornings. Deans tally the numbers hauled off to the hospital. Women’s and minority organizations criticize gender-related violence and exclusionary policies. And current members of fraternities and sororities tune it all out in order to plan their fall bash and their rush protocols.

Here’s a sign of my generation: For years after I began teaching in the 1980s, I didn’t understand what Greek life referred to. I thought GLO stood for some…

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You Never Even Call Me by My Name

August 28, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: We’re on the Eve of Disruption

≪ Previous: What’s Greek About It?

I never thought I’d be tempted by those gender-neutral pronouns, hir and ze and so on. But the case of Chelsea Manning does give one pause. On August 22, The New York Times announced that Private Manning, who is transgender, had requested henceforward to be referred to as female and addressed as “Chelsea.”

Curiously, as many commenters noted, in reporting the story the Times continued to refer to the whistle-blower-formerly-known-as-Bradley as he.

I’ve always thought the rule of thumb was to address people the way they wanted to be addressed. In Breaking Bad, when Walter Jr. asks to be called “Flynn,” I think his parents should set aside the generational suffix and call him Flynn until he changes his mind. This attitude has been tested over the years. My former mother-in-law, seeing my name in print, used to cross out my surname with heavy black marker and write my…

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We’re on the Eve of Disruption

September 10, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: On Quantity

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I’m feeling very late to the party. A colleague sent a recent article by Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic, which apparently echoed a post by Andy Rachleff on the Web site TechCrunch, both on the term disruptive. Last I heard, disruptive described my son’s behavior when he ate too many brownies at the Scout Jamboree. Back then, disruptive behavior was a tendency to be tamed or channeled. Now it’s a theory, a strategy, a goal. Not to mention an approach that academics need to be aware of, since, as Shulevitz points out, “Disruption, well, disrupts—not just ‘the status quo,’ but people’s lives.”

Let me see if I can wrap my head around the positive spin on disruption. In business, you invent a product and then go on to improve, update, and streamline it so you can keep selling new and more expensive gizmos even to those who bought your gizmo in the first place. Then …

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On Quantity

September 19, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: The Genette Game

≪ Previous: We’re on the Eve of Disruption

Once every semester my students perform what I call the Molly Bloom exercise in class. We read aloud the first page of Molly’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses and I proffer my completely invented notion of Joyce’s technique. He decided, I say, to set down as closely as possible the contents of Molly’s mind as she lay in bed. He determined that thought never stops, and most of us think in words. He decided that Molly did not “think” punctuation. And he figured that Molly had a word, or phrase, that she was apt to use and that suggested something about her personality: the word, in Molly’s case, was Yes. I then instruct the students to choose a person they know very well, picture that person engaged in some activity during which they can think to their heart’s content, and choose that person’s word or phrase (common choices: like, dude, I dunno, seriously, OK, this is the …

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The Genette Game

September 22, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: If This, Then That

≪ Previous: On Quantity

I’m teaching a new course this term on what’s commonly known as intertextuality—the web of relations among texts (books, poems, stories, essays, what have you) and the ways in which they comment on, parody, undermine, and otherwise mess with each other. We began with a few theorists, among them the French structuralist Gérard Genette, whose book Palimpsests attempts to name and distinguish various ways of thinking about intertextuality.

By way of illustration, Genette proposes Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid on the one hand, and Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses on the other. In Genette’s phraseology, both the Aeneid and Ulysses are hypertexts, but their relationships to the hypotext (the Odyssey) differ substantially. To bring the comparison down to size, he suggests an old French saying, “Le temps est un grand maître,” or “Time is a great master.”…

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If This, Then That

October 1, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: The Jargon Prize

≪ Previous: The Genette Game

Many months ago, I celebrated what I still call the subjunctive mood. Now I’m going to rant.

We needn’t call it the subjunctive. Let’s call it contrary-to-fact expressions, or contrafactuals. We all know that the language has evolved to render the previously standard verb form in these expressions almost obsolete. Saying, as most do, “If I was hungry, I’d eat your darn casserole,” leaves no room for misunderstanding. The speaker is proclaiming himself not hungry—or at least not hungry enough for Mom’s macaroni tuna. Stuffed shirts may balk at such language use, or circle it angrily on students’ papers, but most of us have accepted the vanishing subjunctive as a natural development, unlike, say, anthropogenic global warming.

The real danger lies in the hypercorrective use of contrafactual locutions when nothing is contrary to fact. Like the use of “whomever” as a…

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The Jargon Prize

October 9, 2013, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Goodbye to All That E-Mail

≪ Previous: If This, Then That

The rumor that unsubscribing yourself from an unwanted e-mail list tends to regenerate your address in other unwanted e-mail blasts bears fruit, in my case, with electronic scatter-bombs from sites promoting educational administration and technology. I have never, for the record, had anything to do with either of these areas of expertise. But I receive regular communications titled “Collegiality from a Positive Leadership Perspective,” “iOS, Android and Mobile Development Tools in Ed Tech,” “Have a Firm Grip on Your Metrics Reviews,” and the like. Indeed, the more I unsubscribe, the more my junk mail in these areas grows.

I felt right at home, then, reading about The Times Higher Education’s Higher Education Jargon Competition. Last year’s winner felt almost like local dialect:

“We can reframe the way we define it, so that it’s not viewed as simply foregrounding…

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