Remember the good old days, when we complained about students e-mailing us all the time?  Like back in 2006, when The New York Times ran an article on students’ pestering of their professors with e-mail:

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

Professors way back then complained that students sent e-mail “with a familiarity that bordered on the imperative”; that junior faculty “struggle with how to respond [because] their tenure prospects may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility”; that e-mail made them feel “as if I ought to be on call all the time.”

In that golden era, before we got used to being “another service that students, as consumers, are buying,” we had the…

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Well, we have a government again. But since the debates over money and politics are due to rev up before their jets have even cooled, let’s take a moment to look at one very messy metaphor.

I’m referring, of course, to the so-called raising of the debt ceiling.

Since George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, plenty of ink has been spilled over political speech. Most of the ink, today, is devoted to ways of manipulating the public into thinking black is white and day is night. Occasionally, though, you run across a phrase so genuinely misguided that finding new language is not only a shrewd move but the only fair and sane step to take. When it comes to debt ceiling, you want to ask, as George Lakoff did last year of fiscal cliff, “Why do some metaphors have far more staying power than others, even when they give a misleading picture of a crucial national issue?”
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The title of the new Daniel Radcliffe vehicle, Kill Your Darlings, cleverly cross-references a familiar piece of writerly advice and the suggestion of murder. It also, according to my Harry-Potter-besotted students, effectively nullifies that piece of advice for at least as long as it conjures, not ruthless editing, but the image of a skinny, innocent, bespectacled Allen Ginsberg.

This short classroom discussion got me ruminating on writing advice. Killing darlings is usually a bitter but memorable pill, if you can get it down your gullet. A New Yorker editor once handed it to me in a different form. “You must learn,” she said in the gravelly voice of experience, “to write badly.” Meaning: to take the risks of stop-and-start dialogue, of bodies described without metaphor, of entering into the voice of an inarticulate protagonist; to dare to describe a boring place, as Flaubert…

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It’s around this time in the semester that I feel the particular burden of being a teacher of creative writing in an English department within a liberal-arts college. Not that we are any more burdened, generally, than other profs grading midterms. But it’s a peculiar position to be in when it comes to marking student prose for questions of usage.

Most, if not all, students come to college believing that their English teachers are the ones in charge of appropriate use of written language. Many of these same students begin their college careers in some sort of expository writing class that is taught either by a member of the English department or by a writing instructor in a composition or comp/rhet program that both students and professors from other departments view as a wholly owned subsidiary of the English department.

As these students emerge from said comp courses, or from …

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For some reason, my ears were tuned to a whole nother frequency last week. That is, I heard the word nother everywhere I turned. Mostly it followed the word whole, though I’d swear someone said, “That’s an entire nother story” once, and someone else dismissed “a complete nother idea.” There’s even a children’s book series by someone suspiciously named Dr. Cuthbert Soup that includes A Whole Nother Story, Another Whole Nother Story, and No Other Story (Whole Nother Story).

I knew the word was resulting from splitting another with an adjective, and that—as, occasionally, with split infinitives—the splitting was necessary for clarity of meaning. Another whole frequency wouldn’t mean the same thing, and An entire another idea is repetitive. Even a whole other frequency doesn’t have quite the same nuance of meaning.

Being curious, I went looking for nother, and…

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The New York Times’s “Draft” column began about 18 months ago with an essay by the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri on the power of sentences. It’s been going strong since. Its contributions run the gamut, from well-known writers like Lahiri, Colm Tóibín, Philip Lopate, and the like to newbies who sometimes sound silly or self-indulgent but who occasionally, as in a recent contribution from Mason Currey, get a mind to thinking.

Currey’s topic was the letter. We’ve all wrung our hands to dishrags with this one, bemoaning the loss of the elegant hand-written missive, the struggles of the postal service, the desolate future for archivists with no tattered physical correspondence to archive. I agree about the sadness of it all, because I am a child of my time. I wrote letters home every week, from summer camp and college and bumming around Europe and my various jobs and heartbreaks in…

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Punctuating dialogue, for reasons I fail to understand completely, is one of the hardest things for my fiction-writing students to master. Autocorrect inserts a capital after any form of so-called terminal punctuation, so “Are you going out?” he asked becomes “Are you going out?” He asked. Certain that the verb accompanying the speaker’s name is the dialogue tag, many students write, She laughed, “That’s a funny joke.” Master classes on the rules, the craft, and the art of punctuating dialogue make some impression, but deeply confused students often default to abjuring any sort of punctuation: “I think I’ll go out” he said “after I’ve done the laundry.”

Almost all conventions regarding punctuation in dialogue rely on common sense. If the quoted speech is part of the sentence as a whole, the punctuation between it and the dialogue tag should not be terminal, nor should the first letter of the tag be capitalized. If the speaker is interrupted, a dash could go before the quotation mark; if the speaker’s tag interrupts the speech, dashes should lie outside punctuation marks. And so on.

But the simplest and most basic mark of punctuation we associate with dialogue receives almost no scrutiny, even though the basis of the convention is the hardest to discern. I refer to the comma.

The verb said, for starters, is a transitive verb. We don’t simply say; we always say something. Generally, we don’t like to separate transitive verbs from their objects with commas, any more than we separate subjects from verbs with commas. You would not, for instance, write He hit, Bobby or I steered, my 10-foot catamaran around the shoals before landing safely in the harbor. Yet the convention of using a comma to initiate a line of quoted speech has so hardened into a rule that three out of four undergraduates, by my estimate, will insert commas before anything in quotes. Thus we get:

Hemingway wrote, “Hills like White Elephants.”

I liked, “The Lottery” better than, “The Ones Who Walk Away From  Omelas.”

Before making, “Castello Cavalcanti” Wes Anderson had never filmed a commercial.

Monet’s, “Impression Sunrise” is one of his most famous paintings.

It’s easy enough, I suppose, to instruct students to use commas before quoted speech and not before titles. But handing them a rule doesn’t provide a rationale. Moreover, we can all think of instances of quoted speech that don’t call for commas.

He’s the kind of guy who says “Whatever” to whatever you propose.

You say “Come home this minute” every time I ask if I can stay out late.

The judgment call regarding such commas is illustrated in this very post. In my first paragraph, I followed the introductory word write with a comma; in the fourth paragraph, I left it without. I made this apparently inconsistent choice instinctively, and my editor did not change it. James Harbeck, who writes the blog Sesquiotica, expresses the rationale for comma use in dialogue sensitively if not succinctly:

When the quoted material is within a narrative frame—even if it’s the only thing in the narrative frame—and we’re being taken to the scene, as it were, a comma is generally used. But when the quoted material is being treated as an instance of an utterance of that phrase, and the verb is the main thing rather than being an entrance point to dialogue (in other words, when the quoted material is truly the complement of the verb rather than an act of locution introduced), a comma is not called for.

You can find illustrative examples in his “Commas Before Quotes” post. The essential element here, I think—and the one I try to impress on students, if they’re not too glazed-eyed to listen—is that dialogue tag words (said, shouted, whisper, write, and so on) can take us to the scene. The comma is the curtain parting, letting the drama emerge. If the descriptive quality of the verb takes precedence over the dramatic emergence of the speech, the comma is a distraction and a hindrance.

It’s a long explication, not a short rule. But sometimes the long way around is the only way in.

I’m writing under deadline, having promised this post to my editor this morning, and I will get it to her this morning, if you count “morning” as lasting until 1:00 p.m., which is when civilized people eat lunch, right?

It is the season to procrastinate. Our excuses are manifold—too many committee meetings, exams to grade, application files to review, holiday cards to mail, presents to purchase, students to reassure, recommendations to write. One can almost revel in it, if one has incurable graphophobia, like old Saussure.

Saussure?

Apparently so, according to Ingrid Piller of Language on the Move, who reports on an archive of letters Saussure sent with varying explanations for his tardiness in delivering an article. The father of 20th-century linguistics had enormous trouble setting pen to paper. Colleagues attributed his procrastination to perfectionism and the incredible care he wished to take in presenting such new concepts. But let’s face it. Those are the excuses presented by most of my students (the ones who’ve run out of claims to dying grandmothers and lingering flu symptoms) when they beg for a last-minute extension. They’re the excuses I give my editor when I run past the noon deadline.

Still, procrastination in writing feels different, doesn’t it, from putting off scrubbing the bathroom or reading applications? Its roots seem to lie less in the warm soil of Saussure’s paresse scripturale (scriptorial laziness) than in the dry, strangulating mud of horreure d’ecrire.

Just yesterday, I met with a student who wanted to rewrite a piece she’d composed early in the semester, but she felt she had grown so much as a writer that the syntax of her September sentences and the way she’d leapt from paragraph to paragraph felt all wrong, like the work of someone else. No problem, I told her. You still want to write the same story, with the same character, but you have new (and, one hopes, more enlightened) ways to go about it. Keep the earlier version open on your desk and take out a new pad of paper, or open a new file on the computer. Then tell yourself you’re just going to write or type the story over again. Within half a sentence, your enriched sensibility will take over, and new sentences, a new point of view, a different scene will start presenting themselves.

Her eyes widened. I asked what was the matter. Ink was cheap, I said. Typing or scribbling would do no damage to her finger muscles. “But the page,” she said just above a whisper. “It’ll be blank.”

Yes, I know. That is the horror. Of course, it should pass quickly—write one sentence, and the page is no longer blank. But then there’s the next sentence, and the one after that.

Saussure’s procrastination, and my own, remind me of what I learned when I first tried downhill skiing at the advanced age of 17. To execute graceful turns as you descend the hill, you need to descend fast enough for the edge of the downhill ski to dig into the snow and swing you around. You won’t really stop being frightened of those turns until you work up enough speed to be sure they’ll work. But you won’t be able to work up that speed until you stop being frightened. The analogy to graphophobia is that you won’t stop fearing the blank page until you have filled it, but you can’t begin to fill it until you get over your fear of it.

Saussure managed to get his brilliant work out … barely. His Cours de Linguistique Générale was published posthumously. So following in his footsteps may make us feel we have brilliant companionship on the path of procrastination, but it does little else. We just have to get on the skis, face the slope, and push off. Here I go. In just a minute. Or maybe two.

I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years was a woman’s, at least in this country. Despite the impression that a female avatar would be “less knowledgeable,” than a male, according to the Stanford researcher Clifford Nass, Apple’s initial roll-out was given a female voice because female voices are preferred in the “helper or assistant role.” The exception, at least at first, was in France and in Britain, where users apparently go for knowledge over subservience. But the female avatar is ubiquitous enough to have spawned at least one Hollywood movie, Spike Jonze’s new “neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance,” Her.

These days, users can change Siri’s voice to male or female at their pleasure. Now there’s a social-science project in the making. Will more of us opt for the authoritative male voice, or the soothing female one? Will we want so-called male language, which apparently privileges exact numbers (two, five) or female language, which apparently waxes vague (some, a few)? Am I the only one who finds such assumptions about voice pitch and word choice a little disturbing?

In Japanese phone-answering systems, automated male voices get the responsible business, like executing stock transactions, but female voices field the majority of the initial queries. In fact, Japan’s chief marker of gender doesn’t lie with the virtual avatar, but with the thousands of real human beings who make up the bulk of professional phone respondents. Every year, the All-Japan Phone-Answering Competition yields a consensus on the ideal voice for fielding customer queries and complaints. Almost all the more than 12,000 contestants are female, and among them, higher voices are deemed more desirable. Delicate phrasing, the right balance of friendliness, and an overarching politeness complete the profile. This year, the winner, Kiyomi Kusunoki, did not speak “in a squeaky voice,” which I take as a sign of progress, but men are a long way from grabbing this particular prize.

One thing seems certain: If enough of us start opting for a male voice on our hand-held devices and GPS systems, Siri will no longer be called “sassy.” Nor probably will he or she (perhaps, at last, we should use ze) be called Siri, a name that originated with one of the inventors of the virtual voice, who named his daughter after “the beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” (In the U.K., the male voice has long been known as Daniel, meaning “God is my judge.”) Most alarming for its inventors, the virtual voice may devolve into, well, what it is: a technology rather than a personality, as the researcher Leila Takayama has explained.

And, we might add, a technology developed by folks who rely a great deal on common perceptions of what it means to be, and to express oneself as, male or female. Breaking new grounds in gender expectations is not, in this case, the destination on the virtual map.

I’m on a phrase hunt, and coming up more or less empty. Some time back, my colleague Ben Yagoda ran through the various ways in which people acknowledge thanks, and grumblings arose at several of them. But for most of these phrases, there’s some sort of explanation. You’re welcome suggests that the thanker is welcome to whatever favor was done. No worries or No problem suggest that the favor was no big deal and doesn’t require thanks. But what about You bet?

I hear the phrase more and more often—in conversation, on the radio, in films. It’s difficult to place the rise of the phrase as a response to “Thank you.” Printed instances of You bet (capital Y) have risen fivefold in the last 50 years, according to Google Ngrams, and it’s fair to say that colloquial instances have risen even faster. But these could easily be examples of You bet as a strong affirmative:

“Want a Porsche for your birthday?”

“You bet!”

Here, it’s not hard to guess at the etymology. The response is short for You bet your boots or You bet your life, or whatever valuable thing you might have around. In other words, the speaker is inviting the interlocutor to place a sure bet on his agreement to the proposition. The OED cites this “asseverative phrase” as beginning around the middle of the 19^th century, in exchanges like P.G. Wodehouse’s “You will order yourself something substantial, marvel-child?” “Bet your life,” said the son and heir tersely.

You bet as a response to Thank you is a bit trickier. If it’s a strong affirmative, it reads something like this:

“Thank you for my birthday Porsche.”

“Yes!”

Granted, other languages have responses that make little to no sense: Bitte schön, for instance, translates as Please pretty. And plenty of bloggers gripe about the rising tide of You bet. But I find no answer as to when we Americans (yes, it’s mostly Americans) started proposing a bet specifically in response to an expression of gratitude. The OED doesn’t list this use. My own random sampling of linguaphiles has produced mostly the guess that You bet here means something like “You can bet on my being there for you.” This may be the best answer, though something in it doesn’t ring true to the usages I hear on media—listen just once to Kai Ryssdal on public radio’s Marketplace—and in my daily life. I’ve even wondered if the phrase could be a corruption of something else, the way that my students now write “from the gecko” when their spell checker doesn’t approve git-go. But I can’t trace a line back to any you’re-welcome-type response that might have evolved into You bet.

So, Lingua Franca community, here’s your first challenge of 2014. Who can locate where, and why, we started using this asseverative phrase as a colloquial version of You’re welcome? First to nail it wins all the bets.

“Why Wasn’t It ‘Grapes of Glee’?” asked The New York Times last week, practically demanding my attention. The article was on a study using big-data techniques to document the correlation between the so-called economic-misery index and what the researchers called the literary-misery index. According to the report, published in Plos One, it takes about 11 years for words in the economic-misery index to surface in books. Authors absorb words from the culture slowly: “We do have a collective memory that conditions the way we write,” said one of the authors, “and … economics is a very important driver of that.”

The Times reporter took this information to two of America’s reigning contemporary literary figures, Chang-Rae Lee and Jane Smiley, who seemed bemused but not about to argue with hard data. Your correspondent, however was a bit more skeptical.

I wondered what the Times, and by extension the authors of the study, meant by the term literary. They had relied on the Google N-gram Viewer, which, as we all know, searches lots of books.

If something is written in a book, by one definition, it’s literature. Lee and Smiley are novelists. Most contemporary readers, asked about literature, will refer to fiction, or perhaps to poetry.

But plenty of published books are not self-consciously literary in the way that fiction and poetry often are, and one might think that, even with a lag effect, the correlation between economics and idiom might be less robust in such self-consciously literary genres.

Of course, there’s the question of the market as well—we’re not talking here just about what language authors are using, but what books publishers are choosing to produce and distribute to the book-buying public.

I perused the original article. Now, I am close to illiterate when it comes to social-science equations. Give me a formula like

and I skip ahead to the words I can read. But I did read the article through to the section on methods, where I found this bit of information from the authors: “We considered English-language books, in four distinct corpora (all books in English, fiction books in English, American English books, and British English books).”

Wait a moment. The Times hadn’t said anything about those corpora. It had referred simply to literature and then gone quoting Lee and Smiley. I backed up to the tables proving the study’s results and found this:

For purposes of this post, we’ll leave aside my discovery here of the delightful new word hedonometer. Let’s focus, instead, on data showing that the highest degree of correlation lies between literary misery expressed in English books as a whole and economic misery from 11 years earlier. But in the notes, we find that one of the scores omitted, for lack of statistically significant correlation with economic misery, was the literary misery in fiction books.

In other words, the correlation among books in general is so strong that it overcomes what is essentially a noncorrelation in books by people like Chang-Rae Lee and Jane Smiley.

Well, ta-da. What I think of as literature, and perhaps you think of as literature, contains language that does not have all that direct a correlation with economic ups and downs. It does change over time, certainly—Lee and Smiley and just about any other writer will acknowledge such change during their career trajectories. Moreover, however self-conscious we may be about our use of language, we live in the same ever-changing stream as everyone else and are bound to feel its idioms.

But if there is a basic qualitative difference between the way language is used in Lee’s On Such A Full Sea and the way it’s used in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, then Plos One’s “Books Average Previous Decade of Economic Misery” may, inadvertently, suggest one way of getting a handle on that difference.

A colleague sent me a contest offering from the venerable American Scholar, magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Titled “Lingua Americana,” it begins by setting out examples of “wonderfully expressive [English] words that defy translation,” including flaky, finagle, and hullaballoo. Remember those words; we’ll return to them.

The contest then proceeds to list untranslatable words that it considers “a bit of a mouthful,” like schadenfreude, or simply unacceptably non-English, like frisson, simpatico, and mensch. For such “foreignisms,” we have not come up with truly English (or, in keeping with the title of the contest, truly American) versions.

Well, I’ll be dad-gummed. You mean we red-blooded Americans, with all our smarts and get-up-and-go, haven’t found a way to call a man a mensch except to call him a mensch? Gives me a helluva frisson just to contemplate it.

Okay, I’ll leave off the hillbilly snark. But isn’t it a little late, even for a publication calling itself The American Scholar, to start shutting the barn door on the English language? I thought we were the sponge language, the one that looks at newly arrived words the way my garden regards so-called weeds: as volunteers. Isn’t that how we got hors d’oeuvres? Bosses? Bananas and rodeos?

Let’s go back to those untranslatable English words. Flaky, obviously, comes from flake, that good old English word denoting soft bits of crust, snow, dandruff, what have you. There seems to be controversy over its origins, however. Some argue for Norse and others for Old High German; none argues for Kent or Philadelphia. Finagle, an Americanism meaning to obtain by trickery, doesn’t appear until the early 20th century but seems to derive from the Britishism fainaigue, which in turn combines feign, to pretend (from the old French feindre) and the French-derived ague, or “acute sickness.”

Hullaballoo grew a little closer to home, stemming from the Scots baloo, for lullaby, to which hulla was presumably added when the good-nights got out of hand. But then again, baloo itself has been traced to the old French bas le loup, or “down with the wolf,” a way of referring to calming lullabies.

Let us review. The American Scholar wishes us to enter a contest in which we find English words for such delightful but untranslatable expressions as schadenfreude, frisson, simpatico, and mensch. Well, I think I’ve got them. Ready? Schadenfreude. Frisson. Simpatico. Mensch.

Can I have my tote bag now?

The writer Bich Minh Nguyen posted a question on Facebook the other day that drew a swell of discussion:

Grammar dilemma over here. According to grammar sites we’re supposed to write “Hi, Jane” rather than “Hi Jane” (because “Hi” is different from “Dear”). But this just doesn’t sit right with me. I dislike the two commas involved: “Hi, Jane,” looks cluttered compared to “Hi Jane.” I’m starting to feel a little anxious whenever I start an email. Will the person I’m writing disapprove of my (lack of) grammar? Which path should I take?

Responses ranged from the euphonic (“’Yo Jane!’ has a nice ring to it”) to the technical (“Personally sometimes I use the comma, other times not; the not being when I am using Siri on a I-device and Siri does not always understand it is supposed to insert a comma rather than spell out the word ‘comma’”). Though several writers suggested the syntactic approach (“’Dear Jane’ starts with an adjective; ‘Hi, Jane’ starts with an interjection”), the solutions offered with that premise quickly became problematic. Those advocating the initial comma tended to prefer end punctuation after the addressee’s name, leaving Bich with an uncomfortable choice between end-stopping the email just after it begins (“Hi, Jane. Hope you’re well”) or waxing overly enthusiastic (“Hi, Jane! Hope you’re well”). One respondent admitted “cheating,” “in that I most likely follow the whole salutation not with a comma but with an m-dash or a colon.” Those arguing against the initial comma gave no quarter: “I’m for overthrow,” wrote one respondent. “The end of the unnecessary comma’s dominance is nigh.”

Bich herself participated in the thread with her usual good humor. “I feel like a ghost ship of cannibal commas is coming right at me,” she wrote—at which point I asked if she and I might correspond a bit about this urgent matter.

And so we did. Following are a few excerpts, which Bich has kindly allowed me to reproduce.

Hi, Bich!

I’m going to try just about every iteration of this greeting, to see how we do. Of course, the alternative some of us have started practicing is to leave off the “Hi” and start simply “Bich,” though that seems abrupt to me. And it’s at the point where “Dear Bich” feels as if I’m about to propose marriage or gently end our relationship.

Hi, Lucy–

As I’m trying out the m-dash, I’m feeling kind of tense. The look of the line signals tension to me, a sense of halting, as it does in poetry.

Part of the problem is that most informal salutations are supposed to sound friendly, which “Hi” generally conveys. Starting with just the person’s name seems abrupt; starting with just “Hi,” without any name, seems vague and borderline rude.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, especially because more and more people have been writing “Hi, Bich,” in their emails to me. I can’t bear the awkward double comma but at the same time I wouldn’t want anyone to scorn my grasp of grammar!

Does that mean the whole thing is really about self-consciousness, about how our email personas are established? In terms of grammar I’ve always been one to follow the “rules,” but I’m feeling rebellious about this one.

I’m completely with you, Bich. And you’ll notice that in this response I managed not to use any salutation at all but just to use your name in the first sentence, as though we were having a conversation. That’s the way I like to avoid the whole grammatical mess when the emails are close enough together. Of course, when they aren’t, it rears its head again. And then I don’t know how this translates cross-culturally, either. I’ve been corresponding with a friend in Pakistan who still uses “Dear Lucy,” which is kind of a relief, but I’m afraid I’ll slip and write “Hi Shazia” at some point and she’ll be offended!

Do you really think the email salutation thing has been around long enough to have rules? Feels to me as though we’re stuck somewhere between letters and conversations and so the rules don’t match up.

 

I try to do the same thing, Lucy, after a correspondence has been started. I basically try to avoid salutations in email whenever possible. It seems to me that any kind of formality can be read as aloof. I worry about this. As a result, I use exclamation points far more often than I ever would have imagined. My emails are filled with them!

I’m really pulling for “Hi Jane” to become the norm. It’s brief, it’s friendly, it’s uncluttered. Grammar does change, after all. I think, with a lot of support, we can make this happen.

Email sign-offs are easier for me because “All best” and “Best” are so widely used and accepted and because it’s easier to end a message by wishing someone well. As in:

Hope you’re well!

Bich

So there you have it, a panoply of choices. Not to mention that Bich and I would like to give the lie to that perfidious rumor that writers don’t correspond these days.

Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of Pioneer Girl, just published by Viking.

I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The negative reviews, that is, the ones that said, “Wi-Fi here is really terrible.” Yes.

I’m uncomfortable in countries where I don’t speak the language. My short-term experiences in Italy, which include two Italians playing a joke by helping me onto a train going south rather than north at 2:00 a.m., suggest that in much of Italy, solo Italiano is to be expected. So while others are blogging this spring, I will be trying to learn enough of the language not to embarrass myself at the local trattoria.

My choices here in Connecticut are many. I can take a beginning course in Italian free at the college where I teach. I can attend a community-learning course at my local library. I can buy CDs or download a curriculum from Rosetta Stone. I can buy one of the dozens of Italian for Dummies-type books out there. I can download an app for my iPod. Decisions, decisions!

I haven’t learned a new language in 35 years. I became fluent in French and German by first learning them in school and then immersing myself. I spent a semester at a lycée in Belgium, two summers working as a pastry salesgirl in France, and four months as a waitress at a ski hotel in Austria. I was seeking adventure, not language fluency, but as anyone who’s had similar experiences can attest, after awhile you open your mouth and phrases start spilling out. In my twenties, living in Southern California, I determined to learn Spanish and signed up for a community-college course, where I found myself frustrated simultaneously by the apparently slow pace and my own inability to memorize at the speeds I had been used to.

Fast forward to 2014. I decided against the free intro college course, perhaps inadvisedly, because I figured its focus on grammar would be more than I needed, both in terms of the week-in-Tuscany goal and in terms of my own background in Latin as well as French. Conversational Italian, I told people, was what I was seeking. But before spending hundreds of dollars on Rosetta Stone, I thought I’d give the $5.99 iPod app, 24/7 Tutor, a try.

As far as it goes—and I expect other apps are similar—it’s not bad. For each level, I get a list of vocabulary, including handy phrases like dov’è il bagno, and various approaches to learning the list—multiple choices, puzzles, spelling, and speaking with audio feedback. The lists increase in complexity to phrases like Everything is so interesting! and Let’s go to the seashore. We’re not exactly discussing Dante, but that’s not our goal.

On the other hand, I don’t see how anyone who doesn’t already understand (in this case) romance languages can possibly memorize all these phrases. What sense can it make that giorno and pomeriggio take buon whereas sera and notte take buona? When you ask, familiarly, for a name, how are you supposed to remember not only to use ti but also to make the verb chiami when in the formal you use si and chiama? For such things, obviously, you have to grasp the nuances between the familiar and the formal and the convention of gendered nouns. As I work through my simple lessons, I find myself going online—and yes, I’ve now ordered a book—to conjugate the verbs, with their always fascinating irregularities. I’ve also gotten the basic rule about the pronunciation of the consonant c—though, again, had I not experienced similar conventions about pronunciation in other romance languages, I’d be going a little nuts with ci and chi and c’è and come.

And then I wonder: What about all these questions we’re asking? Where’s the bathroom, what sort of work do you do, what’s happening? Do the people who create these apps realize that travelers may actually ask these questions and get answers? “The bathroom? Well, it’s around the corner, behind the barbershop, 20 paces then turn left, you can’t miss it, there’s a public WC where you have to pay half a euro.”

Conversation, I think. That’s a two-way street, isn’t it?

The gold standard for these programs is supposedly Rosetta Stone, which is expensive and doesn’t get particularly good reviews. Its philosophy is “immersive,” in that nothing is given in English, but having been immersed, I know the difference between 24 hours a day among the petite bourgeoisie and 20 minutes a day in front of my computer.  Moreover, as a review in The Economist of Rosetta Stone’s Mandarin program points out, the one-size-fits-all approach of its pedagogy slams up against the idiosyncrasies of individual languages. “If you’re good at this kind of thing—if cracking brain-teasers in the Sunday paper is your idea of fun—you might well enjoy the challenge,” the reviewer notes; otherwise, you’re going to want to combine the program, as I’ll do with my $5.99 app, with a more traditional book.

Finally, there’s the test of actually speaking the language with a native. A friend who’s dating a French Canadian asked recently if I’d spend a few lunches speaking French with her so she can prepare to impress his family, and of course je suis ravie to do so. Rosetta Stone offers the Studio, live video tutoring with native speakers, that would seem to justify its high cost. But as another clever language-learning sort, Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 Months, points out, social-media sites will yield native language speakers almost anywhere—and, like me, they’re usually delighted to spend a few minutes chatting in a tongue they love.

Okay, I’m off. Divertiti while I’m gone. And if anyone has recommendations for vineyards near Siena or better language approaches for all us casual travelers, do let us know.

Casa Dante in Perano: good wine, bad Wi-Fi

Having left my post at Lingua Franca four months ago to work on a book and (very incidentally) dabble in Italian, I thought I’d launch my return (Sono tornata = I have returned) with a report. Thanks to a Lingua Franca commenter, I spent about 10 minutes a day from February to late May on the website Duolingo, earning lingots and hearts and wondering why this website seemed so obsessed with cooking in the kitchen. (Where else would you cook?) When I was out of town or idling away a few minutes at the dentist, I hauled out my iPod and worked with the more conversationally based 24/7, whispering phrases like Puoi aiutarmi a trovare into the tiny microphone and ignoring the raised eyebrows around me.

By the time I boarded my flight to what I’d begun dreaming of as the Land of Good Wine and Bad Wi-Fi, I knew just enough to know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know tenses. Anything that happened ieri, forget about it. From the conversational Italian I’d picked up (Sono nata in California = I was born in California), I’d gathered that past tense was formed from the root of the infinitive, but I had no notions about preterite or progressive, and no time to develop them. I could say Vorrei un bicchiere di vino bianco and know that I was saying I would like rather than I want a glass of white wine, but I remained ignorant as to the conditional in general and unable to use it in any other way.

I knew the formal/informal distinction existed, but at what level, and in what circumstances, and whether the formal meant addressing “you” always as third-person singular, or whether there was a second-person plural variation, utterly confused me. This was a consequence, in part, of my haphazard learning approach (a living, breathing teacher would have answered such questions), but it was also a result of the inconsistency built into the programs I was using. 24/7, for instance, made a point of noting that Ti fa male? (“Does it hurt?”) was written in the familiar, but gave no such indicator for Quanto ti devo dare? (“How much do I owe you?”), which likewise uses the familiar ti. And Duolingo allows both Dove sei? and Dove siete? as translations for “Where are you?” but it’s unclear whether the “you” here is being interpreted as both singular and plural or as both informal and formal.

Well, I thought as I settled in for the movie and the airplane meal, I probably won’t use any of it, anyway.

Readers, I have returned to tell you I was wrong.

First, to my consternation and delight, the Italians I met, primarily in the villages of Tuscany but also in larger cities, heard my clumsy overtures (Ho bisogno di qualcosa per decongestionante) and responded in Italian and only Italian. When the conversation got too thick, I’d grab at Parli inglese? or Parli francese?, but once they’d heard those initial vowel-ending words from me, I got no traction with other languages. So I was forced back on my scramble of words and phrases. They forgave my cascade of errors far more readily than I did. When I managed to conclude a complete conversation—like the one with the bartender at the local pub our first night in the countryside, where I begged him to grind me enough coffee for four people for morning because I’d mislaid the packet I’d bought in Siena, and we discussed the difficulty of gathering all one’s belongings off the belt at the crowded supermercato—I wanted to kick up my heels.

Second, of our small group of four, I was the only one speaking Italian at all. Ten minutes a day made me an expert. The effects were mostly hilarious. I got called over at an open-air market to engage in a series of questions about unrecognizable leafy vegetables that turned, as far as I could tell, into an argument among the locals over rughetta versus what we know as arugula. We found our way to our hotel in Rome, toward the end of the trip, via GPS, only to confront one-way streets that prevented our getting closer than three blocks. So the friend driving dropped the rest of us and reset the GPS to the rental return place, and I set about asking directions. By then, I actually felt competent, but as we made our way past the church and around to the left and left again up the alley toward the gate with the fountain, my dependent pals kept asking, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t we get someone who knows English?”

Well, ta-dum. By navigating to the hotel, I suppose I triumphed. But more, I’ve triumphed by evolving from a nonspeaker of Italian to a really poor, rudimentary speaker of Italian. Some nights and mornings in the exquisite Tuscan countryside, I talked myself to sleep or woke myself up going through the phrases I knew, combining them to form new ones. Many things about being in Italy brought pleasure, but engaging with the words, for me, ranked high on the list. Mi piace parlare italiano.  Now maybe I’ll actually study the language.

The fur has been flying the last couple of weeks over a  recent piece by the conservative pundit George Will. Given that Will’s subject is “the supposed campus epidemic of rape,” it may be impossible to discuss his column purely on the basis of language. But I’m game to try.

Will’s word and punctuation choices yield several different sorts of fodder. One might begin, for instance, with his appositive to rape, “a.k.a. ‘sexual assault,’” a term he keeps in quotes throughout his piece, as if there is something inherently problematic about putting the words sexual and assault together in a phrase, much as one might think it problematic to marry benign to dictatorship. The word rape itself, of course, is more or less defined these days as sexual assault (“to force [someone] to have sex with you by using violence or the threat of violence,” according to Merriam-Webster Online). Its archaic definition had to do with the seizure of property by violent means; the step from that sort of general rape to sexual rape, when the property in question is a female who by right belongs to someone else (her father, her betrothed, her husband) is not a large one. But for all his longing to return to the “autonomy, resources, prestige, and comity” of campuses of bygone days, Will does not seem to be arguing for a definition of rape that includes, for instance, a group of gleeful Sabine women whose menfolk have had their lawful property snatched.

So let’s move on. More interesting to me are Will’s usages of the terms survivor and victim. For many years, now, rape crisis centers and other organizations working with people who have lived through situations of sexual or domestic violence have scrupulously avoided using victim. As one blogger put it, “‘Victim’ implies passivity, acceptance of one’s circumstances, and a casualty. The word ‘victim’ robs individuals of their agency and their ability to fight back. ‘Survivor’ displays the individual’s resistance, ability to take action in the face of immense obstacles, and the day-to-day work of surviving despite immense trauma. ‘Survivor’ implies ingenuity, resourcefulness, and inner strength.”

This turn away from victim and toward survivor parallels a rise in the use of terms like victimization, which has seen a twelvefold increase, according to a Google N-gram, since 1960; and victimhood, which seems to have emerged around 1990 and risen steadily in popularity since. In other words, as we have begun referring to victims not simply as persons who have been set upon by other persons, but as persons who have been accorded or have claimed a certain status, rape victims have become almost universally reluctant to employ the term. As a substitute, survivor seems a bit inadequate. I survive an earthquake, but I am the victim of a mugging, because in the latter case, there is a mugger. Now, I may also have to cope with the trauma pursuant to that mugging, and in that sense I may be a survivor as well. But the term itself, while it accords strength and agency to its referent, implies no perpetrator, and in the crime of rape, there is a rapist.

But curiously, for George Will, survivor—conceived as a workaround, to avoid accusations of victimhood and so forth—is itself “the language of prejudgment.” (The Chronicle article to which his column links does not, in fact, use the term survivor, opting instead for alleged victim and alleged perpetrator, so I can’t say what Will’s reference is.) Moreover, its use does nothing to head off Will’s victim-peppered claim, which is that “when [universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. … [A]ttempts to create victim-free campuses—by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations—brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state.”(N.B. Mr. Will struggles here with subject-verb agreement. Lingua Franca readers, help him out.)

Here, in a nutshell, is the language dilemma. Rape is a crime. It has a perpetrator and a victim. Like a burglary or mugging victim, the rape victim is such precisely because whatever agency or power she possessed was inadequate to overcome the action that was perpetrated. At the same time, the language we employ for the women (and men) who go through these experiences is the language of strength, of agency, of fortitude. This distinction does not mean that those trying to sort out the consequences of unwanted sexual encounters are trying to have it both ways—to lay claim to some sort of all-powerful victimhood. It does mean we need to be alert to those moments where one term or the other, victim or survivor, may fall short or find itself susceptible—dare it I say it?—to being ravaged by a hostile force.

The New York Times has begun a strange new series titled “Verbatim,” mini-docudramas culled from transcripts of court documents. In its inaugural video, the punch line kicks in when the office worker being relentlessly grilled about the presence of a photocopy machine in his office is finally badgered into admitting that a machine exists from which he extracts copies of documents. What is that machine called? “Xerox,” he answers desperately.

To my students, the scene isn’t all that funny, except for the hamminess of the actors. They think the office worker is either an idiot or a tool—whose assignment is, for whatever reason, not to let slip the word photocopy. But for those of a certain age, the scene brings back a period of word evolution, abetted by a concentrated marketing campaign.

For me, the period goes back to the time of dittos, those sweet-smelling, smudged copies ubiquitous in mid-20^th-century classrooms. Contrasted to their purplish text were the shiny, expensive Photostats my father would make at his office when he needed an exact replica of a document. He took me once to see the Photostat machine in operation. It was big, and hot, and the paper it spat out curled slightly, like a wood shaving, and he let me know that I was witnessing progress.

Then Xerox came along. Suddenly, at the office jobs I held in the late 1970s, you could Xerox everything. The cheaper machines still exuded the shiny, slightly grayish paper I remembered from the Photostats, but things evolved quickly. Pretty soon we were Xeroxing onto plain copy paper; we were Xeroxing and collating, Xeroxing and stapling, even Xeroxing and binding. If you wanted a copy of something, you Xeroxed it—just as, today, if you want to look for something on the Internet, you Google it.

The term for what threatened the Xerox Corporation at that point was genericide, the loss of its trademark, a fate that befell dozens of now-common appellations before them, notably zipper and thermos. Not everyone minds their brand’s becoming the go-to term for the product; Adobe doesn’t seem to have done anything about the ubiquitous use of Photoshop, nor has Google attempted to stop runaway Googling, even on Bing. But in the early 21st century, Xerox fought back, begging its customers in hundreds of advertisements not to “use ‘Xerox’ the way you use ‘aspirin.’”

Viewing the New York Times docudrama, I reflected on how well Xerox’s campaign actually worked. Almost no one uses Xerox as a verb anymore. It has hung on firmly to the capitalization that defines it as a trademark, in contrast to such casualties as trampoline, escalator, linoleum, and (yes) heroin. (My own view is that Photostat and Kleenex are ready for a lower-casing, but neither The Chronicle nor any other publication for which I’ve written will allow such trademark erosion to affect their style manuals.) We wax foul-mouthed about the deficiencies and personal vendettas exercised by the office photocopier or copy machine, even though Xerox is a lot easier to say.

I’m no economist, and there may be other arguments for the fading away of Xerox as a generic substitute—the rapid rise of other photocopier brands, for instance, or Xerox Corporation’s forays into the computer industry. But when I watched the docudrama, I succumbed once again to the persuasive rhetoric of the company’s brand campaign. No, no, I wanted to tell the poor schlub who was being badgered by the lawyer. Don’t use Xerox to describe your office machine! You might hurt that poor company’s trademark! And then where would be all be? Back smelling the dittos—or, oops, Dittos. They were, after all, made by the Ditto Company, and where are they now?

I must love language more than I love truth. Example: The venerable Economist, along with several other publications, recently reported on a study whose tentative conclusion was that female-named hurricanes—or, more precisely, feminine-sounding hurricanes—cause more death than their masculine counterparts. The reason behind this apparent rise of the Valkyries is that those who hear of, say, Hurricane Tiffany fear her far less than those who hear of Hurricane Boris. They therefore take fewer precautions and put their lives more at risk.

My first reaction to this news echoed that of an Economist commenter who goes by DavesView:

So, when deciding whether to evacuate an area, some people base their decision on the storm’s actual severity, and some base their decision on how girly the name sounds? And that second group is more likely to die in a storm?

Are we sure there is anything that needs fixing here?

Then, of course, my balloon popped when I read the sober critique of the study by Jeff Lazo, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. I mean, I live with a social scientist, and this happens all the time. You get hold of something absolutely mind-blowing about human behavior, and he starts picking away at the nuts and bolts. For instance, given that hurricanes only got male names beginning in 1979, there really aren’t enough data to support any conclusions about male vs. female. And then you’ve got direct vs. indirect deaths, like how can a guy who cleans up fallen electrical wires be more prone to dying of electrical shock if the storm that took down the wires was named Celia and not Christopher? And what about the volunteers who responded to the research team’s survey regarding hypothetical storms? How were they selected, what were their other biases, and so on?

Sheesh. I was having fun there for a minute, thinking about Hurricane Lacey and the Darwin Prize.

Then I ran across the original researchers’ rebuttal to their adversaries, and the story grew more interesting. Not from the point of view of public policy—should we start naming storms Alpha, Beta, and Gamma rather than Adelaide, Ben, and Claire, if that will save lives?—but from the point of view of gender and names, an issue that permeates our culture.  Among the many solid points the original researchers raised, they had this to say:

Our analysis primarily focused on the femininity-masculinity of names, not only on male/female as a binary category. Even during the female-only years, the names differed in degree of femininity (compare two female names: Fern, which is less feminine to Camille, a rather feminine name).

Whoah! Wow! When did this happen? Are you telling me that Fern of Charlotte’s Web is less feminine than, say, Charlotte? Who decides these things? And what was the very male French composer Saint-Saëns’s first name again?

I went back, very curious now, to the list of “Retired Atlantic Names”—that is, the storms whose impact has been great enough that their names are forever inscribed and will not be used again. In the 1950s, these names included Edna, Hazel, and Ione; in the 1960s, Hattie, Cleo, and Beulah. Now, these may not strike you as exceptionally feminine compared with, say, Fifi (retired in 1974) or Lili (retired in 2002). And the male name Frederic (retired in 1979, with that limp-looking c, minus the k) or even Fabian (retired in the 2000s) may not strike you as macho compared with the sturdier Hugo and Mitch (1989, 1998). But let us remind ourselves that the most popular girl’s baby name in 1933 was Norma. Surely many of those doting parents thought their cherubic baby daughters feminine. And Evelyn was once a perfectly acceptable name for a dude.

Let’s just say, for argument’s sake—and because it’s fun to think about it—that the researchers are right. People go gaily out into the wind when the storm’s got a girly name, and they hunker down when the male force approaches. Now look at the so-called six-year list of Atlantic storms, going forward. These are the names we recycle, the ones we’ll use over and over again until “a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity.” How will we be thinking of Chantal 30 years from now? Or Henri, or Van, or Nana, or Gert? Gert!  So we have this fantastic mish-mash of recycled names punctuated by replacement names presumably lobbed into the mix by young scientists in the thick of the zeitgeist: Shary sandwiched between Richard and Tobias, Cristobal just below Bertha.

I know, I know, there are decisions to be made, and science should drive policy. But let’s set the statistics aside for a moment and contemplate how these storms have wrested their names from us and clothed themselves in the bright apparel of those gendered syllables, their glistening armor and death-dealing arias. We could start with the most androgynous one. Remember hir? Sandy.

The literary world has been engaged in a hearty dialogue over the merits and deficiencies of Donna Tartt’s massive novel The Goldfinch, which spent more than 30 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Rave reviews of the book’s range and rich plot have confronted scathing condemnations of its cloying stock characters and overstuffed passages. We won’t rehearse the whole controversy. Let’s home in on a single word usage:

“I was asleep almost before the seat belt light went off—missing drinks, missing dinner, missing the in-flight movies—waking only when the shades were pulled up and light flooded the cabin and the stewardess came pushing her cart through with our pre-packaged breakfasts: chilled twig of grapes; chilled cup of juice; lardy, yolk-yellow, cellophane-wrapped croissant; and our choice of coffee or tea.”

The speaker is Theo Decker, a millennial if there ever was one. In the terrorist explosion that kills his mother when he is 13, there are “cellphones strewn across the floor,” and references abound to a post-9/11 world. The transatlantic plane on which he is traveling, in the passage above, serves a breakfast very much like the one I got on my recent trip home from Italy, and very unlike the ones being served on transatlantic flights in, say, 1970.

The Goldfinch has been universally described as “Dickensian,” and Tartt signals her indebtedness to Boz throughout the book. So despite Theo’s lack of formal education and a formative social milieu inhabited largely by petty thieves, woodworkers, and drug dealers, the reader tends to accept a certain filigreed diction in the first-person narrative:

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

Fine. But back to that airplane cabin. The legal history of airline cabin service is messy and, for several decades, appalling.  Once the major carriers discovered that they could use the images of nubile attendants to promote their transportation services to the businessmen who were their chief clientele, they fought tooth and nail against Equal Employment Opportunity rulings and Title VII legislation to preserve sex, weight, age, and appearance restrictions. “It’s the sex thing,” one airline executive said. “Put a dog on an airplane and 20 businessmen will be sore for a month.” But that was in 1965, when U.S. Representative James H. Scheuer, Democrat of New York, commanded the stewardesses who were suing under Title VII to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.”

Theo Decker wasn’t around in 1965. He wasn’t around in 1973, when a federal court ruling finally swept away unequal treatment of flight attendants, opening the gates for the more diverse crews we now see every time we fly.  The term flight attendant began to replace stewardess, not only because of pejorative implications of a label that had come with quips like “Coffee, tea, or me?” and “Fly me to Bermuda,” but also because male flight attendants had begun entering the profession in large numbers.

By the time Theo Decker was born, presumably sometime between 1988 and 1995, at least one-fifth of cabin crews were men; that demographic has grown to more than a quarter, close to half on some airlines. Like my sons, who were born during those years, Theo would have heard only the term flight attendant for the people bringing him breakfast on the airplane.

So where did Tartt get stewardess? Not from Dickens; he never flew on a plane. Earlier mentions in the book (“a crisp stewardessy guide”; a father’s smile “that sometimes made stewardesses bump him up to first class”) could have emerged from the clichéd mid-20^th century image of the stewardess. But not Theo’s contemporary flight encounter. Could it be a simple slip of the tongue? But Tartt herself was born in 1963 and so grew up mostly with  flight attendant as the prevalent term.

My own theory, judging from other aspects of the book’s plot and characterizations, is that Tartt is leaning, not just on Dickens, but also on the male coming-of-age literary heavyweights of the mid-20th century: Bellow, Salinger, Updike, Roth. The picaresque adventures of the male hero, the feathery lightness of the female characters, the indulgences of the dark side, the ennobling effects of art: They all fit those guys as well as Dickens. Stewardess is their word. What exactly, then, is it doing in The Goldfinch?

Debates about punctuation, for me, are like debates about rests and accidentals in musical scores. They go on and on; if the manuscript is old enough, they can be decided by a coin flip; and they force us, in the end, to consider the work as a whole—its shape, its construction and intent. Mozart’s scores, for instance, several of which were left in disarray on the composer’s death, come in for a fair share of controversy. In his Piano Concerto No. 13, is the complex figured bass in the tutti by a quirkily inclined Mozart, or do the multiple tiny irregularities—the piano holding a D note against the full orchestra, or inconsistencies in the noting of accidentals—suggest the work of a hack? The conclusion you draw may lead to your judgment of the work as a whole.

So it is with the period in the Declaration of Independence that Danielle Allen, a political scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is calling a stray ink blot. Punctuation rules in the 18^th century, despite Ben Jonson’s English Grammar, remained mostly elocutionary. We have already talked ourselves hoarse over the excessive commas in the syntax of the Second Amendment. But Allen’s argument contends that the full stop of a period following the opening clause of the second sentence of the Declaration distorts the logic of the founders. Here’s the passage in question, in the form most of us have seen:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Looking through the archives, Allen found evidence that the period after the first “Happiness” was unintended. Others, looking at the same material, have found it closer to a comma (parallel to the comma following the word governed). What difference does it make?

Jack Rakove of Stanford is quoted in The New York Times as believing that the stray period subordinates the importance of good government to the claims about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” On the face of it, his argument seems weak to me. The first sentence of a paragraph is generally the topic sentence, yes. But separating one idea from the other by means of a full stop does not subordinate the second idea to the first. Rush Limbaugh, roundly fulminating at the reporter who brought Allen’s discovery to light, inadvertently gives us a clue to a more enlightening view of the matter:

And her point is that without the period, the sentence just flows without a stop and grants equal power to government—in fact, maybe even more power—to secure those rights. Now, again, I want to stress here, ladies and gentlemen that this is bogus. … The role of government is subordinated to the people. But it doesn’t matter to this scholar. It doesn’t matter to this feminist who is attempting to claim that the original Founding Father Declaration of Independence was designed to establish a big government in order to secure and provide those rights. … This assertion here that there should not be a period and that that changes dramatically the whole sentence, the whole paragraph. It’s completely incorrect grammatically without a period. If you don’t have a period in this paragraph it is completely ungrammatical and there is nothing else in the Declaration of Independence that is ungrammatical. Nothing. They were painstaking about that.

Well, yes, Rush. They were. Their punctuation was irregular by contemporary standards, but their grammar and syntax were elegant. And the odd thing about placing a period after the initial word Happiness is that it renders the very long passage that follows a fragment. As any old-fashioned sentence diagrammer will tell you, without that pesky period, there are four noun clauses in the sentence, each beginning with the word that, each in apposition to the truths we are holding to be self-evident.

If the period stands, the thats should go, and the comma after governed as well. The passage would then read thus:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Obviously, no one would allow such butchery of a sacred document. But place the word that at the beginning of the second (and, presumably, the third) sentence, and it has no referent; the noun clauses introduced by that have no way to operate, no role to play in the so-called sentence to which they belong.

Syntactically, then, losing the period after Happiness seems the wisest solution. Once we get past this hurdle the size of an ink blot, perhaps we can begin debating how self-evident, really, those four truths still are to us.