I’m holding Ed Snowden up as an example. Not of a patriot, or a whistle-blower, or a scoundrel, or traitor. But as an example of what I’ve been telling students and fellow teachers for years: that if you have something to express in your writing, you believe it wholeheartedly, and it carries the urgency of original thought, it will come out by way of elegant syntax and more or less error-free construction. We can yammer on about dangling modifiers and passive voice and incongruity and topic sentences till the cows come home, and none of it will make more than 10 percent of the difference. That Which Must Be Said is the big enchilada.

At a dinner party the other night, we spent three hours debating the ethics, or lack thereof, of Edward Snowden’s actions. This column does not mean to take up that debate. Instead, I invite you to take a writerly look at the emails Snowden sent to Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker he first contacted about the cache of government documents he planned to release. He begins:

At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.

Note how the opener is the prepositional “at this stage,” implying that other stages have preceded and will follow; we have entered the play, as it were, in medias res. Snowden offers his word, his truth, not as “only my word,” or as “can’t offer anything except my word.” He offers nothing more than his word, giving his word a place beyond which we ought not to expect anything more; one’s word is the greatest thing a man can give. Of course, we are also merely “at this stage”; there may be more to come. And in the next sentence, his word yields its first demonstration, crisp and forceful, describing the individual who owns it not by gender, race, or any affiliation, but by the role he plays in the government, the position from which he speaks.

Later:

Understand that the above steps are not bullet proof, and are intended only to give us breathing room. In the end if you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated. This must not deter you from releasing the information I will provide.

The “Understand” here, framed as a command, opens the paragraph; Snowden has now taken full charge of the dialogue, and the “us” later in that same sentence brings his interlocutor in as his partner. In the next sentence, just in case he has pressed his persuasion too hard, he lets up—and, moreover, slips in a hint about a much later stage, “the end,” where Poitras will be the one in charge. What also strikes me in this sentence is the syntax of “I will likely be immediately implicated,” which in its placement of adverbs achieves an odd but strikingly efficient—almost an onomatopoeic—description of Snowden’s fate.

In another email:

You ask why I picked you. I didn’t. You did. The surveillance you’ve experienced means you’ve been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern sigint system works.

From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.

The first of these paragraphs turns Poitras’s question around rhetorically in a pair of crisp two-word sentences followed by a longer explicative sentence using a careful bit of passive voice (“you’ve been selected”) to implicate the government without naming it. The paragraph that follows has been the subject of some jokes for its syntactical theft of Sting’s “Every Breath You Take”—but of course, that echo produces a chill all the greater when you reach the word system (not a pining lover). To add to the horror of the picture, Snowden personifies the system by giving it hands, and then he executes a deft pair of parallel adjective clauses modifying that dexterous system, leaving the word unlimited tantalizingly implied at the end of the sentence.

Finally, after excusing his clumsiness (“I am not a writer, and I have to draft this in a great hurry”), Snowden piles up a series of short accusatory paragraphs. The first two end with the noun clauses “which I can prove.” The next two convert that claim to separate sentences, each headed by a demonstrative pronoun: “This I can also prove.” My 10^th-grade teacher would have marked Snowden for vague reference on both the “whiches” and the “thises,” but she would have been wrong—because the scope and reach of the wrongdoings he has just described in terse, specific language call, rhetorically, for the pointed finger of a which and a this.

Now, Snowden’s claim not to be a writer may be a tad disingenuous. He immersed himself in the Greek classics as a teenager, and there are few better preparations for rhetoric. Still, I would argue that the clarity and elegance of most of the syntax and diction in his email communications are the results of his knowing his own mind and knowing what he wanted to say. So simple, right? And so impossible to teach.

New York’s MTA is about to mount a campaign against it. They’re debating the issue in Chicago. Even in polite Toronto, the issue—and the term—have, uh, spread widely. Manspreading first appeared, as far as I can tell, just three short months ago, on October 6, 2014, but it already garners 665,000 results on Google.

It’s a word that was begging to be coined. Manspreading refers, of course, to certain men’s habit of spreading their thighs in a wide V from the pelvis outward, often taking up two or even three seats on the bus or subway and crowding other passengers. For reasons that need no belaboring, women don’t tend to sit this way, so the identification by sex is evidence-based, but it also refers to the manly part of the anatomy to which the posture tends to call attention.

The complaint against manspreading, then, operates at two levels. One is simply the spread. As the blogger of One Bro, Two Seats notes in one caption, “He wasn’t even doing this before I tried to sit next to him.” Before it had a name, the manspreading phenomenon got its first wave of publicity in a long-running blog titled Men Taking up Too Much Space on the Train, a series of photographs with commentary by readers and the blogger, MTUTMSotT—who is clearly something of a language maven, judging by his “edit” of a comment:

Not only do you upload pictures of men without their permission (which [a not-only-but-also construction unfolding a parenthetical subordinate clause—looks like we have a pro on our hands], while legal [this is an interesting bid for credibility], is more disrespectful than spreading your legs a bit [an understatement that’s more convincing because it’s enfolded] on a train could ever be) but you also prove that third-wave [almost no one can correctly hyphenate a compound modifier—props for this] feminism [this is a bit elliptical, no? are you saying I should pursue a fourth wave or, like, refocus on universal suffrage?] is undoubtably [spelling] a joke with it [man, almost, but a prepositional phrase that repeats the subject at the end of the sentence definitely makes it looks like the structure you chose was a little much for you]. Out of all the problems in the world that this blog could have been about [“a blog” would have been a bit stronger here, since if it were focused on a different problem it wouldn’t be “this” blog], it became [in what sense did it “become”? I think you’re writing from an idea that bloggers start by opening the Tumblr template page then asking themselves what the main problem in the world is] a catalog of dudes spreading their legs while sitting [your prose is fine but its edge is a little dull, and in combination with your bitterness leaves me with a portrait of a person with intelligence who is unable to create—am I right?].

MTUTMSotT has also crafted from his readers’ comments a continuing “superpoem,” titled “Men Defending Their Balls,” that almost distracted me completely from writing this post.

But back to language, the second level of discussion. Manspreading follows in a tradition of various man- neologisms (manogisms?) that seem to have arisen in the wake of second-wave feminism and amid the demise of vexed customs like men’s rising to give the so-called weaker sex a seat. I’m thinking of man cave, man-pack, man-bag, man bun, man time, and ManZone, just for starters. The man spread, in this family of slang, awaits dude ownership. Which is undoubtedly why the MTA decided to take a bro approach to the problem with its “Dude … Stop the Spread, Please” signs.

The conservative website Breitbart, on the other hand, takes the Latinate high road to addressing the manspreading issue, which he sees not as a problem of men taking up too much space, but as “pathetic feminist pipsqueakery, the last dying gasp of a movement with nothing to win and nothing to say, determined to abuse and antagonise the male sex at all costs and for whatever perceived or outright imaginary infraction it can conjure from the vicissitudes of everyday life.”

The contributors to MTUTMSotT’s superpoem might have trouble finding common cause with the fey quality of Breitbart’s prose, which runs to pronouncements like “this otiose playground jihad against men” and complaints of “capacious handbags clogging the gangways.” In fact, Breitbart takes pains to remind us that he does not “frequent public transport,” so his position in the debate is purely ideological. But it seems he is trying to rescue The Spread, not just for louche dudes who brag about their private parts, but also for the nobler heroes of our species, whose secret sitting habits ought not be a matter for public talk—after all, “even in the dark bars of the London suburbs I trawled as a late teen looking for companionship, filled with desperate masculinity, I never saw such a comically absurd picture.”

Personally, I’m glad to hear that spreading your legs can now be deemed socially questionable for both sexes. I grant you, it may always mean something slightly different for men than it does for women. But an empty seat is an empty seat, neither male nor female. It awaits a nether region, not the side of a thigh.

“Is your novel fiction, or did any of it really happen?”

I’ve started doing readings of my new novel, A Sister to Honor, and sure enough, the question came from one of the attentive listeners waiting in line to buy a signed copy.  I can’t blame her for her confusion. I’d like to blame Truman Capote, who came up with the term nonfiction novel to describe his new-journalism book In Cold Blood:

It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the “nonfiction novel,” as I thought of it. … The nonfiction novel should not be confused with the documentary novel—a popular and interesting but impure genre, which allows all the latitude of the fiction writer but usually contains neither the persuasiveness of fact nor the poetic attitude fiction is capable of reaching. The author lets his imagination run riot over the facts! If I sound querulous or arrogant about this, it’s not only that I have to protect my child, but that I truly don’t believe anything like it exists in the history of journalism.

Needless to say, Capote’s definition runs counter to what you’ll still find, almost 50 years after that interview, in most definitions of the term, including that of my colleague Ben Yagoda, who wrote of the confusion he discovered among his students trying to distinguish between novels and books.

That confusion hasn’t been cleared up any by the emergence of the often autobiographical graphic novel—which fits neither the old-fashioned definition of a risqué tale to which the moniker graphic novel once applied nor the description of an autobiographical novel, but is rather an autobiography or memoir in comics form. Amazon files comics-style “Biographies and History” under the umbrella “Graphic Novels.”

Nor has the trend of streaming short stories to create “novels in stories” helped much, since many readers will now consider any book comprising made-up narratives (short stories, short plays) to be a novel. And then if you throw in the nonfiction novel, and the graphic novel … well, you can see where the reader in the line starts getting her question.

What I would like to have told her is that the word came from the Italian word for “new,” because the novel in its early period was meant to be something new, and in its way it’s always looking to push the baggy envelope of a form whose rules have never been nailed down so tightly as those of verse or drama. That’s what makes the novel so daunting to attempt: not just length or characters or multiple story lines, but the inherent imperfection of a form whose Platonic ideal has yet to be limned. Though many European languages retain something of the earlier word, romance, in their term for the novel, Hawthorne famously distinguished between the two in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables:

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former … has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

Hawthorne’s distinction is lost, needless to say, on contemporary bloggers like MyReadersPress.com, which opines:

There is a difference between a novel and a book. Physically, they look the same, but inside they are different. A novel is a collection of many ideas, stories, characters and fantasies, bound together with the writer’s imagination to become a novel. It is always a fiction novel. While a book is like a novel, a book has many pictures or images inside the pages. It has been written for fiction or non-fiction ideas. . . . A book could be a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, atlas, science textbook, calculus textbook, algebra textbook, etc., while a novel is composed only of one aspect: romance. Many books are not a novel itself, but a novel is also described as a book for everyone.  . . . A novel . . . has only one meaning, and that is the story of how love begins and ends in a very special event.

Oh dear. One hates to think where, say, War and Peace or Cloud Atlas should be shelved now.

But I suppose, if we have the effrontery to name a literary form “the new,” we should expect kaleidoscopic definitions over the centuries. And let’s not even start on the questions that follow, like What kind of novelist are you? What genre is this novel?

I am so delighted that this person came to hear me read. I am so happy that she’s buying a book. I smile. I tell her I made up everything that happens in the book, but it’s all become real to me, and I hope it will for her, too.

N.B. The title of this post is a play on Robert Creeley’s similarly titled poem, taken also from a question posed to him by a listener.

In English, it forms possibly the shortest subject-verb-predicate sentence: I am X. But we cannot seem to agree on what it means. In my lifetime, the first phrase that rings out is John F. Kennedy’s, on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg: Ich bin ein Berliner! The second, echoing now from Paris across the Western hemisphere, is Je suis Charlie Hebdo. These are both rhetorical flourishes, obviously. But they also both nag at our sense of what it means to declare ourselves something—as opposed to halting, as Descartes did, at the simple declaration (Cogito ergo sum) of our existence.

Kennedy didn’t originate the phrase, of course. He took it from Cicero’s In Verrem, where Cicero puts the phrase Civis romanus sum, “I am a citizen of Rome,” into the mouth of a man unjustly crucified by a renegade governor in Sicily, to proclaim the fundamental right of such a citizen to stand for trial in, and under the legal protections of, Rome. Initially adopting the phrase in a speech in New Orleans, Kennedy’s first rhetorical move was to replace a plea for rights with a claim of pride: “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was to say, ‘I am a citizen of Rome.’ Today, I believe, in 1962 the proudest boast is to say, ‘I am a citizen of the United States.’”

By the time we reach the Rathaus Schöneberg, pride has become solidarity, with patriotism set aside in favor of a blurring of boundaries: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’” Now, Kennedy cannot mean that Americans can opt for a trial in Berlin (nor does he mean, contrary to urban legend, that he is a jelly doughnut); nor does he mean to support the positions of the Social Democratic Party. He’s just trying to let Berliners know they’re not alone in their stand against Khrushchev.

I am has taken off, in the intervening decades. We’ve got I Am Legend, I Am Bread, I Am That Girl, I Am Other, I Am You. We’ve even got Tom Shadyac’s New Age film I Am, which has less to do with Descartes than with the “power of one.”

And now we have arrived, sadly, at I am Charlie Hebdo. And at I am not Charlie Hebdo. What are we talking about, here? First of all—this should not need saying, but language does beg to be interrogated—Charlie Hebdo is neither a person nor a country. Its name evolved from an earlier, banned satirical magazine and refers to its weekly publication (hebdominaire) and the name Charlie for Charles Schultz’s comic-strip character Charlie Brown, as well as for an early target of satire, President Charles de Gaulle of France. To be Charlie Hebdo, some say, is to express solidarity with those exercising a freedom of expression threatened by the horrific murders of 12 people at the offices of the magazine on January 7, 2015. In that sense, they are appropriating the meaning of Ich bin ein Berliner—that is, all those who wish to exercise free expression, regardless of what they wish to say, are momentarily “citizens” of a “city” we will temporarily call Charlie Hebdo. As the magazine’s lawyer told France Info radio, “The spirit of ‘I am Charlie’ means the right to blaspheme.”

But wait, say journalists like David Brooks of The New York Times, in “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo”:

Most of us don’t actually engage in the sort of deliberately offensive humor that that newspaper specializes in. We might have started out that way. When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to “épater la bourgeoisie,” to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs. But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. . . . Most of us do try to show a modicum of respect for people of different creeds and faiths. We do try to open conversations with listening rather than insult.

Here, Brooks goes back to Cicero’s “I am a citizen of Rome,” essentially. That is, if you’re going to claim to be Charlie Hebdo, you need to subscribe to Charlie Hebdo’s laws and mores, not just express solidarity with the freedom of its journalists and condemnation of their murderers.

Oh, those two devilish little words, I am! Maybe Shakespeare can give us some help? Let’s let him have the last attempt:

No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign.

—Sonnet 121

I’m sure I’m not the only Lingua Franca reader who received a communication just before the start of the spring term thanking the committee who had worked hard over break on the institutional goal of Strengthening Campus Culture. Those of us whose campus cultures were weak will see them shored up; those whose campus cultures were already strong will see them buttressed for the future.

Only I’m not certain what a campus culture is, exactly. I know: It’s marketing-speak. But we’re talking about it in committees and in white papers, so I want to play dumb for a moment and ask what it is we’re talking about.

Once upon a time, there was school spirit. It had to do mostly with athletics, but also with a tribal affiliation—wearing school colors and logos, associating individual or team achievements with school achievement for purposes of celebration. Misfits like me generally lacked school spirit, but there were limits on how guilty we could be made to feel.

Campus culture seems to share many aspects of school spirit. The American Democracy Project calls it “a powerful source of socialization,” and defines a strong campus culture as conveying “a vibrant sense of mission and a distinctive culture that supports students’ civic understanding and engagement.” That latter turn, toward civic engagement, suggests that campus culture parts ways with school spirit in its emphasis on diversity. Nerds like me—or minorities of any kind—don’t opt out of a strong campus culture the way we opted out of school spirit, because by its very definition, the culture includes us. As the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin puts it, “DDCE cultivates an inclusive campus culture that actively and intentionally engages diverse people, ideas, and perspectives to create a vibrant learning and working environment.”

But hold on, vibrant people. Campus culture is getting a little ragged around the edges, at least in media coverage. Under the headline Vanderbilt gang-rape defense points to campus culture, we read, “Defense attorneys for the former Vanderbilt University football players whose own cellphones show they participated in a dorm-room sex assault have placed blame on the elite Southern university, saying their clients’ judgment was warped by a campus culture where drunken sex was common.” That’s not necessarily a weak campus culture; it may be plenty strong. What it isn’t is diverse, inclusive, engaged, or focused on academics.

Ah. Academics. Now, there’s a buzz-kill word for you. But in fact, when our administrators speak of cultivating a strong campus culture, they are not talking about winning awards for being the greatest party school on the East or West Coast or somewhere in the middle. They are talking about diversity, yes, but they are generally coupling a belief in healthier attitudes toward heterogeneity on campus with a belief in more intellectual engagement. Campaigns for strong campus cultures generally recommend more professorial presence at evening events, more student-faculty collaboration, more spaces and opportunities for student-centered panels, symposia, and so on outside the classroom. This is all good, though beleaguered and underpaid adjunct instructors may find themselves lacking a bit of, um, school spirit for such occasions. Binghamton University may be recognizing the strain that exists, beneath the surface, between what we’re calling campus culture and the less jazzy focus on academics in its website appeal: “Our academic culture resembles a first-rate private university—rigorous, collaborative and boldly innovative—while our campus culture exemplifies the best kind of public university experience: richly diverse students, active social life and deep engagement with the community.”

Leon Wieseltier, meanwhile, in his elegy for humanism, recently wrote, “The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry.” That other strange use of the word culture, coupled as it is with industry, makes me wonder if we are not embarked on a specific sort of marketing endeavor, which we might call the campus culture industry. We have Offices of Campus Culture, Funds for Enhancing Campus Culture, Visioning Processes for Campus Culture, Campus Culture surveys, and Campus Culture Operation Studies. These are not run by thugs. These are run by intelligent, open-minded academics and administrators who want to see our institutions adapt in rapidly changing times. They are often advised, however, by marketing firms whose goals may be different.

So let’s stay on our toes. Stay alert to those capital Cs, their large glib curls swallowing all our tensions. As a sales tool, Campus Culture is a very effective turn of phrase. Let’s just take a moment to assess what it is we’re buying, or working to create.

Gender neutrality, however loudly announced in official pronouncements or in the news, creeps into our own set of norms on little cat feet. In my case, I realized it had made another inroad when I was settling in at a symphony performance and heard the voice over the loudspeaker: Ladies and Gentlemen, please silence your cellphones and other electronic devices.

Why Ladies and Gentlemen? I thought. Why can’t he simply say, Symphony Patrons? Must he remind us at the outset of our socially assigned gender and its prescribed behavior (Act like a lady!)? And then, as the violins began tuning, I started wondering about the usual school announcements that begin Boys and Girls …  What about those? Why not Students? And why is it Boys before Girls but Ladies before Gentlemen?

Good thing the first piece on the program was Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” which managed to pull me out of the rabbit hole of such speculation so I could enjoy the concert. I returned to this pesky issue only when I learned of the City University of New York Graduate Center’s memorandum on gendered salutations. As a strong suggestion—not, the lawyer Saundra Schuster emphatically maintained, a mandate—the Graduate Center’s policy

is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties. … Accordingly, “Mr.” and “Ms.” should be omitted from salutations in any correspondence with a student, prospective student or third party.  For pronouns used in the body of a letter, refer to a student or prospective student by that person’s full name.  For example, in the body of a letter, you would say “Chris Jones,” when you previously would have referred to “Mr. Jones” or “Ms. Jones.”

Those of us who have written countless letters of recommendation or academic warning might find this directive problematic. For individuals within the academic hierarchy of the university, we have gender-neutral honorifics at the ready: Professor Jones, Dean Jones, President Jones, even Dr. Jones for the free-floating Ph.D. But what of the student, the administrative assistant, the career services counselor? Many of us already use “Chris Jones” at the first mention of the individual, e.g., “I highly recommend Chris Jones for admission to your graduate program in engineering.” But when we refer again to the individual farther down in the body of the letter, we make a calculated decision. If the candidate is relatively young, or our relationship goes back many years, we may use Chris as the name. But if the candidate—or, more problematically, the individual about whom there is some concern—is older, or our relationship is more formal, we generally choose the last name with some sort of honorific; the blunt use of the last name alone, e.g.,  “Jones has had some difficulty staying on task in recent months,” feels dismissive. Are we now to repeat Chris Jones … Chris Jones … Chris Jones throughout the correspondence? Feels needlessly repetitive. Other solutions have a vague Communist ring: Student Jones; Assistant Director Jones; Librarian Jones. Might as well go with Comrade Jones and be done with it.

The websites to which the CUNY memorandum sends its hapless recipients are no help in solving this practical problem. They discuss the singular they, ways of reconstructing sentences to avoid he or she, the use of gender-neutral terms for job descriptors, and so on.

One is tempted, then, to throw up one’s hands, or to label the whole effort, as The Daily Beast does, “a mind-boggling waste of academics’ and students’ time and energy.” Certainly, the CUNY memo presents a problem without a clear solution, and I have no solution at the ready. But 50 years ago, those who proposed Ms. as an honorific were laughed at; those who advised that terms like fire fighter and mail carrier should be used in place of fireman and postman were told such things would never change. The otherwise sound advice in John Gardner’s 1983 The Art of Fiction implies, to the 21^st century reader, a strange exclusivity:

It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it should have been brown. …  It’s feeling that makes the composer break surprisingly from his key, feeling that gives the writer the rhythms of his sentences. … The great writer has an instinct for these things. He has, like a great comedian, an infallible sense of timing.

A generation from now, I suspect symphony-goers (if there are symphony-goers, and I hope there will be) will be addressed in some way other than as Ladies and Gentlemen, and we’ll all feel fine about it. Maybe, by then, we’ll have figured out a respectful, gender neutral, nonclumsy way to refer to Chris Jones in the second paragraph of that imagined letter. That we don’t have a solution yet doesn’t mean no problem exists.

I heard the news of Harper Lee’s new novel—or, to be precise, of the planned release of the companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird that she penned many decades ago—while I was doing research at the Missouri Historical Library and Research Center. My own subject, still vaguely outlined, is the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, now more than a century in the past. Lee’s subject, of course, was the Jim Crow racism that prevailed in the mid-20^th century American South. In terms of language, then, both To Kill a Mockingbird and Lee’s forthcoming work, Go Set a Watchman, lie midway between the vernacular of the St. Louis World’s Fair and that of our own time.

I’m not terrifically hopeful about the reception that Go Set a Watchman will receive, despite the beatification of Harper Lee over the decades. Her sole published novel, though still widely read in middle-school classrooms, has come under critical attack in recent years. However daringly progressive Scout’s story may have seemed in 1960, we have to set the language of speeches like righteous Miss Maudie’s in the context of Harper Lee’s time:

“The handful of people in this town who say that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord’s kindness am I.”

There but for the Lord’s kindness am I. We take this as the sentence spoken by a positive character in a novel written by a progressive author only by bearing in mind that Harper Lee was writing in the 1950s and was not immune to every iota of condescension or stereotyping, just to a lot of it.

I find myself looking back, not so much on my first encounter with the novel, but on the movie, which appeared in 1962. I was 8. My mother was determined to take me to it, and we stood in a long line at the Tivoli theatre in St. Louis waiting for tickets. Suddenly my mother thrust me behind her and held me there, gripping my shoulder. When she released me, she bent down and explained that my grandmother had been passing by on the opposite sidewalk. “She wouldn’t like it,” my mother explained, “you coming to see this movie.” I knew then what we tend to forget, now: However inadvertently smug Miss Maudie may seem to our sensibilities, To Kill a Mockingbird was, for a time and in some places, controversial.

At my seat in the Missouri Historical Library, I thumbed through correspondence and reports whose language in some places can only be described as repellent. Of the Cocopa Indians, an anthropologist casually writes, “Their early extinction seems inevitable; and it would seem probable that they will have the distinction of melting away through voluntary adoption of unfit Caucasian customs without the aid of church or state.” Of so-called studies in anthropometry, a superintendent reports that “to judge from the Races present at the Exposition, those with the largest heads are the most intelligent, and those with the smallest heads the least intelligent.” The ethnic groups assembled in living tableaux at the Fair were arranged to display “Man from the plane of the animal to his distinct and exalted position as a progressive conqueror of lower nature.” Meanwhile, a letter drifted in to the Fair’s Executive Committee noting that “a rule … prohibits the carrying of colored passengers in the automobiles now in service at the grounds.”

Almost no one reading the reports in 1904 took offense at the use of the word extinction in regard to a group of people at the Fair whose tribe was threatened with forced assimilation and genocide; or with the casual grouping of peoples into Races with preconceived notions about head size and intelligence that confirmed the status quo; or with phrases like the plane of the animal or conqueror of lower nature. No one challenged the blaming of bigoted, exclusionary practices on a rule. More than a century after these sentences were written, their language still belongs to its time, yes; but we do not. Sitting in the quiet library, I found myself sometimes agog that such sentences could be set down in earnest.

And today? What will the readers of 2065 think when they look back on the language we use? The readers of 2115? Will they find us as enlightened as we find ourselves? Or will they forgive us, for we knew not what we were saying?

I belong to a generation that ate in restaurants only on special occasions. You know: Mom’s birthday. Or after visiting Grandma in the hospital. Or maybe in the airport restaurant, the one with the white linen tablecloths, when we went to fetch someone who was actually flying into town to visit us. So there wasn’t a foodie culture, much less a running dialogue on the language of menus or waiter-speak.

Today, while I find much of the observations about the language of restaurants fascinating—I can no longer regard a description of a “fresh” item without calculating the venue’s place in the pecking order of eating establishments—the tone of the commentary gets a little wearying. Doesn’t it? Enough with the complaining about typos in menus. Enough with the whining about the ways in which those who wait upon us (and no, I do not care if they are called waiters, waitresses, waitrons, or servers) say you’re welcome. These people are trying to serve us food, and for the most part, they’re not getting paid enough to do it, and with the lousy system of tipping in this country, they are continually trying to “read” the customer and angle for the best approach to coax a livable wage supplement out of the stranger at the table.

So when I wonder whence arose the response of “Perfect” to a customer’s order, I do not mean to snark. Rather, I’m trying to recall what waiters used to say and puzzle out why the response has changed.

I’m not sure they used to say anything. Much depends on the establishment, of course. But for the sake of longitudinal study, let’s imagine a high-end hamburger place. In my memory, the response to a person’s food order in this sort of establishment—any establishment, really, was the quick series of gestures following Billy Crystal’s request for the Number Three in When Harry Met Sally: a nod, a smile, a turn to the next customer with eyebrows raised expectantly:

The server was not expected to make a comment on the food order; in fact, it seemed such comment was studiously avoided, as if it would be in poor taste to suggest that the customer had chosen an item that would be preferable to another item on the menu, as if all items on the menu were not equally preferable.

When someone taking a food order did respond, it was more along the lines of the waiter responding to Terry Crews’s nervous, insecure order of champagne and oysters in White Girls with “Very good, sir”:

In fact, I begin to suspect, the more unsure the patron, the more reassuring—and quickly conclusive—the language of the serving staff, at least back in the day. Thus you have Jerry Lewis’s bewildered character in Cracking Up, confronted by an endless array of salads from which to choose, saying hesitantly, “Watercress is the, uh … ” and the waitress responding quickly, “Watercress it is. Good choice. You got it”:

Which brings us to “Perfect.” Menus have evolved faster than most of our abilities to comprehend them. Among the many features on the menu of my local high-end burger joint are Romesco aioli, Comtè cheese, cilantro crema, truffled mushroom spread, housemade kimchi, a quinoa-sunflower burger, and Elemakule Tiki Bitters. Sometimes we ask about things. Other times we simply plunge. We get tired of having frisée defined for us again; we knew what frisée was, we just forgot. Or we forgot what edamame was, or pepperoncini. So we go ahead and order. But I strongly suspect there’s an anxious wrinkle on our brow, a hint of worry very different from the high command of, say, Jack Nicholson’s order of the chickenless chicken sandwich in Five Easy Pieces.

And what does our server want? She wants a tip. She needs a tip. Which means she needs for us to feel we have not just communicated our wishes (Very good, sir) or received her approval (Good choice), but set everything in order. Perfect! I don’t believe the response—irritating as it may be to bloggers like the comedian Ken Levine—has anything to do with the wisdom of one’s dining choice. No one’s recommending the Fatty Melt, or whatever it was you ordered. No, we are saying you’re perfect. You’re perfectly OK. As your friend will be, when she finishes ordering. Now sit back. Sip your beer. And remember: Restaurants may not be perfect. But they’re better, by far, than they used to be.

Here she comes again. She’s been interrupted. She’s been left behind. She’s worn a pearl earring and had a dragon tattoo. She’s played with fire and kicked the hornet’s nest. When she’s not the other Boleyn, or working in the shop, she may be your #Boss. She’s not that kind, and she’s been gone. Only not far enough gone, because here she comes again, on the train.

You know who I mean. The Girl. The Title Girl.

Of the hundreds of books listed on Goodreads with the word Girl in the title, several dozen have been on the best-seller list. Not the children’s or young-adults’ bestseller list, but the adult one. Nor do these eponymous girls inhabit childhood or adolescence, as did Anne Frank of The Diary of a Young Girl or Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl. These girls have sex, plot murders, do drugs, and experience full-blown existential crises.

And the boys? Well, there aren’t so many of them. There’s the Boy in Striped Pajamas, but he is clearly a boy, 9 years old, and his story is directed at “Grades 9 and up.” There are the Boys in the Boat, a college crew team engaged in patriotic sport. Let’s set the boys aside for now.

Because what is it with the word girl and the title of a best seller? Stack Exchange tried valiantly on this one. A polite reader had inquired: “There is a recent movie entitled Gone Girl. You may have seen it. I wonder why they used the noun girl instead of woman in the title, as the age of the girl, who is the subject of the movie, is about up to 30 years old?” Before closing the subject as “off-topic” (“It is about a film title and not the English language”), the site allowed two answers, both of which struck me as odd; e.g., “It is a common idea, to never ask a woman her age, so again girl is more complimentary than woman or lady.” In addition to wrongly placing the onus of the title on the author, Gillian Flynn, the respondents attempting to answer the question concluded that the “two G’s give the title a jaunty feel … more rhyming, catchy, and memorable.”

For the record, as many readers of this blog know, authors do not necessarily choose their book titles. Half the titles of the books I’ve published have been the dream children of the publisher, to which I have acquiesced with varying degrees of grace, since the contract leaves the final decision in the publisher’s hands. And publishers are loving the word Girl, with all it implies. Not, I would suggest, a compliment paid to a female striving to look younger than her years. Rather, one combination or another of vulnerability, deceptiveness, sexual allure, chutzpah, mystery, entrapment, and lack of gravitas makes the word seem an early augury of best-sellerdom.

Feminists have long railed against the inappropriate use of girl; in 1983, Francine Frank and Frank Anshen wrote in Language and the Sexes, “We recognize that some adults refer to their friends as a group as girls or boys and find nothing belittling in such usage. However, in many contexts, the use of girl or girls for adults implies immaturity and relative unimportance.” More recently, we find the word getting reclaimed as gurrl, gurrrl, or simply grrl, defined by Urban Dictionary as “a womyn with attitude.” Whether Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls, with its immature twenty-somethings of both sexes, participates in that reappropriation or joins the Girl party that includes The Girl on the Train is a subject open for lively debate. And my colleagues Anne Curzan and Ben Yagoda have weighed in on different facets of the girls/guys/ladies/women conundrum. So I would disagree with Stack Exchange: The explosion of titles using Girl unironically to refer to adult women belongs in a discussion of the English language as we are using—and arguing about—it today.

Many years ago, shortly after it had gone coed, I spent a year at Phillips Exeter Academy, where etched in stone above the administration building was the motto They come here boys; they leave here men. We used to joke about adding the second sentence, They come here girls; they leave here women. The joke lay in the different implications of those two transformations. With Girl titles abounding, I wonder if we should have pondered the alternative: They come here girls; they leave here Girls. I’d like to think we can do better than that.

[[photo: Screen shot from the movie Gone Girl]]

They drop into our In boxes like mad, twitching flies, these contests apparently designed to make us feel either startlingly young or hopelessly old and out of it. It’s either “How many of these ancient pieces of technology did you use?” or “How well do you know 2014 Pop Culture?” I pass on most of them, but when our editor sent me The New York Times’s Language Quiz, I took the bait.

Designed to test “how linguistically en vogue you are,” the quiz provides multiple-choice definitions for various neologisms of the Twitter age. What was intriguing to me about it wasn’t so much my score, which was as middling as I’d have expected, but the challenge of figuring out the provenance of the various coinages—which surely, like most coinages, either evolved without much reflection on the part of the users or burst spontaneously from some hastily composed text and then oozed through the blogosphere.

Spoiler Alert. If you want to take this test yourself, do it now, before I reveal half the answers.

Yolo feels like a classic. First, it’s an acronym—“you only live once”—and second, it trips onomatopoeically off the tongue, so you sound a little giddy when you say (or write) it. Much better than lol, which I’ve never known how to pronounce. This one was easy for me, but I paused anyway to consider the false choices the Times offered. The first, “a Western tie,” is of course a bolo, a term my twenty-somethings never heard of, it having been popularized by Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff, circa 1968. The second choice, “you’re low,” plays on the assumption that these trendy expressions are coming from some kind of faux-gangsta talk, an easy trap into which a middle-aged nerd trying to be hip could fall.

Unbothered is kind of a trick question; think too much, as I did, and you’ll get it wrong. The first choice is “bothered,” which brings to mind those reverse-meaning phrases like “I could care less”; and in our ironic age, fronting one’s botheration with the negative of the word would seem a logical maneuver. The second choice, “clean, tidy,” made sense to me as a young person’s evasion of words his or her mother would have used to describe, let’s say, a well-made bed. In fact, the correct choice is apparently the obvious definition, “unfazed.” Unbothered isn’t really a coinage, in that we can probably add “un-“ to anything we like (unrestful, un-creepy, etc.); and why create a longer word when a short one’s available? I don’t know, but my hunch leans toward the same British influence seen in the next word, joggers, which are pants used to go jogging, much as trainers, in Brit English, are shoes used for athletic training.

Nothing special in the definition of rekt, though I suppose someone could mistake it for an acronym of “Real Early K—(?) Time,” and check the false answer “real early.” It’s an alternate spelling of “wrecked,” which seemed right to me. (“To puke” was way-too-obvious bait for oldsters who think of college students drinking.) But more interesting was the word’s origin in online gaming and its association with pwned, a term I’d never understood and felt prompted, by its inclusion in the answer’s explanation, to look up. Seems pwned (pronounced poaned) originated not in an alternate spelling but in a typographical misspelling, of owned, by a designer creating the online game World of Warcraft. (This was, apparently, before spell checkers came into play.) If you were beaten by the game, you were meant to be owned, but instead you were pwned. Poker players, many of them veterans of video games, took up the term and spread it far enough that a website now exists, haveibeenpwned.com, where you can check if your email firewall has been breached.

My favorite, however, has to be on fleek, both because it’s gone so instantly viral (and will surely, like a butterfly, live out its few days of glory, lay its eggs, and die) and because it makes no etymological sense. Neither does on flick, which many initially thought 16-year-old Peaches Monroee was trying to say in the 12-second video in which she described her newly waxed eyebrows’ perfection as on fleek. For what it’s worth, half the other words in the video made no sense to me, either because I don’t know the slang of Chicago’s south side or because Peaches (as she explained to Merriam-Webster) likes to make up new words. Fleek lends itself to the vowel lengthening of words like Hiiii, Soooo, and Reeeally; it’s easy to imagine supra-perfection rendered as on fleeeek!. Plus, the sounds are fun to say—the fl to start with, the various ways of pronouncing that long e sound, and the quick explosion of the k. I’ll miss on fleek when it’s gone, even though I just learned it for the first time in this quiz.

But I’m still not taking that quiz about commercial jingles for food. I feel stupid enough already, thank you.

“Hamilton,” a grammatically creative musical

The first line of the third paragraph of Ben Brantley’s review of the new hit Broadway play Hamilton delighted and shocked me. Following up on a line from the play, “History is happening in Manhattan,” he writes: “’Happening’ qualifies as both an adjective and a verb in this instance.”

Wow. Just wow.

For those who don’t get Brantley’s observation or my reaction, a quick lesson. The verb to be, followed by a present participle, often means some form of what many of us call a progressive tense: I am walking. She was spinning the wool. They will be starting their motors in a minute. Some verbs, though, despite being commonly found in the form of participles following to be, function not as verbs, but as complementary adjectives or nouns. Many people call these stative verbs, in that they seem to indicate a state of being: He’s understanding. It’s fitting for him to give the eulogy. She is amusing.

The test for distinguishing present progressive from to be + subjective complement has traditionally been to insert differing adverbs into the sentence. (I am not addressing the verb vs. gerund problem here, wherein the trick is inserting the before the -ing word, e.g., Seeing is believing = The seeing of it is the believing of it.) If you can insert an adverb of manner, we’re told, you probably have a progressive tense:

I am walking fast.

She was deftly spinning the wool.

They will be starting their motors loudly in a minute.

But look what happens with:

He’s understanding rapidly.

It’s eloquently fitting for him to give the eulogy.

She is determinedly amusing.

The first of this latter group of sentences has now changed, from the characterization of an understanding person to the description of the mental action the person is taking. The second makes for a misplaced modifier; we have to mentally transpose the eloquence to the eulogy, not to the fittingness of the choice of eulogist. But the last example is a bit fuzzy. Obviously, if you were to insert a direct object for amusing, you would have She is determinedly amusing him, a clear case of amusing being part of the verb. But we have all known people who seem to be, as a matter of character, determinedly amusing.

Likewise, some suggest, you can insert an adverb of degree before the -ing word and determine if it forms a complementary adjective:

He’s very understanding.

It’s very fitting for him to give the eulogy.

She is so amusing.

But looks what happens with:

I am very walking.

She was very spinning the wool.

They will be so starting their motors in a minute.

This test works a bit better, though current slang use of so bends the rule somewhat — e.g., I am so going to that party!

Which takes us back to Ben Brantley. When he points out that “History is happening in Manhattan” yields happening as both verb and adjective, he is seeing the sentence in that ambiguous area where action and description overlap. If happening is part of the verb, the sentence means that history is taking place in Manhattan: The play he’s reviewing is making history, or the re-enactment of history within this play about the founding fathers brings the history to such life that it seems to be taking place now rather than almost 250 years ago.

But if happening is an adjective acting as a subjective complement in “History is happening in Manhattan,” then history is a “happening thing,” as in the song by the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. History, in this sense, has become hip, groovy, cutting-edge, as opposed to that fusty nonsense you find in textbooks. Brantley is telling us that we don’t have to make a choice here. He loves the play because it comprises both meanings of the term; it’s happening in both denotations of the word.

Why do I love that? It’s economical, for one. (Look at all the verbiage I just spewed trying to say what Brantley expressed in a few words.) It presupposes a knowledge of and delight in the expressive possibilities of grammar references. And while the sentence doesn’t cut off those who don’t get what Brantley’s on about — because the review proceeds to discuss the play in both senses of happening — it gives a few of us a fun space to linger in, before we move on to the apparent impossibility of finding tickets to a hot new musical.

I’m always coming late to the party. Over the weekend, traveling through Arizona with a clogged computer, I stopped in at the Apple store, 12 minutes late for my appointment at the Genius Bar. They hold the appointments for 10 minutes, after which you go into the queue. There were about 300 people in the store. Standing in line, I asked a roaming Apple person how long she thought the wait might be for those of us who had trouble making our way through the desert to this oasis.

“You need to talk to the guy with the iPad,” she said, nodding toward a fresh-faced young man tapping his screen at the front of the line. “He has better visibility on that.”

For about five minutes I wondered why she would say has better visibility on rather than knows more about. Then I estimated my chances of going mad in the Apple store and exited.

Although I had failed to fix my laptop, I thought I’d discovered a new bit of Applespeak. But on returning to my hotel room and Googling (because, of course, the mere dwelling temporarily inside the Apple store had magically repaired whatever was ailing my hard drive), I found the expression everywhere.

Straight uses: In the report “Electricity Market Reform,” February 15, 2011: “Until we have visibility on that, it is quite difficult to be confident that this is going to drive the real uplift in investment that is absolutely crucial.” From Investorshub, March 2012: “YES but we don’t have visibility on that time line.”

And complaints: In a blog kept by McSmith, tracking terms of art in patent litigation: “Visibility = figure out what the hell we’re going to do.” In Kuno Creative, under 2013’s most overused expressions, under “Emerging Garbage”: “We don’t have ‘visibility on that’ yet. Huh? You mean you can’t see it? Replacements: see, understand.” In Meeting Boy’s blog, August 2013: “’I’d like to have visibility on that.’ Took me 5 minutes to realize that was just a fancy way of saying, can I have access to the report?”

Clearly, the expression’s been around long enough for those in the know to grow annoyed with it. But where did it originate? Ngrams yield one clue. Before 2007 (which is as contemporary as the data get), the term rose steeply from 1990 to 2003, where it peaked in books using it mostly to refer to information visible on computer screens — flight parameters, production lots, access-control parameters that those involved were attempting to view. More recent instances, though their general meaning is opaque to me, seem to confirm the figurative use of a computer-screen term; for instance, this December 2014 entry in the techie discussion Gossamer Threads, under “NetApp: Toasters”:

I’ve been testing a few monitoring scripts for cDOT and had to pull
out some physical components on heads / disk shelves, I noticed the
following:
when a PSU removed from a DS2246 disk shelf, this fact is not visible
for CLI tools like “alert” or “system health”. Also Zephyr API calls
of ‘ses’ category don’t seem to have visibility on that.

In a literal sense, then, the fellow with the iPad in the Apple store has “better visibility on” my chances of seeing a Genius before the sun sets over the mountains because he’s looking at a schedule on his little screen, and that schedule shows the remaining open slots.

Figuratively, though, the expression seems to me to accomplish two things. First, it places knowledge, or understanding, in the categories of vision and transparency. If we can see it, we can know it. Look, there it is, plain as day, right on my computer screen. Second, and related, it removes responsibility from the person who’s trying to “figure out what the hell we’re going to do.” If you don’t have visibility, it’s not your fault. Not the same—no, not at all—as not having a vision.

How useful a term it is, then, not having visibility. Shall we welcome it into the lingo of academe?

What do you think my grade will be in this course, Professor?

Sorry, kid. I don’t have visibility on that.

I know, I know. It’s already in your syllabi. I’m always late to the party.

(Credit–and apologies–to James Joyce for the title of this post.)

My friend Robb Forman Dew, who won the National Book Award for her first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, recently received more than 50 comments on her Facebook post:

I’m weary of the sudden and peculiar crowing about not being so old that you would be ignorant enough to double space after a marking the end of a sentence with a period. And now people are complaining about “double periods.” If you’ve been composing prose since the moment you could hold a crayon, and then you used a pencil to print by hand, then a pen to write in cursive, graduated to a non-electric typewriter, then an IBM Selectric, and finally your first Mac, that double space after a sentence is part of how you translate an idea from the sense of it in your head to its place on a crisp, white page of paper. And you’re lucky to have absorbed that nuance of intention. Be VERY glad you’re over forty!

The double-space issue has been around for a long time; hence my surprise at the number of comments on Robb’s post. A 1990 guide to processing electronic manuscripts notes, “Typewriter-style output uses two spaces after periods; typesetting never uses two. Typewriter- style output uses two carriage-returns between paragraphs, typeset output only one.” The reason for the change, as most who underwent it understand, was the introduction of proportional spacing in computer fonts, versus the monospacing to which we were all accustomed when we used, say, Courier for our typewriters or early word processors. Radio Shack’s Rainbow magazine, published in the late 1980s for Tandy users, advertised its punctuation checker, which would automatically look for errors in spacing after end punctuation—though the online version of the journal seems to leave two spaces.

What’s odd, to me, are the equal parts of venom and defensiveness about the double-spacing practice.  Farhad Manjoo’s article in Slate, “Space Invaders: Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period,” generated so many comments that the magazine reran it three times, until the comments became tirades not only against Manjoo’s insistence on single spacing but also against the reprinting of the article.  Perhaps the most revealing opinion on the debate comes from Jennifer Gonzalez’s recent “The Price of Snark,” in her blog on pedagogy, where she cops to having been offensive in a prior post on “Nothing Says Over 40 Like Two Spaces After a Period!”  She writes:

I thought my headline and graphic were funny. Yep. And judging by Facebook shares, a few thousand other people did, too. Only now do I understand that that kind of funny only amuses those who are in on the joke. To the butts of the joke, that kind of funny is just mean.

For most of us who transitioned from typewriters to computers, the change has come gradually. Before sending my book manuscripts off in the early 2000s, I did a global search-and-replace of “. ″ for “.  ” — and that worked just fine to accommodate my publisher’s typesetting process. (Yes, I realize you may need to repeat the process for question marks and exclamation points, and it requires a bit more finesse to adjust spacing following a quote mark that may or may not end the sentence. Still, it’s not the most onerous task in manuscript preparation.)

Sometime in those years, though, I stopped typing both spaces, much the way I learned to stop using tabs to begin paragraphs when I could style them to indent the first line. Some people have not changed their practice, either because they’re not amenable to change or because they prefer the two spaces aesthetically, despite proportional spacing. (They may also prefer tabbing to start a paragraph; I get that; it gives you that “start of paragraph” feeling.) The “problem” is easy to fix, either after the manuscript is finished or at the typesetter. Why, then, the animosity? Why describe the two-space convention in emails typed with monospaced font as “overwrought, self-important, and dorky”? Why respond to such articles by typing two or three spaces after end punctuation “just to piss you off”?

My own sense is that prescriptivism in punctuation is received less kindly, in general, than prescriptivism in grammar. Deny as we might that aesthetics should come into play here, some writers prefer the look of the extra space, just as some prefer the look of punctuation that falls outside quotation marks, or the look of the single quote mark as opposed to the double. Despite one Slate commenter’s suggestion, “If you want ‘aesthetically pleasing’ … go to the art gallery. That is not the objective of the written (or typed) word,” our eyes fall on those words, and the multitude of fonts and styles now available in word-processing programs suggests that we have become more, not less, concerned with aesthetics in textual communication. To test this theory, I have typed one paragraph in this post with two spaces after every period. Did you notice? And how do you respond?

A concerned Lingua Franca reader writes:

Perhaps it is just here in Gainesville, but I find that the radio reporters, especially those reporting weather, use the possessive pronoun when referring to time periods: “Your Friday will be sunny.” “It will be below freezing on your Monday night.” Is this modern usage? Does it happen in other places as well? Is it acceptable?

I’d noticed this particularly in robocalls and fund appeals from local arts charities—Support your Hartford Symphony! Support your candidate! Support your local NPR station!—almost always with the possessive pronoun emphasized. The first time I heard this use of the second person possessive, I felt a little teed off. Who said I had any ownership of these organizations or causes? Soon I managed to live with the practice, contenting myself with a sense of your not as an attributive adjective but in my Random House dictionary’s second definition: “2. (used informally to indicate all members of a group, occupation, etc., or things of a particular type): Take your factory worker, for instance. Your powerbrakes don’t need that much servicing.”

But your Friday and your Monday seem a bit presumptuous. I did a little sniffing around the Internet and found that, indeed, when it comes to days of the week, we seem to be owning them more often than we used to. As I write, CNN’s homepage announces “5 New Things to Know for your New Day.” TGI Fridays cleverly encourages us all to “Find Your Fridays.” A Fox affiliate offers “Your Town Fridays.” Soundcloud has offerings “For Your Friday.” Toledo News offers “Your Day at 9.”

English has always leaned heavily on pronoun possessives and on the second person. We don’t wash ourselves the face, as the French and Germans do (Nous nous lavons le visage; Wir waschen uns das Gesicht); we wash our face. And we don’t use a pronoun like one to indicate a typical person so much as we employ second-person address, e.g. You never know what will happen.

Still, this insistent use of the second-person possessive to refer to a day of the week, or a political party, seems to me to have a kind of collar-grabbing quality. It may partake more of the idiomatic usage suggested by Random House’s third definition: “3. (used to indicate that one belonging to oneself or to any person): The consulate is your best source of information. As you go down the hill, the library is on your left.” In these examples, as in your Monday and your candidate, nothing whatever is lost by shifting your to the except a degree of nuance. If I think the consulate is the best source of information (presumably about a specific subject), then it follows that I consider it best for you; if you or anyone else is driving down the hill, the library will be on the left. We don’t notice these usages, because they seem thoughtful in their personalization. The person using the second-person possessive seems to be focused on our particular situation more than on a general truth.

And that’s the source, I suspect, of the weather reporter’s quirk. You don’t get much more universal than weather, and reports of the weather were once considered the sine qua non of dull news. Now we have the Weather Channel, as well as louder, brighter graphics every day for the frenetic people who bring us wintry mix and overcast skies. No wonder they want to create the impression that they are speaking to their special someone. Ditto the advertisements I cited above.

When we’re grumpy (and note I am playing with a different pronoun here; I should really write When I’m grumpy, but I want you, my readers, to feel solidarity with what I’m about to say), we may react to WKBT’s “Your Monday Weather Update” with “Not my update, Buster, I’m headed for Florida!” But I admit to having been swayed by the local charity appeals. If it isn’t my local art museum, whose is it? And if it works as advertising, you can bet it’ll be around in the language for a good while longer.

Reasons abound for why I’m glad I don’t have a teenager prepping for the SAT at the moment. But the latest word, from the pop star Taylor Swift, on the Princeton Review’s practice test tripled my relief at having passed that hurdle. The test introduces a section titled Grammar in Real Life with the following prompt: “Pop lyrics are a great source of bad grammar. See if you can find the error in each of the following.” The lyrics that follow are by Swift, Katy Perry, Whitney Houston, and Lady Gaga. (I find it curious that they chose an all-female shame slate here, but we’ll let that pass for the moment.)

Taylor Swift’s offending lyric is “Somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.” Apparently the Princeton Review misquoted the line, prompting a series of tweets and the resulting publicity, but the “offense” remains the same.

What offense? you might ask. Might it be the elision of the word If from the beginning of the sentence? The collapsing of are going to into gonna? Nope. Third time’s the charm: it’s the use of them to refer to a singular pronoun. As the Princeton Review publisher Rob Franek put it in his defense: “If we look at the whole sentence, it starts off with ‘somebody,’ and ‘somebody,’ as you know, is a singular pronoun and if it’s singular, the rest of the sentence has to be singular.”

Never mind that the wording of the defense is itself confusing—what, exactly, does Franek mean by the rest of the sentence? Would a sentence like “When somebody tells me he loves M&Ms, M&Ms appear on his desk” be incorrect because M&Ms is a plural noun and appear a plural verb form? We know what Franek’s after.

But first, he’s wrong. However persnickety you may be about pronoun agreement, too much consensus exists regarding singular “they” to label it a grammar error.

Second, even if we were to grant the so-called error, what happened to poetic license? I don’t know Swift’s reasons for using they, but I would not be surprised to learn she was trying to write a song that would be relevant to both male and female listeners, and singular they gave her a means by which to leave the sex of the avowed lover up to the listener’s imagination. Poets and songwriters do this all the time, and for the Princeton Review to label such license “error” is to rob aspiring students of the freedom to play with language. Would we really want to “correct” No, no, no, it ain’t me babe to No, no, no, it isn’t I, babe? How about When the stars fall from the sky/For you and I?

And let us not pretend that only contemporary pop stars take such license. For years — nay, even now — the last line of T.S. Eliot’s brilliant poem “The Hollow Men” has bugged me:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

To my parallel-loving mind, it should be either Not with a bang but with a whimper—or, if that won’t do, move the modifier: With not a bang but a whimper. But neither of those so-called solutions will do at all. The first messes with the dactylic meter that makes the line great (NOT with a BANG but a WHIMper). The second places the stress in altogether the wrong place (WITH not a BANG but a WHIMper). So, obviously, Eliot had his reasons, and those excellent reasons overrode niggling details of syntax, and I love the poem.

The same applies, I think, to the other examples on the practice test. Katy Perry’s “In another life, I would make you stay, so I don’t have to say you were the one that got away” replaces the “proper” wouldn’t with don’t, which both works better rhythmically and emphasizes the present action of the speaker. (For my money, I’d replace the one that with the one who, but since the test only allows for one error per sentence, I suspect they’re not considering that diction choice.) Whitney Houston’s “It’s the second time around for you and I” does not, like the Doors’s lyric, bend for a rhyme, but the two iterations of me in the line that follows (“And believe me it’s confusing me”) give reason enough to choose I for the first line, whether or not you concur with its use as a prepositional object. Finally, Lady Gaga’s “You and me could write a bad romance” gains its low-down mood in part from that slangy start, and I find I like the m-echo of me and romance better than I would the internal rhyme of I and write, were she to formalize the lyric.

Intelligent people might disagree about these choices. But labeling them bad grammar in an effort at relevance for young test-takers? That’s bad pedagogy, and poor assessment.

I woke up this morning thinking of larvae. Not the actual creatures, but the word. I moved on from there to hippopatomi and stigmata.

All of these, of course, are Latinate plurals adopted into English. Some are used more than others. What my waking brain was trying to discover was a pattern. Why do we tend to Anglicize some of these plural forms and let others be? And has anyone settled on the pronunciation of ae, and does it disappear at the same rate and the same time as the ligature, æ?

I’m sure someone has answers to all these questions. It isn’t I. I’m on my second cup of coffee, and not much farther along. What becomes obvious, once one begins scribbling down all the words in the Scrabble finder, is that technical and academic terms (vertebrae, alveoli, curriculum vitae) tend to preserve their Latin plurals. Common words (forums, formulas) tend to Anglicize. More intriguing, for me, are the common words that remain stubbornly Latinate or hang in the balance.

The plural of forum, for instance, was fora, for the most part, before 1900, whereas today it is little used. Funguses never had a chance against fungi. But virtuosos have lagged fairly consistently behind virtuosi, and there have always been just slightly more concertos than concerti.

For the most part, in my entirely eclectic survey, the feminine Latin ending loses, perhaps because we haven’t figured out the pronunciation. We speak of et ceteras, caesuras, and (when we speak of them at all) vaginas, not et ceterae, caesurae, and vaginae. Antennas, admittedly, gained ascendancy only after 1990. And the feminine plurals of things of which the singular is rarely spoken, like larvae and algae, get a pass. Masculine nouns ending in -us, meanwhile, tend to lag in their Anglicizing of the plural, perhaps because of the clumsiness of pronouncing papyruses rather than papyri (though there’s a pronunciation quibble on that last syllable also). Only hippopotamuses has stood a chance. It’s so much fun to say, especially in what we used to call op-talk.

I want to claim that neuter Latin plurals rule, but Google Ngrams, the source of all my knowledge here, is an imperfect tool. I think of atria as large lofty spaces in office buildings or McMansions, but there’s the tricky question of whether the word refers to anatomical structures of the heart, and those medical Latin terms do linger. We hardly think of data and criteria as plural forms, anymore. And the stigmata are frozen in Biblical terminology; it wouldn’t do to think of them as stigmatums. Still, I’d like to bet that if you are a singular noun ending in –um, you’ve hung on to your plural –a longer than your feminine (and most masculine) counterparts.

I like to keep my antennae up for such trivia, so anyone who can illuminate these multiple dilemmae should add their two denarii.

I know a guy who wakes up in the night and scrawls candidates for his WBM list. These things don’t necessarily make the cut the next morning. They have to be scrawled night after night, or linger in his head through the day, and eventually they’re added. WBM stands for What’s Bugging Me. If you don’t write “Susy shoes front hall” more than once or twice, Susy’s habit of leaving her galoshes in the middle of the hallway doesn’t really bug you, and you should get over it.

My truth has been making it onto my WBM list lately. Marriage counselors prescribe it as an empowering way to speak one’s mind. Self-published memoirs come out with titles like Living My Truth. Blogs attempt to Write My Truth or Own My Truth. Even a reality show and a Japanese song purport to express someone or other’s truth.

Okay. I get it. My truth is a fad. But where does it come from, and why does it bother me?

My truth and your truth are clearly on the rise, though my truth hasn’t come near the heights of its use in 1810. That era saw much publication of two kinds of books: Christian texts and compilations or reprints of dramatic works. In the first category, my truth has basically one of two senses: either the Lord is speaking, in which case presumably no daylight exists between His truth and the truth; or some flawed human is claiming ownership of his truth as a way of pledging fealty to Christian belief.

In the dramatic works, my truth is used in the same way as my troth. Aha. Troth, of course, generally means a sort of pledge to keep one’s word, and in fact, the original definition of truth, going back to the first millennium, was that of fidelity. The sense I consider to be the main idea of truth, “conformity with fact, agreement with reality,” doesn’t appear until late in the 16^th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So I think what’s bothering me is that a sense exists for my truth, and it rubs elbows with the faddish expression, but the difference between them matters. Living My Truth could mean, for instance, living in such a way as to be faithful — but to what? To oneself, it seems. You be you. The solipsism of this configuration eviscerates what I think of as the archaic notion, in which the speaker is true to something (God, a spouse, a promise) outside his or her own personality. Speaking my truth endorses the relative nature of truth in its conformity-with-fact sense, but we undergraduate-college professors have seen all too clearly where such relativism can lead. To wit:

Undergrad:  Random-number generators became less random after 9/11 because that trauma shook the consciousness of the world.

Prof: There’s no evidence whatever that random-number generators are any less random than they were before.

Undergrad: That’s my truth. I saw it in Tom Shadyac’s movie.

Owning My Truth seems to have several meanings, depending on who employs the phrase. It could mean owning up to one’s own state of mind or human condition. Shakespeare advised something of this kind in to thine own self be true, but his was a warning against self-deception, not advice to consider one’s state of mind particularly objective or self-justifying. Owning my Truth could also mean sticking by my opinion or point of view (per the dialogue above) regardless of factual evidence.  That, to me, is actually a dangerous iteration of the phrase, particularly when it’s employed by young people. Standing up for one’s beliefs, speaking truth to power, and so on has great merit, especially as it joins the believer or truth-speaker with others who might take equally strong stands. Owning something you call truth, when truth has shrunk to the size of private, personal purview, divides and splinters us from one another.

I guess, in the end, that’s what’s bugging me.

My hunch is that the case of the missing comma began with email. In an earlier post, I talked about a friend’s dilemma over email salutations, wherein the preferred casual “Hi” at the beginning is followed by a person’s name and then a comma, rendering the grammatically standard vocative comma (“Hi, Jane,”) perhaps superfluous and at least funny-looking. I’ve been counting, and of the hundreds of emails I’ve received from students since that post appeared, none — and I mean zero — used a comma after “Hi” or “Hello.” The emails beginning “Dear Prof. Ferriss,” of course, follow a different punctuation rule. But the dropped comma in direct address seems to have become standard usage for email exchange.

Which brings me to fiction and poetry writing. With increasing frequency, I find the use of the vocative, including poetic apostrophes, missing what I’ve always considered an essential comma:

I got the call today Bruce.

Don’t think about it Melissa.

Who am I fixing it up for Cindy?

David I love you.

Death I wrap you close about me.

Looking at these sentences in isolation, I find them absurd. I also know the standard examples proving the need for a vocative comma:

I’d like a blueberry Betty vs. I’d like a blueberry, Betty.

Really nice Mat vs. Really nice, Mat.

I know your sister Sally vs. I know your sister, Sally.

Let’s eat Grandpa vs. Let’s eat, Grandpa.

Where discussions of the vocative comma have arisen recently, those who resist it cite what the  New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris has called “playing by ear.” As one Grammar Girl commenter pointed out, “Just consider how you say, ‘Hi, Jane, how are you?’ Rarely do you pause after ‘Hi’; it would sound artificial.” Of course, we use plenty of commas for reasons other than sound — take, for instance, the comma I just inserted before that direct quotation.

But we also glean plenty of meaning from context. Those who choose not to use the serial comma are not really worried about the example I went to see the two strippers, JFK and Stalin. That sentence doesn’t occur in so-called real life. Neither does any confusion between a friend named Betty and the colloquial name for a dessert.

The vocative comma is a convention. Those of us who are used to the convention stop in our tracks for a moment when it’s missing. I do, at least, every time I find it missing in student work. My stopping to consider the missing comma impedes my enjoyment of the poem or story, and I suspect it could impede others’ enjoyment, not to mention the potential acceptance of said poem or story for publication by a persnickety editor. So I mark it, I talk to students about it, I try to inspire renewed use of the vocative comma. But its absence long ago ceased to bother me in email salutations, and I suspect it will bother me less and less in written discourse as time goes on. I may eventually cease marking it at all, as I’ve ceased “correcting” alright to all right.

Any doubt that the vocative comma is a mere convention went out the window when I learned that Shakespeare (or, to be precise, Shakespeare’s typesetter) left it out of some of the lines now most familiar to us. In most editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we read:

Speak, Pyramus. Thisbe, stand forth.

But in the first quarto, the line reads

Speake Pyramus: Thysby stand forth.

And in John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising,” the fifth line of the final stanza as we generally read it appears:

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we

But in Donne’s original, we find

Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,

What do you think readers?

Apparently I subscribe to Quora. I don’t know when my subscription began. Mostly, the posts are the sort of trivia I indulge in only when desperate for work avoidance. But the question, “What is the most misspelt word in the English language?” got my attention. Of course, the first response worried the difference between misspelt and misspelled, but then we were off and running.

Spelling, of course, is a convention to which we cling more fiercely when we have dictionaries at the ready. Before Samuel Johnson came around, people paid little attention. Just think of all the spelling bees they missed out on in the 15th century. But here we are, creatures of our time, and certain misspellings tend to irk most of us, even those who call themselves poor spellers.

Still, there’s a difference, I think, between misspelling and misuse, as there’s a difference between misspelling and improper use of punctuation. I prefer to eliminate the many candidates for the honor of most misspelt word that rely on the misplaced apostrophe (e.g., its/it’s). I’ll also eliminate what I call the genuine malaprop, where the misused word is not well understood in its standard sense (e.g., effect/affect, further/farther). Quora readers offered quite a few examples that misspelled by way of an added or closed space (may be rather than maybe, alot rather than a lot), and for my own persnickety reasons I took them out of the running. I also couldn’t quite go for those made-up words that add an unnecessary prefix or suffix, like irregardless. I’m leaving off proper-name misspellings, like Carribean. Finally, typos like teh don’t make my cut.

But quite a few candidates remain. I’ve divided these into two categories: the misspellings that might have arrived on the page by way of an overcompensating spell checker, and misspellings that don’t exist currently in the dictionary. So I think we can award two winners. Since hundreds of us are now reading over final papers from the semester, I suspect we’ll arrive at some sort of consensus. Judging from the Quora submissions, I’ve anointed two lists of finalists, in alphabetical order:

Remember, we are looking not for the most egregious misspelling, or the one that bothers you the most, but for the most common misspelling in each category. Why do you see the ones you choose so much more often than others? Is it the double consonant or vowel? The peculiarity of the conventional spelling? A question of pronunciation? Hypercorrection? Or just the common occurrence of the word itself (in which case, why do people misspell it so much)?

Finally, do you suspect that these two most common misspellings, whichever they are, will eventually morph into acceptable alternate spellings, like amok/amuck or barbecue/barbeque? Take a moment of work avoidance from those papers and cast your vote!

I didn’t plan to write a follow-up to my spelling-contest post, but reader response prompted too many thoughts to contain in a footnote.

First, by popular vote, the winners from my lists were loose as a misspelling of lose and definately as a misspelling of definitely. A note on each of these:

Sites abound for the loose/lose problem; there’s even a Facebook page. I admit, I find it odd that so many people truly misspell the common word lose. (By “truly misspell,” I mean I think it’s neither a typo nor a usage error.) But when I look more closely, the error makes sense. Lose violates two notions we have of standard spelling. First, the single o “should” be pronounced as in nose, pose, and hose. Second, the way it is pronounced accords with what we’ve been taught about a doubled o. Granted, a word like noose is comparable to loose in that both esses are pronounced as ess and not zee. So really, the speller is being asked to choose which “rule” the word violates — the rule for the vowel or for the consonant? As for the outraged cry, “How can they think this is the same word?,” consider all the homographs we use without thinking twice about it:

The wind at my back / I wind the clock.

Lead poisoning is serious. / He leads the pack.

Give me my bow and arrow. / He took a bow onstage.

If someone thought lose and loose were homographs, they would follow the same pattern.

Definately (which, as many pointed out, spell checkers often “correct” to defiantly) is more of a puzzle. In some regions, the word may be pronounced with a short a sound in the third syllable, but I don’t think that accounts for the error. Perhaps it’s just the strange look of those two i‘s. There’s some comfort in knowing that definately tops the list of misspelled words in Britain, too.

But what I pondered most, as I read through votes and suggestions, is what we consider a misspelling. One commenter pointed out that quiet, meaning quite, may be a typo. Despite my injunction against punctuation errors, several people resorted to the its/it’s problem, and that one, too, could be typographical error, at least in about half the cases. We are talking here about faulty (or nonexistent) proofreading more than spelling error.

Other suggestions for what I called Group A got me thinking about metaphor. I may be wrong about this, but I think the writers who refer to someone’s taking the reigns of a horse, or the writers trying to post a mute question, could genuinely believe that they are employing a metaphoric use. Do not the strips of leather by which you control the horse allow you to reign over the horse’s movements? Is not the question that we are deeming unnecessary a question that, in a way, fails to speak?

I am not suggesting that misspellers go through some process by which they arrive at a clever metaphor. They write the word incorrectly and move on. But given the way English works — just think of the last time you sailed through an interview — I would not be surprised if, confronted with their mistakes, many of these writers managed to mount a defense that depended on metaphor. I believe the commenter jamesgor made the same point when he observed that the mistake of writing principle when one means principal “retains a certain logic.”

I may be ungenerous when I observe that other errors that were suggested seem to me to fall into the further/farther camp; that is, the problem here is one of limited and confused vocabulary and thus a usage error rather than a misspelling. I’m not sure all undergraduate students know what a tract is, so I’m not surprised if they mention an independent soul’s taking a different tract. Nor may they understand a tack as anything other than a very short nail, so if someone takes a different tack (note the resemblance to taking a different tract), there’s no cognitive dissonance to be found.

Finally, some words we regard as misspelled may be eggcorns, as in the suggestion of including granite as a misspelling for granted because students will write of being “taken for granite.”  Does it matter whether we dub something a misspelling or not? To me it does, only because these gray areas reveal more about the way the mind fires or misfires than spelling vacuum with two c‘s and one u.

Returning to my lists and popular vote, I find a runner-up in lead as the past tense of lead, which actually makes sense, given the way English works elsewhere. Today I read, yesterday I read. Today I lead; yesterday I lead. Not to mention the metal that sounds the same as that mistaken past tense.

And in Group B, many pointed out the double-consonant problem in misspellings like transfered and (an addition to the list) accomodate. A few people noted wierd, and it is weird, isn’t it, that we don’t see that misspelling more often, given the “i before e” rhyme that most of us (including my sons, whatever you may think about the demise of spelling) learned in elementary school?

While conventional wisdom has it that good spelling emerges from wide reading, studies have shown that brain dysfunction may account for much poor spelling. Inventiveness, as suggested above, may take up the slack left by neurological glitches. And I am not ready to let spell checkers off the hook. When I asked an undergraduate class about the vast difference between the spelling I was seeing in online posts using classroom software and the spelling in papers composed using Microsoft Word, a collective groan went up. The classroom software, the students complained, had no spell checker. If they wanted the posts to look “right,” they had to compose in Word, get the spelling checked, and then copy into the online post.

To which I say: Let’s get a spell checker into the online posting system, and let it be a really smart spell checker that knows enough of the difference between principle and principal to query it. Proper spelling may be a symptom of something — but unlike the diligence associated with careful proofreading, it is not a virtue, no matter how many gold stars we give out.