Maybe John McWhorter is just being provocative in his post “Why Kim Kardashian Can’t Write Good.” Following up on his argument that texting and tweeting amount to “talking with your fingers,” he contends that we are at the dawn of a renewed oral society. We shouldn’t be so concerned, he says, that our students’ formal writing skills are slipping. Other primarily oral societies — the ancient Greeks, for instance — managed to think critically and develop persuasive arguments. “With modern technology,” he observes, “you can just talk again — and because that is what has always come more naturally to people, increasingly, they do.”

I’m sure McWhorter will receive plenty of backlash to this argument. His critics will range from those who would point out the still-prevalent reams of formal writing to those who have their finger on the difference between history as we now understand it and history as the ancient Greeks understood it. I’d like to observe just one small point: Those Greek rhetoricians he refers to were all male. And while plenty of other things contributed to the patriarchal nature of ancient Greek society, I have trouble imagining an oral society that does not privilege male speech.

The ability to write, after all, was a chief liberator for women’s “voices.” Much academic work has been done on the epistolary tradition (and as McWhorter observes, 19th-century letters were a type of “formal writing,” compared to text and email today.) Early women novelists, to be taken seriously, frequently adopted male pen names. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was able to play on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to promote “rational” education of women, including works of “intellect” (though when push came to shove, she remained in favor of reading novels, “for any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank”).

But far more than letter-writing, opinions expressed in the public sphere are vulnerable to the louder, deeper voices, larger physical presence, and larger gestures of men in that same space. We need look no further than recent instances of abuse toward female TV reporters in that most civilized of countries, Canada, for evidence. Or the treatment Hillary Clinton received when she teared up in public compared with the treatment Joe Biden or John Boehner has received. High or “shrill” voices come in for their share of mockery and dismissal. And so on. Kardashian’s ridiculous tweet, if it is indeed “talking with the fingers,” surely received more mocking press coverage than similar absurd tweets by male celebrities like Justin Bieber.

The playing field in formal written expression isn’t exactly level. We can’t go about always disguising our identities via initials and pseudonyms. Hawthorne’s complaint against “scribbling women” extends to serious essays and fiction by women, whose book covers receive notably lighter treatment than comparable books by men. But ask any female who’s got a serious argument to make, and she will reply that writing outweighs oral presentation when it comes to rebalancing the scales. We have not moved far, in that respect, from the moment when James’s Verena Tarrant, in The Bostonians, made her impassioned plea on behalf of women’s freedom, and Basil Ransom received it thus:

He had taken her measure as a public speaker, judged her importance in the field of discussion, the cause of reform. From any serious point of view it was neither worth answering nor worth considering, and Basil Ransom made his reflections on the crazy character of the age in which such a performance as that was treated as an intellectual effort, a contribution to a question. … Nevertheless, its importance was high, and consisted precisely, in part, of the fact that the voice was not the voice of Olive or of Adeline. Its importance was that Verena was unspeakably attractive.

For all the reasons suggested by James’s scene, the skills involved in crafting a written argument are particularly empowering to women whether or not, as McWhorter opines, they will become part of the “specialty” group that practices formal writing at a high level.

McWhorter uses piano players as an analogy for writers in his essay. Pianists and other musicians auditioning for orchestras these days generally sit behind a black curtain, so their sex does not affect the judgment of those listening to and assessing them. In the public realm, there is no curtain to block gender markers — the higher voice; the shorter stature; the attention to physical appearance, especially clothes, endemic to the media’s focus on women speaking in public — that have the effect of muting or shouting down women’s voices. The page remains our best curtain.

I’ve just returned from France, and the glow has not worn off. What glow, you ask? Would that be the long dinners over excellent wine, finished off with a plate of delectable stinky cheeses? The gilded sunsets over the Loire Valley? The newly refinished tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, with their mysterious sixth sense?

Yes to all of these. But yes, mostly, to the effect that speaking French has on my mood. I am fluent in French, though far from bilingual. After a day in the language, my jaw tires. Now and then I have to dance around a word I’ve forgotten, or substitute the English with an apologetic comment on dit. When a French person tells a joke, I have been known to ruin the punch line by asking to have it repeated. Nonetheless (néanmoins, one of my favorite-sounding French words), I cheer up when I am speaking French.

I’ve noticed this effect for years. It is not necessarily tied to being in France, regardless of my avowed francophilia. If I’ve had a trying day, I can lift my mood simply by translating and expressing my thoughts in French—to the dog or the mirror, since no one else in my household understands the language. My idea of group therapy is my local Francos à la biblio, a group of speakers of varying abilities who meet at the local library to discuss a film or a story en français. I get a particular high off the parlor trick of reciting “Jabberwocky” or “The Owl and the Pussycat” in French, which no one in my inner circle can abide.

I also suspect this mood-lifting effect is tied not to French but to the act of speaking fluently in any second language. I know of no research on this point. Recently, an op-ed in The New York Times, discussing the practice of psychotherapy in a foreign tongue, remarked that “many Russians today, myself included, use English in just this way: as a language of survival, of escape, of independent thinking and unrestricted speech.” But I’ve undergone none of the repression to which the article refers, and I have never been tempted to say something in French that I’m reluctant to say in English. Other researchers think they have uncovered a salutary effect on reasoning when engaging in a second language, and as The Economist’s language column observes, “if the hypothesis is correct, the better cognition should only obtain when people are using their foreign language with some effort.”

That argument applies to reasoning, not mood. Perhaps, then, it cheers me up to be reasoning more slowly or more effectively. I don’t know. I am certainly not taking up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that claims language structures a so-called world view; the world views of my French friends are as varied as those of my American friends. And while my lame Italian still gives me a little spark, I know language strugglers whose moods plummet with the frustration of trying to make themselves understood.

But absent empirical studies, I’ll take the hilarious flirtation scenes in A Fish Called Wanda as evidence that something about speaking (or, in Jamie Lee Curtis’s case, listening to nonsense in) a second language releases oxytocin or some other happy brain chemical, at least for some of us. Go ahead. Let your mood soar. Jouissez.

The summer I was 20, I hatched the insane plan of riding the moped I’d purchased at my job in France through England and Scotland and over to my mother’s ancestral home in Ireland. Various near-disasters ensued, not the least of them occasioned by my ignorance of a war that was then raging directly along my path through Northern Ireland. But the daily challenge was the rain. My moped ran well through a light mist, but stopped dead in the frequent downpours that anyone with a grain of sense would know as a fact of life in the British Isles. By the time I reached the countryside of Donegal, I was cold, tired, wet, hungry, and despondent. The small cut I’d received on the ring finger of my right hand had opened and swollen into a dangerous-looking, throbbing purple oval. At the wayside pubs where I sought refuge from the rain, women were not allowed past the foyer. Finally, standing in a small entranceway where a pay phone hung on the wall, I availed myself of the desperate measure my mother had given me permission to take, should my adventure prove too much for me. I lifted the receiver, spun the dial around from zero, and asked the operator to place a station to station collect call to St. Louis, in the United States.

The operator said she would call me back. During the half-hour in which I waited, the gray clouds over the next hill gradually lifted to reveal a line of hesitant blue. Then the phone rang. “I’m sorry,” the operator reported. “All circuits across the Atlantic are busy now.”

I wiped off the seat of my moped and rode on.

One of the “period moments” in the last season of Mad Men featured Don Draper placing a person to person call to Betty Francis. Nobody makes those calls anymore, but just hearing the term brought me back to that moment in the pub. When I was at a safer remove from home, in college, our routine was for me to call home person to person, collect, whereupon my mother would say that person was not available and would call me back. This happened perhaps once a month, because even direct-dial calls were expensive. When she took a traveling job with a nascent computer company, my mother received a trunk line, or WATS line, which I’ve only recently learned stood for Wide Area Telephone Service. Those lines were what we now call toll-free, a designation that may soon pass away as cellphones, with their lack of distinction between local and long-distance calls, take over our telephone communications. At the time, having such a line was amazing, because no one called long-distance regularly; if we wanted our relatives to hear our voices, we mailed tapes of ourselves talking.

Just as amazing were the glitches in the system that yielded what we called, one glorious teenage summer in Southern California, the Free Line. This was an empty spot in the circuitry, into which teenagers phoned to flirt with each other. The boys all claimed to be blond, 6-foot-tall surfers age 18; the girls all claimed to have 36-24-36 measurements and to be 16-year-old blonde cheerleaders. My cousin made the serious mistake of meeting a contact from the Free Line for a date, over which a curtain will be drawn.

During my time working in France, I discovered another glitch, yielding a pay phone called the Free Phone on the Left Bank, where foreigners stood in a line around the block because for reasons unknown you could call the United States without charge. That this phenomenon lasted for months I have always attributed to French generosity rather than ineptitude.

All this language — collect call, person to person, station to station, WATS, trunk line — evolved during the first half-century of  the telephone’s everyday use and has been slipping into archaism since. Already, growing up in a city, I was too young to know much about party lines. My father occasionally received a telex, but I didn’t know its difference from a telegram. I did know that if I stayed on the phone with my boyfriend for too many hours in the evening, the operator would eventually break in, generally at the request of my mother’s best friend who was willing to declare an emergency — such was the only way (other than common sense) to know that someone else was trying to reach the family.

A few of these terms do linger. On the list of “menu options” given me by a computerized answering service yesterday, I could dial 13 for one person, dial 12 for another, dial zero for assistance. Of course, I wasn’t dialing anything. Dialing was what I did in that Irish pub, four decades ago. But when someone’s not really on the job these days, we still speak of their dialing it in. What other language lingers, from those days of switchboards and pay phones? Indulge your nostalgia and let us know. The party line’s open.

Just when you thought it was safe to go out and play in the fields of gender, along comes Mx. The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary is considering adding this new honorific for those who are uncomfortable with assignment to one or another gender. Comparisons with Ms., another invented “abbreviation” that doesn’t really abbreviate anything, are inevitable. Commenting in The New York Times, Alice H. Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, suggested that unlike Ms., which was meant to “obscure personal details,” Mx. is intended “to highlight them,” a point to which I’ll return. First, though, I’m struck by the notion that we need honorifics at all.  Am I the only one who plays with this demand — say, in filling out online details for an airline reservation, where I’ll spring occasionally for “Dr.,” not because I like to flaunt my Ph.D. but because a) I’m weary of what’s happened to the Mrs./Ms./Miss debate, and b) I have this fantasy that someone out there is tracking percentages of female doctors.

Apparently we have had honorifics for millennia. The Romans, for instance, used Dominus, Augustus, and Magister — the last of which evolved into the English term Master, which became Mister.  By the 16^th century, Master was being used (though not exclusively) as a title for a young boy, and Mister began its rise as a term for a gentleman. But in line with the trend toward professionalization, other, higher-status honorifics grabbed hold, leaving Mr. as the default term for anyone who claims male status. I’m sure I am not the only professor who attended college when almost all the faculty were male and were referred to as “Mr. Smith,” etc. But in my 30 years of teaching, I have usually been addressed as Professor, except by the few students who prefer to call their college teachers Doctor.

Because I was brought up to write, for instance, “Mrs. John Smith” on the envelope of a letter addressed to Mary Smith, I’d always thought that Mrs., short for Mistress, stemmed from a married woman’s status — that it meant, essentially, “Mistress of John Smith.” Not so, according to several etymology sources. In the 14^th century it was used to denote a woman who took charge of a child — a governess or a teacher. It could also be used to refer to a sexual partner, or in general, used with a woman’s given name, to refer to any female. Its short form could be spelled Miss. Only as the abbreviation Mrs. began to be pronounced missus and thus to separate from the word mistress did it acquire a meaning limited to married women and quite distinct from what we mean when we speak of a man’s mistress. At about that same time, Miss became relegated to the realm of unmarried women.

The point of all this etymology is that we didn’t start out with our current definitions for Mr., Mrs., Ms., and Miss. One of the unfortunate developments in the half-century since Ms. was coined has been certain agencies’ tendency to designate it as a term for a formerly married woman or for a woman using her name professionally — in other words, to return to Alice Eagly’s phrasing, precisely to try to highlight something about the user of the honorific rather than let stand its status as a simple counterpart to our current use of Mr. We are also a very long way from eliminating the use of Miss and Mrs.; since 2000, the use of both those honorifics has risen sharply, while the use of Ms. has remained flat. It’s this development, rather than a newly invented status for those who are transitioning between genders or who consider themselves “gender queer,” that makes Mx. interesting to me.

Other non-gender-specific options are, of course, available. There are the various egalitarian honorifics—Citizen, Comrade, Friend. There is the occasionally used single initial M., which has the misfortune of being the French abbreviation of Monsieur. There’s doing away with honorifics altogether — since America is supposed to be a class-free society (no smirks, please), why should the airlines or anyone else force us to append a title before a person’s name? But as anyone who has written a highly formal recommendation knows, continually repeating the applicant’s first and last names feels robotic and tiresome; reverting to the last name only feels denigrating; and using only the first name can seem overly personal or informal. So an honorific is a handy device.

Which brings me to my last point. Whatever its origin, I would prefer that Mx., if we adopt it, be available to all human beings. I see no reason why its purpose should be, per Prof. Eagly, to “highlight” personal details. About the proliferation of options this occasions I have no useful suggestions. Personally, I wish Mrs. and Miss would go the way of Magister. Perhaps in a few more centuries.

Mr. Derp

Paul Krugman’s attempts at being hip end up landing, I suppose, like hipness attempted by any of us blogging here: midway between cute and cringeworthy. A few weeks ago, his column noted an increase in what he called derpitude, “useful shorthand for an all-too-obvious feature of the modern intellectual landscape: people who keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong.”

Derp had a familiar ring to it, which grew louder as Krugman referenced his source: South Park. My children were squarely in the South Park demographic — boys born between 1986 and 1990 — and when other parents told me I should join them in banning South Park at home, I determined to watch it for myself. As it turned out, the performance of Isaac Hayes as the school chef, whose specialty was “chocolate salty balls,” pretty much convinced me that this was a show the kids and I should watch together.

The character who became known as Mr. Derp on the show was always doing stupid stuff, after which he would hit himself on the forehead and cry, “Derp!” The word acquired the meaning, according to Urban Dictionary and other sources, of “a phrase used when someone makes a mistake, or says or does something stupid or ridiculous.” So if you were to say, for instance, “Gee, I dunno about global warming. We had a pretty cool winter in Florida this year,” I might cry “Derp!” and slap myself, subtly of course, so as not to hurt your feelings.

As far as I know, that’s all there is to it. But you get a guy like Krugman in the conversation, and suddenly economists start saying “Derp” without any reference other than his column.

Krugman is defining derp, I will remind us all here, as the act of the stupid person, not the reaction to it; and, moreover, as a particular kind of stupidity: “Making the same wrong prediction year after year, never acknowledging past errors or considering the possibility that you have the wrong model of how the economy works — well, that’s derp. And there’s a lot of derp out there.”

Is it derp? Or more properly, is derp an activity of some kind, like the making of a prediction? Or is it a response, like “Word,” uttered when the listener believes the speaker has said something particularly true or philosophically rich? Well, now that Krugman has adopted the term and coined its abstract version, derpitude, I suppose it is. The word was certainly up for grabs; Urban Dictionary lists DeRp as “The contemporary DNC and GOP parties are one party, the DeRps.” And maybe we needed a term for the repeated falsehoods, particularly economic ones, that never get called out. Maybe asinine wasn’t quite doing the job.

But it would be ironic if kids stopped saying “Derp!” because grown-up economists have co-opted the term and changed or at least narrowed its meaning. Right now a kid could read Krugman’s column (though I don’t know the kid who would) and say, rightly, “Man, he doesn’t really get it. Derp!” Ten years from now, a similar kid might conclude that someone like Tim Worstall, in Forbes, exhorting his readers “to fight the derp. Do not allow people to get away with simply repeating, endlessly, things that are not true,” is using a term that could be on the SAT.

So go ahead. Read this column and comment, “Derp!” Or the next time someone insists that a conjunction like but cannot begin a sentence, describe it as derpitude. No better toy, I say, than a bright new piece of language.

Not being a big user of emoticons or emoji, I usually have to pause to arrive at the difference between them. So I hadn’t given any thought to their function in the sentence until I came across Gretchen McCullough’s post querying how these little gremlins infesting our written language ought to be punctuated. She combines the two, as do most people who write about them. Emoji, after all, began as a colorful and labor-saving alternative to stacking up pieces of punctuation in order to create an image. Now that Moby-Dick has been translated into emoji—a feat that’s difficult to imagine using parentheses and colons — I suspect we’ll start seeing discussions that treat emoticons and emoji differently. For the sake of argument, though, we’ll lump them together here.

McCullough asks how to punctuate “around” emoji, assuming them to be part of the sentence they accompany. She offers three obvious alternatives: punctuate after, punctuate before, and don’t punctuate at all. E.g.:

• (Don’t forget to bring chocolate :).)/ OMG .
• (Don’t forget to bring chocolate.) :) / OMG.
• (Don’t forget to bring chocolate) :) / (Don’t forget to bring chocolate :)) / OMG

The third set has two versions of the emoticon sentence because eliminating the full-stop period still leaves the parentheses, the close of which can be placed before or after the emoticon, depending on which version confuses you less.

With differing preferences in that regard, all of the emo-users I queried went for the non-end-stopped alternative, because, as one pointed out, these little doohickeys show up most often in writing where punctuation as a whole has disappeared. A typical Facebook message, for instance, even without these symbols, might read something like:

• man I am so pumped you are the best dont forget beer

Perfectly understandable in context, and any festoons would simply fall, as Tyler Schnoebelen (who wrote a whole dissertation on this) notes, at the end of the sentence.

Others aren’t having it. They like to think of emojis and emoticons as punctuation in and of themselves, a variety of discourse marks. To me, that’s trying to massage the things into a category that can’t contain them. Punctuation itself, after all, emerged after several civilizations had already developed writing, and ballooned only with the advent of printing. So it’s possible, first, to imagine a kind of writing that doesn’t call for punctuation; and second, to imagine some other category arising, fulfilling some other function for a different era — one, say, when text is not so much published as streamed.

The question becomes complicated only if we also imagine these symbols and little pictures making their way into the kinds of texts that are routinely punctuated. Thus far I have not seen that happening. If they were to make the leap back from tweets and quick emails to essays and arguments, my guess is that they would come closer to the sense of the medieval illuminated manuscript than to any concept of punctuation. Those manuscripts did not just contain illustrations of the topic at hand. They also used inhabited and historiated initials, which could be decorative or actually partake of the subject; and drolleries, thumbnail images in the margins. These illustrative elements seem closer to the sense of the emoji. And since there weren’t a lot of punctuation rules when such manuscripts were being prepared, perhaps we could go to an ad hoc system here as well.

meanwhile though so long as punctuation is dying in the twittersphere the argument seems moot to me what about you (?_?)

My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction writer, interested in how personalities respond to rhetorical maneuvers. It hasn’t been lost on me that the majority of highly rated comments in newspapers like The New York Times come from a handful of commenters, who seem to make a full-time job out of logging on to major journals and Internet sources to post comments that get up- or down-rated by a majority of comment-readers like me. I’ve also been intermittently curious about the posts that get deleted for “inappropriate content” as well as the unseemly rants that sneak through the Internet filters.

But I hadn’t made the leap from reading comments to considering blog-commenting as a specific form of writing until I came across the (to me) eye-opening post by Kevin Duncan on a site called boostblogtraffic. Apparently there is a long-range purpose to posting blog comments: to persuade popular bloggers to notice you, and to then make reference to your blog in their blog, thus giving you more traffic and more reader comments (likely by hopeful bloggers) posted at the end of your own story or list of funny cat videos or advice to recovered evangelicals … or whatever. Apparently we go round and round until we end where someone is trying to make money selling something, or perhaps not even then.

What sets this writing form apart from others?

The wooing.

According to Duncan, blog commenters are trying to score a big date with the blogger. Like any suitor, they do best to hone their approach: It’s possible, according to Duncan, “to stumble into marriage, kids, and a house with a white picket fence even if you turn up to your first date with a mustard stain on your shirt and use the pickup line, ‘Did you hear about Pluto?’ But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s likely.”

He goes on to warn against first-date faux pas like using a gravatar (which I just this second learned is a globally recognized avatar) as your image, because “you know you’re sexy. Show us that smile!” Ditto using a false name (“Using your real name on a first date is just the right thing to do”); dumping links in your comments (“Imagine you’re on a date and, halfway through, your date asks if you have life insurance”); failing to read the post (“Ever been on a date with someone from Match who didn’t bother to read your profile?”); and repeating what the post said (“Ever had a date where the other person repeated everything?”).

Better to greet the blogger, by name, unlike the date that launches right into talking about his day. Better to pay the blogger a compliment (“You meet your date for the first time. ‘Wow! I love your outfit,’ you might say.”). Be sure to add value to the exchange. (Here, our analogy diverges from romance to food: “No one cares how good the appetizers are if the main course is a garbage sandwich with no mayo.”) Finally, leave the object of your desire with a parting promise (“After a successful first date, each person is usually looking for a clue that the other enjoyed themselves … and when wooing a popular blogger, you’d be smart to let them know you’re interested in a longer-term relationship.”)

Once I got this far in my new understanding of the Art of Blog Commenting (let’s call it ABC, shall we?), I began fantasizing about how you, the loyal commenters of Lingua Franca, could begin wooing me. You could greet me by name (“howdy, if you’re feeling folksy”): “Howdy, She Who Is Carried to the Light.” (Only don’t repeat that; remember the warning.) You could pay me a sincere compliment, say on my effective disguise before the paparazzi. You could add value by sharing a personal insight (“Did you find something particularly relatable?”), when you read about my 12-year-old terrier. And above all, be sure to leave me with a promise. Promise me you’ll use the serial comma. Promise me you’ll stop haranguing me and my buddies about singular they, and instead you’ll start appreciating our tart sense of humor, our keen insights into gendered speech, and especially my clever titles.

Then, only then, baby, you’ll have me forever.

But wait. Didn’t Bon Jovi say love is war? Apparently so. Because Duncan advises, once he’s done with all the lovey-dovey stuff, that “great comments alone won’t catapult you to world domination.” But “comments are perhaps the most misused — and least understood — weapons in the ambitious blogger’s arsenal.”

Yikes. Let’s just be friends, OK? And keep your hands to yourself.

This is the question I get most often when people learn I have a new novel out. I understand the context of the question. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, or go browsing on Amazon, you will see real or virtual shelves devoted to Mystery, Romance, Thrillers, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult. My books, and the books of most writers I happen to know, don’t belong on any of them.

Recently, at a book festival, I was invited to lunch with a couple of the other authors who were presenting. The entire conversation seemed to hinge on whether it was possible, as an author, to move from Romance to Women’s Contemporary. Naïf that I was, I hadn’t even known a Women’s Contemporary category existed, much less that it was a coveted place to belong. These authors were also churning out books at a rate I found astonishing. Their editors were “demanding” novels every nine months, or even six months. No editor has ever demanded a novel of me; I can’t imagine why they would, or how I would meet such a demand.

The default category, for those who either refuse or are incapable of fitting their imaginations to the parameters of these other labels, is Literary Fiction. To claim membership in that club invites one of two characterizations. First, you are parading as a snob, disdaining the so-called formulas of genre writing. (And it doesn’t help to claim that some of your best friends read only mysteries or science fiction.) Second, you are a dunce, literary fiction being a catch-all for boring, precious, pretentious, M.F.A.-style narrative that no one wants to read.

The popular writer Jennifer Weiner has become a self-created lightning rod for the debate between so-called literary and so-called commercial fiction; she has a parallel role in the debate about women’s representation in top-flight book reviews and journals. The conflation of these two debates, of course, makes the question, “What kind of fiction do you write?” even more tiresome for a female novelist, since it’s easy to get the impression that the commercial (“chick lit”) writers are female and any literary writers you’ve ever heard of are male.

Trying to formulate an answer to the question, I find myself returning to Henry James’s vigorous defense of “the art of fiction,” in which he writes, for starters, “It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic.” I think that we who cannot claim membership in any of the genre clubs still feel something of this need to apologize, a feeling that can come off, paradoxically, as arrogant. Poets, however slim their earnings, rarely feel the sting of a history in which their kind was routinely described as hacks. (Interestingly, a shortening of hackney, the term for a horse available for hire). Or consider the double-edged sword of the term popular writer, with its implication that anyone whose work is widely beloved must of necessity be creating shallow material. Even Charles Dickens, that most respected of popular novelists, could get defensive, as in a letter to his friend Wilkie Collins, reproaching the “jolter-headedness of the conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes, and that any writing can be done without the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable.”

None of this helps me know what to say. Lately I’ve been pulling that annoying trick of answering a question with a question, i.e.,

“What kind of fiction do you write?”
“What kind do you like to read?”

They usually have an answer, which puts them one up on me. Very occasionally, their answer is, “Anything that’s good” — in which case, I get my answer for free.

According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than diagramming sentences, and she wasn’t all that far from the truth. As with the claim that Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is the longest sentence in the English language, calling Donald Trump’s explosion of language a sentence stretches the meaning of the word sentence. Verbal speech contains no punctuation, so the decision to punctuate this particular string of words as a single sentence was Slate’s alone. I count seven completed main clauses or compound main clauses (e.g. joined by but, and, a semi-colon, etc.), including the command “Look.” There are also several phrases, like “having nuclear,” that connect to nothing. The rest are adverbial clauses, adjectival clauses, or noun clauses used as subjects or objects or appositionally.

Reed-Kellogg diagramming is mostly a parlor trick, these days. Plenty of arguments make the case that it’s inadequate as a means to set forth English syntax. It happens to be a trick I know, and rare is the time I don’t learn something from it. Is it possible to learn something from diagramming the Donald?

Yes, I concluded, it is. First, I’m surprised that so much of a speech that sounds like pure blather actually does form a few coherent sentences, albeit fractured and interrupted by other thoughts. Second, If you can locate the main clauses I’m talking about, you can see, graphically, how much weight they have to bear. Take what I’ve pegged as the third main clause, the one that begins “that’s.” Those two words (one of them elided) have to carry the burden of an adverbial clause followed by a prepositional phrase with a noun clause carrying five verbs as its object.

Rhetorically, that’s as ineffective as asking me to pick up and carry a five-drawer metal filing cabinet. Ditto the clause (the second part of a very long compound “sentence”) that begins “the thing is.” It carries a compound noun clause modified by an adverbial clause as its predicate; moreover, it drags along an adjectival clause that has no fewer than five sub-clauses hanging from it, just one of them carrying two noun clauses in the object position followed by a whole architecture of complex adverbial clauses.

This isn’t fancy syntactical footwork on Trump’s part. It’s just bad rhetoric. The nouns that serve as subjects for all these clauses are—with implied nouns in parentheses—(you), uncle, you, they, you, they, they, that, you, I, I, thing, it, we, that, it, lives, you, (I), it, I, I, it, it, you, you, what, they, it, it, they, it, women, men, Persians, Iranians, they, they, who, that, nuclear, uncle, what. The verbs of the main clauses are was, (had), know, try, is, know, (is), is, and would have thought. My point in listing these words is that, if nouns (especially nouns as subjects) and verbs are the backbones of sentences, fairly weak backbones are straining to carry all these modifiers. The effect on Trump’s audience isn’t achieved via argument or even syntax, but by the repetition of those suggestive words they and it.

Finally, although my initial reading of the chosen section from Trump’s speech concluded that it was pure stream of consciousness, diagramming it actually yielded a couple of intelligible points. You may not agree with them, but here (I think) they are: Trump believes he is smart, as his uncle was smart, and he possesses the credentials to back up that claim. If he were a liberal, he thinks, “they” — i.e., the biased liberal media — would give credence to his intelligence, and would trust his views on nuclear power. As it is, the Iranians (and the Persians, whoever they are) are out-negotiating us — a truth he can perceive because of his intelligence.

Go ahead. Correct my errors. Or tell me I’ve wasted my time. It was more fun, at least, than listening to the guy.

Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What, then, is the opposite of hate? The answer, it seems to me, changes when we accuse the person rather than the hate or the hating. In today’s parlance, a hater is not simply someone who hates — or rather, the variety of hate has become narrower and more specific. In politics, there are Hillary haters. Tom Brady recently called an ESPN commentator a “Patriot hater.” Anyone who writes in a forum, like this one, that invites comments is advised to ignore the haters. T-shirts admonishing us, “Don’t Be a Hater,” abound.

According to Urban Dictionary, a hater is “a person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success,” or possibly an “overused word that people like to use just because someone else expresses a dislike for a certain individual.” Ah, there’s the rub. However freely we may confess to hating some things (anchovies, Nazis), no one wants to be a hater. I cannot find who first coined the catchy phrase “Don’t be a hater, be a celebrator!” but it’s precisely the kind of facile advice that leaves its audience no choice.

As I’m using it here, hater undoubtedly came of age with the Internet, where vitriol thrives amongst anonymity, and brave individuals like Malala Yousafzai are the objects of not only nasty barbs but actual, sometimes quite explicit death threats. One cannot escape the sense that the people typing such venom are hateful people, people who hate not because they have a specific reason or an instinctive feeling of repugnance (Nazis, anchovies), but because destroying others, particularly those with high profiles, is in their nature.

But here we encounter a problem. Accusing someone of being a hater is easy. It depends not on something specific they have done but on who they essentially are. When Tom Brady calls Mark Brunell, the ESPN commentator, a hater, he is responding to Brunell’s statement, “I don’t believe there’s an equipment manager in the NFL who on his own initiative would deflate a ball without his starting quarterback’s approval. I just didn’t believe what Tom Brady had to say.” That statement is an expression of Brunell’s lack of belief, backed up by his experience and a certain amount of evidence. To call Brunell a hater is not a defense; it’s an attempt to change the subject by attacking Brunell himself. In a subtler and more general way, The Atlantic’s headline “Among the Hillary Haters” implicitly lumps all those who criticize Hillary Clinton into a mass of jealous, spiteful scandalmongers. This blanket judgment does a disservice not only to those who may have genuine criticisms of Clinton, but also to those who are trying to make an informed decision about Clinton’s experience and qualifications — an attempt that requires sifting sharp but reasoned attacks from dirt-digging and trolling.

Finally, while “Don’t be a hater, be a celebrator” is catchy, it suggests that we should celebrate everything, including those causes, ideologies, and people we find odious. I would prefer that hater be contrasted with lover, even if indifference is love’s true opposite. To be a lover is not simply to be enamored of another individual. It can mean to guide one’s life by what one loves. Doing so almost necessarily means expressing strong objections to people and ideologies that cause injury to what we love, be it justice, the planet, the game of football, or our children. Simplistic perhaps. But not hateful.

Folk etymologies are not unique to the age of Snopes. I discovered this amusing truth just after I’d signed my fellow writer Doug Preston’s letter to the Justice Department encouraging that arm of government to press forward with an investigation of possible monopolistic practices by Amazon.com Inc. First, I was curious about the opposition to Preston’s initiative, which turns out to comprise a small army of self-publishing authors. Their beneficent view of Jeff Bezos’ giant corporation, diametrically opposed to the way university- and trade-press authors talk about it, got me thinking about the name itself. What do a giant online retailer, a threatened river in South America, and a legendary tribe of female warriors have in common?

Clue: There’s no punch line. But the first thing I discovered was that the Greeks themselves invented a story for their women warriors, claiming that the name derived from a- and –mazos, meaning “without a breast,” presumably because these fearless women lopped off one breast to improve their archery skills. However, no Greek art depicting Amazons shows any of them missing a mammary; and someone clearly forgot to tell William Marston that part of the legend when he set out to invent the generously endowed Wonder Woman. A likelier source for the name is found in the Iranian compound ha-mazan, “one fighting together,” or possibly ama-janah, “virility-killing.” That the myth itself alternately posited a race of promiscuous women and a tribe of celibate warriors, with voluptuous images contrasting a folk notion of mastectomy, starts the Amazons off on the paradoxical path that DC Comics (and, eventually, Warner Brothers) exploited.

But Bezos’ Amazon was not, it turns out, named for a woman warrior, but for the mighty river that wends its way from the mountains of Peru to the Atlantic Ocean. What is female or warriorlike about that body of water? Possibly everything, possibly nothing. One theory holds that the 1541 Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana named the river after either a group of female warriors or possibly a similar group of beardless, long-haired male warriors of the Tapuya tribe. Another points to a native Guarani term, amassona, meaning “boat-destroyer,” alluding to a tidal bore that reverses the river’s current as far as 800 kilometers upstream from the ocean. In this formulation, the name Amazon really ought to end at that point, to be replaced by the Brazilian name, Solimões, for the upper part of the river.

Apparently Bezos didn’t take his research that far, or even so far as to consider some relationship between the greatest river in the world and a mythical tribe of female fighters. He began, rather, with the name Cadabra, presumably short for abracadabra (itself possibly a bowdlerization of abecedary). When his lawyer misheard the word as Cadaver, Bezos was prompted to change the name. He went for the river because of the implication of large scale and because website listings at the time were mostly alphabetical. The A and Z in Amazon didn’t hurt, since it allowed the logo designer to join them with a little yellow arrow, suggesting a place that sells everything from A to Z and also leaves its customers smiling.

Which, presumably, they will continue to do despite the Authors United letter to the Justice Department. But that’s another story, neither mythic nor watery.

I hadn’t given Parent 1 and Parent 2 a thought before I saw the headline on Tennessee’s “reversal” of its “ban on ‘mother’ and ‘father.’” Huh, I thought. How had I missed news of a state’s banning mothers?

In terms of language, there’s a small, esoterically interesting story here that I’ll claim as part of what’s become sort of my bailiwick, writing about gender-neutral language. But the larger story has to do with the venues in which something becomes, or fails to become, news.

Here’s the deal. For many years, not only because of gay partnerships but also because of divorce, adoption, single parenthood, and so on, certain registration forms in the United States and abroad have asked for the names of a child’s caregivers not as Mother and Father but as Parent 1 and Parent 2. These designations are less cumbersome than specifying mother/father/stepmother/stepfather; they leave room for there to be two mothers or two fathers; and they eliminate any quibbling about whether Father or Mother should be listed first. I was still filling out Fafsa forms for one of my offspring in 2013, when the change was introduced by that federal department, and I can’t say I noticed. Apparently I filled out a passport application for my kids with similar wording. For all I know, the pediatrician was asking about Parents 1 and 2, or the public schools where my children were enrolled. Slipped right by me.

Now that Tennessee has “reversed” its “ban,” I can imagine there being a weird little bit of gender-studies interest here. For instance, was Father listed first on these forms before Parent was introduced? And do heterosexual couples tend to list the father first now, giving evidence that they think in patriarchal terms, or do they list the mother first because she is supposedly the primary caregiver? Someone (not I, particularly) might be curious to know the answers to these questions. Someone else (I) might note with a bit of irony that the form in question is a “permanent parenting form” to be used in arranging child custody after a divorce.

But these questions and observations are not what interest the reporters and readers of this big news about Tennessee. Todd Starnes, announcing the “reversal” on Fox News, remains troubled by the government’s “redefin[ing] traditional family roles”: “I reckon it’s only a matter of time,” he (somewhat predictably) writes, “before Tennessee completely conforms to the demands of the gender-neutral crowd and begins referring to children as ‘Thing One’ and ‘Thing Two.’” And his commenters sound a note of doom: “Thank God I will not be in this life for much longer. The destruction that has come to America is down right disgusting.” Responses range from rage to rags-and-ashes depression. “I gave birth — I am the Mother. Don’t try and call me anything else,” writes one commenter to the original news of Parents 1 and 2 in The Blaze, whose “hot topics” are Hillary Clinton, Planned Parenthood, Iran Deal, Islamic State, and EPA. Earlier, commenting on the news about the Education Department’s gender-neutral language, CNS News (“The Right News. Right Now”) commenters asked, “Now will the Liberal Democrats do away with ‘Mother’s Day’ and ‘Father’s Day’?” “I suspect with the way the Left has been removing all standards in our society that the word sex will be replaced by the word ‘species’; will that be their next civil right de jour?”

I can’t find the story in The New York Times, Slate, MSNBC, or anywhere else with a reputation for being so-called liberal.

This sort of news-picking isn’t exclusive to the right, of course. Google “crèche public space,” and you’ll get reports mostly from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, DailyKos, Slate, and About Atheism. But for those of us who actually find something interesting in the intersecting meanings of parent, mother, and father, or who note with curiosity and delight the ways in which children adapt to and adopt a changing vocabulary when it comes to the roles that adults play in their lives, such lopsidedness is a pity. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a parent is a great thing to be.

I am not prepared to engage in the Passive Wars. As with any dispute, however, it behooves us to know what the heck it is we’re fighting about. As my colleague Geoffrey Pullum and others have observed, verb constructions described as passive often aren’t any such thing, and the very word passive suggests a kind of prose that lacks get-up-and-go, or whatever it is our sentences ought to have. Here, though, I want to draw our attention to a point of confusion that plagues even the most committed passive-watchers among us: the distinction between verbs in the passive voice and past participles used as predicate adjectives, or subjective complements.

Take, for example, a string of sentences in a recent Lingua Franca post (used by permission of my colleague Ben Yagoda):

The partial participation of newcomers is by no means “disconnected” from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy. …

Wow. Those are some awful sentences. But are the bolded sections passive constructions? Close observers of syntax have offered several tests.

1. The test of adding very. Very is an adverb that modifies only adjectives and other adverbs; you can’t say She runs very the way you can say She runs quickly. So some grammarians suggest sticking very in before the past participle to determine if it is part of the verb or if it is functioning as a subjective complement. Thus The ice cream was very frozen, but not The bomb was very detonated: ergo, was frozen is not a passive construction, but was detonated is. This test runs quickly into problems. I can write I was very surprised and mean it as a description of my state of mind, but if I add by your present to the sentence, I have created a passive construction (I was very surprised by your present). Confusing, right? So let’s move on.
2. As the last example suggests, the presence of a prepositional phrase beginning with by could suggest that the past participle is part of a passive-voice verb; alternately, the presence of a noun clause might indicate a state of mind. For instance, The jury was convinced that the defendant was innocent gives us the state of the jury’s mind, whereas The jury was convinced by the lawyer’s argument gives us the lawyer’s action as a passive-voice construction. The problem here is that the clause and the prepositional phrase are not mutually exclusive; you can easily say The jury was convinced by the lawyer’s argument that the defendant was innocent. Let’s move on.
3. My favorite test is the simple reversal of the voice from passive to active. I was abandoned by my mother = My mother abandoned me. There’s wiggle room here when the by-phrase is absent: I was abandoned, by itself, could indicate an action that was performed or a feeling I’m experiencing; no way to tell. Still, it’s a starting point.
4. Finally, since a past participle used as a subjective complement is essentially functioning as an adjective, it should be replaceable by an adjective without the sentence’s going haywire. Absent context, in The door was locked, we cannot say for sure if we mean something akin to The door was locked by her captor. But if we can replace locked with immovable without undue harm to the sentence, then locked is functioning as a predicate adjective. Conversely, in I was slammed against the door, writing I was uncomfortable against the door just doesn’t cut it; was slammed is a passive-voice construction even if we don’t know who did the slamming.

None of these tests is foolproof. But if we return to the passage above, we can apply at least one or two of them to the boldface phrases and come up with a conclusion. In “The partial participation of newcomers is by no means ‘disconnected’ from the practice of interest,” we can add the adverb very to disconnected; there is no by phrase; we cannot turn the verb around to create an active-voice sentence (“So-and-so disconnected the partial participation of newcomers”? I don’t think so); and we can substitute the adjective discontinuous for disconnected without harming the meaning of the already convoluted sentence. My conclusion, then, is that this is not a passive construction but a wordy description of the participation in question.

How about “peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening”? Very enabled doesn’t sound right. But there’s no by phrase, and I don’t sense any agent doing the enabling; we could turn the clause around and write when we enable it rather than when it is enabled, but I’m not confident that we are present even in a shadowy way in this sentence. Finally, I wouldn’t mind substituting functional for enabled. So I would still call enabled here a predicate adjective rather than part of a verb.

In “The ambiguity … must then be connected to issues of legitimacy,” I think we have a genuine passive. Sure, there’s no by phrase. But adding very to connected changes not only the meaning but the syntax of the sentence. I get the sense that someone — we, probably — needs to be doing this connecting, so I can create an active-voice sentence. And substituting an adjective like pertinent for connected doesn’t make sense in a sentence that is advising some kind of action.

I’ve gone on at some length. Why on earth does it matter? Well, the Passive Wars are about the quality of writing, about whether overuse of passive voice does harm to prose. If we learn to distinguish between passive voice and state-of-being expressions that use past participles as predicate adjectives or subjective complements, those who wish to denounce whatever they think is doing harm to prose (particularly student prose) can decide what they’re really denouncing. One school of thought recently has been to add “by zombies” to any construction to determine if it is passive. But really, calling state-of-being expressions passive is itself creating zombies, and we all know zombies don’t exist.

Once a year, Flushing Meadows in New York turns into a 22-ring circus of tennis, and people start asking me, as a lifelong tennis player, what all those words mean. I wasn’t going to write about tennis lingo in this blog, but a new acronym in the sport put me over the edge. So here goes.

The name of the sport itself seems to have come from the French tenez, or “take,” which is purportedly what the server used to shout before firing the ball cross-court to begin the point. The game we play these days, whether on the red clay at Roland Garros, the grass at Wimbledon, or the hard court of your local public park (which is where I learned the game), is known as lawn tennis, to contrast it with real tennis. How did it get real? Where, that’s where the debates begin. Some say real is a mispronunciation of royal, others that it is the real McCoy, still played (rarely) today as it was in the days of Henry VIII, indoors on a court with four walls and a bunch of different rules that I’m not bothering to learn or explain here. The scoring system, I understand, is the same as for the tennis I know: Love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, ad, game. Weird, right? Apparently Billie Jean King thought so, too, and when she started to get the hang of it, she expected (who wouldn’t?) that at the very least the score following 30 would be 45.

Beginning at love, we find another debate. Is it from the French l’oeuf, meaning “the egg,” a round image similar to the bagel no one wants in the form of a set lost six games to nothing? Or is it a polite way to say zero, allowing that we polite tennis players are out there for the pure love—or honor, which in Flemish is lof—of the game? I tend to think the latter simply because the French don’t actually say l’oeuf when calling the score but pronounce, quite bluntly, zéro. (Then again, despite the etymological connection of deuce to the French deux, when announcing the even score from which a player must win two points to take the game, the French choose to say égalité. Go figure.) The first point you win, or lose, in a game is labeled 15 because the initial concept was that of a clock: if you need four points to win the game, each point is like 15 minutes on the clock’s hour. Yes, some players say 5, but that’s shorthand, never heard in the major tournaments. Then there’s 30; OK. Then 40. Huh? Here again, a controversy. Billie Jean King believed that, given the two games needed to win in the case of deuce, the movement along the “clock” needed to be abbreviated, so the score moved to 40 in order to leave room for 50 and then 60. This convoluted thinking seems unlikely to me. Simpler and more reasonable is another shortening, as from 15 to 5, of 45 to 40. So Billie Jean was right, only the slang got the better of us.

There’s even a twist on the word game Bananagrams, in which players are allowed only to create words used in tennis. Sounds tough, but it’s amazing how many of those terms there are, especially if you count words like breadstick (the 1 in a 6-1 set), shank, gimme, and handcuff. You can’t count acronyms, though, which means that the new “word” I learned during this year’s U.S. Open, SABR, wouldn’t be allowed. I heard the term in an interview with Roger Federer, following his third-round victory, when he was asked if he would be bringing out the saber against the American player John Isner. He doubted he would, he said, and the interviewer made some remark about his surely wanting to be able to produce more twins. I shall leave it to readers’ imaginations as to what I thought, at that point, was the Fed’s saber. But it turns out that SABR stands for Sneak Attack By Roger, also known as the Kamikaze Return and referring to Federer’s new tactic of rapidly approaching an opponent’s second serve so as to hit it near the service line in a sort of half-volley, throwing the server suddenly on the defensive. As to how the Fed thinks Isner might deal with the SABR — well, tennis is a polite sport, and we shall tolerate no further innuendoes.

What is going on in Tennessee? First we learn that they tried to ban mothers and fathers before coming to their senses. Now we learn that their flagship university tried to ban he and she—before it came to its senses. What senses are these, and how is it that Tennessee keeps losing them?

This week, we’ll look at he and she. At our first faculty meeting, before I’d learned of the issue in Tennessee, I heard a moment of gender awkwardness when the chair of one of our departments stood up to introduce a recently hired colleague. Looking for new faces in the crowd, I had noticed this newcomer, a solid, androgynous looking person with a fashionable close haircut, dressed in traditionally male garb. For a fleeting moment I wondered if this individual was male or female, especially since women have greater latitude in their dress and appearance these days. When he was introduced as Jason, I had my answer—which was further enlarged by the detail of Jason’s having earned his B.A. at Mount Holyoke. Then the introducer slipped, and between the hes and hims came shes and hers. I don’t think it was a big deal, either to us in the audience or to Jason, but one did notice a passing ripple of confusion.

That confusion, I suspect, would not have been helped by the suggestion offered through the University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion. Following in the footsteps of other entities, official and unofficial, they proposed that, in calling the roll during the first week of classes, professors should “ask everyone to provide their name and pronouns.” Not only, presumably, will they hear “he” and “she,” sometimes given by students whose body types and clothing might have suggested a different pronoun, but they may also hear ze, xe, and other iterations of a gender-neutral pronoun. It’s almost amusing to think that asking this question publicly of every student in the class would “ensure you are not singling out transgender or nonbinary students”—in fact, it could ensure exactly such singling out.

Nor, I suspect, is there any greater chance of Jason’s preferring ze to he. Clearly Jason identifies as a specific gender, as male, and in English we have gender-specific pronouns that work just as well for a trans person as for a cis person. That leaves, however, the possibility that many individuals, regardless of their gender or their attitude toward gender identity, might prefer to be regarded, particularly in a professional environment, in a non-gender-specific manner. Right now, English doesn’t really have a way to meet this goal (singular they is useful, but it doesn’t cover all the bases), and so some advocates have proposed ze, hir, xyrs, etc. Maybe such terms won’t catch on, but maybe they will — and if they do, I doubt such change will signal the end of society as we know it.

Still, the uproar in Tennessee, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, was loud and raucous enough to cause the university chancellor and the president of the state university system to reveal that they were “deeply concerned” and to announce that “references to the use of gender-neutral pronouns will be removed from the Office for Diversity and Inclusion website.”

The complaint, of course, was about supposedly politically correct arm-twisting. And to be fair, as it walked back its own policy, the Office of Inclusion and Diversity mischaracterized the tone of its initial missive.  “This quarter we chose to raise awareness about inclusive language,” the protested, “specifically gender-neutral pronouns. The information provided in our e-newsletter was offered as a resource — not as a policy or mandate — to our campus community on inclusive practices.” Well, maybe not. But the original announcement, which has now been taken down, did use the mighty art of persuasion, with phrases like “We should not assume” and “The more we make sharing of pronouns a universal practice, the more inclusive we will be as a campus.” Suggestions are framed as commands (“instead of calling roll, ask everyone to provide their name and pronouns”). Not to follow in the footsteps laid out for you would, the e-newsletter implies, create “a heavy burden for persons already marginalized by their gender expression or identity.” That’s not just raising awareness. That’s making an argument. It’s a complicated argument — arguments about language always are, as this CHE video suggests — but surely one worth having. Come on, Tennessee. Stop dancing around these issues. Get in the ring with each other on this stuff, and duke it out.

This year, for the first time, I am teaching a freshman — oops, first-year — seminar. Right there is the problem. As readers of this blog know, I like to be on top of the latest gender-neutral neologism. For many years, the term freshman has belonged to a class of designations (fireman, policeman, mailman) for which our culture has tried to find gender-neutral alternatives. In this case, within one of the arguably most progressive institutions we have, we’re having trouble getting there. Why?

We can start with how we got all four of the terms we use for college students as they advance through the ranks: freshmen (first-year students), sophomores, juniors, seniors. Fresh men dates back at least 500 years, and its meaning is fairly self-explanatory. The term sophomore is more slippery. On the one hand, you’ve got the Greek word sophos, for wisdom, combined with moros, for foolish, yielding a wise moron. On the other, you have sophistry, the use of fallacious arguments, which lets us apply sophomoric to anyone, student or no, who engages in pretentious, juvenile behavior. Complicating matters further, junior and senior were originally junior sophester and senior soph, or simply sophester — presumably because junior is a comparative adjective and the soph here refers to that wisdom thing.

So one impediment to change is the triad of terms that define the other three years of college, at least in the United States (in England, students begin as freshmen, or freshers, but then become second-years, etc., so their quandary is different). If we change freshman to first-year student, why do the other designations remain the same confusing set?

Another stumbling block, in my admittedly brief experience undergoing the various meetings and training sessions that now precede the teaching of the first-year seminar, is that first-year is a clumsy substitute. Just about every website I checked, when it updated the term freshman, substituted first-year student. Try saying first-year student, sophomore, junior, senior. Doesn’t roll off the tongue.

Attempts to use first-year, like freshman, as both adjective and noun (“There go the first-years”) have mostly fallen flat, perhaps because the singular seems still to want something to modify. The University of Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson’s educational philosophy calls for students to be named after their year, presents an apparent exception. But I checked with a friend who attended UVa, and she reports a peculiar phenomenon. Students might ask, “What year are you?” and receive the answer, “I’m fourth year” rather than “I’m a senior.” If one asks of a group of students, “What are they?” — meaning “Are they sophomores or juniors? — one will get the response “They’re third year.” In other words, no one creates a plural with the term, and so it is not really used as a compound noun. It’s as if, curious about the rank of a group of professors, you were to ask, “What are they?” and receive the response, “They’re associate” rather than “They’re associate professors” or “They’re associates.” Apparently this noun-eliding formulation works for UVa students, but I haven’t seen it spread anywhere else.

It may also be that the American tradition of naming the years in high school has impeded any change in these terms once students get to college. For most students, ninth grade is a continuation; they may have shifted to a new building, and they roam more between classes, but essentially they see a continuation of their secondary education.  Calling someone a first-year, in that case, feels odd; hence, they arrive at college with freshman implanted in the brain.

Finally, I suspect we are reluctant to foist too much change at once on newly arrived 18-year-olds. We strive to ease this transition, to keep the challenges manageable, to make students feel more comfortable (an adjective I heard a lot in my training sessions). We are hoping the gender neutralizing will come about organically or by gentle persuasion; thus you have Penn State’s effort to indulge the old-fashioned (“The following types of students are considered first-year applicants [or freshman applicants, as some refer to them]”). We have Elon University’s vice-president of communications striving to prevent any appearance that first-year is a term dictated by college policy: “We use the word ‘freshman’ interchangeably.” Although my small institution sticks to first-year in all descriptions of the academic program taken by a student in his or her first year, the term freshman crops up on 362 separate pages within the institution’s website.

And even folks like me, who stick with mail carrier and restaurant server and the like, get tongue-tied when it comes to freshman versus first-year. I’ve taken to saying frosh, which I prefer to the English freshers, the latter sounding to me like a sort of shower or cheap room spray. Anyone else — that is, among those who even see this as a problem — have a solution?

A few months ago we at Lingua Franca received an email from a suffering reader. His eyes are hurting and his ears are subject to a terrible sound. That sound is the verb lessen. Whatever happened to decrease? our discomfited reader would like to know. And couldn’t we simply ban lessen?

As plenty of other readers remind us, there are more urgent problems in the world. But a complaint like this pushes my curiosity button. Contrary to our writer’s impression, the usage of lessen rather than decrease (and rather than the other word frequently compared with these two, reduce) has, well, decreased over the last 150 years. Decrease comes from Old French, with the Oxford English Dictionary citing its first use in English as 1393. Lessen comes from adding -en to the adjective less (Old English or Old Frisian, per OED), but its use as a verb dates back to the same period, as does the use of reduce. So you can’t accuse any of these words of barging in — and why would you, anyway?

Far more interesting, to me, are the differences in usage. Do we need whatever nuance lessen supplies, or could we get by without it? English, of course, has an unusually large number of synonyms because of its polyglot roots. One way of looking at the difference between two words is by way of the synonyms we find in a thesaurus. In the online version, decrease gets 57 synonyms, lessen 47; of the most relevant synonyms, decrease shows 26 and lessen 17. But more revealing than the numbers is that these terms, synonyms for each other, possess only eight highly relevant synonyms in common. Among the synonyms unique to decrease are curb, depreciate, lower, slash, and wane. Among those unique to lessen are dilute, erode, mitigate, and taper off. Among the less relevant synonyms, decrease gets wear down; lessen gets wind down. Intelligent minds can disagree about which synonyms belong where; it is odd to find reduce defined as make less; decrease and yet not find decrease among its synonyms. But the distinctions between decrease and lessen seem right to me. I might want to say, for instance, “The size of the lake lessened [rather than decreased] the effect of the pollutants”; I would certainly want to say “The shop decreased [rather than lessened] its prices to draw customers.”

Our suffering reader points out that decrease has a logical antonym, increase. If the opposite of less is more, shouldn’t the antonym for lessen be moren? And doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Well, yes. But we have plenty of similar examples. The verb decline, for instance, is one of the synonyms for decrease, but I would use incline as its antonym only if I were talking about a patio lounger.

What’s fair to say, I think, is that with the wealth of vocabulary at our disposal in English, we enjoy richer meanings the more we pay attention to the fine distinctions among them. A synonym conveys approximately, not exactly, the same sense. Writing “We suggest she decrease the size of her bottom margin” conveys a precise meaning that could be obscured by “We suggest she lessen the size of her bottom margin.” And there’s an expressiveness in “No amount of grief counseling could lessen his loss” that we lose in the harsher-sounding “No amount of grief counseling could decrease his loss.”

And so, dear reader, in my role as the arbiter of what can and cannot be allowed into the English language, I hereby deny your request to banish lessen from the lexicon. If we truly don’t need the word, I expect it will die out on its own. And since there’s been no significant lessening of interest in the use of decrease, I doubt we’ll see any decrease there either. May a garden of meanings bloom, each in its own discrete and eloquent way.

First-year undergraduate writing leaves so much to be desired that it seems silly to get stuck on two letters. But as I grade my first set of papers, I’m struck by the sudden ubiquity of –st:

• It is interesting to note that whilst the character is dreaming …
• The true nature of his actions is unbeknownst to the reader.
• Amongst his peers, Melville was the best at this.
• Whilst we should not overly concern ourselves with that here …

What’s going on? Most language mavens see the –st forms of these works as archaic and attribute their use to formal-sounding hypercorrection. To some extent, that must be true. Some -st forms came from the adverbial genitive addition of –es in the 14th century — the same formation that gave us besides rather than beside. Some sort of confusion with the –est ending of superlatives left us with amongst, amidst, whilst — and, in fact, against, the only one that remains current in common American usage. (Its original form, the prepositional use of again, is now considered “regional and nonstandard” by the OED.) How unbeknownst got its extra letters — unknown morphing into unbeknown and unknownst, then further morphing into unbeknownst, all around the 18^th century — is, well, unknown.

Still, I get it: the –st endings are old, though not actually as old as the words we still commonly use; among, for instance, dates from 1000, amongst from 1375. Old words are fancier words, to some people, and first-year students want to use fancy words. But students have always wanted to impress their teachers with fancy words, and I haven’t seen this proliferation of –st forms until this year. Sure enough: Ngrams shows a slow tumble in the use of these forms through the 20^th century, and then a sharp rise beginning in about 2003. So just as avenues of rapid communication seem to have made many student locutions more casual, in this case there’s correlation (not causation, I realize) between the rise of social media and the rise of amongst, whilst, amidst, and even unbeknownst. One avid Twitter user and grammarian, Stan Carey, took to the Twittersphere to discover off-the-cuff rationales for using the –st forms of these words. There were plenty, ranging from the differences among meanings of a word like while (“while = time concurrent, whilst = even though”) to its place in the sentence (“Maybe more emphasis with the –st, especially coming at the beginning of a sentence”; “I decide which form to use based on the sound of the following word”; “I restrict whilst to when subject omitted in following clause, e.g. whilst walking but never whilst I was walking.”).

My job in this class is to prepare students to write academic papers that will pass muster with their professors through the rest of their years in college. To that end, I’m discouraging the use of –st forms. Too many professors will see only hypercorrection and, as Robert Hartwell Fiske puts it in his Dictionary of Unendurable English, “the mark of a sophomoric, not a sophisticated, writer or speaker.” But I’m keeping an eye and ear out for evolving distinctions in usage that might eventually resemble the difference we observe between beside and besides (or that some observe between toward and towards). That is, one day amongst might actually mean something slightly different from among. The future is unbeknownst, and whilst we await it, we may as well admit that we live amidst change.

A colleague came to me yesterday with a question about a student paper on hearing loss. Should the student, he wanted to know, have capitalized the word deaf?

Simply by writing the word as lowercase, above, I have apparently made a political choice. We have reached agreement, albeit with complications, on the upper- or lowercasing of purely ideological or political terms. AP Style, for instance, supplies helpful sentences like ”The conservative Republican senator and his Conservative Party colleague said they believe democracy and socialism are incompatible” and ”The Communist said he is basically a socialist who has reservations about Marxism.” But neither these examples nor terms like Asian-American or Jewish, which derive from labels long considered proper, address the question of capitalization for deaf.

Neither, it occurred to me as I started delving deeper, do we have clear markers for other terms that both describe a person’s innate identity and describe their membership (conscious or not) in a group promoting or defending that identity. Some college offices, like Pennsylvania State University’s Commission on Racial/Ethnic Diversity, provide guidelines that follow advocacy groups’ recommendations for the terms black and native when referring to African-Americans or American Indians, which are to capitalize them. (I am lowercasing everything here, simply to create an even playing field for words as words.) But Merrill Perlman at the Columbia Journalism Review observed trenchantly, following the Charleston massacre last June, that while black is often capitalized and white is generally capitalized only in white-supremacy screeds, “’Black’ and ‘white’ are equally broad descriptions of skin color, not ethnicity or origin.” So the jury remains out on color capitalization, except to say that customs have changed over time; a 1910 style guide recommends, under Race Designations, “Capitalize ‘Creole,’ referring to French and Spanish Creoles in Louisiana. Lowercase colored (applied to African race), gipsy, mulatto, negro, quadroon, etc.”

I could find no instances where a style guide recommended capitalizing the terms blind or mute. According to the Seattle Lighthouse, “Deaf-Blind refers to a to a cultural identity. … An obvious example of a specifically Deaf-Blind cultural element is the use of American Sign Language (ASL) as a shared form of communication. … On the other hand, when we refer to the medical condition of not being able to see or to hear we write ‘blind’ or ‘deaf.’” This outlook accords with the guidelines issued by the National Council on Disability and Journalism, which suggests, “Lowercase when referring to a hearing-loss condition or to a deaf person who prefers lowercase. Capitalize for those who identify as members of the Deaf community or when they capitalize Deaf when describing themselves.” But the Deaf Counseling Center, with affiliates across the country, begs to differ:

Far from viewing “Deaf” as a way of excluding people, we see the term as an inclusive one. To us, “Deaf” refers to any people who happen to be Deaf. It has nothing to do with having Deaf or hearing parents, or using ASL, SEE, spoken English, cued speech, or any other communication modality. Neither does it matter if one was mainstreamed, educated at a Deaf school, or homeschooled. Degree of hearing loss, being Deaf from birth or being late-Deafened, using a hearing aid or a cochlear implant — none of these, in our minds, precludes anyone from being Deaf.

Now, their reasoning is faulty. They compare the term deaf with Jewish, African, Hispanic, and Caucasian, all of which derive from proper names; they steer away from comparisons with black, white, or socialist. But that point strikes me as irrelevant to the debate at hand, which is whether students should be encouraged to capitalize “self-defined references for specific groups,” as Penn State’s office puts it, in order to convey respect—or whether such capitalization implies advocacy and is inappropriate in an analytical paper. The Chicago Manual of Style leaves the question open as to Deaf/deaf. (It does not even tackle the issue of Black/black or White/white.)

So weigh in, Lingua Francophiles. Where do you come down on uppercase?

Is there any frisson more delicious than the learning of a great new word? OK, don’t answer that. But a great new word is a gift, and I received one last week only to find that it had been passed around certain circles for years.

I refer to skeuomorphism, which I heard as skiomorphism on NPR’s All Things Considered in a discussion of action-movie audio features. We are surrounded, it seems, by skeuomorphism, and a heavy debate continues as to its usefulness. Every time you save your work on the computer to a “folder,” identified by a little icon of a sheet of stiff paper folded once so a tab appears at the top, you are making use of a skeuomorphic figure, a design that makes the computer’s action resemble its real-world counterpart of putting sheets of paper away in a manila folder. Though the word wasn’t coined until the late 19^th century, its origin is Greek (from the words for container and form) and such design gestures have been going on at least since the Greeks manufactured ceramic cups with bumps shaped to resemble the rivets in the Minoans’ silver cups. Every time we speak of a car’s having horsepower, we are using a skeuomorph; the “wood” paneling on the 1986 Chrysler station wagon was skeuomorphic, echoing the wooden side of a high-class carriage.

Associated with skeuomorphism, in the feature on movie sounds, was reification, a concept I am familiar with: making the abstract real. Marxists talk about reification in terms of God; movie critics talk about it in terms of the whooshing sound made by jets hurtling through empty space (which does not carry sound). In other words, reifying skeuomorphs depict what has never existed, whereas common skeuomorphs depict what existed (and may still exist) but not in the actual configuration at hand. (No horses in a car.)

For millions of computer users, the difference is academic. Most of our students today have never seen the actual floppy disc from which their word-processing programming takes its Save icon. Most understand that the “c” in “Cc” and “Bcc” stands for “copy,” but the extra “c” seems superfluous, because they wouldn’t know carbon paper if it smeared blue ink all over their faces. When I drag items to the Trash, it makes a sound somewhere between crumpling and shredding, but I no longer associate that sound with either of those actions, only with dragging computer icons to the Trash.

The raging debate, which I missed when it began, focuses mostly on Apple’s decision, in its release of iOS 7 in 2012, to abandon much of the skeuomorphism that had been its hallmark: the careful “leather stitching” on its Calendar function, the beauty of the raised “button.” Like Windows, it apparently went finally for a flat design in which the icons just barely pretended to be the things they were reminding us of. As far as this neophyte can tell, however, skeuomorphism remains alive and well, if reduced to line drawings: Skype kindly gives me the choice of an old-fashioned looking movie camera or a phone handset that resembles the one on my Princess phone circa 1978. As Mark Figlozzi of Bizango (my own website designer), wrote to me, “Some designers take ‘clean design’ to mean we should strip away illusions, like the illusion that a button on your screen is a physical object that you can press. Why should a button on a flat glass screen have texture, or cast a shadow, implying it is raised from the rest of the screen, when, in truth, it is flat?” But “then we look at an outlined rectangle and turn up our nose: ‘Ooh, you are still using outlines and rectangles?’”

Now that my eyes and ears are open, skeuomorphism is everywhere. Not only in the lightning charge that signals my computer’s AC connection, not only in the paper-airplane whoosh of the email going out, but also in the thin vinyl strips we paste onto contemporary window panes to make them look like mullions. (I really dislike the look of a nonmullioned pane, don’t you?) Even as any skeuomorphic design will eventually veer toward the abstract — my own website “bookshelf” is a mere gesture compared to iBooks’s wood-grained “shelving” — we find the anchor of the skeuomorph reassuring. Figlozzi writes, “Maybe one day the pendulum of opinion will swing back just a little. Not back to the days of faux leather stitching, maybe. But maybe we’ll once again acknowledge that there is some part of us that looks at the digital environment and craves a hint of the physical world.”

After all, isn’t language itself skeuomorphic? The words we use made up of words designating things (the real container, the three-dimensional form) that may no longer operate as they did in the past? And yet how useful that past is. Without it, what icons would we use? What words?