I ignore a lot of messages on my computer. Life is easier that way. Recently I ignored an update about texting on my phone that had to do with emojis. For years, I’ve been ignoring the little note when I’m replying to certain emails: “This message must be sent as Unicode.” Go ahead, I tell the computer. Send it that way. Whoever wrote me must have done something in Unicode; it’s not my fault.

But now a connection arises between the emoji-related messages and the Unicode-related messages, and the detective in me rises to the fore.

For some time now, at least since the appearance of Emoji Dick, people have been debating whether emojis are, or could become, a language unto themselves. But before you can get into the meat of that argument, you have to ask what emojis are and where they come from. Most people agree that these little pictures started in Japan and may have originally leaned on Japanese references. But now that texting has wrapped its arms around emojis, frequent texters apparently need hundreds of icons available to them on their phones. Using combinations of colons, semi-colons, slashes, and brackets doesn’t cut it any more; we want full-color images, often with moving parts. Someone has to make those little pictures available, and it turns out the people who do it are the Unicode people.

And who, you might ask, are the Unicode people?

The Unicode Consortium, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, defines itself as “devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.” As I (in my lame layperson’s way) understand it, by encoding the underlying graphemes, the smallest units in any writing system, Unicode enables various scripts and symbol sets to appear consistently across computer platforms and languages. Without Unicode, someone’s blog written in Cyrillic would appear on my web browser as gobbledygook. In keeping track of these encodings to be sure they meet “software globalization standards,” the Unicode Consortium finds itself confronted with the task of standardizing both how and what emojis appear. The New York Times calls the consortium the “midwife to new emojis.” Already it has standardized almost 1,300 emojis that have rapidly been made available to smartphone texters, and right now they have a batch of 67 new images to be approved or nixed in the spring of 2016.

These are the pictograms, if you will, that would form the basis of an emoji lexicon, if such a thing were to gain widespread acceptance. And when you think of an actual language, or at least a writing system, sprouting up, the kerfuffle over the proposed inclusion of an emoji rifle (justified, apparently, because many of the proposed emojis focus on sports, and shooting is an Olympic sport) seems kind of weird. How would one debate guns in emoji-ese with only the image of a pistol and none of a rifle? Not to mention that the emoji of an eggplant can apparently mean something about ratatouille or something about sex. Lots of room for misunderstanding there.

I still don’t quite understand why I get that message about the occasional email’s needing to be sent in Unicode, and I’m not losing sleep over it. Nor have I taken to emojis. In the discussion of the forthcoming vote on new emojis, including the infamous rifle, strips of bacon, Mother Christmas, an avocado, and a clown face, one linguist noted, “In text, you’re less expressive if you don’t have emojis.” Somehow, I don’t find that to be true. I have a new iPhone 6 with the new iOS 9.1. I don’t anticipate an occasion where I’ll want to insert a hot dog, taco, or middle finger emoji, and I don’t expect my expressiveness to suffer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I still don’t know how to punctuate these things.

But then, there are plenty of languages I don’t speak. If and when I find myself permanently settled in Emoji Country, maybe I’ll take a beginner’s course.  Meanwhile, I’ll leave the decision-making to those Unicode people. May they steady through the .

I write this not long after New England’s first frost, when the temperatures have suddenly rebounded into the 70s. Everyone I know calls this Indian summer. Everyone I know loves it. And every year I wonder what to do about the potential racism.

Very few people say Indian giver; most preschool teachers now tell their 3-year-olds to sit cross-legged, not Indian style. These terms have been effectively identified as racist: a so-called Indian giver has purportedly given something only to snatch it back (the term deriving from notions of private property that were alien to many tribes’ culture and that Europeans used to their distinct advantage); someone sitting Indian style has only the floor or dirt for a chair.

People have spilled plenty of ink over the origin of the term Indian summer, beginning with an entire book by one Albert Matthews, published in 1901. Matthews dismisses the source that most people I know attribute to Indian summer, which is essentially the same bigoted notion of false promise that prompted Indian giver. That is, the “summer” arrives after the first real blast of autumn, but vanishes just as you begin to think winter has been staved off. Other countries apparently have equally offensive terms for this brief spurt of balmy weather. The Russians, for instance, apparently call it woman summer. (Think about that. No, don’t.) Other theories, like the idea that a brief period of warmth was the best time for a raid on white settlements, aren’t much more flattering to Native Americans.

But I’ve been asking my students about their connotations for Indian summer. About half of them know the term. The others — some international students, some from warm parts of the country — shake their heads quizzically. For the ones who do know and use it, I’ve asked why. “Because of Thanksgiving?” some say. Some say, “Because my grandmother uses it.” Others refer to the bright maple and sycamore leaves as being “Indian colors.” (Whether they mean the cartoonish idea of Indian skin color or something about feathers, I’ve neglected to ask.) They look forward to this week of warm weather; they don’t feel betrayed or cheated by it.

The question I’m raising for myself, then, may extend to other terms with derogatory origins that have lost their original associations. Google Ngrams shows the word spelled gyp declining drastically in usage, while the word spelled jip—meaning the same thing, but probably not rousing the same connotation — is rising. A Dutch treat is common practice and rarely connected to any idea of the Dutch being miserly. Few people think of the peanut gallery as a place where African-Americans were allowed to sit, nor do we associate being sold down the river with slavery. As a person of Irish ancestry, I give myself a (questionable) pass when I leave half a cup of orange juice in the bottle and tell my husband I’ve played a dirty Irish trick, but at least I know the term is derogatory. Should we restrain ourselves from employing a term whose derogatory origins are virtually invisible in contemporary discourse?

I don’t have an answer to this question, but I do know it would be easier to answer if an alternative were ready to hand. For gypped, we have cheated; for the peanut gallery we have the third balcony. But woman summer is hardly a better choice for this season. October summer or November summer might do, but I just made those up; I’ve never heard anyone use them. Even the English apparently don’t say St. Martin’s summer anymore. One of my students said she calls it a warm spell, which is both less evocative and less provocative. Another said it worries her. Why? “Makes me think of global warming,” she said.

Well, yes. There is that. Meanwhile, though, I’m going outside.

Like my colleague Ben Yagoda, I was intrigued by Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times article on modes of speaking, but for a different reason. Toward the end of the article, Wayne observes that, unlike social-media writers or radio hosts,

In disciplines like academics, technology and finance, many speakers pepper long speeches with “right.” Their pitch does not rise on the word, which comes in the middle of a series of statements — “analytics are most valuable over long periods, right, than shorter ones, so … ” — rather than at the end.

I had not noticed this phenomenon. Excited by the possibility of a groundbreaking Lingua Franca post, I went looking for examples of it. I trolled the Internet and plumbed the depths of journals like American Speech, Academe, and the International Review of Qualitative Research. Coming up empty, I wrote to Mr. Wayne, who informed me that the prevalence of the uninflected right in the middle of sentences spoken by academics and others was purely his own and his editor’s impression.

Hmm. Well, given that this particular claim concludes an article in our newspaper of record, with a summarizing statement that right “is not, therefore, delivered as a question that gives the listener a chance to respond to and possibly refute, but as a quick statement that is at once self-affirming … and condescending,” one might ask for the same thing we beg of our students: evidence. I was disappointed to learn that this sweeping claim stemmed from anecdotal observation.

But the exercise got me wondering about my own impressions of my, and my colleagues’, distinctive manner of speaking in the classroom. There are few audio- or videotapes of “normal” classroom address by professors; most available are canned performances. Here are some things I’ve noticed — and I mean none of them to imply a generalization about academic idiom.

• My thesis adviser, decades ago, spoke without notes in what I was certain were bulleted lists. He would begin, “I think you want to say something like the following,” and then the list would follow, with his thumb and forefinger nipping the air at shoulder height to perform the bullets. I have since noted this same tendency, though not as commonly performed, in other professors. As I move into my fourth decade as a teacher, I begin to feel the itch to do it myself.

• Over a long lunch, a friend who’s been at this teaching game longer than I have excused himself briefly to use the men’s room. As he stood, he said, “Why don’t you think about that while I’m gone, and then we can keep talking?” He took three steps away from the table, then returned to apologize. It was in his bones by now, he explained. He couldn’t leave a class alone for two minutes without giving them an assignment, and here he was importing that tic into his social life.

• I’m hearing myself, more and more, saying Let me …  as in “Let me try to open this discussion up a little with some background on Huxley.” Or “Let me introduce a different notion of point of view.” I never talk this way in front of other audiences or with friends. It’s a pedagogical strategy thinly disguised as a pseudorequest.

• I’ve gradually absorbed a tendency I first noticed in observing colleagues’ classes: the use of first-person plural, often with an interjected rhetorical question, to state either one’s firmly held view or its opposite. As in “We tend to think, don’t we, that the character committing adultery will be the bad guy?” or “These days, we expect most first-person narrators to be unreliable.”

I don’t sit in on classes in biology or art history, and for all I know their verbal tics and strategies are different. What about it, Lingua Francaphiles? ‘Fess up. Do you use right in the middle of sentences? What are your favorite rhetorical devices? Generalize all you want.

When I first heard of a partial zero-emissions vehicle (or PZEV, a fun acronym to say), I wondered if it was a line from a joke. But no. It is a line from a vehicle category designed to circumvent requirements like California’s demand that zero-emissions vehicles be produced by a certain date. There are technical specifications for a PZEV that have to do with exhaust emissions and fuel-system emissions. For a language columnist, however, the interest lies in the modified absolute.

Sticklers love to focus on these. Unique is their favorite. As they point out, it means “one of a kind,” and therefore cannot logically be modified by qualifiers of degree, like more, somewhat, very, etc. The fix proposed, if you must have the modifier, is generally to choose a different adjective, like distinctive or unusual.

For me, the fun lies, first, in finding the absolutes. In addition to unique, English Plus gives us absolute, overwhelmed, straight, opposite, right, dead, entirely, eternal, fatal, final, identical, infinite, mortal, opposite, perfect, immortal, finite, and irrevocable. Though I note that entirely is the only adverb among a group of adjectives (what of entire? What of perfectly?), I don’t have a quarrel with this list. But what about unconscious? What about pregnant? Or evenly? Or true? If overwhelmed is an absolute, what about overjoyed? I can imagine someone at eight months saying to someone at three months, “I’m more pregnant than you are,” and we’d all know what she meant. But then, I can imagine someone saying, “I’m more overwhelmed than I was yesterday,” or “He’s even more perfect at math than she is.” Picking out the absolutes, for me, is less an exercise in prescriptivist grammar than a thought experiment about what most of us consider to be the inviolate apogees or nadirs of Platonic ideas. To debate absolutes is to discover how little we believe in them, in this age of relativism. Look what’s happened to the idea of parallel lines. If nothing’s sacrosanct, then is sacrosanct an absolute?

The other fun lies in finding adverbs you can get away with, even in the face of the schoolmarms. Perhaps that’s the joke behind the munchkins’ song in The Wizard of Oz:

But we’ve got to verify it legally, to see
If she
Is morally, ethically
Spiritually, physically
Positively, absolutely
Undeniably and reliably Dead.
As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her.
And she’s not only merely dead,
She’s really most sincerely dead.

Though modifiers of degree may be frowned upon, all these modifiers work. So do modifiers that we often take as indicating degree but whose formal definitions give them leeway to modify absolutes. For instance, “That line is really straight” can indicate that the line satisfies all the requirements of straightness, as opposed to a line that appears straight but isn’t. “These two chairs are more nearly identical than those two chairs” supplies comparison while preserving the motion that identical is an absolute state that the chairs can only approach. Someone might be “truly overwhelmed” as opposed to “virtually overwhelmed,” and someone else might be “almost truly overwhelmed.” Call me juvenile, but when I locate these adverbs, I feel as though I’m saying a silent nyaa-nyaa-na-foo-foo to an invisible Mrs. Gradgrind.

None of this makes me happy with the idea of a partial zero-emissions vehicle — but that’s my impatience with the pace of progress, not my complaint about the wordplay that brings us the new MINI Cooper, which as cars go is really very absolutely cute.

Happy start to cuffing season. Yes, folks, it officially begins today.

I just learned the term cuffing season four days ago, and already I know I cannot talk about it without showing my age. The phenomenon it refers to has been around, probably, for centuries: the tendency of humans to “cuddle up” as the weather turns colder and to seek freedom when the flowers come out in the spring. But its specific contemporary reference, and the advice that goes along with it, feels less anthropological and more trendy.

The term cuffing, or cuffin, as far as I can tell, emerges as slang around 2008 to refer, as Urban Dictionary puts it, to not wanting to share a mate with anyone else. The idea is that you’re handcuffed together, which (unless you’re into bondage) doesn’t sound all that romantic or even intentional. The season of cuffing gets its name sometime in 2010, coupled with an even less attractive sobriquet, lonely bitch season. The rap track that popularized the term, with its line “Summer hoes turn into winter wifeys,” doesn’t help.

Some African-Americans point out that the term was urban slang intended as a joke that white folks have taken too seriously. It’s hard to know. The season gets announced like the start to a horse race … or a hunt. “The decision to take part in cuffing season is entirely up to the predator,” advises The University Star of Texas State University. “If you’re not doing the cuffing, you’re getting cuffed,” says Madame Noire. In the mainstream media, those playing this “game” are advised to “treat it like a real relationship,” even though it has an expiration date stamped loudly on its wrapper. The cuffing-season guide is surely tongue in cheek, but slick magazines (which some people take seriously) are using the term to badger women into even more strenuous attention to the sexiness of their bodies and their lingerie wardrobes (yes, everything is an opportunity for a sale), even when the typical image of the season is of a couple in bulky sweaters and Uggs.

And here’s where it gets strange for me and I start to feel old. Cuffing season is specifically about sex, specifically designates relationships as temporary (the season ends on April 1), and blames the darkness, coldness, and loneliness of singlehood in winter for the need to cuff. If it weren’t so dark and cold — if warm weather and sunlight could fool you out of feeling lonely, as happens in Hawaii where “cuffing season is not reported” — you’d presumably still be having sex, but you wouldn’t be handcuffed to a partner as a sort of nightly security blanket.

Maybe my distaste here stems from the number of hours I’ve spent, this year, talking about differences in sexual mores between certain tribal cultures and the secular, urban habits of the West. My latest novel explores some of those differences, and I’ve found myself recounting to audiences how practices we almost take for granted, like exploring intimacy with a partner before committing to cohabitation, and cohabiting before committing to marriage, provoke disgust among people I came to know while researching the book in northern Pakistan. Having seen mouths widen in horror as I described that common American path toward matrimony, I can only imagine the expressions I would receive if I were to describe to young Pashtun women the planned three-month break from unfettered hookups that we call cuffing season.

But I don’t think my disquiet is that narrowly based, and I don’t think it stems from prudery. The term itself bothers me. It suggests a pair of people chained together, not a couple embracing. An older term, bundling, which suggested co-sleeping without sex (and which, whatever its Colonial roots, was still practiced at a Southern university in the 1970s), at least had the advantage of connoting coziness. Those iron circlets at the wrist look cold, especially in winter. The other meaning for cuff, as a verb, is to strike with the palm of the hand.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I’m glad I’m old and happily partnered. I never did take well to being cuffed.

For the record, I believe we have a problem on campuses with a persistent, low level, broadly shared, largely unconscious set of prejudices that places an unfair burden on minorities (and, often, women). I also think we have the wrong word for it. The word popping up everywhere — surely it will be a candidate for 2016’s Word of the Year — is microaggressions.

To get to what I think doesn’t work, here, I want to begin with the origin of the word itself. The Greek prefix micro stands in opposition to macro, meaning very small as opposed to very large. But although microeconomics and macroeconomics are often presented as a pair, more often we pay attention to things made small and fail to inflect the large aspect. Thus we say microscope but rarely macroscope, microbrewery but never macrobrewery; we speak of microbiology and biology, not macrobiology. The idea seems to be that the initial notion is of large scale and needs the prefix only to set, say, the small, independent brewery apart from the standard big, commercial enterprise. It’s the same thing, only littler. Ditto microbus, microcassette, microclimate, microfilm, micromanage, and so on.

We have some understanding of what aggression is. Whether consciously intended or not, it is overt, provocative, hostile behavior that precedes an attack or implicitly threatens an attack. ISIS is aggressive in its pursuit of a caliphate; teenage bystanders have trouble intervening in cases of sexual aggression. Following our model, a microaggression should be an aggression on a small scale: a minor hostility, a small threat, a slight provocation.

But microaggression theory yields a different meaning. Coined in 1970 by the Harvard professor Charles M. Pierce, the term signals

… offenses done to blacks by whites in this sort of gratuitous neverending way. … Almost all black-white racial interactions are characterized by white put-downs, done in automatic, preconscious, or unconscious fashion.

People can be unconscious aggressors because of personality traits or unresolved anger. But as social scientists have further described microaggression (and extended it to mainstream behaviors toward groups other than African-Americans), they have stressed the aversive nature of such interactions — the tendency to minimize the effects of longstanding discrimination, to position the dominant culture as “normal,” to express surprise when a member of a minority group deviates from the stereotype.

These are unhealthy tendencies, and those calling attention to their presence on our campuses are waging a difficult and valuable struggle. But I do not believe most of these behaviors are aggressions, micro or otherwise. In fact, many recent statements protesting such tendencies take pains to point out how unaggressive they are. “People who engage in microaggressions are ordinary folks who experience themselves as good, moral, decent individuals,” says the Columbia professor and commentator Derald Wing Sue, who gives as an example a woman’s backing away from entering an elevator carrying a lone black man. Now, that’s hurtful behavior occasioned by the woman’s race- and sex-based assumptions about her personal safety. But is it an aggression for her to back away? I’d rather call it not a micro-anything but what it is: stereotyping, or soft bigotry, or provincial thinking.

What does this matter (aside from the general idea that words matter)? People who commit aggressive acts are aggressors, at least in the moment of the act. By general agreement, people who commit so-called microaggressions may be behaving like jerks, or they may be mouthing some piece of received opinion (“You speak such good English”) that they’ve failed to reconsider. By finding some other way to describe certain intolerable behaviors, we can save the charge of microaggression for behaviors that do fit the model of aggression-in-small-ways, like blackface fraternity parties or characterization of a woman’s speaking up in a meeting as shrill. We may even find people more willing to listen to a characterization of their actions as stereotyping or hurtful or counterproductive when we’re not accusing them of an aggression (micro or otherwise) that they logically disown.

I’ve offered a few alternative terms. Who’s ready to propose others? Or does microaggression really describe what one might call a macrocommon set of behaviors? Pull out your lexicons and let us know.

My admiration for the writer Jhumpa Lahiri went up a thousandfold after reading an excerpt from her new book, titled “Teach Yourself Italian,” in this week’s New Yorker. Having been trying to teach myself Italian for the past 18 months, I thought I would find a fellow voyager in Lahiri’s essay. As it turns out, Lahiri became so obsessed with the language that she moved to Italy with her family, something I’ve never contemplated doing. Wow, I thought. Then she began reading solely in Italian, to improve her literacy. Good for her, I thought, looking wistfully at my shelf of Elena Ferrante novels translated into English by the redoubtable Ann Goldstein. Then she began keeping a journal — in Italian. Finally, at the end of the essay, she allows that she is currently writing in Italian. In her journal, I assumed. Then I read the little italic explanation at the end of the final column: Translated, from the Italian, by Ann Goldstein.

Holy crap. She wrote that whole essay — as it turns out, she’s written a whole book, now — in a language she decided to learn as an adult. Along the way, people have told her that she’s out of her mind, spending so much time mastering a language when she already writes quite successfully in a language that, unlike Italian, is read around the world. But as she walks us through the process of starting to express herself in this foreign tongue, I get where she’s coming from:

In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I’m always uncertain. My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself.

Using the metaphor of Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she adds, “I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.”

Lahiri follows a distinguished line of writers who have elected to compose their work in a nonnative tongue. Many of these — Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Ha Jin — have chosen to write in English. But since, as my colleague Geoffrey Pullum recently pointed out, English is the lingua franca of the globe, I’m not focused on them so much as on those who chose a different, less widespread vernacular. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote in French because it allowed him to write “without style.” Ágota Kristóf, who also chose French when she immigrated to Switzerland from her native Hungary, said toward the end of her life that “a book takes five times longer when I’m writing in French, even now. But I did a lot of theatre in my youth, and there, there’s not too much description, there’s dialogue, sentences. I began writing little plays as a game.” Ana-Kazumi Stahl, whose heritage is Japanese, German, and American, writes in Spanish. She says of her adopted literary language:

I learn a great deal about how I make stories by writing in a language that prompts me always to remember the value in choosing a word, in listening to a phrase, and in remembering the main structural elements in a text. The limitation was generous — the style was removed. What was important was the characters, the conflict — the love.

What these comments share is an appreciation for what’s left out of the writing when composing in a second language: style, or description, or sophistication — all things we tend to strive for when we try to write eloquently in our native tongue. I do think we tend to lose sight, in a language that has shaped our world since we were born, of language’s central task: to make meaning. We take for granted the multiple choices we have; we ramp up the prose; we lose sight of the roots of the words we’re making flowers with.

Though I speak French fluently and read it passably, I am not yet prepared to try writing in French. I tell myself I’m too old. I remind myself how much I love English, and I do: I love the mongrel quality of it, the ridiculous wealth of vocabulary, the many ways a verb can be jiggered to convey different senses of the past, the inflections of syntax that convey a speaker’s region or accent. But really, I’m daunted. Partly it’s the steep climb that scares me — the passé simple! — but even more, it’s the rawness, the self-revelation that beginning to express oneself in a new tongue seems to bring on. As Lahiri puts it in her Daphne metaphor, “It’s true that a new language covers me, but unlike Daphne I have a permeable covering — I’m almost without a skin.” How dangerous, and how thrilling.

I grew up singing carols, and I am still singing them, these days in an interfaith chorus that gives an annual holiday concert with audience participation. Returning to the songs of one’s youth is always a sentimental experience. But with carols, particularly, I recall simultaneously relishing the rich language in these little ditties and feeling confused by what I came to understand as inverted syntax.

Poetry, and poetic language, often move the parts of a sentence into places different from ordinary prose. The rhyme may call for it, or the meter, or the desire to emphasize an image or phrase that might otherwise be lost. Still, when you consider that children sing many or most of these carols, the sheer quantity of inverted syntax is impressive. A sampling, with the relevant phrases in bold:

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.

Herod the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

Don we now our gay apparel

They looked up and saw a star
Shining in the east beyond them far,
And to the earth it gave great light

The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
…
Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand

For many years, I thought “Don” was a person with some part to play in “Deck the Halls.” I thought the king was charging the day. I wondered why faith was beaming with hearts. None of this syntactical misunderstanding bothered me; I assumed that when I got older, I would get it. Some of the inversions, though, coupled with confusion over punctuation, manipulate the audience participants into singing a sort of sweet nonsense. Take the following lyrics, found online, for a famous carol:

Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace …

See the period after “bright”? It echoes the pause everyone takes at that point in the song. And this did bother me, even as a kid. What was round yon Virgin? I wondered. There seemed to be three people in this tableau — a Virgin, a Mother, and a Child. Add archaic language, and you have one member of my chorus who grew up thinking it was “Round John Virgin,” sort of like Wild Bill Hickok (especially confusing when you consider that the dad’s name is Joseph). Another thought a round young virgin (perhaps pregnant?) had joined the mother and child and was sleeping.

Choruses like mine attempt to communicate the more logical structure of the lyrics by way of pauses and sustained breaths; in the printed version, the result might be something like this

Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace …

Or perhaps, if holy infant is an apostrophe and not an appositive,

All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace. …

Either way, at least round is a preposition, not an adjective, the light shines round the people, and only two of them are in the scene.

Confusion notwithstanding, and religion to one side (which I know is difficult to maintain; these are Christian hymns), I think giving children inverted syntax to play with is a good thing. Most, it’s true, will sing lyrics like these and not think much about how the words actually fall into sentences. But then, most will not grow up to read Lingua Franca. Those with our strange proclivities may find puzzles to solve, in these carols, that could lead them from Joyful, all ye nations rise to a knack for the periodic sentence.

Meanwhile, God rest ye merry whilst ye Christmas or another holiday keep!

When I used to think about the word skeptic, it was to wonder whether to spell it beginning sk or sc. No longer. Now that AP guidelines have recommended avoiding the term climate-change skeptic, I find myself pondering the differences among skeptic, doubter, and denier. The Associated Press Stylebook editors write, in part,

Our guidance is to use “climate change doubters” or “those who reject mainstream climate science” and to avoid the use of “skeptics” or “deniers.”

The reasoning here is twofold. First, genuine scientists usually consider themselves skeptics; since they don’t find that so-called climate-change skeptics employ “scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” they take umbrage at the term’s being hijacked. Second, the “doubters” take umbrage at the word denier, which smacks to them of Holocaust denial.

I was actually favoring the last term, myself, precisely for the echo it provides. Hit ‘em where they live, I say. Then I looked at comments on a number of “climate-skeptic” sites and found reasoning like this:

I think the goal of ruling out the middle ground is, with that gone, the default position left is the alarmist one as the sceptic [sic] position has been renamed ‘denier,’ and that people don’t want to be associated with that, no matter how valid a position it is, or however correct its arguments are. It’s an entirely political tactic.

Ah, I thought. So someone thinks there is a middle ground. And sure enough, that middle ground is one the deniers (I’m going to use all these terms here, just to see which one suits me best) are very good at laying claim to. Climate change is a theory, they point out. It’s all very complicated. Here are charts, here are graphs. Here’s an idea the scientists had 20 years ago that got debunked. And we don’t know. We don’t deny anything. We just don’t know.

OK. Sheesh. One wants to talk to these people, so let’s begin at a place where we can all breathe.

Here’s the thing about skeptics. They often claim skepticism as inherent to their nature — not surprisingly, since the term originally referred to a whole school of ancient Greek philosophers. They try to be governed as little as possible by belief and as much as possible by rational inquiry. They ask and ask and ask. (Richard Muller, of the University of California at Berkeley, who famously published his change of view, could fairly be called a former climate-change skeptic.) Doubters, by contrast, usually don’t doubt everything. They doubt a particular thing — the Apostle Thomas, for instance, doubting the resurrected Jesus — until evidence or argument convinces them. I think of John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt and recall especially the avenging Mother Superior, who says, stricken, at the end, “I have doubt.” Doubt isn’t always about religious matters — juries are asked to make judgments “beyond a reasonable doubt” — but it seems to me much involved with questions of belief. And since anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, relies on mountains of scientific evidence, I’m a little reluctant to use a term that implies that climate scientists are faithful believers.

Finally, one thing I learned from cruising all these climate-skeptic websites is that few in this camp fail to credit the existence of climate change or global warming. It’s the anthropogenic part that gets short shrift. Just about every other cause is thrown on the table for consideration — sunspots, the Medieval Warming Period, the benevolence of CO₂, cyclical variations, the North Atlantic oscillation — but the burning of fossil fuels fails to make the cut. So this camp is not filled with climate-change deniers but with AGW deniers (they like to call themselves lukewarmers), which is an unwieldy mouthful for journalists.

I don’t have a new term to propose, though I have been playing with Nimby-like acronyms, like Paccas (People against Anthropogenic Climate Change Acceptance) or Drages (Denying the Reality of Anthropogenic Global Effects). I also suspect we cannot land on an accurate term without knowing the funding behind these groups that impede our progress in forestalling global warming. In the end, are these opinion-makers truly skeptics, doubters, or deniers? Or are they cynics whose mouthpieces are paid for by the fossil-fuel lobby? If that’s the case, I don’t care what you call them so long as you don’t call them sincere.

I suspect there isn’t a reader out there who doesn’t have a story about being on the wrong side of so-called political correctness. Mine goes this way. In graduate school, my well-meaning professor had attempted to demonstrate to the class that some opening paragraphs for essays were more effective than others, and to that end he had anonymously copied several of our opening paragraphs from our last set of papers. One paragraph went loftily on about a certain theoretical approach the writer planned to take, but you couldn’t find in the thicket of words the line of reasoning the author planned to follow.

Our professor asked us to critique this paragraph. I said that it put me in mind of a fat lady on thin legs: The argument was too weak to carry the mountain of rhetoric forward.

After class, a fellow student literally cornered me in the hallway. I needed to pick a kid up from day care, but he held me captive with a demand that I retract my comparison. He knew the author, he said, and she was overweight, and I had been insensitive in the extreme. After apologizing for any feelings I might have hurt, I pointed out that I was using a metaphor.

No excuse, he said.

But I couldn’t have made it a fat man on thin legs, I said, because the image was really of those legs coming out from a voluminous skirt. I couldn’t call it a house on stilts, because the argument needed to move. So what should I have done? And by the way, I needed to pick up my kid.

Stop using metaphors, my politically correct accuser said, and then he let me go.

Though politically correct came into the lexicon by way of the Communist Party, it has been a derisive term for at least four decades. The difference lies in what’s being derided and why. In the 1960s and 1970s, a politically correct person was one who talked the talk but rarely walked the walk. The apotheosis was perhaps “P.C. Person,” from Brown University’s student newspaper, who had nothing better to do than to correct others’ speech. But this particular form of mockery did, at least, suggest that there were some legitimate concerns to which language might point; that the problem was PC scolds who never actually got their hands dirty in political action rather than the existence of a politically charged agenda.

Today, you can’t open a newspaper or magazine, or turn on the news, without reading another accusation of political correctness. Ted Cruz claims that political correctness is killing people. Comedians complain that political correctness is killing comedy. To Donald Trump, America’s big problem is political correctness. What these folks mean by the term seems to be not an “incorrect” use of language — e.g., colored person instead of person of color — but the presumed illegitimacy of ideas or movements they oppose. In response to such blatant, vague, knee-jerk attempts to silence opponents, some have claimed that political correctness doesn’t really exist amid the objects of the speaker’s scorn. In one of Tom Toles’s recent cartoons for The Washington Post, a pointy-headed white guy says, “I’m so sick of ‘political correctness.’”

“Try it,” says the woman he’s addressing, “without the ‘political correctness’ then.”

“I’m so sick,” the guy says, “of not being able to insult and belittle women and minorities.”

Or there’s PC2Respect, the browser extension that automatically changes political correctness to treating people with respect on any web page. As in the revamped headline, “Why Do Millennials Love Treating People With Respect?”

I like this move to disarm the PC-accusers by pointing out that what they’re loath to do, mostly, is to grant the legitimacy of others’ viewpoints. Certainly, that’s what’s happening in most of the news-grabbing moments.

But I also want to be careful. There’s a pendulum here. Forgetting the I in LBGTI should not be an occasion for eye-rolling. If a 22-year-old male feminist gets chastised every time he calls his female classmates girls, his feminism could go into retreat. Should I have found another metaphor for that awful opening paragraph? I still don’t know. But I do know that cornering me in the hallway and declaring metaphors off-base was not a convincing argument. There’s no such thing as the PC Police. There’s no such thing as an “incorrect” way to treat others with respect. But there are scolds, and we can try not to be one of them.

The illustration at left is from my local walk-in medical clinic, where I finally went after the New Year’s Cold persisted for two weeks. (I’m better now, thanks.) It interests me not only because of the continuing debate about doubled consonants, but also because of its implied narrative.

First, the debate (which isn’t much of a debate). Generally speaking, doubling or not doubling the consonant at the ended of a two-syllable word with the accent on the first syllable is regarded as one of those British versus American style questions. The Brits double; the Americans don’t; and the Brits may stop doubling soon if the Internet has its way. So, for Americans, it’s traveling, canceled, and focuses; for Brits, travelling, cancelled, and focusses. Then we have a word like bus, to which some of us have trouble adding a suffix without doubling the consonant. People complain that busing, for instance, rhymes with abusing. (Others counter that busses would refer to more than one kiss.) My own quibble here is that verbs like rat, mar, and thin double their consonants before most suffixes. Perhaps short vowel + s proves the exception. When I went looking for a one-syllable word that rhymes with bus, the only one I found with a single s was pus, which always doubles the s before suffixes, at least according to Ngrams. (Readers, can you come up with another example?)

The New Yorker, always looking to stand out from the rest of America while insisting on its Americanness (or is that Americaness?), continues to double the consonants regardless, as Mary Norris has hilariously pointed out. And like any so-called rule of spelling, exceptions abound. Kidnap and suntan, for instance, follow an accent pattern similar to cancel, but you don’t find much kidnaping or suntaning going on.

But the debate, may it rage, is not really what drew me to snap the picture of this little sign in the exam room at the clinic. Rather, I think of the others who waited there before me to have their sprains, fevers, and cuts examined. One person saw the word traveled and thought she would help the benighted poster by correcting the spelling. The next person came along, saw the penciled correction, and one-upped the first correcter by pointing out contemporary usage.

I have been reading the gargantuan fiction of William T. Vollman, who, in his quest for authenticity, uses all the variant spellings he can find when he refers, say, to the Iroquois Indians (Yroquois, Irocois, Irikhoiw). The journals and letters he’s researched, after all, unguided by dictionaries or style manuals, spell not only that name but dozens of other words according to the writer’s accent or whim. Not any longer. John Q. Citizen may love or hate spelling, but he usually has very firm ideas about it. Updating those ideas, or allowing that it could go either way, does not sit well with most of us. Talk to anyone who really, really prefers grey over gray, or bussing over busing, and you’ll find that even when we understand variable spellings, our preferences remain consistent and strong. How many times have those of you who teach about language had acquaintances or strangers ask you to validate their view of a “proper” spelling or spelling rule? And how many have found that, regardless of what you say, your interlocutor’s view reasserts itself?

I know this observation has as its corollary certain widespread misunderstandings of spelling, as there are wide misunderstandings of grammar. At the same time, I found the emendations on the sign in the exam room refreshing. They mean people are still focusing — focussing — well, anyhow, they still care about this stuff.

I am one of thousands of nontweeters on Twitter, people who signed up for one silly reason or another (mine: my publisher told me to) yet have never found much to tweet about. Trying to work up my enthusiasm for this medium of communication, I asked avid tweeters what they loved about it. Their most common answer? “The messages are only 140 characters long.”

Now that Twitter is moving to a higher limit for tweets, let’s pause on this feature, with a nod to poetic form. Why 140 characters? Apparently that is, or was, close to the 160-character limit for SMS, or text messages. Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, wanted to leave 20 characters free for the tweeter’s user name and still allow the tweet to show up as SMS on a basic phone. Presto: 140 characters. Twitter, of course, is not the first form to limit the writer’s expression. Haiku, a Japanese form that doesn’t really translate well to English, limits syllables in its three lines: five for the first line, seven for the second, five for the third. The traditional English sonnet, written as it is in 14 lines of iambic pentameter, prescribes a limit, if not for characters, at least for metric stresses. Sonnet and haiku writers love their limits; as one poet friend put it, “When I have something really emotional to say, something really out of control, I resort to the sonnet.” Other writers have invented limits to test what can be done when you are straining against them, as in Ernest Vincent Wright’s lipogrammatic novel Gadsby, which contains no words with the letter e.

But for every form there exist nonce versions, exceptions, or as some would put it, cheating. With Twitter, for several years now, users have circumvented the 140-character limit by using bit.ly, a website that shortens URLs to help you stick to 140 characters. I try to imagine something like this for, say, haiku. I want to write, for instance,

The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la!
Breathe promise of merry sunshine.
As we merrily dance and we sing, tra-la!

Haiku.ly helps me out with

Flowers bloom in spring
Breathe promise merry sunshine
Dance & sing tra-la!

Okay, so Bashô it isn’t, and Twitter doesn’t even try to be poetry. But until I looked it up just now — and gave my poor brain-processing skills a minute — I had no idea that <3, for instance, a “heart” on which thousands of Twitter users have relied to shorten their messages, meant love. I suspect the combination of bit.ly and Twitter slang renders such orthography ever more specific to, well, fluent Twitterers.

The reason Twitter is abandoning its limit is, of course, the bottom line. It wants to compete with Facebook; it needs more new users. Most responses to the impending change lament the passing of Twitter’s enforced brevity, as if it really did cause all those remarks about Donald Trump, soggy cereal, and the Kardashians to possess the soul of wit. But you can bet that users will wax more prolix as soon as 10,000 is the new limit. And then where will we find the witty ones?

So I’m writing my historical novel, minding my own business, when some sort of semantic bug bites me and sends me off on a language tangent. Does this ever happen to you? Last week, I was describing the building of a gristmill on a tributary of the Hudson River around 1700. Given the rough terrain at the time and the need to haul a lot of heavy stuff around, I thought the mill builders might have donkeys handy, rather than horses. This supposition occasioned a bunch of research into when certain hoofed animals arrived in the Americas (not long after Columbus); what sort of resistance donkeys might have to cold or wet conditions (depends on the donkey, and has to do with the fur, or hair); and what sort of work they were used for (hauling stuff to build a mill didn’t seem out of the question). But the word nagged at me. Donkey. Just didn’t sound like early 18th century. Sure enough, no one’s saying donkey until 1785. Why not?

(You can see already how far I’m drifting.)

Duchess of Somerset, 1710

Countess of Buckinghamshire, 1790

Turns out that ass is the universal term in English up to this point. Just check your Shakespeare. Then pronunciation changed a bit—pronunciation is always changing, especially among the nonliterate—and the word arse began to sound a lot like ass. The late 18^th century saw a certain swing toward modesty; women’s dresses revealed a great deal more breast in 1720 than in 1790. As the word for a common beast of burden began to sound like the word for buttocks—that is, it degenerated—other words stepped in. Burro was one, from the Spanish. Donkey appeared around 1785, derived from an origin lost in the mists of time — perhaps from its dun-colored coat, perhaps for its donlike qualities (?), perhaps for the name Duncan (??).

I loved learning this little etymological tidbit and promptly referred to the long-eared hoofers working my mill as asses. But I discovered a couple of other amusing degenerations along the way. One I had known about but not really attended to: rooster in place of cock. Here, the story goes like this: The male of the fowl was originally the roosting cock, or cock, and no one had a problem with it until, in the 17^th century, penises began to be called cocks. Why this latter use? No one’s sure. OED connects this meaning to the “technical” use of the word as “a spout or short pipe serving as a channel,” but I wonder if it’s not also connected to the more dominant sense of cock as “one who arouses slumberers” or “leader.” In either case, unlike arse, which underwent a change in pronunciation, cock took on its body-part meaning rather late; and once again, the late 18^th century — chiefly in the Puritan United States — ushered in the less titillating rooster to mean the bird.

Then we come to Coney Island. (I told you I would stray a long way from that gristmill.) The Dutch named the place after its large population of rabbits, called konijn. Simple enough. But the English, too, referred to the little mammals as coneys (the Latin name is Oryctolagus cuniculus), and for several centuries called only the babies rabbits, after the Old French rabotte. How we changed from calling the adult critters coneys to calling them rabbits, beginning (like the change from ass to donkey) in the late 18th century, seems obscure until you read that back in the day, rather than pronouncing the first syllable of coney with a long o, the word used to rhyme with honey. In fact, per the OED, “The usual current pronunciation with long ō …  seems to have become established during the course of the 19th cent., and may in part be a spelling pronunciation reflecting the rarity of the word in general use in standard English at this date … reinforced by the desire to avoid association with c—.” In other words, we not only started using rabbit to refer to adults as well as young ’uns; we also changed our pronunciation of the older term to avoid any salacious misinterpretation. Was Coney Island ever pronounced so as to rhyme with Honey Island? Of this, I could find no instance, but given its history (a remarkable art exhibit on the history of Coney Island originated here in Hartford and is now at the Brooklyn Museum), it wouldn’t surprise me.

Degeneration as a source of change isn’t unique to these three terms, of course. What others have you found? Tell us the story — in printable language, of course. Meanwhile, I need to get back to that gristmill.

It’s hard to tell exactly when the verb enable spawned the noun enabler. An 1825 issue of the Annual Register, per the OED, provides some hint in suggesting that “the word Habilitador might, if there were such a word, be translated Enabler.” A habilitador, or habilitater, was one who endowed something or someone with ability or capacity. For at least some period of time, an enabler did likewise. As recently as 1978, in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s publication Stimulating Human Services Reform, we read that “the enabler helps people to be realistic about problems. … The enabler is concerned with others, their services, programs, and needs.”

No one accused today of being an enabler would recognize themself (per Ben Yagoda) in such a description. Rather, we get something like the following:

I would characterize this Fed as an enabler that has allowed the consumer to bury himself in debt. (comment, The New York Times, July 1, 2004)

“The Enabler” (a critical assessment of The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Bush Legacy by Glenn Kessler, New York Times Book Review November 25, 2007)

Are they a cold calculating partnership? A sex addict and his enabler?” (Vanity Fair, February 1999)

Don’t be an enabler. That’s an Alcoholics Anonymous word for someone who helps instead of hindering the drinker. (Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1979)

She was not a victim. She was an enabler. She … worked with him. (Donald Trump, January 2016)

Was dreading seeing my abuser on tv campaign trail for enabler wife. (Juanita Broaddrick, January 2016)

Stop Enabling Your Overly Dependent Adult Child (Psychology Today, April 2014)

Supportive Mother or Enabler? Signs to Watch Out For in a Mama’s Boy (Elephant Journal, August 2013)

My 22-year-old brother is an addict and my mother is an enabler (Internet of the Mind, June 2013)

Codependent and Enabling Behaviors (MentalHelp.net, January 27, 2007)

Three of these quotes, as you can surely tell, concerned Hillary Clinton. Three were directed specifically at mothers. I suspect mothers and wives get this accusation of “enabling” more often than any other group of individuals or organizations. I have several reasons to wish devoutly that whatever semantic shift led to this present pejorative use be temporary and replaced by something more nuanced.  Three big reasons:

1. There once was something positive about enabling, and we have not found a term to replace it. Let us say, for instance, that one wanted, in the old-fashioned sense, to enable an alcoholic husband to find other ways to cope, or to enable a painfully bashful son to acquire social skills. What one would be after would be a combination of several of the OED’s definitions, some of which are labeled rare or obsolete, e.g. “to give power to a person,” “to make competent or capable,” “to supply with the requisite means to an end,” “to regard as qualified.” But the word has lost most of those connotations, and no other word has really taken its place. (For the record, the OED manifests the more contemporary meaning only in its definition of enabler, and only as “Draft Additions, March 2009.”)
2. The chief harm often implied by enabling, in the sense now used pervasively by the media, is harm to the person or organization one is trying to help. Needless to say, well-meaning people (often, though clearly not always, wives and mothers) feel awful about such behavior, since it directly contradicts what they’re trying to do (that is, to enable in the old-fashioned sense). When enabling implies the larger sin of aiding and abetting behavior, e.g., Sidney Blumenthal “as Clinton’s enabler: a rumor-mongering Wormtongue whispering confirmation of the vast right-wing conspiracy that the Nixonian Clinton sees everywhere,” then presumably guilty enablers are harming, not just the object of their concern, but innocent bystanders. What’s more, this second sense of enabling implies some conscious collusion. So the more recent meaning of enabler, while clearly pejorative, is fuzzy at best.
3. The charge of being an enabler is almost impossible to refute. So long as you have friends, constituencies, or loved ones who wrestle with chronic problems or who behave badly with others, the very fact that you maintain close ties to these people can hint of enabling. And yet, one might argue, how can one enable (in the archaic sense) if one must cut ties in order not to be accused of enabling (in the contemporary sense)?

There’s no standing in the way of language change. Either the indiscriminate use of enable will evolve into something more nuanced and amenable to discussion, or many of us will start avoiding the word altogether. Meanwhile, I hope to enable my students to grow into critical thinkers; to overcome procrastination; to graduate successfully; to lead productive and examined lives. Go ahead. Call me the Enabler in Chief.

A reader writes, “I received an email just now with the following in it: ‘A technician and myself went to check out the computer in SHM2012.’ I have noticed this a lot (our kids do it) — the unwillingness to use ‘I,’ and the substitution of ‘myself.’: definitely a feature of changing language.”

The use of the reflexive pronoun in a nonreflexive way seems to be a growing phenomenon, but the data are mixed. Among the and -self phrases, and myself occurs most frequently, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English as well as Google’s Ngram Viewer – but and myself, per COCA, has declined significantly since 1990, whereas and himself has risen. Though Ngrams shows a bump in and myself in the last few years, the examples tend to be some variation on book titles like My Father and Myself, which accords with COCA’s evidence that and myself occurs most frequently when the possessive my appears earlier in the sentence — as in one of the examples listed in Ngrams, from Philip Roth’s Reading Myself and Others (1975):

In time (more, probably, than it should have taken) I became aware of enormous differences of sensibility between my Jewish adversaries and myself.

Roth’s use sounds reflexive (though it isn’t) because of the modifying pronoun in “my Jewish adversaries.” Ditto most of the examples in COCA, like the response of a brigadier general to Gwen Ifill that “my group and myself have been working with both the House and Senate committees.”

Most of those examples, for all the reflexive pronouns I searched, are in spoken language (followed by fiction, which often represents spoken language in dialogue). But contrary to our reader’s observation, it’s not just young people resorting to the reflexive. In the February 11 PBS News Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said, “So, let’s not in any way imply here that either President Obama or myself would not take on any vested interest.” Clinton’s been criticized for using I too often, so resorting to myself could be a dodge here. My own suspicion is that it’s a dodge elsewhere, as well, as in the 2015 interview in which Bernie Sanders noted, “There are real differences between Hillary Clinton and myself.” Or take this recent blog post:

A story about my brother Brian and myself
One night my parents went out to a party and left Brian and i alone

What with the creep toward using I, he, etc. as prepositional objects (usually, as in the above example, as part of a compound object, but see my update on this trend here), and our wide acceptance of object pronouns following linking verbs (“It’s me”), myself feels like a safe alternative. In our classes, students who have been enjoined not to use I in formal academic papers feel as though they can get away with myself; in politics, candidates who fear being accused of narcissism can refer to a “self” that somehow stands apart. It’s like a discovery: the all-purpose, case-free pronoun!

The nonreflexive use of -self may be creeping in among mainstream published writers in a different way. As Philip Corbett observed recently in The New York Times, “writers sometimes use a reflexive pronoun where an ordinary personal pronoun is called for — perhaps in the mistaken view that the reflexive is more formal or correct. This often occurs in prepositional phrases such as ‘like himself.’” Some of Corbett’s examples:

Ms. Syz says her clients, primarily in Europe and the United States, many of whom are art collectors like herself, find traditional jewelry too staid and appreciate her mix of haute and tongue-in-cheek style.

Rayyane Tabet said he loved how the show juxtaposed Lebanese artists like himself with international artists rather than confining them to the category of “art from the Arab world.”

But for someone like myself, who lives on the East Coast and often visits Los Angeles, Sunset Boulevard means something different: food.

Corbett’s focus is on preserving the Times’s style guidelines, so he doesn’t mention what strikes me about all these examples, which is that the pronoun that could be (but isn’t) the reference for the reflexive pronoun exists earlier in the sentence — in the first example, with “her clients”; in the second, with “he loved”; and in the third, with “someone.” In other words, the swing toward myself isn’t just a mistake or an example of faddishness, but a skewed understanding of how reflexivity works.

But the most interesting tidbit about this reflexivity business, I found when I started checking into it, is its deeper history. That same Ngram showed a much earlier bump, in the mid-19^th century, for both and –self and like –self  locutions. Those documents are rife with nonreflexive uses of the reflexive pronoun, e.g.,

Whether unluckily or not, it is hardly now worth while to consider; but both Hume and myself, in quitting the office, forgot all about our borrowed pistols. [Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, 1853]

The rubrics to the session of the 23d April, 1846 are those of Segura, Flores, and myself. [The United States vs. Andres Castillero, 1860]

Branson and myself then agreed to compromise the matter, by submitting our difficulties to an arbitration. [True History of the Kansas Wars, 1856]

Judge Douglas complains, at considerable length, about a disposition on the part of Trumbull and myself to attack him personally. [Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Honorable Stephen A. Douglas, 1860]

I hazard no guesses as to what prompted this flurry of –self in the run-up to the Civil War. But I suspect that mixed in with various other reasons for its rise today is a distant echo of what we consider to be the more “proper” speech of an earlier time. If I sounds pretentious or narcissistic and me has been drummed out for being “wrong,” that leaves myself to elevate the discourse. Plus, as my colleague Ben Yagoda has observed elsewhere, “once people start talking or writing, they like to do so as long as they can, even if the extra airtime comes from saying ‘myself’ instead of ‘I.’”

I myself don’t much like it, but maybe yourselves have some other view.

Adam Calhoun’s heat map of punctuation in Huckleberry Finn.

Anyone who writes seriously pays attention to punctuation; we know that. That devilish comma in the Second Amendment has spawned countless 21st-century opinion columns despite its obvious roots in 18^th-century conventions. But only this past week did I discover a tiny branch of study devoted only to punctuation patterns.

Adam Calhoun, an eclectic neuroscientist at Princeton, found himself drawn to the artist Nicholas Rougeux’s series of posters in the tradition of a particular kind of book art, or the misnamed artist’s book: works of art that use elements of the book as material. I’ve been simultaneously fascinated and disturbed by this trend, which celebrates the wonders of books while sometimes eviscerating them of their literary significance. But while Rougeux’s posters, using Project Gutenberg, achieve “an exploration of visual rhythm of punctuation in well-known literary works” by making coils of punctuation marks, Calhoun wanted something more revealing about the works themselves.

He ran out pages of punctuation, then set about comparing works in English from across time and cultures. Some of the results are unsurprising. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is awash in semicolons; Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian contains almost none. Other results are more subtle than they first appear. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, for instance, contains longer sentences on average than any of the other works Calhoun studied. But when broken down into clauses — determined, perhaps unjustifiably, by “words between punctuation marks” — Calhoun says, “Faulkner is not that much of an outlier.”

I reached Calhoun to talk about his project, and the first question I had was why he’d chosen Absalom, Absalom as his favorite novel. “I find Faulkner’s language interesting,” he said, “and that book was much more accessible, for me, than The Sound and the Fury.” He admits to some flaws in his analysis of novel-length punctuation patterns. While he’s devised a code to enable others to analyze their favorite texts, as he’s done, his system does not distinguish between apostrophes and single quotation marks. That Alice in Wonderland, utilizing British convention, would contain more of these little marks than, say, A Farewell to Arms thus makes perfect sense; but the relative abundance of single-quote marks in Huckleberry Finn could just as easily suggest Twain’s rendering of dropped consonants or syllables, a feature that has nothing to do with amount of dialogue. Similarly, although Calhoun’s “plots” of punctuation show em- and en-dashes, neither is included in his statistical analysis, an omission that would deeply confuse readers of Emily Dickinson, among others.

Even more fun, for me, than Calhoun’s analyses were his heat maps. Simplifying his system to render periods, question marks, and exclamation points red, commas and quotation marks green, and semicolons and colons blue, he lays out colorful squares to illustrate 15  works of literature. These are beautiful and mysterious. The plays — Romeo and Juliet and A Doll’s House — glow red, whereas Great Expectations seems indigo. Joyce’s Ulysses moves from predominantly reddish lines to a rising tide of blue as Leopold Bloom’s day ends and we anticipate the punctuation-free monologue of his wife Molly. Smack in the middle of a fairly bluish Huckleberry Finn is a line of pure red that Calhoun reminded me was the little play in the center of the book. Perhaps most breathtaking of all, the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus contains broad swaths of red and blue, which Calhoun attributes to its organization as “Statement A followed by Statement B followed by Statement C.”

The only heat map that shows much green, indicating dialogue, is Absalom, Absalom. In his discussion of his analyses, Calhoun mentions that in looking at the work of a contemporary author like Cormac McCarthy, where no quotations set off the dialogue, he found that “When the warm, curling hands of the quotation are gone the reader is left with a broader sense of space.” I asked him what he meant, and he explained that McCarthy’s dialogue blends in with the rest of his prose and seems to make spoken words almost part of the descriptive landscape. Certainly the heat map of Blood Meridian, which is redder even than the plays, echoes this sense of a broad, flat plain.

Adam Calhoun has been astonished by his original post’s going viral and pleased that, thus far, virtually all the responses he’s received have been enthusiastic about the project. He pointed out that he is not acting as a literary critic but as a neuroscientist, interested in how minds make and communicate meaning. He reminded me that researchers have discovered what they’re calling syntax in the courtship songs of male fruit flies. Whatever changes we undergo as a result of texting, punctuation remains one of the ways we shape and deliver meaning. The word itself derives from the Latin verb meaning to point out. Not only what we point to, but how we point, varies and changes as rapidly, and as consequentially, as language itself.

Nineteen fifty-four, the year of my birth,* witnessed Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley’s first successful  song, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine, Hank Aaron’s first major league baseball game, and the coining of the word nowheresville. That last is according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s new Birthday Word Generator, linked to the date when OED researchers have been able to locate the first usage of a term. My sister’s word is oenophilic, which I would have thought went back a few more years or centuries; my husband’s word is gobbledygook.

I recently witnessed Laura Poitras’s new installation at the Whitney Museum in New York, which among other things features a video of a detainee at Abu Ghraib being interrogated. One of the first things the off-camera American asks him is the year of his birth. There’s something terribly poignant for me in his answer: “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know how old you are?” the interrogator presses. The suspect shrugs and says simply, “No.”

Those of us who do know tend to fetishize our birth year, even our birth month and day. Astrology’s never done anything for me, but language casts a very different spell. Though Samuel Butler published the first novel about nowheresville, Erewhon, in 1872, I would have guessed the term’s origin later, somewhere between the flight from Western norms that took place in the late 1960s and the renewed drive for material success toward the end of the century. Nowheresville is both the place you escape to and the dead end of the road. I don’t mind sharing its birth year.

Jackalope as trophy

I can’t resist searching for others. My older son’s word is bazillionaire, perhaps a fitting bookend to nowheresville. What’s strange about this dating is that the root, bazillion, goes back to 1939, apparently predating zillion. That can’t be right, I think. And perhaps my getting this far in the birthday word game suggests the OED’s ulterior motive in creating the Birthday Word Generator. “The OED team is continuously researching the histories of words,” they tell us on the website, along with a link to OED appeals, a web page with terms the team needs help with. Though the jackalope, for instance, is currently dated to the early 1950s, the editors have reason to believe a Wyoming taxidermist created the first one perhaps 20 years earlier, and they’re seeking some verifiable evidence. Paranormal had the OED editors stumped, but readers are weighing in, mostly with texts from 1905. Apparently not persuasively enough, though: The birthday word for 1905 remains hands-on.

Obviously, that’s not the only term that originated in 1905, so the editors are doing some selection. To find my very own day-of-birth word, I had to use their Advanced Word Search guide, which led me to a word that was two days old by the time I entered the world: narco.

Well, that’s so very me, I thought: a narco from nowheresville. Thanks, guys.

Still, the old behemoth is up to some fun tricks these days. Sniffing around birthday words, I even ran into the OED’s Timeline Challenge, where you try to guess when a word like thinker or movie entered the language. (I got 4 out of 5 on my first round, 1 out of 5 on my second round.)

Still, nothing beats your own personal birthday word. Unlike astrological signs, you cannot try to time your next child’s birth to coincide with a word; after all, we don’t know what words are coming at us in the future. The closest the OED is willing to approach our own time is with your 12-year-old’s 2004 word, podcast. Give it to her on a birthday card. Tell her to treasure it, a word as young and bright as she is.

*I have never understood the tendency among both men and women to fudge one’s age. I think I look good for 62. For 54, not so much.

I first heard the word in an Elvis Presley song, “In the Ghetto,” released not long after the Billy Joe Royal song “Down in the Boondocks.” I remember comparing the lyrics. “And his hunger burns,” Presley crooned of his “hungry little boy,”

so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto

Billy Joe Royal’s boy was no less poor but more hopeful, counting on love and hard work to move him from the “boondocks” to a place “on the hill.”

I think I understood, then, that Presley’s boy was black. Presley spoke of him in the third person and exhorted “you and me” to give him a “helping hand.” Royal’s boy was speaking for himself, complaining that “people put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in.”

Last week, in a Democratic debate in Flint, Mich., Bernie Sanders lit up the Twittersphere by confessing, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As plenty of media outlets noted, the remark “suggests that there are not poor whites and nonpoor African-Americans,” that race and class are identical. Both blacks and whites raised their voices to object.

I have not used the word ghetto for many years. I suspect I stopped using it, without any conscious effort, when it underwent an anthimerical shift from noun to adjective. As a blogger at Stuff White People Do notes, when clothing, actions, or cars are tagged as ghetto, “although the speaker is conjuring up and basically uttering racist stereotypes, that’s supposed to be OK because there’s something hip about saying ‘ghetto’ like that.”

I also suspect I stopped using the word when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 put the practice of redlining mostly out of business. When African-Americans had been directly barred from buying or renting housing in white neighborhoods, the urban areas where they lived fit what I understood about the ghetto: that its geographical boundary was enforced by the dominant society around it, creating a de facto prison for its inhabitants.

That meaning, of course, applies to the famous Warsaw Ghetto and other restricted Jewish quarters of European cities, a history that makes Sanders’s dilemma in the current situation ironic. Though the origin of the word is disputed, most believe that it derives from the Italian getto, or foundry, since indeed the first ghetto, in Venice, was founded upon a foundry site. Jews were compelled to live there, not because they were poor but because they were Jewish. And most early mentions in the Oxford English Dictionary are of Jewish ghettos; only in the late 19^th century do we start to hear of working-class ghettos. When Sanders, in his response to the kerfuffle created by his debate remark, explained, “What I meant to say is when you talk about ghettos, traditionally what you’re talking about is African-American communities,” the tradition he speaks of dates back not to communities barred by law from leaving a particular part of town, but to the racist reaction, primarily in northern cities, to the influx of black people during the Great Northward Migration. That reaction, and dozens of policies over the last century, have indeed combined to consign millions of African-Americans to substandard housing in undesirable sections of cities.

So why not use ghetto, not as an adjective, but as a noun, to refer to those sections? Evidently Sanders, despite or perhaps because of his Jewish heritage, has no problem with it. I do, and others do as well, and I think our problem is not that white people can also be found in substandard housing, or even that plenty of black families live in wealthy suburbs. I think we object because we do not wish to believe that the forces, however prevalent, that keep minorities in slums are sanctioned and immutable, as they were for the ghettos of Europe. We hope — with some evidence, not enough, but some — that Billy Joe Royal’s somewhat more sanguine option, rather than Presley’s patronizing pity, is available to the boy (we’ll figure him as black, since that’s Sanders’s idea) born in the dilapidated projects of the Bronx:

Every night I watch the light of the house up on the hill
I love a little girl that lives up there and I guess I always will
But I don’t dare knock on her door ’cause her daddy is my boss man
So I’ll just have to be content to see her whenever I can

Down in the projects, down in the projects
People put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in
I love her, she loves me but I don’t fit her society
Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the projects.

One fine day I’ll find a way to move from this old shack
I’ll hold my head up like a king and I never, never will look back
Until that morning I’ll work and slave and I’ll save every dime
But tonight she’ll have to steal away to see me one more time

Down in the projects, down in the projects …

Not long ago, I attended a conference at Radcliffe on “Ways With Words: Exploring Language and Gender.” The first, and perhaps most salient, thing to note is that this conference was packed. Cis men, cis women, trans men, trans women, gay people, straight people, old and young and in between — in between ages, genders, sexualities, you name it. Granted, this is academe, and we’re always eager to discuss the political dimensions of the new. But I was surprised at the breadth of interest in the topic — and I soon discovered that we mean very different things when we even name a topic something like “Language and Gender.”

For instance, the conference kicked off with a smart, funny stand-up routine by the comedian Aparna Nancheria, who used visuals to demonstrate some of the absurd ways in which we try to communicate in social situations across lines of gender and age: essentially, a 21st-century version of men being from Mars and women from Venus, with a touch of moms being from Earth.

This theme resurfaced later in the conference, when Big Data experts weighed in. Lyle Ungar, for instance, of the University of Pennsylvania, is compiling statistics from 70,000 volunteer Facebook users who self-identify as male or female. The language they use, available as a set of interesting visuals on Ungar’s project website, dispels a number of myths while preserving others. To the question “Do women talk more than men?,” the answer from this study is an unequivocal no. The social-media chattiness of both sexes is roughly equal. To the question “Are men more assertive than women?,” the answer is also no, with a diagram showing widely scattered differences and a weak slope pointing toward more assertiveness on the part of women. On the other hand, as perhaps expected, women use more “warm” words than men, while men’s idiom is more “hostile.” The bubbles showing words that appear most frequently drew rueful laughs from the audience.

That’s the male/female language discussion. Meanwhile, a parallel discussion weaving through most of the conference focused on all those terms that blur gender identity. The 51  gender categories available on Facebook. Native American conceptions of (and language for) transitional identities. The political dimensions of trying to fit gender-neutral pronouns (ze, hir, and the like) into contemporary discourse. The keynote speaker, Janet Mock, a cultural commentator (and trans woman), referred to a common conception of LGBT advocates as being “white cisgender gay men” and questioned the value of “passing” for trans people, noting in an aside that passing is “an active verb.” (I admit, I did not quite understand the relevance of that grammatical point.) Her main point — that when we speak of binary genders and heterosexuality, we are contending that “this is the normal, and everything else will be labeled as different” — encapsulated the concern of those who saw the topic “Language and Gender” as being about breaking down traditional ideas of gender entirely.

Is there any shared ground between these two discussions? Rebecca Bigler, of the University of Texas at Austin, whose research focuses on children, noted that “humans are inherent categorizers, but we can change their bases for categorization.” Relying on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, she proposes that “gendered language causes sexist thought.” Studying preschool and kindergarten classrooms, she found that even such simple greetings as “Good morning, boys and girls!” could begin a domino effect that ended with young children’s responses to the question of who gets to be president (boys, because girls are “too stupid” or because “boys hate girls” and will never vote for them). By encouraging the idea that “there are no such things as girl things and boy things,” she and her group hope to reduce both binary thinking and sexism. But as a questioner pointed out, two dissimilar goals seem apparent — the establishment of nongendered speech (e.g., addressing the U.S. president merely as “President” and not “Mr. President” or “Ms. President”) and the affirming of alternative categories.

Still, for me, Bigler’s investigation framed the issue in the most material way. I remember learning, years ago, that most children’s books with anthropomorphized animal characters referred to the characters as female only when they were mothers or were causing trouble. (Winnie the Pooh and Jan Brett’s version of The Mitten are telling examples.) I immediately began changing the genders of random characters when I read such books aloud to my preschool boys. The first time I did so, they immediately stopped me to ask, “Why’s it a girl?”

“It just is,” I said.

“But why?”

“Why not?” I said. “Half the world is girls.”

“OK,” they said, and after that, the gender-switching became easier.

But driving home from the conference, I wondered about my claim that half the world is girls. Binary again, I suppose. This is a conversation that has a long way to go.

Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our observations are those of the disinterested listener. We may note, as I have, our tendency to cling to expressions now considered old-fashioned or stiff. But what of the ways in which we find the expressions of the zeitgeist coming out of our own mouths?

I can’t recall what my husband and I were talking about during a long hike last week, but I heard myself say — twice! — something on the order of “Good on him!” I felt simultaneously puzzled and a little ridiculous, like someone stealing an expression from a language she doesn’t speak. Of course, when we returned home, I did my research. Most sources trace good on you to Australian idiom. The stress is often on the preposition, something like “Good onya.” And while it’s hard to track the spread of an idiomatic expression that could mean something else — e.g., “That outfit looks good on you,” would never be confused with “Eating celery is good for you” — I’m not the only one who has heard young Americans say Good on you when they mean a sincere compliment, while relegating Good for you to sarcasm.

For me, I realized when I tried to analyze my own adoption of the term, a subtle distinction exists even when both terms are used sincerely. When I said “Good on him!” during our walk, I wasn’t simply congratulating the person we were talking about, as I would someone who’d won a prize (there, I suspect I would still say “Good for him!”). Rather, I was according this person a certain degree of moral virtue, as someone who had acted unselfishly or painstakingly. Mind you, I had thought none of this through before the words popped out of my mouth. But unlike other expressions I’ve found myself unconsciously adopting over the years — there was a time, humiliating to recall, when I used awesome to voice even a nanoparticle of admiration — I feel no desire to eliminate good on you from my vocabulary. After all, there’s nothing particularly rational about the preposition for in the expression I’m used to, and having both in my lexicon gives me nuances I like.

Beyond this particular expression, I know my style of speech has changed. I use like as a tic, not to the degree of my students, but far more than I did 20 years ago. The same is true even for Terry Gross, that most consistent of interviewers, who in her 1990 interview with Tim O’Brien uses “I mean” a fair amount whereas in her 2015 interview with Marc Maron she sprinkles plenty of likes through her conversation. Close friends are increasingly using subject pronouns as objects of prepositions, and I know they didn’t do so in their 20s.

Since last week, though, I have made a project of asking others in my age group whether they think their style of speaking has changed in the last quarter-century. We’ve drifted, each time, into an exchange over what’s happened to language generally. But with the exception of gender-neutral terms (singular they, he or she, and job descriptions), the adoption of which we wear as a sort of badge of honor, no one in this small sample copped to individual shifts in idiom. No one else thought they used like frequently; no one else recalled saying good on rather than good for or based off of rather than based on; everyone claimed a hearty rejection of popular terms like massive, totally, killing it or seriously. When I allowed that I find my own idiom changing, they hastened to reassure me that it wasn’t so — or at least not, like, totally.

But it is so, and I don’t mind. Good on me, I think. Language, like life, is change. How it differs from the rocks.