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Pentimento: the Saxon Genitive

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI spent part of spring break serendipitously immersed in language. We were on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (the “Rich Coast,” as Puerto Rico is the “Rich Port,” neither of which description seems apt these days), among a group of international visitors. I resuscitated my flagging Spanish, interpreted for language-challenged French and German tourists, and tried out my toddler-level Italian with several restaurant proprietors who had relocated from Sicily. I’m not gifted at languages, but I enjoyed the challenge of switching among pollo (po-yo), pollo (poll-oh), poulet, and hähnchen. In such situations, conversation naturally turns to language differences, and here I was stumped by questions over the genitive.

Why, my fellow tourists wanted to know, does English use an apostrophe and s to show possession? It’s not simpler than other options, and plenty of cases sow confusion. Is it John and Mary’s children? Or John’s and Mary’s children? If the former is preferred, as I insisted it was, what of the sentence I went there with John and Mary’s children? How were they to tell whether John was the father or simply part of the group?

In that case, I averred, you could always say the children of John and Mary. Well, then, why not do that all the time? Why not avoid the nagging question of how to form the possessive of a singular word ending in s, or the fingernails-on-chalkboard dissonance of the friend I helped’s problem? If the plural of attorney general is attorneys general, how does one form the possessive?

English, we all agreed, had more than its fair share of madness in its constructions, and they — its learners — had my deepest sympathy.

Then I came home and looked up the formation of the possessive in English. As I had suspected, though I didn’t share my hunch with my new friends, the ’s, or Saxon genitive, is not just a peculiar use of punctuation, but a contraction of sorts. Once upon a time, around the time we still had gender for ordinary nouns, we marked the genitive case for masculine and neuter nouns with –es, much as German today  simply tacks on –s. We’ve lost both gender and the case system, for the most part. What we call the possessive is not really a genitive because, rather than inflecting the noun, it pertains to the whole phrase, e.g., the King of Prussia’s niece. Still, the genitive lingers in the elided –es indicated by ’s.

I suspect — though others reading this may know better — that this process is one reason we’re not completely clear as to whether John is a friend of Susie or John is a friend of Susie’s. Both ’s and the preposition of mark what used to be genitive case. If it’s true that our language inclines us to use the so-called Saxon genitive, we might feel uncomfortable leaving it off, even when we insert the preposition.

Does this development account for the ubiquity of apostrophe errors, especially when it comes to distinguishing among plural, possessive and s-ending singular forms? I’m not the only one who grits my teeth every time I pass the home of Judy and Bill Masters, who hang a shingle by their walk proclaiming The Master’s. I’d like to untangle the strands of language history that lead to such gaffes. I have no doubt that the transition between a true genitive and what we now call the possessive, with its altered position in the sentence and so on, is responsible for the rampant insertion of the apostrophe in your’s, our’s, and their’s.

Clearly, I’m no expert. But discovering this tidbit of language history feels to me like pentimento, the discovery of the picture underlying the picture that we ordinarily see. Once you glimpse the shadowy outlines that remain, the picture on the surface looks different to you thereafter, changed in ways that some might call misleading, but that enriches your view—a whale rising from the sea, a face behind the old guitarist, a genitive behind the possessive.


Never Underestimating

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thumbMaybe George W. Bush’s neologism misunderestimate isn’t such a bad candidate for adoption into the lexicon. That’s what I decided shortly after reading the following passage in a New York Times article about the various adaptations of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho:

Mr. Bale’s role in Bateman’s liftoff is impossible to underestimate. You can trace the character’s ascent along the arc of the actor’s career. (Bateman, Batman, Bale, baleful — there’s a malevolent linguistic richness in this subject matter.) He’s slowly become recognized as the dominant actor of his generation.

I had to read the paragraph twice. Its first sentence suggested to me that Mr. Bateman’s role was so minute that no underestimation of it would reach the microscopic level of its influence. But then there’s the next sentence, talking of “ascent,” and the final one asserting Mr. Bateman’s dominance. Could the writer (and the inattentive editor) have confused underestimate with overestimate? Somehow that seemed unlikely.

Googling the phrase, I found multiple discussions of this problem. For years, apparently, writers have been penning impossible to underestimate when they mean the opposite. The problem lies not with the prefix over- or under-, but with its proximity to the adjective impossible. Mark Liberman, in Language Log entries from 2007 and 2009, attributes the problem to our “poor monkey brains” that cannot logically process both the negative of impossible and the concept of underestimate in the same phrase. Apparently we commit much the same error when we write shouldn’t be overestimated, meaning cannot be overestimated or shouldn’t be underestimated.

What I find interesting is that we seem to misunderestimate, if I may co-opt Bush’s coinage, more than we misoverestimate. Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I found five recent instances of impossible to underestimate, all of them meaning shouldn’t be underestimated. A parallel search of should not overestimate, by contrast, yielded four recent examples, all of which cautioned readers not to inflate whatever was being talked about. Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a spike in cannot be underestimated from 1960 to the present day, and in every instance I scanned, the intended meaning was the opposite. The same did not hold true for formulations with overestimate.

Maybe we hear under as negative and over as positive speech. Perhaps — and this would account for the steep rise in cannot be underestimated since 1960 — we are increasingly averse to being told what we should or should not do. Since large influence is more noteworthy than small influence, the instruction not to underestimate finds more print than its opposite. And rather than instructing readers not to underestimate, writers tell them it is impossible, yielding such recent head-scratchers as these:

“It was an evolution of a product that was hard,” Limp, who is Amazon’s SVP of Device, told Business Insider. “I can’t underestimate the amount of work and invention that went into this.” (Business Insider)

One cannot underestimate the importance of flexibility and openness that a small trading state needs to prosper. (South China Morning Post)

It may be almost impossible to underestimate the gullibility of professional Fed watchers. At least Lucy van Pelt needed to place an actual football on the ground to fool poor Charlie Brown. (Real Clear Markets)

My theory is pure conjecture, of course. I welcome other thoughts as to why this phrase is rising in frequency even as it clings to confusion. I’ll close by noting the one instance in which I found a negative + underestimate used in its logical, literal sense, when a commenter on CNN noted that it would be impossible to underestimate Sarah Palin’s current influence. No misunderestimation, that belief allows some of us to sleep at night.

N.B. re last week’s post on the Saxon genitive, taken to an extreme in last Sunday’s New York Times article on heroin violence in St. Louis:

Those who have succumbed to the drug include a nephew of Steve Stenger’s, the St. Louis County executive, who died from an overdose in 2014. A brother of Mayor Francis Slay’s was arrested on a charge of heroin possession in 2012, and the stepson of Jennifer Joyce’s, the city’s top prosecutor, was arrested on the same charge last month.

Defeat the hobgoblin of consistency, I say; suppress that apostrophe-s before an appositive!

 

Poetically Punctuating

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stanleyquotepoetrypunctuationAt last, in the final four weeks of the semester, my “Introduction to Creative Writing” class has come to poetry. I both love and dread this section. I love it because I teach poetry taxonomically. That is, each student must delve deep into the well of poetry old and new until she finds a poetic form to embrace. She then reports to us all on the history and highlights of, say, the pantoum or the elegy; recites a poem in that form; and writes one in that form. The exercise reminds me of the fantastic abundance of formal possibilities in the poem and the endless flexibility of its so-called rules. A sonnet, for instance, is “a little song,” and while we lean toward the iambic pentameter, 14-line version of the thing, thousands of gorgeous sonnets fulfill the basic expectations of the form without rhyming, without iambs, and in more or fewer lines. It’s fun to watch my undergraduates discover the species and subspecies of poetic utterance. Some lose their fear of it; others learn, for the first time, to respect it.

Then we come to their own creations. These are necessarily halting, clumsy, often sentimental or opaque. I’ve been teaching this course for decades, and the quality has not varied much. What’s becoming more of a problem, because it’s a rising problem in the world of writing, is punctuation.

As I and others on this blog have observed, we punctuate less and less. The trend began before the phenomenon of texting, but texting (with its awkward switch between one screen and another in order to add punctuation) has accelerated it. I routinely mark three or four dozen missing commas in a student essay, and recently I’ve begun noting many missing periods as well. Add to this tendency the nonce punctuation of many contemporary poems (just start with e.e. cummings and keep going), and you have a recipe for Wild Inconsistency, with generous spicings of confusion and serendipity. Moreover, perhaps influenced by hip-hop and spoken word poetry, more students than ever before, in my experience, are stuck writing end-stopped lines of poetry, something like this:

Once I traveled to Paris
The Eiffel Tower the Louvre
Along the Seine I walked and walked
The rain came down umbrellas opened
Paris shimmers in the fog

(Bad, yes; worse when it rhymes, and I’m not here to torture anyone.)

With its possibilities for invention and rule-breaking, poetry may seem the last way to guide students toward a more nuanced and effective use of punctuation. But consider what happens when students learn to “read” the punctuation in even the most traditional verse. Take Emily Dickinson’s “A Light Exists in Spring”*:

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

When they first read the poem aloud, students accustomed to nonexistent punctuation and the end-stopped line tend to voice it as “A light exists in spring [pause] Not present on the year [pause] At any other period [pause] When March is scarcely here [big pause].” When I asked them to rewrite the poem without line breaks but with the punctuation, they get something entirely different:

A light exists in spring not present on the year at any other period. When March is scarcely here a color stands abroad on solitary hills that silence cannot overtake, but human nature feels.

Aha. So those little points and tails in Dickinson’s lines aren’t just some sort of confetti. They are markers for the reader; they establish a tension between the metered, rhymed lines of the poem and the syntax of its sentences.

I’m not sanguine about my poetry unit’s making a huge difference in how my students handle punctuation. The best I am hoping is that they will start seeing those little dots and squiggles as something other than “formal” writing rules and start seeing them as supremely useful tools for expression. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, they will turned in a few final poems that, per Pound’s famous dictum, are at least as well written as their prose.

*Other versions of Dickinson’s poem use slightly different punctuation, but the effect is generally the same.

The Narratee and the Typo

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enhanced-buzz-822-1378391228-4A long, earnest study has been knocking around at Lingua Franca regarding so-called grammos and typos in social media. As argued by a psychologist and a linguist at the University of Michigan, the response to “actual written errors” (as opposed to social-media conventions like elided punctuation or nonstandard abbreviations) depends on the personality of the reader more than any other criterion. I find this idea, in a word, weird.

For many years, a debate raged in the field of narratology over whether there was such a thing as the narratee, a term coined by Gerald Prince in 1971 to describe “the fictive entity to which the narrator directs his narration.” After plenty of pushback from colleagues and dissenters, Prince actually reconsidered his theory in 1982, noting that he had “tended to conflate” the roles of the addressee, the receiver, and the text-embedded narratee of a discourse.

The Michigan researchers used 83 volunteers to assess responses to an ad for a housemate and compare those responses to personality profiles created through the Big Five personality assessment. I don’t know how much credibility this personality-assessment tool has among psychologists, but I took the test just for fun and found it tailor-made to boost my good feelings about myself. Surely I am responsible and dependable, curious about many things, and eager to help others! But OK, let’s pretend that among the 83 volunteers involved in the study, some admitted to being irresponsible, incurious, and self-centered. I remain unconvinced that such a study produces a rounded personality profile so much as it produces a given respondent’s tendency to think well or poorly of himself.

Moving right along, we find that the researcher distributed three versions of the housemate ad: one “fully correct,” one with “2–4 grammos (underlined),” and one with “2–4 typos (in boldface).”

Hey! My name is Pat and I’m interested in sharing a house with other students who are serious abuot (about) there (their) schoolwork but who also know how to relax and have fun. I like to play tennis and love old school rap. If your (you’re) someone who likes that kind of thing too, maybe we would mkae (make) good housemates.

The study proceeded to cross-reference all sorts of traits associated with the participants, including agreeability, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroses, and openness, along with their “attitude” toward grammar and their sensitivity to grammos and typos. Articulating the various specifics of the study is above my pay grade, but the general conclusion, that “personality traits influence our reactions to written errors,” seems straightforward enough. In addition to finding that grammos bothered people more than typos did, the authors concluded that extraversion particularly affected the readers’ receptivity to the ad despite the errors with which it was seeded. In addition, the researchers concluded that “those who believe ‘good grammar is important’ don’t view typos as evidence of ‘bad grammar’ and thus do not rate people who produce typos as negatively as extraverts who are less concerned with ‘good grammar.’”

As the parent of two young men, I’ve seen dozens of housemate ads. They are all coded. I’ve learned what 420 friendly means. I’ve learned that SHARE CLEANING RESPONSIBILITIES!!! means the interview for the room will be conducted by a suspicious victim of prior housemate abuse who will look askance at my older son’s torn shirt and unkempt beard. I’ve learned that students overwhelmingly list their preference for male or female roommates. And no one ever mentions tennis; in fact, the mention of tennis (plus “old school rap”? Seriously?) already casts doubt on the advertiser’s legitimacy.

This all happens before we get to the typos.

In Prince’s reconsideration of the narratee, he asks himself, “Should I write a letter to a friend and say something like ‘You ate a hamburger for lunch and it made me very happy,’ where exactly would the meta-narratee be?” The same question, I suspect, applies to the study at hand. There’s an invented narrator — the advertiser — and an invented narratee — a student who’s going to judge the housing situation on the basis of partying, tennis, and rap, but who somehow fails to notice the essential strangeness of the ad. The subjects of the study are supposed to be what Prince would call the meta-narratees — that is, readers who find the text to be directed toward them even if they are not specifically addressed within the text. In fiction, Prince notes, this idea has some merit, but in nonfiction it’s nonsense. A housemate ad is directed toward potential housemates, period. That this example is a fictional ad doesn’t really matter, in my view: We are treating it, for purposes of the study, as the real thing.

I’m sure that so-called grammos and typos affect readers differently. But neither of them happens outside a context. If the Big Five personality traits make a difference — and I’m doubtful even on this point — that difference surely surfaces long before we get to the point where a given subject is “bothered” by the use of you’re rather than your. Why? Because we’re not the narratee for the ad. When the study’s authors write that “extraverts with stronger beliefs about good grammar were more sensitive to typos; however, there were no differences linked to beliefs about good grammar associated with grammos,” they’re focusing on the one group that can possibly imagine itself responding to a rather peculiar ad that emphasizes relaxing and having fun. Possibly that’s a group that forgives the auto-correct function while noticing a lackadaisical approach to the spell-check function. But content comes first and is never separate.

That’s what I find. But then, I’m not looking to rent a room.

How ’Bout That As?

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Logo_AsEnglish offers plenty of opportunities for repeating words. A perennial favorite, maxing out at five instances, is “I think that that that that that man used should have been a which.” The sentence cheats a bit, in my view, because like President Clinton’s famous utterance, “It depends what the meaning of is is,” one instance of the word must be set apart as word-qua-word. Still, that that is a common repetition, with is is not far behind. As my colleague Ben Yagoda has pointed out, the repetition of is, grammatically justifiable in a sentence like

What it is is what it is

becomes a much-used redundancy in sentences where an initial What has dropped out, like

The reality is is that it’s worth a lot less — 35.5 million guaranteed. (The sports correspondent Stefan Fatsis, on All Things Considered.)

So far, so idiomatic. Idiomatic, too, are the many clauses that end with a preposition followed by the same word used prepositionally or otherwise, e.g.,

I don’t know which drawer to put the socks in in case you need to find them.
She wanted someone to give the gun to to ensure she wouldn’t use it.

Then I ran across this sentence, in last weekend’s New York Times:

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, which also has a primary Tuesday, said he was concerned that the fight between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton could hurt the party’s congressional candidates and candidates for governor if the Democratic contest comes to be seen as fractious and divided as the Republican presidential race.

Huh, I thought. There goes what I thought was the most awkward but least avoidable repetition we had: the initial use of as as a preposition with its object replaced by a comparative as … as expression. The Corpus of Contemporary American English furnishes several examples of what I’m talking about:

One of the reasons I’d become engaged to marry Thomas-the-Toad Chalikis was that my family had made my life an unbearable hell until I agreed to marry somebody. And Thomas-the-Toad emerged as as likely a candidate as any. (Foul Play, Tori Carrington, N.Y.: Forge, 2007)

ZAHN: Your grandfather describes your voice as as beautiful as a bell. JONES: Yeah. (CNN, James Earl Jones Interview, 2005)

This guy is not just “the greatest” in the boxing ring, he is the greatest manipulator of his image, of the public, of the fight game and, frankly, of the media. And it’s — he sees it as as much a part of the sport as he ever saw. (CNN, Paula Zahn, 1999)

And I thought she would be trying to prove herself as a young person just as much as as a woman. (NPR interview with Helen Baxendale, 1998)

I called President Salinas as a friend, as well as as the president of the United States, to express my sorrow. (ABC, Clinton news conference, 1994)

I don’t know how to search for instances where the first as in this construction has been elided (in the New York Times example, not eliding it would have yielded ” … if the Democratic contest comes to be seen as as fractious and divided as the Republican presidential race ….”). But I’m certain that I’ve been seeing such elision more and more. Trying to “fix” the as as problem (if it is a problem) by other means doesn’t yield much by way of graceful expression. Should Tori Carrington have written “Thomas-the-Toad emerged as a candidate as likely as any”? Should Zahn have commented to James Earl Jones, “Your grandfather describes your voice as beautiful, like a bell”?

So let’s look again at the New York Times example, with its elision. I don’t feel I’m missing any meaning here. Sure, as I work my way through the sentence, I may expect the phrase “as fractious and divided” to lead elsewhere. But I hit that second as, and all becomes clear. The writer is focusing on a comparison of degree that qualifies how the Connecticut Democratic contest could come to be seen. The first as, in this case, is serving double duty: as a preposition and as an adverb.

I’m content with collapsing as, just as we can manage without two instances of that in my example above, leaving the less fun but perfectly acceptable sentence “I think that that that man used should have been a which.”

Objections? Think of it as friendly an amendment to our grammatical rulebook as, say, singular they.

Lucifer in the Flesh

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satan_cruzAs a Luciferian from birth, I listened with interest when word of John Boehner’s recent characterization of the Republican candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh” got out. Apparently, there’s no worse insult. The Internet exploded after Boehner made his comment, accompanied by the apparently tamer “miserable son of a bitch,” at an interview at Stanford University. Satanists were consulted and properly expressed their horror at being compared with Ted Cruz; the word incarnate, rare among political pundits, was brought out from the closet and dusted off.

Lucifer in the flesh grabs our attention, not just because a former Speaker of the House is calling a sitting Senator a really bad man, but also because both the name and the qualifier have biblical connotations. Other words by which Lucifer is known — Satan and the devil — aren’t exactly synonyms. Satan is “the enemy,” the one who is opposed. It’s that meaning of the word that the founders of the Satanic Temple adopted as “a symbol of man’s inherent nature, representative of the eternal rebel.” It’s Satan, presumably, with whom we wrestle in the wilderness. The devil (or Devil, if you insist) is diabolical, which is to say he’s a slanderer, a false god.

Strictly speaking, Lucifer is an angel. You can trace his origins to the planet Venus, who brings the light in the evening and then falls from the sky. He’s got a story, which is more than can be said for Satan or the devil, and there are those who think the version of the story in which he metamorphoses from angel to devil misrepresents him. What interests me about Boehner’s turn of phrase is that Lucifer comes closest to already having a shape, because poets like Milton gave him one:

… Lucifer from Heaven
(So call him, brighter once amidst the host
Of angels, than that star the stars among,)
Fell with his flaming legions through the deep
Into his place. …

It’s easier to stick horns onto Ted Cruz’s worried forehead when we have Lucifer, rather than the more symbolic Satan or Devil, to contemplate. So what need have we of “in the flesh”? News media quickly translated the phrase to “the living incarnate of Satan.” But not only do most people not know the exact correlation between incarnate (literally, “into” “flesh” or “meat”), most of us don’t detect the doctrinal connotations of the word flesh as it’s used certainly in Boehner’s Roman Catholicism and probably in the biblical focus of Cruz’s Baptism. As Monsignor Charles Pope of the Washington Archdiocese describes it,

Only very rarely does the biblical phrase “the flesh” (ἡ σὰρξ (he sarx), in Greek) refer only to the physical body. … It refers to that part of us that is alienated from God. … The Protestants often call the flesh our “sin nature” which is not a bad term in summarizing what the flesh is. In Catholic tradition the flesh is where concupiscence sets up shop.

Ah. Concupiscence. Our fleshly nature. Visions of Ted Cruz’s college roommate and his innuendos float in the mind. In case we’re in any doubt, the monsignor usefully provides us with biblical texts, including this bit from Galatians:

The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Ouch. Not perhaps, for us secular folk, but certainly for deeply religious Christians like Monsignor Pope, “Lucifer in the flesh” is not simply a devilish fellow visible to our eyes, but that selfish, vainglorious jerk among God’s chosen as he goes about his immature, destructive, and icky sexual business.

No wonder, in his next sentence, that Boehner called Cruz “miserable.” He just reduced him to misery. Miserere ei.

The Versatile Octothorpe

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octothorpeNot being a tweeter, I rarely think about the octothorpe, now known more commonly as a hashtag. I do mark students’ papers by hand, though, and one thing I tend to insert — when no one is spelled as one word, or when a fictional story leaps from one block of time or point of view to another — is a mark for space, indicated by #. Then, just yesterday, I had to submit a prescription number over to the phone to my local pharmacy and was instructed to press pound when I was done.

Hashtag. Pound sign. Space. And then there’s the use of the octothorpe to replace the word number, as in “He was #4 in the queue.” How did those little cross-hatched horizontal and vertical lines come to mean so many different things?

1024px-Libra_pondo_abbreviation_newton

Newton’s handwritten libra pondo sign.

Apparently it begins, like so much else, with the Romans, whose abbreviation for libra pondo, or pound weight, was (as it still is) lb, but with a stylized l including a finishing, cursive-like slash across the center, to distinguish it from the number 1. By 1850, bookkeepers had adopted two uses of the octothorpe: If it followed a number, it retained the sense of pounds, but if it preceded a number, it simply indicated number. For a long while, the octothorpe was a handwriting shortcut; it didn’t appear on keyboards until the late 19th century, and wasn’t called the pound sign until the 1930s. (For that, you had £, meaning British pounds, or lb. for avoirdupois weight.)

So how do we get to hashtag? And while we’re at it, who ever heard of octothorpe?

Well, for centuries artists have used cross-hatching, the drawing and intersecting of various series of close parallel lines — think the engravings of Albrecht Dürer. The word hatch devolves into hash, which is what this sign is still called in much of the former British Commonwealth. Then along comes a guy named Chris Messina, a Google developer who had the idea of using a sign as a way to bring together people who were discussing the same topic online. He chose the octothorpe because it was already handy on his phone. Why was it (along with the star sign, or *), on the phone? Well, Greek alpha and omega were originally introduced for the extra spaces on the rectangular keypad with which we’re all now familiar, even when we’re told to “dial” a number. But a Bell Labs specialist decided those were too arcane for most touchpad users, and he opted instead for symbols that, by then, were ubiquitous on typewriter and computer keyboards and could be used for special functions.

My favorite, though, is the word with which I began this examination: octothorpe. As always happens when I’ve recently learned a word, I like to use it all the time. Clearly the octo- prefix refers to the eight points create by the sign, so at first I thought octothorpe was the ancient Greek name, so much more satisfactory than the term “@,” which we unpoetically call “the at sign.” Sadly, no. It was coined sometime in the 1960s, again by an employee, possibly Don Macpherson, at Bell Labs, but the exact origin remains a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its chief explanation as Macpherson’s involvement with a group attempting to get Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals returned from Sweden; the thorpe was then an homage of sort to the Olympic runner. But a Bell engineer testifies in The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word History that the original word was octotherp, and it was kind of a joke. Another source in the OED alleges that “‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.” Thorp is indeed an archaic term for a village, though I’m not confident that the engineers at Bell Labs knew that. But if they did, they were mighty prescient. The hashtag, after all, is like the shingles hanging from the virtual pentices of our global village. Come ye here to talk about #MelaniaTrump, gather ye over there for #womancard.

Finally, let us not forget the many uses of the octothorpe (which I’ve now written eight times!) in emoticon creation. How else could you picture a smiling person in a fur hat?

#:-)

 

Language Shrapnel

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fbomb-e1378933217819When Joe Biden famously muttered an f-bomb-modified plaudit for the Affordable Care Act, many news outlets left his exact phrasing to readers’ imaginations. The New York Times reported his saying, “Mr. President, this is a big [expletive] deal.” The Atlantic referred to Biden’s “accidentally audible profanity” and mentioned T-shirts sporting the slogan, “Health Reform Is a BFD.” But the Huffington Post, The Guardian, Salon, and New York Magazine reported the gaffe exactly as uttered.

Where do we stand, these days, on obscenity in the news? The New Yorker’s famed prudishness began to topple under the esteemed editorship of William Shawn, according to the longtime staff writer Calvin Trillin, who needed to quote a Nebraska farmer’s anti-Semitic epithet in full to get the effect he needed. Though the reins quickly loosened under the editors Tina Brown and David Remnick, Trillin’s quandary remains one that most obscenity-challenged media wrestle with. That is, you can expect your journalists not to lace their reports with vulgarities; you can reject fiction or poetry whose authors insist on using words you’re uncomfortable with printing. But when the use of the obscenity is itself the news, the standards people at mainstream news outlets can get their panties in a twist.

Tom Kent, standards editor at the Associated Press, recently reaffirmed, “We use vulgar and obscene quotations only when we feel they’re essential to telling a story.” Such a simple and conservative guideline will presumably save proofreaders from the “disorienting” experience of the New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, who reported that “it no longer occurs to me to query the use of four-letter words, even when they are used gratuitously,” but who recommends a “detox facility” for language checkers bombarded by the salty stuff.

But in a political season that promises to get lower and dirtier as the year wears on, the question of what to include or leave out — and how to leave it out — is bound to get vexing.

First, there’s the question of editing vulgarities at all. The Awl’s list of words creeping into The New Yorker’s lexicon (I’m leaning on The New Yorker here only because its standards have shifted so clearly over time) includes many that people like me might see as explicit but hardly obscene. Anal, fart, penis, testicle, vagina … let’s see if my editor needs to censor any of these. Meanwhile, it’s clear that many, if not most, online news sources eschew the bleeping of so-called four-letter words for any reason other than the sort of targeted offensiveness that’s represented by the so-called “c” word for female genitalia.

Second, there’s the question of what to do with the deleted material. The New York Times prefers not to signal the word with hyphens or stars (f—k, s**t), but rather to indicate that the party in question used a profanity. For instance, when the editor of The New Republic announced that he was “ready to break [insert four-letter word for poop here],” the Times noted that he would “break stuff — though he used a profanity,” whereas The Boston Globe reported that he spoke of “breaking [expletive]” and The Washington Post reported the same phrase as “breaking s—.” The beleaguered Mary Norris even reports on the difficulty of styling the euphemism: “Shall it be ‘f’-word, f word, f-word, ‘F’ word, F word, or F-word? I don’t like any of them.” When it came to writing about a breakout Broadway play a few years back, the Times took the rather embarrassing tack of listing it as “The ________ With the Hat.”

Third, there’s the question of distinguishing one voice from another. A certain real-estate mogul running for president is prone to habits of language markedly different from the habits of a certain former secretary of state. When we hear the candidates on television, the sudden, high-pitched interruption of the bleep generally manages to preserve the speaker’s idiom. But noting politely that a candidate used a profanity, or replacing it with a more acceptable word, can tend to flatten vocabulary in ways that may not serve the purpose of journalism.

Change is afoot, just as surely as it was when profanities like damn, hell, or Christ could not be reprinted when used to blow off steam; or when jackass and scumbag were considered too vulgar to print. But if the juiciest of our obscenities are to retain any of their zest, news organizations are probably obliged to help us hold them in reserve. In a creative-writing class several years ago, one of my students wrote a sestina, a poem that calls for the same six words to alternately repeat themselves as the final words of the poem’s lines. One of her six words was — you guessed it — the same as Joe Biden’s. I watched as she read the poem aloud, and the whole class sat stiff, waiting for the word to punch its way into the poem again. We agreed, after some discussion, that she was sacrificing her poem to the shock of a single Anglo-Saxon term. We were, like Mary Norris, debilitated, suffering from a sort of profanity overdose that I would like — if only the standards editor would let me — to call f***tigue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Trying to Write the Mighty Line

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sapphicFor years, now, I’ve taught a mixed-genre “Introduction to Creative Writing” course with a very specific poetry component. Each student in the class must choose a poetic form he or she loves; I suggest two dozen of them, and leave books explicating several dozen other choices on the shelf outside my office. Each student gives a short presentation on their chosen form — its provenance, history, development, parameters, and best-known practitioners. They recite from memory at least 12 lines of a poem written in that form. Finally, they write a poem in that form for class critique.

This unit gets the highest praise and deepest criticism from students in the class. Invariably, on student evaluations, some student recommends (usually in ALL CAPS) that the unit be removed as tedious and too hard. Almost always, though, at least one student reports something along the lines of this semester’s note, that “This assignment … was the first time a professor has challenged me to reach out of my comfort zone … yet my favorite piece of work is the octave I wrote.”

My challenge, each year, is to tune students’ ears to the accentual language they speak. English is a strongly accented language. We inherited verse initially from Greek and Roman poets, whose long and short syllables created the music of the (often sung) poetry. But we don’t lengthen syllables in English so much as we stress them, pronouncing the second syllable of a word like believe louder than the first. Very early English poetry was not unlike hip-hop today, in that it paid attention only to the stresses in the line and more or less chanted the lines so each foot, regardless of syllables, had the same tempo. Later, we began adding in the nonaccented syllables, so the “music,” if you will, emerged from the tantalizing pattern of stress to nonstress. Thus the iamb, the anapest, the dactyl, the troche, and so on.  As Mark Liberman put it in Language Log, in English, “Metrics is applied phonology.”

Not all students choose to write in forms that feature meter, but some do, and for them, I find that hearing the stress patterns inherent in the language they speak has become increasingly difficult. I once heard the renowned contemporary formalist Marilyn Hacker say that if she saw a student mentally counting stresses on her fingers, she knew she had the beginnings of a poet. I would be loath to apply that standard now. One student recently chose to write in blank verse. “Marlowe’s mighty line” and Shakespeare’s staple for all his plays, blank verse eschews rhyme but cleaves to a mostly iambic pentameter pattern, whose perhaps apocryphal justification is that the iamb (lub-DUB) echoes the heartbeat, and the five-meter line is about the length of a human breath. Examples are almost countless:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Shakespeare)

You stars that reign’d at my nativity (Marlowe)

It little profits that an idle king (Tennyson)

Each night at eight my neighbor hacks and spits (John Canaday)

When I see birches bend to left and right (Frost)

I emailed her. I haven’t heard from her. (Marilyn Hacker)

My student, like most others in the class, had been taught to count syllables (10 to a line) in order to “calculate” iambic pentameter, just as she had been taught to count syllables in order to write haiku — a favorite of high-school poetry-writing exercises because of the form’s short length, but also a form that translates with difficulty from the linguistic structures of Japanese. Syllable-counting is useless in trying to achieve musicality in English, and even on its own terms, the exercise fails because (given the propensity of spoken English to “swallow” many syllables) students fail to count, say, the -en or -ing endings of many words.

But in earlier times, I was able to sit with students, read lines aloud, ask them to note the stresses they heard, and establish where there was (or was not) some sort of metrical pattern. With my blank-verse student, we read her lines — lurching combinations of anapests, dactyls, and iambs, with as many as six and as few as three feet to a line — aloud over and over, and she could not hear what was loud and what was soft. Discouraged, she asked how she might learn where the accents lay in words or phrases she wanted to use. I pointed out that, while one-syllable words derived their stress from syntax, any time she went to look up the pronunciation of a word with more than one syllable, the dictionary would show her where the stresses lay. “But I would never look in a dictionary to pronounce a word,” she said.

“If you didn’t know the word,” I said, “how else would you learn to pronounce it?”

“I go to Google translate,” she said, “and they say the word for me. But I don’t hear the stress.”

I sort of threw up my hands at that point. A half-hour later, a poet who had passed earlier by my office door stuck her head in. “I CANnot WAIT for CLASSes TO be DONE,” she said, with a knowing grin.

At the risk of becoming one of those hand-wringing old-timers, I wonder if the ways in which our text-based language and its oral counterpart are operating today is affecting our ability to hear the music inherent in English. If you are a high-school teacher reading this, I’d like at least to ask you to stop telling students to count syllables. Have them listen, instead. They could start with this:

 

 

 

Input, Output, and Literature

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Timeline_0978_WordStar_2Generations pass so quickly these days, as my colleague William Germano noted, that the responsibility to record certain changes falls rather suddenly on those of us about to pass away. I am referring here, not to sports or to actual mortality, but to the modes of writing inflected by the advent and wide adoption of the personal computer.

I’ve just finished Matthew Kirschenbaum’s eye-opening Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and it’s sent me down memory lane. I’m older than Kirschenbaum. I did not, like him, have to submit typed papers in middle school, because middle school, for me, was junior high, and not everyone had a typewriter at home, much less the Apple IIe that Kirschenbaum’s father bought. At the other end of the spectrum, I realized this past year that I am now teaching students who, unlike my own sons, have never known a world without laptops.

Kirschenbaum does not quite tackle the whole subject of word processing’s effect on literature. He does walk us through the shifts in both technology and thinking that led up to the process now creating this blog post. He reminds us that the early word processors — the MT/ST that supercharged the IBM Selectric, the onset of Wordstar in the early 1980s, the Tandys and Lexitrons and Kaypros that went down as cannon fodder in the war to claim hegemony over text production — were meant to serve mostly nonliterary functions. What we call a typist, after all, was a type writer, just as a person who crunched numbers was a computer. But even if, as Kirschenbaum puts it, “approaching word processing as a specifically literary subject therefore means acknowledging that we seek to concern ourselves with a statistically exceptional form of writing that has accounted for only a narrow segment of the historical printing and publishing industry,” I found the book enlarged my sense of what had occurred during the course of my adult literary career. He points out the profound difference between writing as imprinting letters onto an impressionable surface and writing as input and output of symbols “that are themselves numeric”; or, as one writer put it, “writing with light.”

Moreover, Kirschenbaum’s history brought back my own desperate moments along the learning curve. The meltdowns I experienced on losing whole files whose backups disks were corrupted, or on watching my Apple screen literally melt before my eyes one hot July day, taking my novel with it, find ample echoes in the narratives of the writers he interviews. Isaac Asimov, Amy Tan, John Updike, Ralph Ellison, Michael Chabon, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen King, Anne Rice all tell their stories of exultation and despondency at the “hands” of evolving technology. By Kirschenbaum’s lights, I was a relatively early adopter, buying my first IBM PC in 1984. I lived then in the Hudson Valley, and my IBM-employed neighbor offered to come by and set up the machine for me. By the time he had installed all the groovy new programs that weren’t available on the disks in the box, it was midnight. By 3:00 a.m., understanding nothing about my souped-up machine, I was lying on the floor bawling. Two weeks later, I was walking on air.

I also spent part of the 1980s involved in the early stages of desktop publishing, which Kirschenbaum also addresses, and his narration of the search for Wysiwyg output (What You See Is What You Get) flooded me with memories of that quest for the magic link between the act of writing and the experience of reading. As he points out, along the way, writers have taken on tasks that were previously assigned to (mostly female) others — not just typing, but proofreading, formatting, indexing, and so on.

But Kirschenbaum deliberately stays away from the question of how using computers to write has affected the writing itself. I remember being reluctant, as were several of Kirschenbaum’s interlocutors, to convert from the typewriter to the computer. My fear was that the very ease of revision would rob my fingers of their revising role. That is, I had found in the course of writing my first novel that the very retyping of a marked-up page produced changes that weren’t in the handwritten markup — that as my fingers pressed the keys, new syntax, new phrases, new elisions called for notice. Clearly I could not read my way to revision; I had to type my way there. And if this newfangled device, engaging my lazier nature, saved me the trouble of all that retyping, would it not close the door on those finger-driven revisions?

Kirschenbaum does talk about revision, though mostly in glowing terms, as in the effect of a larger or wide screen on the writer’s ability “to conceive of [the text] as a whole, a gestalt.” (I find that nothing less than a stack of hard copy gives me that gestalt, which is why I beg my students to print out their work, but this is not a book on pedagogy.)  He also eschews the kind of debate that assigns style or book length to the prevalence of computers. He writes, for instance, “It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that [George R.R.] Martin’s sentence structures … are tied in any significant degree to the specifics of WordStar’s keyboard commands.”

For George R.R. Martin, I suspect Kirschenbaum is right. Martin was born in 1948 and had been writing professionally for more than a decade before he began using a computer. The same holds true for most of the writers Kirschenbaum interviews. We are looking, here, at the generation that took to word processing consciously, often skeptically, and with an eye toward finding freedom from the burdens of handling reams of paper, of writers’ cramp, of revision fatigue, of handwritten or Wite-Out corrections. We are not looking at young writers, whose idea of what makes a written text “perfect” (one of Kirschenbaum’s chapter titles) leans heavily on spell- and grammar-checkers and the default settings of Microsoft Word. Kirschenbaum does address the conventional wisdom that everything is “overwritten” nowadays, in both senses of that term, and he engages the vexed question of writers’ legacies, e.g., should we be storing floppy disks in contemporary writers’ archives, or fetishing their computers as we do Hemingway’s typewriter? But whether and how the writing of novelists and poets who grew up with computers will differ from the writing of those who switched midstream and brought old habits with them is not Kirschenbaum’s subject. Perhaps no answer will emerge until the lens of history has had time to fix its focus on our era as a whole. Much has yet to change in the interplay of literary creativity and technology, and word processing may prove to be the least of it.

Just Like a Woman

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naked-cartwheelOn occasional Thursday evenings I participate in a figure-drawing circle. Artists of all abilities sit with their easels in front of them and a nude model in the center, who poses first in short stints, then in a “long pose” broken by five-minute breaks. A month or so ago, a new model, very young, intriguing-looking and flexible, posed for us. She had short hair tinged blue (as was her pubic hair), multiply pierced earlobes, a petite figure. There was something different about the way she held herself, or the way her body seemed to fit together, that intrigued me as I sketched. (Not that my charcoal drawings conveyed any of this; I am a terrible draughtsperson.) When we took a break and she donned her robe and began talking to one of the artists, the difference became immediately clear. Her voice was a warm, slightly gravelly baritone. When we returned to our drawing positions, I noticed her Adam’s apple and the set of her jaw, which hadn’t seemed so obvious to me before.

The researchers Sarah Ferguson and Jaime Booz at the University of Utah are studying the effects of “clear speech” on the acceptance of transgender men in society. “Transgender women say sometimes they are doing fine in public until they open their mouth, because the voice is low,” says Booz, himself a transgender man. “That can be a safety issue.” Using a recorded database of 41 talkers in conversational speech and clear speech — the slower, higher-pitched way we talk to people with impaired hearing — Booz and Ferguson asked 17 participants to rate 656 gender-neutral sentences as being more or less “masculine” or feminine” in sound.

Masculine and feminine are, of course, subjective qualities, highly charged when it comes to discussing transgender issues. Caitlyn Jenner feminine brings up 262,000 Google hits, the top ones focusing on Jenner’s voice. An individual who transitions from male to female after puberty will retain whatever huskiness their voice already had. But a female voice, to many of us, is not the same thing as a feminine voice. Truisms like this from a website offering advice on developing a female voice–“Women are not as concerned with the meaning of a word so much as its context, and that context is expressed in a more flowing, graceful manner. Women will round the edges of their words to avoid cliffs and walls”—blur these categories in ways that plenty of women, trans- or cis-, associate with a world where a woman’s voice carries little power. Then there’s this clip, from Cambridge University Press’s Clear Speech:

Besides its being mostly a woman’s voice, the clip — with its careful articulation and slow pace — makes me think of an elementary-school teacher’s voice, the sort that is holding its temper in check while the teacher tells the rowdy class to settle down. But Booz insists that the point of the study — and of vocal training in general — is not to enforce a binary choice:

I specifically wanted to capture small differences in gender ratings both between talkers and within talkers (different sentences said by the same talker). I was looking for something much more nuanced than a binary choice, especially because I was looking at whether or not the same talker could impact femininity ratings by making a speaking style change. Same voice, different behavior.

As Booz observes, vocal physiology affects the pitch and timbre of a voice, but so do “socialized factors”: “Children, who have similar vocal anatomy, regardless of gender, start imitating adult speaking patterns at very early ages.”

With speaking, as with wardrobe, body sculpting, gait, and so on, transgender people make tough decisions whose effects go beyond the tiny proportion of people who are transgender. Do we want women — and, by extension, little girls — to sound feminine, or do we want the definition of a woman’s voice to transgress boundaries? One voice trainer points out that “the actual difference in pitch between the sexes is minimal. In fact, the overlap of range between the sexes allows for almost ANY individual to fall well within accepted norms of pitch.” Do we want to “reserve” certain words for men, others for women? Booz describes his own voice as “sing-songy.” “Our goal in voice and communication training with a transgender person,” Booz wrote to me,

is to help them find a voice that is comfortable for them. Whether or not that voice is perceived as male or female is a different question. For some trans people, how their voice is perceived will be crucial above all else. . . . I transitioned specifically for voice changes, as my voice was the thing that caused me the most anxiety. I am very happy with my pitch now, but I find that I still get perceived as female by children. . . . With adults, I typically am perceived as a gay man. I’m comfortable in my voice, so these assumptions don’t bother me.

When the model in my drawing class spoke, she did so in a baritone that seemed confident and even musical. For her sake, and for all our sakes, I hope she feels as comfortable as Jaime Booz. She’s already come so far. She told one of the artists that she was studying to be a circus performer. At the end of the drawing session, still stark naked, she executed a lovely cartwheel. Her smile at the end spoke volumes.

An Ancient Poetic Device Called — ?

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didomosaic3

Dido & Aeneas, in the cave.

As my final Stateside treat before leaving for Corsica this weekend, I’ve just finished my friend Ann Patty’s book Living With a Dead Language: My Romance With Latin. Ann will be subbing for me next week, so I want to introduce you to her — though probably the best introduction would be to read the book, which is just out in bookstores.

My affectionate response to Living With a Dead Language has to do with more than friendship, though. I’m in my third year of trying fitfully to learn Italian, the most direct descendant of Latin, and on this trip I’ll be learning a cappella Corsican music, most of it in an old Italian dialect that crisscrosses Latin at various points. You get lyrics like:

Si Diu hè d’accunsentu Ch’ellu mandi à Gabriellu
Messageru Alluminatu Per à luce di u vasngelu
Vogliu sente u so discorsu Cù lu spiritu di u zitellu

You can suss it out, sort of, with both Italian and Latin, bearing in mind meanwhile that Corsica itself has been part of France for a long while, so French is its official language. One of the things I most look forward to about this trip is the stew of words I’ll find myself in.

Ann’s book focuses on the main ingredient of that stew, the Latin of Horace and Catullus, Cicero and Ovid. Like me with Italian, she’s picking up this new language in the latter part of her life, wrestling with memorization but also bringing a broader set of skills than she might have possessed studying Latin in college. One of those is a sense of syntax. And here’s where I want us to help her out with a rhetorical phenomenon she describes beautifully but for which she cannot find an adequate name. She calls it a word picture, but confesses that the term — defined generally as “a graphic or vivid description in words” — is inadequate to the poetic device. Here’s her first example, from Ovid’s Amores:

Cingere litorea flaventia tempora myrto

Her translation, “Encircle your golden temples with myrtle,” cannot convey what the Latin achieves, which is literally “Encircle shoreline golden temples with myrtle.” Shoreline modifies myrtle, so the encircling is actually happening in the syntax, or as Ann puts it, “The chiasmic placement of the words enacts their meaning.”

This is not the same as concrete poetry, like George Herbert’s famous “Easter Wings,” where the poem is shaped visually into wings; nor is it the word painting that we hear in musical pieces designed to reach high notes when places are exalted and dive into low registers for valleys. It’s a device that relies entirely on syntax. Virgil apparently used this strategy often, as in the Aeneid 4:24, where

speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem

puts Dido and Aeneas together enclosed in a cave by having the cave (spelucam) and the reference to their being together (eandem) enclose them in the phrase itself.

and in English, we have e.e. cummings,

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers
you open always petal by petal myself . . .

where the successive petals unfold to reveal myself.

Ann suggests verba acta (words enacted), verba imaginata (words in image), or imago in verbis (image in words) as possible names for this syntactic flourish. And certainly with so many of our prosodic and figurative terms (caesura, iambic, anaphora, simile, etc.) coming from Greek or Latin, a Latin term would suit. But does such a term exist already, or would anyone else like to invent one? Put your candidates, and your examples, forward. And welcome to Ann.

Babble, Brabbeln, Babiller, Balbettare

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firstwordsI’ve spent the last month babbling. I like that word, babble. It’s what babies do before they “really” talk. It’s also the sound of water running over rocks. Apparently it is not related etymologically to Babel, the Hebrew word for Babylon, now known for the infamous tower whose builders were punished with the sudden eruption of mutually unintelligible languages.

I’ve been babbling because I have a purely fanciful desire to speak the major European languages, and my monthlong trip to Corsica and Italy gave me a chance to do that. The desire is fanciful because I’ve never taken up this language-learning business in earnest, like Jhumpa Lahiri with her private lessons and her wholesale removal to Rome purely for the purpose of Italian fluency. Rather, I had the good fortune to live abroad for short bursts of time early in my life, and there’s something about the particular exercise of the mind involved in speaking a different language that seems to engage my pleasure centers, so I do it when I get the opportunity.

In this recent case, I shared an apartment for three weeks with Dagmar, a warm but English-challenged teacher from Hamburg who participated in the singing workshop I took in Corsica. For that spell of time, I not only had the pleasure of French all around me but also the happy task of translating announcements and singing instructions into German for Dagmar. When the transaction was binary, English to German, I didn’t do so poorly, though my German was acquired at a ski-hotel job in the Austrian Alps in the 1970s and has grown terribly creaky at the vocabulary joints. When I had to go from French to German, though, my brain fried a little. I had to pass through a wall of English, as it were. Sometimes I’d find the French-English cognate, like robe meaning dress, and then reach for the English-German cognate, which brought me over to cloth and then to kleid. Needless to say, Dagmar had to exercise patience. I also found that the tatters of my German remained relatively fluent and nicely accented, giving the very false impression that I actually knew how to speak the language, so that Dagmar and I had many discussions in which she ended a long series of quick observations with Nicht? and I nodded with what I hoped was appropriate enthusiasm or commiseration. And occasionally a word would swim up out of the darkness, as when Dagmar was trying to describe her nieces as Zwillinge and somehow, before both of us drowned in frustration, the word twins just came to me. Where had I learned it? Not at that ski hotel, I’m sure. But there it was, like a bright penny found deep in the swampy pond.

Corsican, and a sort of Corsican-inflected Latin, also flowed through that part of the journey and gave me a bridge to the next bit of babbling, the Italian I insisted on exercising during the coda of the trip, a few nonsinging days up the coast of Italy. I say “insisted,” because by that time my sensible husband had joined me. He does not speak Italian, and many of our interlocutors in Lucca, Pisa, Genoa, and points between possessed perfectly serviceable English. Still, selfishly, I would say something like Preferisco parlare italiano; ho bisogno di pratica, which would initiate a flood of Italian that I then translated very badly for my patient fellow traveler. (We must do this same thing to people who admit to speaking a little English; if they say just one phrase fairly well, we start conversations full of idioms and conditional clauses, and probably miss the growing looks of bewilderment on their faces. Note to self: Watch that habit, in future.)

But Italy was where the babbling really mattered. This was my second brief sojourn in the bel paese since beginning to try out the language, and I could feel my fluency develop much the way you can detect the change in your muscles if you actually initiate an intense workout program — the firming-up, and also the ache. At night, trying to sleep, I’d hear again the long descriptions of the dinner specialties. I’d puzzle out the parts that flew by me the first time around (and that on one occasion presented me with mussels, to which I’m allergic, in an otherwise delectable antipasto). The toned-up soreness of the exercised parts of my brain kept me awake. At the end of the day, my cheeks and lips felt tired from making new sounds. But I’m at least twice as fluent in Italian as I was 10 days ago, and babbling got me there.

A 9-month-old baby, the daughter of one of the directors, was with us during the singing workshop, and she babbled constantly. She’s on her way to language. Listening to toddlers in France and Italy, I’m struck by the sounds of their beginning to speak mother tongues from which I will always stand at some remove. We learn by letting the words run from our mouths as water runs over stones in a brook, and if the stones are the mistakes made by toddlers (to our endless delight) and klutzy linguaphiles like me (to potential annoyance), we can still make a little music. Or as Tennyson puts it,

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

 

You Say Div-ISS-ive, I Say Div-EYE-sive

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gop-demo-thinkstockNow that the Republican convention has popped its balloons and the Democratic one is inflating theirs, let’s pause for a moment to consider politics and pronunciation. I had very little stomach for the speeches in Cleveland, but I did tune in long enough to hear a few words whose distinctive pronunciation got me thinking. My sampling is anecdotal and perhaps arbitrary; I’m hoping others will expand and perhaps clarify this list.

Divisive. This one didn’t begin with President Obama’s pronunciation of a short “i” on the second syllable, but Obama’s habit has surely influenced how other politicians say the word. When he was in the race, Jeb Bush continued to say div-EYE-sive, and so does Hillary Clinton. But Bernie Sanders has swung over to the short-”i” div-ISS-ive, and many commentators have followed suit. People have called this pronunciation a Briticism, but the Oxford English Dictionary gives us div-EYE-sive, as do all other major dictionaries. Journalists have started to take on the short-”i” habit. It’s odd only because, generally speaking, divisive follows the trend of other adjectives formed from verbs ending in –ide, like decide/decisive, deride/derisive. (By contrast, adjectives formed from -it verbs, like admit/admissive or permit/permissive, add a second s and pronounce the second syllable with a short “i” sound.)

Simultaneous. This one is a Briticism that I heard from at least one commentator on the RNC. Call me crazy, but I think we’re starting to pronounce the first syllable with a short “i” at least in part because of the way we’re starting to say divisive. Also perhaps because of …

Iraq and Iran. For a while, George Bush’s Eye-rak and Eye-ran pronunciations produced a simultaneous effect of co-opting the names of those nations and suggesting that no culture in those places deserved any effort on the part of a Texan to change the way he talked. Interestingly, the Republican pundits, including Trump, are not seeing fit to continue this habit. But neither will they stoop to Hillary Clinton’s or Bernie Sanders’s pronunciations, Ee-RAHK and Ee-RAHN. So Trump’s acceptance speech last week included many references to ih-RAN, with the first syllable rhyming with the new sih of simultaneous and the viss of divisive.

Muslim and Islam. While we’re on foreign affairs, let’s review the political differences here, which have grown more pronounced over the years. To an American, the spelling of the first word suggests the pronunciation Muhz-lim, which was the pronunciation we heard from Trump on Thursday night. By contrast, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both pronounced the word Mooss-lim, which apparently means “someone who submits or surrenders” in Arabic, whereas Trump’s pronunciation can suggest an opposite meaning, implying a tyrant or oppressor. Similarly, I heard IZ-lum from Trump, as opposed to Iss-LAHM from Clinton. According to the conservative publication The Federalist,

Those on the Left pronounce these two words the way a native Arabic speaker would, as a way of signaling their sympathy for the American-Muslim population. They are indicating they identify with this population and they have their backs.

When politicians’ pronunciation goes far from the American mainstream, they become subjects of mockery. George’s Bush’s Yur-up and nu-ku-lar were laugh lines, as was Trump’s pronunciation of Tanzania earlier this year. But when you can inflect a word one way or another without drawing undue attention, you can control the narrative that surrounds that word. We’re not talking here about bloopers, but about the small choices that powerful people make, sometimes consciously and sometimes without thinking. There are more important language issues in the presidential campaign now, sure, like the difference between “illegal aliens” and “undocumented immigrants.” But we notice those. Pronunciation is subtler; it slips by us. What choices have you managed to note in these endless speeches, and what impact might they have?

 

 

 

Antimetabole Season

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tumblr_inline_mvjmslKfjw1qbolbn“We lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” That was Joe Biden (quoting Bill Clinton) at the Democratic National Convention, using perhaps a politician’s favorite rhetorical device: antimetabole. Great word, huh? It’s from the Greek, like so many literary terms of art, in this case a Greek word meaning “turning about.” This reversal of word order has been responsible for some of the most oft-quoted bits of political discourse in history, including:

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, 1961)

“It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” (Winston Churchill, 1942)

“Just because you’re born in the slum does not mean the slum is born in you.” (Jesse Jackson, Democratic National Convention, 1984)

“East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” (Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, 1987)

“You stood up for America; now America must stand up for you.” (Barack Obama, 2011)

We can chase plenty of odd insights by playing with antimetabole, from “I believe what I see, and I see what I believe” to “I never entertain wicked thoughts; wicked thoughts entertain me.” But what delights me more than the actual examples we can find or make up is the razor-thin difference between antimetabole and a couple of other handy literary devices.

Take, for starters, chiasmus, the parent of antimetabole. In chiasmus — from the Greek meaning “crosswise arrangement” — two clauses set off against each other convey opposite meanings. All instances of antimetabole are a type of chiasmus, but these examples of chiasmus are not antimetabole:

“Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.” (Socrates, 5th Century BC)

“We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.” (John McCain, 2008)

“It is hard to make money, but to spend it is easy.” (Anonymous)

“Charm is a woman’s strength; strength is a man’s charm.” (Havelock Ellis)

The grandparent of both chiasmus and antimetabole, of course, is antithesis, a rhetorical figure that highlights contrast by juxtaposing phrases or clauses. All the above examples are antitheses, but so are these, which are neither chiasmus nor antimetabole:

“Folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” (Abraham Lincoln)

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” (Martin Luther King)

“Those who have been left out, we will try to bring in. Those left behind, we will help to catch up.” (Richard Nixon, inaugural address, 1969)

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are filled with passionate intensity.” (Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

Some may see the small differences in the ways these sentences play with language as inconsequential. To me, they represent the way in which rhetoric truly is an art. Like any art, it takes talent, skill, and practice, and like any art, its subtle shadings are what elevate it above the ordinary and also make its practice a high-wire act. A lame antimetabole will produce more groans than cheers; a finely executed example of antithesis may gain its effect without anyone’s noticing the rhetorical trick.

I take the same delight in distinguishing other closely related rhetorical flourishes from each other. Years ago, I read somewhere that ours was a metonymic, rather than a metaphorical, age. I still have no idea who said that or what was meant by it, but I found myself listening more closely to phrases like The White House said today, or He’s the administration’s hired gun, where one thing stands in for another. The effect is different from the language of metaphor, which two things are directly or implicitly compared, as in It’s a puppet government or He’s just a figurehead. If you dig just a bit deeper, you can find synecdoche, that subset of metonymy in which a part stands for the whole, almost everywhere in political speech. Boots on the ground. Nominated for the bench. Earmarked.

It’s going to be a long political season ahead. We might as well amuse ourselves. Let’s distinguish enthusiastically among the devices of rhetoric, lest the rhetoric divide us, and extinguish all our enthusiasm.

 

 

 


We the Partisan People

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war-is-peaceIn response to my recent post on pronunciation in political speech, one reader took me to his video on the subject, which led me in turn to an amazing bit of research underway by scholars at Stanford and Brown Universities, the University of Chicago, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. In their paper “Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech,” Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Matt Taddy have combed through 126 years of congressional speech to detect patterns of partisanship based on two-word phrases, defining partisanship as “the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech.”

Now, it’s no secret that Republicans and Democrats each have their favorite turns of phrase. One politician’s “anthropogenic climate change” is another’s “so-called global warming”; one’s “undocumented immigrant” is another’s “illegal alien.” The question is whether partisanship shows up more in language patterns now than it did in days of yore. We already know that presidential campaigns have been even uglier than what we saw last winter and spring: John Quncy Adams’s supporters accused Andrew Jackson’s mother of being a prostitute, while Jackson called Adams a “hermaphrodite.” But to test whether legislators’ speech in general has undergone what George Lakoff called “consequential change,” these researchers tried to “apply tools from structural estimation and machine learning to study the partisanship of language in the U.S. Congress from 1873 to 2009.” As their Figure 3, below, illustrates, they found a remarkable rise in partisan speech since the famous “Contract With America” of the mid-1990s. Their conclusions are at odds with earlier research on partisan speech, which had concluded that, while partisanship has been rising recently, it was even higher in the past, at least if one judges by language.Figure 3 jpeg

Why does this new research point toward a rise in partisan speech, not just recently, but compared with speech from all earlier eras in American politics? According to one of the researchers, Jesse Shapiro of Brown University, the current research team used an automated method called regularization to craft an answer to the first empirical question anyone should ask of a statistical survey like this: Could the differences be due to chance? If the thing you’re studying is fairly limited, you can compare the actual distribution to a random distribution and come up with a conclusion. But since language constitutes such a vast pool of choices, you need some other method to correct for what statisticians called “finite sample bias,” or, as Shapiro puts it, “taking too seriously the information in small selections of data, for example the patterns of usage of rarely occurring phrases.” For those who understand statistics better than I do, more information on the team’s methods can be found in a series of lectures by Matt Taddy here. For those as ignorant of statistical methods as I am, Shapiro’s explanation may be helpful:

One way to describe the model at a high level is that it is an “urn model” of speech. That is, we model speech as if speakers are drawing phrases at random from an urn, and the contents of the urn differ by party. Our methods then attempt to estimate how different the contents of the Republican urn are from those of the Democratic urn. The urn model is a dramatic oversimplification of the way that human speech works, of course, but it it also a very useful metaphor that makes it possible to perform the exercise we lay out in the paper.

But here’s the startling thing about the team’s conclusion, particularly as we enter the final months of this torturous presidential campaign. In their words, with my emphases:

An average one-minute speech in our data contains around 33 phrases (after pre-processing). In 1874, an observer hearing such a speech would be expected to have a posterior of around .54 on the speaker’s true party. In 1990, this value remained almost equivalent at around .55. In 2008, the value was .83.

More than four out of five times that you hear a one-minute clip of a legislator’s speech, in other words, you will know what party he or she belongs to. Only 16 years ago — and consistently through the centuries preceding — your chances of a correct guess would have hovered close to 50/50.

So it’s not your imagination. We are speaking, as it were, two different languages when it comes to the values and social policies our representatives preach and we echo. These languages frame issues in ways that influence public opinion, and politicians now pay consultants tremendous fees to coin neologisms and match pairs of words in such a way as to seize the headlines. Just think about mass shooting versus radical Islamic terrorism — two phrases chosen by Democrats and Republicans, respectively, to describe the recent killings in an Orlando nightclub if you need to imagine the waves of influence that spread from a carefully chosen partisan phrase. And as the authors of the study write,

Language is also one of the most fundamental cues of group identity, with differences in language or accent producing own-group preferences even in infants and young children (Kinzler et al. 2007). Imposing a common language was a key factor in the creation of a common French identity (Weber 1976), and Catalan-language education has been effective in strengthening a distinct Catalan identity within Spain (Clots-Figueras and Masella 2013). That the two political camps in the US increasingly speak different languages may contribute to the striking increase in inter-party hostility evident in recent years (Iyengar et al. 2012).

Do I think they’re pointing to a dangerous trend? To quote one of our most partisan contemporary politicians, You betcha.

 

 

 

What Are We Drinking?

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Kool-AidI ran across a Facebook thread recently lamenting the insensitivity of the ubiquitous phrase “drink the Kool-Aid.” The argument was that the phrase originated with the Jonestown massacre of November 18, 1978, when the cult leader Jim Jones called on (and in many cases forced) his followers to drink cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, resulting in more than 900 deaths in a remote jungle outpost in Guyana. Given its tragic origins, many felt, we should not be using it to describe, say, the followers of Donald Trump or those who slavishly follow fashion. That Forbes named “drink the Kool-Aid” the most annoying business cliché of 2012 suggests how widespread the usage is. Two questions:

a)    Does the phrase originate with the Jonestown tragedy?

b)    Should we avoid it?

Being an oldster, I had always thought the phrase predated Jonestown and began with the LSD parties on the 1960s that were featured in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At least one contributor to Urban Dictionary agrees with me, defining the phrase as “to make a wholehearted, unconditional commitment (to some group, or idea, or plan) in contrast to choosing an alternative.” That definition also squares with what many in the Jonestown cult were also doing, but I tend to think of dropping acid, especially in 1960s San Francisco, as more benign than swallowing cyanide.

But ours is a minority view. Most publications I checked assigned the origin of “drink the Kool-Aid” to Jonestown. An Ngram search finds one reference to the phrase prior to 1978, but it doesn’t list the source, and a search of published books isn’t likely to turn up a contemporary slang phrase, anyway.

So let’s say I’m wrong, and the phrase originates with Jonestown. Does that make its casual use, as one Facebook commenter put it, “ahistorical … a kind of erasure”? Interviewed in 2011 by The Atlantic, the Jonestown survivor Teri Buford O’Shea responded that the phrase “makes me shudder. I know it’s part of the culture now and I shouldn’t be so sensitive to it. But Jonestown was an important part of American history, and it’s been marginalized.”

Certainly, we can agree that billboards posted by a South Bend, Ind., restaurant that boasted, “We’re like a cult with better Kool-Aid” were rightfully taken down. But Katy Waldman at Slate argues:

But, respectfully, what service does it do to expunge sad or loathsome events from our historical memory? One colleague told me that researching “drank the Kool-Aid” introduced her to the story of Jonestown — arguably a good thing from the perspective of victims and their families. What’s more, invoking a past evil to describe a present one is not necessarily trivializing. And though we do seem to have domesticated this expression, the group of people who suffered directly at the hands of Jim Jones is too small to preclude the use of an evocative and widely understood figure of speech, especially as it accrues new meanings, relevancies, and, um, flavors.

Another Facebook poster wrote, “Language is full of such uses: ‘the rule of thumb’ (which may possibly refer to wife-beating); ‘to meet one’s Waterloo’ (which must refer to at least the death or wounding of 25,000 of Napoleon’s troops).” And both Anne Curzan and I have written on this blog about phrases (“old hat” and “Indian summer”) whose unsavory origins are lost in the mists of time.

Perhaps, then, it’s a question of historical distance. Obviously the cat is out of the bag* in terms of the common usage of “drink the Kool-Aid.” But each of us can make our own decision about whether and how we use popular language. For me, if the phrase began with the tragedy of Jonestown — or if practically everyone thinks it did, which amounts to the same thing — I’d rather not use it. But neither am I prepared to question, say, a close friend’s use of it, as I might if they were to talk about getting “gypped” or “sold down the river.” If my son were to use it — well, as they say, that’s a teachable moment.

*a phrase that, incidentally, originated either with a country-fair trick of trying to substitute a cat for a piglet, or with the torturous whip called the cat o’ nine tails.

 

 

A Person Who

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am-a-simple-person-who-hides-a-thousand-feelings-behind-the-happiest-dGxksS-quoteI heard Barbra Streisand the other day, being interviewed on the radio, describe herself as “a person who likes to live in the moment.” The phrasing made me think of my students, whom I’ll see in two short weeks. We always start our small classes with introductions, and I can no longer count the times I’ve heard, “I’m a person who. … ” To my ear, there’s little difference in basic meaning between I’m a person who likes and I like. Rhetorically, though, the emphasis is different. I decided to dig around a little for what others had made of what I sensed was a growing habit.

Sure enough, Google’s Ngram viewer shows a 15-fold increase in I’m a person who from 1958 to 1991, with the expression holding its own since then. Examples from the books they survey include:

“I’m a person who feels a oneness with the earth.” —Don Diebel, The Complete Guide to Meeting Women, 1991

“I’m not at all proud of it, but I’m a person who has, from time to time, talked behind the backs of my own family members.” —Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff With Your Family, 1998

“I’m not a killer, but I’m a person who believes in life and a person who believes in family and a person who believes in love.” —Elaine Latzman Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, 1994

“I’m a person who has no concept of self-protection.” —Michael S. Duke, Worlds of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1991

“I’m a person who doesn’t mind having enemies.” —Barbara Rockwell, Boiling Frogs: Intel vs. the Village, 2005

You get the idea. I don’t find any grammarians specifically tut-tutting over this convoluted way of talking, nor should they. (More on grammar in a minute.) But the rise in the expression, I suspect, is due to an offloading of individual agency that correlates to social media. More and more, we share — our cat pictures, the deaths in our family, our political views, our indigestion. Ads find their way back to us based on the preferences we exhibit online. We become, in a sense, a collection of our preferences and beliefs, our commitments and our phobias. Each of those expressions binds us to others who feel, believe, have X concept, don’t mind Y. We become walking integers: persons who write things down, persons who have gone on blind dates, and so on. It’s almost as if we’re anticipating the response of Me too! I’m that same person! When Tim Armstrong of AOL says, “I’m a person who likes to tackle challenges,” he’s saying not just that he likes to tackle challenges, but also that he expects kinship with others who like to tackle them. He’s also setting the quality aside in a way; it belongs to the person-who-is-Tim-Armstrong, a person being created rhetorically as he shapes the sentence.

It’s this setting-aside, I think, not the wordiness, that bothers me about I am a person who. Interestingly, as I poked around looking for instances and possibly criticisms of the expression, I ran across a sensible question from an English-language learner. “Is it correct,” this native Spanish speaker asked, “’I’m a person who enjoys what I do’? Or ‘I’m a person who enjoys what he does’?

Answers varied. “In most instances of spoken English,” one respondent wrote, “you would probably hear: I’m a person who enjoys what they do.” Another wrote, “Both would be acceptable, but ‘what he does’ is more idiomatic.” Finally, an English speaker pointed out, “‘What (s)he does’ is probably the norm. But this only applies to the singular; in the plural you must say ‘we are people who enjoy what we do.’” The difference, wherein the construction in the singular uses different pronouns in the main clause and the final noun clause but the plural construction uses the same pronoun, is no doubt due to the consistency in verb form of the adjectival and noun clauses. That is, we do uses the same plural verb case as Who enjoy, so it’s easy to keep the same pronoun subject. I do, by contrast, doesn’t match up with Who enjoys, and the tendency is to find the pronoun (He does) that matches third-person singular. (I realize that the first suggestion, employing singular “they, doesn’t fit this pattern, but I still think the pattern governs the construction as a whole.)

I’m belaboring this little point because the huge shift in usage seems to be primarily for first-person singular, I’m a person who rather than She’s a person who and other forms. And the shift to third person in the last clause — what he does — seems to me to fit with this tendency to be claiming the behavior, separating oneself from it, and establishing membership in an amorphous club of those-who-do-X, all at the same time. Perhaps that’s why the Donald, in an August 11 interview, managed to say with a straight face, “I’m a person who doesn’t like insulting people.” Even he, winner of the greatest number of Pinocchios of all time, might find “I don’t like insulting people” too much of a stretch.

Or maybe he’s a person for whom no stretch is too much.

‘Shenanigans’ in Rio

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pic44731_mdThis just in from my friend, the writer Ethelbert Miller:

We know too many are trapped inside the criminal-justice system. After all the dirt of crime we never seem to reach the rinse cycle. We are never able to stop or dry our tears from injustice. One word I never heard any black person incarcerated use was the word shenanigans. I think if we used this word to describe black behavior there would be a reduction in the number of black boys arrested. Think of the word shenanigans recently used by U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte. This simple word means no jail time for him. He can continue to live if not in the pool at least in the great outdoors. His criminal behavior won’t come with a price tag. He will be free to live his life with fewer commercial endorsements or he might make money as a consultant to future Olympic hopefuls. This is what I call that language thing so I won’t have to label it white privilege. What Lochte and his fellow swimmers did in Rio is what an English teacher might call a Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer moment. Let’s pee and destroy someone’s property and call it — shenanigans. No handcuffs for the penis. Just call it silly or high-spirited behavior — say it was mischief — just don’t associate it with the blackness of one’s skin. It will never cling — it’s that language thing again. It’s like the morning ash that covers our skins when we attempt to rise and live our lives.

Ethelbert is referring, of course, to the incident at the Rio de Janiero Olympics, where Ryan Lochte and others invented a story of having been robbed at gunpoint in order to cover up their own vandalism. I think Ethelbert is right; that is, not only have I never heard a black person refer to his or his friends’ “shenanigans,” I cannot imagine them employing the term, any more than I can imagine a male politician’s voice being described as “shrill.” To check whether my own impression is biased, I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English. I found shenanigans used to describe Bill Clinton many times; to describe possible bending of the law to exonerate the clerk who refused to grant same-sex marriage licenses; to warn of threats to President Obama’s life; to describe the  manipulation of the budget in New Jersey; to name the hassles that states must endure to put Obamacare into effect; to sum up the activities of Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on 21 counts of corruption; to label the attention-getting activities of Miley Cyrus; to describe the fraud committed by the ticket brokers known as the Wiseguys; to describe the robo-signing practices of corrupt mortgage brokers. The most frequent modifier of the word is either political or Wall Street. It’s used both to lighten up on criminal or otherwise despicable behavior, or to cast aspersions on governmental bureaucracy. The only black person I found named as committing shenanigans was a Heisman-winning Florida State quarterback who stole some crab legs (and was also accused of rape, but that charge was set aside from the “shenanigans”).

Like many people, I thought the word shenanigans was Irish-derived slang, echoing hooligan and mulligan. Turns out the origin is unknown but suspected to have descended from the Spanish charranada, meaning “trick” or “deceit.” Its first known use was in mid-19th-century San Francisco, though, where Irish immigrants constituted 37 percent of the city’s population by 1880, and the hundreds of Shenanigan’s Pubs around today certainly consider themselves Irish. As with the expression drinking the Kool-Aid, which I discussed not long ago, the actual origin may matter less than common opinion. Mischievous leprechauns and tipsy Irishmen are common stereotypes, neither taken very seriously.

But Ethelbert Miller is correct: Any untoward or illegal action by an African-American in this country is taken very seriously. Perhaps there would be an exception for an Olympic athlete (as there was, to a limited extent, for a preprofessional football player), but I doubt that, had Simone Biles gotten drunk, smashed a bathroom door, and then claimed to have been held up at gunpoint, her actions would have been described as shenanigans. Yet Lochte’s behavior earned that jesting description not only from the perpetrator himself but also, hundreds of times, in the press.

What to do? We’re not going to ban the word — and who’d want to, given how much fun it is to say? But we can be mindful of its selective use, its exonerating effect, and the consequences for all those for whom the corresponding term seems to be, say, thuggery or criminality. When my friend Ethelbert refers to the “price tag” paid by black people and not white people because of such word choices, he’s not mouthing malarkey, but speaking the simple truth.

The Specter of the ‘Alt-Right’

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Pepe TrumpI’m feeling a bit slimed as I type this post. Assuming you’ve come here in innocence, I hope you can finish the next few paragraphs without the slime’s smearing onto you.

It began, as many instances of sliming do, with curiosity, following Hillary Clinton’s August 25 speech denouncing Donald Trump’s ties to the so-called alt-right movement. Living as I do in a bubble, I had never heard the term alt-right before. In fact, my acquaintance with alt as a prefix was more or less limited to the Alt key on my keyboard, which I never understood in the first place and which has now been replaced by the Option key on my Mac. (I use it for diacritics, though I’m sure it’s useful in other ways.) I had at least understood alt as an abbreviation of alternate or alternative, which made sense in terms of keyboard functioning and also worked for alt-rock, which was a movement seeking independence from mainstream rock ’n’ roll in the 1990s.

But alt-right, Clinton made clear, presents not so much an alternative as an extreme. When I found Slate’s explanation of the movement, I could not believe the sources to which they sent me were truly propounding the views attributed to them. I was wrong.

First, Taki’s Magazine, to which the Slate article sent me to find the origin of the term alternative right (it was used in a headline over the text of the philosopher Paul Gottfried’s address to the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008), seems to expound nativist, misogynist, racist ideology to a fare-thee-well, including headlines like “Feminist Witch Hunts Are Rape” and “L.A.’s Dirty Little Brown Secret” (a doozy that gives a thumbs-up to ethnic cleansing). I got even more curious when I spotted a strange, froglike creature next to the headline “Getting the Alt-Right Wrong.” Since the article itself didn’t explain the green cartoon guy, I had to read further to learn that he was Pepe, originally a mascot on the trolling website 4chan and since co-opted by extreme conservatives as an avatar of their movement. (At the point in Clinton’s speech where she first used the term alt-right, someone shouted out “Pepe!”) That the green Donald Trump image I’ve now picked to accompany this post looks completely creepy to me but is celebrated by some of his ardent supporters should have told me that researching this topic further was not going to make me feel any better.

But I couldn’t help myself. I traveled through the vortex into the even more extreme Radix Journal, where “Hannibal Bateman” (a merging, I assume, of Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman), sitting on a leather couch backgrounded by a gray stone wall that brings man cave to mind, refers to the “emphasis on freedom” in Western democracies as “a negative ideal.” Bateman — er, Richard Spencer, who seems to use Bateman as an alter ego — appears again in an even more alarming video explaining the innocuously titled National Policy Institute. Touting “the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States,” this video reminded me of the chilling “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scene in Cabaret.

To top off my research, on another site to which Slate referred me, I read a lead article titled “Is Black Genocide Right?” Here, I felt certain, I would find satire of the sort proffered by Jonathan Swift in “A Modest Proposal.” Surely, I said to myself as I began reading, like many of Swift’s original readers, the journalist at Slate had mistaken a sendup for a horrifyingly sincere proposal.

But no. Apparently the answer to the question in the headline is “Maybe. In fact, probably. Yeah. Probably, black genocide is practically, morally, ethically right.”

I warned you. Slimed.

There are other terms, many as seemingly innocuous as alternative, associated with the alt-right movement. Triple parentheses, for example. You might think those are just keyboard-gone-wild punctuation, the way quadruple exclamation points have taken over the texting world. You’d be wrong. The alt-right uses those “cute-hug” parentheses to visually represent the cartoonish “echo” assigned to Jewish surnames on a podcast called The Daily Shoah. To distance yourself from Jewishness and establish your alt-right credentials, you can reverse the parentheses, as in )))Lana Lokteff(((, one of whose tweets claimed there were “zero gassings” during the Holocaust.

It’s all stupid, right? All slime, like the secret handshakes and gross mascots adopted by those creepy neighborhood gangs made up of insecure boys who bolstered their egos by ganging up on the kid with the eye patch. Yes, some of those boys have major funding now, and megaphones for their dog whistles. But they are not an alternative, and if we keep at it, we can ghostbust their slime. Maybe even put it to use. Like that other stuff, you know, that you use for fertilizer.

 

 

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