Twenty years ago this month, I was in New Orleans to receive an award for my writing. I’ve been thinking about that moment as we return to classes. Whatever subject you teach, you most likely find yourself in the position of judging the quality of students’ prose. Indeed, for most of us, the grades we award at the end of the term will depend largely on how well our students express themselves in writing.

Here’s how the award I received in 1996 came about. I had published a couple of books in the previous decade and then gone through a dry spell. I was the financial support of two small children, teaching full-time and stealing time for writing the way most novelists do, in bits and snatches mostly late at night and before dawn. My literary agent had drifted away. Slowly, over the years, I had accumulated a series of stories that I worked and reworked — as a story collection, as a first-person novel, as a third-person novel, as a triptych — until I felt, in my late-night addled brain, that the manuscript might be ready for prime time. I shipped it off to a contest and waited. I waited so long, and with so much else on my plate, that when the call came to tell me that I had won, I thought it was my jokester of a brother-in-law, pulling my leg.

The prize was to be awarded in a gala ceremony in the French Quarter, and the fabulous organization sponsoring it flew me into New Orleans, picked me up in a limo with champagne in the back, put me up in a hotel whose nightly rate amounted to twice my monthly rent, and fêted me at several parties over the weekend. I had never before experienced such attention. At one long evening reception, so many people came up to speak with me that I never made my way to the table heaped with food, so that I slipped out of my fancy hotel room at 1:00 a.m. to fetch a turkey sandwich at the deli on Canal Street. I had never been to New Orleans before; walking the colorful streets of the city, I felt a surge of energy that I had not experienced in years, and the day I was to receive the award I actually pulled out my new laptop and began a new project.

But here’s the rub. At the reception following the gala, a middle-aged lawyer introduced himself to me as my first reader. The way the judging of this prize worked, he explained, was that a small army of volunteers read the full-length manuscripts that came in, four at a time, and chose one of the four to move up to the next round. The final arbiter of the contest, a well-known writer, received the top 40 or so from which she picked her favorite. This lawyer — let’s call him Mr. B — was an enthusiastic reader, and he stepped up to read one foursome after another. Finally he brought back a quartet of manuscripts from which he had chosen, as instructed, one finalist, and he asked if there were more entries to read. Just four more, he was told, and they needed a quick assessment to move the contest along. He took the manuscripts, but called the office several days later.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t make up my mind. Two of these novels seem equally good to me.”

“Just shut your eyes and point to one,” he was told. “The judge has already read the other finalists and made her selection, so you’re just deciding who gets to be a finalist. We need a choice by tonight.”

“I don’t do things that way,” said Mr. B. He canceled his afternoon’s appointments. He went to a café in the French Quarter and ordered a glass of red wine. He did his best thinking, he explained to me at the reception, sitting at an outdoor café nursing a glass. For hours he went over the two manuscripts he liked. He jotted down notes about one, then notes about the other. He compared the plots. He compared the styles. He couldn’t choose. He was just a lawyer and an avid reader, he told himself, not an expert. Finally, as the sun lowered, he decided to read just the first page and the last page of each novel manuscript. He based his decision on his feelings about those four pages, and he brought his selection back to the office of the organization.

“Great,” they said. “Not that it matters, but now we’ve got closure.”

They sent that manuscript to the judge. Reading it, she changed her mind. That manuscript was my novel, and I got the prize.

“But what about the other manuscript?” I asked Mr. B. “The one you liked just as well?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t even get to be a finalist,” he said.

Partly on the basis of the award I won, I secured a new literary agent and a two-book contract from Simon & Schuster. I’ve gone on to publish a fair handful of fiction and nonfiction. But had the lawyer’s taste been different, I wouldn’t even have known how seriously my work had been considered, or how close I had come — just as that other contestant, whoever he is, may never know.

One can argue that this contest’s process was flawed, but I have sat on a number of award juries since that September, and I can testify that no process is perfect. Nor is the process by which we judge, and grade, student writing. I’m not saying everything comes down to a coin toss. There are clear markers of good writing, some of which we discuss in this blog. But there come times, too, when luck and preference enter in. My conversation with Mr. B humbled me, as a writer. I like to think it humbled me as a teacher, too. Sometimes I sit, virtually if not literally, at that café, and I read the pages, back and forth, and try to remember that someone’s fate may rest with how I feel about the beginning, or the middle, or the end.

Unions are slowly making their way back into the news these days, perhaps because it’s a presidential election season, perhaps because graduate students are now considering their right to bargain collectively at several universities, primarily in the Ivy League. To mark this trend, a huge inflatable rat, nicknamed Scabby, has appeared at Long Island University, where stalled negotiations resulted in a lockout before faculty and administration agreed on a contract, and at Columbia University, where graduate assistants are about to vote on unionizing.

I’m all for unions. But there are a couple of strange things about this inflatable rat, who’s been around for a quarter-century. First, although he has been created to be as ugly and nasty as he can appear, including the pink scab on his stomach, Scabby has drawn an affectionate following. He even has a Facebook page, where fans cry out, “Go, Scabby!” every time the rat pops up at a particular location. If the rat’s named for a scab, a nonunion worker who crosses picket lines, why are we cheering him? People love posing for photos with the hideous beast, and the uglier he gets, the more we seem to love him. He’s a mascot of sorts, but as one pro-labor organizer tweeted, “The symbol of Scabby appearing at a strike is a clear signal to the public that the management is attacking its workforce and the public by using unfair and unsafe practices.” In other words, the rat is supposed to stand in for the bad guys.

Which brings me to my second point. The phrase that birthed Scabby is actually nonunion rat. Rats have long signified disease as well as perfidious cunning. Some may take offense at this exploitation of a smart little mammal. My son, for instance, nurtured a rat he named Skibber for two years in order to earn himself a dog, and he liked to carry Skibber around the house balanced on his head, like a coonskin cap. And a fellow participant in my singing trip to Corsica this summer reported that she had “rescued” a rat from Prospect Park in Brooklyn and brought it home, with the consequence that she now hosts 21 rats in five cages, and claims to love and have named them all. But these folks are outliers. Traditionally, to be called a rat is an insult, as is being called a scab, a term that originated with the scabby lesions of smallpox. In other words, disease; impurity. A union statement attributed to Jack London claims that

when a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.

But Scabby has become known as the union rat, not the nonunion rat. As one pro-union website puts it, “Scabby is a symbol of solidarity, and the most visible symbol of a labor movement that isn’t dead yet.”

Does it matter whether we love Scabby or see him as the enemy? Perhaps not. His presence either way serves as a signal that union activity is afoot. His use by unions or groups trying to organize was recently confirmed as protected free speech by the Seventh Circuit. If he becomes emblematic, not of union busters but of union members, that won’t be the first time that a phrase has come to acquire its opposite meaning. And who knows? Maybe we’ll start liking gray, pointy-nosed, long-toothed rats a little better. What will happen to our feelings about pigs, what with inflatable pigs representing wicked management, is a question for another day.

I began advocating for the aughts 15 years ago. I was not alone — Google search finds the term used occasionally to describe the first decade of the 21^st century as far back as January 2000 — but for many years it made people uncomfortable. When we were living through the 1980s, we could say things like “I can’t wait for the eighties to be over.” But in 2005, if you mentioned casually that you thought the aughts were becoming the decade of Iraq, people looked at you funny, not because they thought Iraq was unimportant but because they thought the word aught was weird, pretentious, or from another language.

So what did those people call the decade we were in, not that long ago? I’ve been thinking about this question this week for two reasons. One is that our administrative assistant has been needing some files from three and four years ago, and I notice that she refers to those years as “two twelve” and “two thirteen.” What makes sense about this approach is that we never got around to calling 2008, for instance, “twenty oh eight,” but stuck to “two thousand eight” (same number of syllables, after all); so if you want to take the same approach in current and future decades, you might opt to keep the two and drop the thousand, in order to avoid the clumsiness of two thousand thirty-seven. And after all, no one’s likely to think the administrative assistant needs a file from the third century.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about the name for the first decade of the century has been the presidential campaigns, which talk about the Obama administration or the George Bush administration. Some on-the-street comedy sketches have revealed that some citizens’ understanding of their history is so vague that they wonder where Barack Obama was when the planes flew into the World Trade towers. There might be a value in speaking of this decade that saw us through the Gore/Bush Florida fiasco and WikiLeaks.

So let’s review. During the decade itself, a number of possible terms surfaced, from the twenty ohs to the zeros. In Britain and Australia, apparently, the term noughties caught on quickly. Nought, of course, is one spelling of naught, which means nothing. And since naughty seems far too mild a word to apply to the extreme events of 2001-10, noughties seems a sensible choice. But like knickers, it’s perhaps too archly British to catch on on this side of the pond.

Aught, by contrast, really means the converse of naught — that is, anything or all. Shakespeare was fond of it in this original sense:

I take no pleasure/In aught a eunuch has (Cleopatra to Mardian, Antony and Cleopatra)

It might be yours or hers, for aught I know (Diana, speaking of a ring, All’s Well that Ends Well)

If thou art changed to aught, ’tis to an ass (Luciana to Dromio, Comedy of Errors)

But like many other terms, aught has come to mean its opposite — perhaps because, like napron and norange, it ran into the end of a prior word, as when York says to the Queen, in Henry VI, Part 2, “What, worse than naught?” However it got there, when we use the word — which is rarely — we tend to use it as a synonym, not an antonym, of naught. Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker pointed out this illogic at the end of the decade, when the aughts was still, according to her, “a compromise that pleases no one.” Yet magically, as if overnight (really beginning around 2011), the aughts has become the accepted term for the years in question. (Let’s not belabor the argument as to whether the decade begins in 2000 and runs through 2009, or begins in 2001 and runs through 2010. The sixties, after all, really didn’t get rolling until at least 1964.) Google searches for the aughts, over the past year, turn up mostly references to the decade, whereas searches for the naughts turns up a potpourri of references, few of them referring to time. And the noughties remains primarily British.

I don’t really care that aught has changed its meaning; it’s not the first word to do so. And as a handle on the decade, I like it. A word that had seemed archaic now sounds, in headlines like “Who Let the Aughts Out?” (Popcrush), like a hip term.

So come on, politicians. Let’s talk about the aughts. All of them. It was a helluva decade. It deserves a name.

I’ve learned to be suspicious whenever any change in language is described as inconvenient. It’s inconvenient, when you think about it, to have so many forms of the past tense in English. It’s inconvenient that we in America spell a number of words differently from the British. When the honorific Ms. was introduced in the 1960s, people complained that it was inconvenient to have to insert a new option into the list of choices on forms, or to wonder how a woman wanted to be addressed. So-called inconvenient changes also become, rather quickly, the butt of jokes made mostly at the expense of those who think that, after all, the change they have in mind isn’t really all that inconvenient.

The latest surge of complaints about inconvenience coupled with jokes at the expense of change-makers arises with the University of Michigan’s newly designed forms for students choosing classes. As The Detroit News reported:

UM students can select pronouns such as he, she, him, her, ze — a gender neutral pronoun — or other pronouns they identify with starting this week.

The change is so students can let others know which pronoun they identify with and expect others to use when referencing them, Provost Martha Pollack and Vice President for Student Life Royster Harper wrote to students on the Ann Arbor campus.

“Faculty members play a vital role in ensuring all of our community feels valued, respected, and included,” Pollack and Harper wrote.

“Asking about and correctly using someone’s designated pronoun is one of the most basic ways to show respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender identities.”

I don’t know the percentage of students who chose he or she as their preferred pronoun, but I suspect it was well over 90 percent and included transgender students, most of whom identify as male or female. If I’m right, two truths emerge. First, any inconvenience is slight, perhaps at the level of accommodation for visually impaired students. (I’m not naming alternate gender identity as an impairment, just talking accommodation and statistics.) Second, those who do list a pronoun other than he or she are voicing a strong preference for how they wish others to address them — a strong statement, that is, of their identity in the face of great odds. So we have a deeply desirable accommodation at little cost.

But from the backlash and the jokes, you wouldn’t think so. The top-rated comments on the News report about the pronoun option read,

When these folks get out of the U with whatever degree the U feels fit to give them (after all, they will soon find something offensive about sturctured (sic) departments, degrees, such as engineering, chemistry, physics etc. etc) .. they will encounter the real world where no one actually gives a tinkers damn about such idiocy.

. . .

Good luck, snowflakes. One day you’ll figure out that when reality becomes optional, totalitarianism becomes inevitable.

Soon followed the jokes. The chairman of the board of governors of the right-wing Young America Foundation, Grant Strobl, a student at the University of Michigan, logged onto his portal and chose the preferred pronoun His Majesty. In an interview with The College Fix, he quipped, “I henceforth shall be referred to as: His Majesty, Grant Strobl. I encourage all U-M students to go onto Wolverine Access, and insert the identity of their dreams.”

Funny … right?

Apparently the denizens of the website Total Frat Move think so. They referred to Mr. Strobl’s having accomplished “a brilliant troll job” and lambasted any who thought otherwise:

These gender pronoun snobs are the worst. He she ze xe vey ir hir het hesh ne himer shkle enn heshe hann herm. …  Thanks to “gender fluidity,” everyday is a fun game of “let’s solve the puzzle in my pants.”

The irony here is that the jokesters are the ones inserting inconvenience into the process, urging anyone looking for a snigger to exploit the system until the university gives up on it.

But maybe they won’t give up. It took 20 years, in the end, but even conservative William Safire of The New York Times, confessing that it “broke his heart” to do so, conceded in 1984 that Ms. was the most reasonable honorific to use with women who wished to be addressed as Ms.

Meanwhile, I hope that Mr. Strobl gets his wish and finds himself addressed as His Majesty in every recommendation that his professors write for him to potential employers. It will be a fine joke, or something.

How can a statement that begins “I apologize” not be an apology? Many have referred to Donald Trump’s initial statement following the October 5 revelation of a taped conversation featuring lewd and objectifying language about women as a “nonapology.” Having received plenty of similar nonapologies from rebellious teenagers, I’d like to take a moment to explain.

The statement at hand is from Trump’s press release of October 7: “I apologize if anyone was offended.” The syntax is familiar to many who have been on the receiving end of such supposed apologies — for example:

From the illicit party-thrower: I apologize if your living room wasn’t put back the way you like it.

From the unfaithful spouse: I apologize if you felt betrayed.

From the customer-service representative who keeps you on hold for 20 minutes and then cuts you off: I apologize if you were upset.

From the date rapist: I apologize if you were traumatized.

The first problem with these statements, as many have pointed out in the case of Trump, is that they shift the responsibility from the doer to the receiver of the offensive action. The passive voice employed in “was offended,” “was traumatized,” “wasn’t put back,” and so on fails to acknowledge personal responsibility in the way that “I offended,” “I traumatized,” “I failed to put back” would. Condescension often creeps in with the implication that whoever is seeking the apology possesses unreasonably delicate feelings that a different, more robust individual would be able to put aside. We call this blaming the victim not because the victim caused the action to occur, but because the victim’s peculiar sensibilities are prompting the need for an apology.

There’s a second problem with the syntax of these statements that I think warrants greater attention, but before we get to it, I want (again) to put straight the function of a clause beginning with if. Defenders of the subjunctive often style these clauses contrary-to-fact, as in Johnny Cash’s If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway? Would you have my baby? But not all if clauses are contrary to fact. Trump’s nonapologetic if anyone was offended actually acknowledges that some people may feel offended, just as If we’re with Grandma for the weekend, we’ll get pancakes acknowledges that we may spend the weekend with Grandma. Otherwise, in Trump’s case, we’d have “I would apologize if anyone were offended,” which is about as much of a nonapology as can be mustered.

No, the second problem isn’t that the clause is contrary to fact, but that it is hypothetical; it leaves enormous room for the action to have been nonoffensive. We can see this most clearly if we reverse the syntax, i.e., “If anyone was offended, I apologize.” Strictly speaking, that sentence says the same thing as the statement Trump put out. But it also implies the reverse: If you were not offended, I don’t apologize.

We actually got into a discussion of this at the breakfast table this morning. (Gives you some idea of how exciting mornings are in my household!) My husband pointed out the fallacy of my reasoning with a popular logician’s example: If you are over 12 feet tall, you are over six feet tall. Reverse that statement, and you get something ridiculous: You are not over 12 feet tall, therefore you are not over six feet tall. Not being very good at logic, I pointed out that there should surely be a difference when the second part of the sentence involves someone else’s agency. Let’s say I have a distinct prejudice against extraordinarily tall people and I say, If you are over 12 feet tall, I hate you. Surely, then, if you are not over 12 feet tall, I do not hate you.

But, my logical husband pointed out, I might have other reasons to hate you. Maybe you have terrible breath. Maybe you take candy from babies. That’s why the argument contains a logical fallacy: Just because A implies B does not mean that not-A implies not-B. And yet, in the universe of height, it does. If only A implies B, then whatever is not-A cannot imply B. If my hatred is reserved only for people of unbelievable altitude, I cannot hate those who do not achieve that altitude.

Breakfast ended happily, and I returned to Trump’s statement. Although the Donald came out later with something more closely approximating a true apology, this initial formulation had the ring of “If only A, then B.” That is, the only reason to apologize for initiating lascivious, vulgar, misogynist conversation about females is the possibility that people listening to a tape of that conversation would find it offensive. The conversation itself is not a reason to apologize. The views it implies about women are not a reason to apologize. The actions he reports having taken are not actions to apologize for, unless the reports of said actions are offensive.

This truth, I think, is the reason all such nonapologies are destined to infuriate those who receive them. The illicit party-thrower sees nothing wrong in his acting illicitly; the date rapist sees nothing wrong in his having raped. What determines moral consequences is solely the existence of an offended party. The corollary, needless to say, is that the offender silently vows, not to abstain, but to avoid getting caught or confronted. We want the promise — for instance, Trump’s later pledge “to be a better man tomorrow” — to be backed up with an acknowledgment that he regrets the act itself; that rather than prompting a wish that people wouldn’t be upset about the words or action, the demand for apology has prompted a true search of the soul.

But then, you’d need a soul to search.

With all the political news jamming the airwaves, I hadn’t been paying much attention to Bridgegate. But it came up on the radio the other day, and I found myself musing both on the appropriateness of the term and the exhaustion of the suffix –gate.

The term seems amusingly appropriate since in essence, that’s what Governor Chris Christie’s minions accomplished on the infamous week in 2013 when they blocked two lanes going over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan: They erected a “gate” deliberately to frustrate drivers and turn their ire on the local mayor.

I asked a couple of undergraduate students about –gate. They’d heard of Deflategate, the kerfuffle over footballs that led to the four-game suspension of the Patriots’ Tom Brady. Where had –gate come from? They weren’t sure. One ventured Watergate, but couldn’t say if that was the original term or had something to do with a scandal involving water.

I hadn’t been keeping track, since the 1972 break-in at the Watergate office complex, but Wikipedia has. Or at least it’s been trying to keep track. Its list of 157 –gate scandals is, it warns, “a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.” It doesn’t include fictional –gate scandals conceived by television shows and comic strips. Nonetheless, the list includes three Nannygates and three Troopergates. Staying up to the minute, it includes Pussygate, The Washington Post’s recent exposé of the “extremely lewd conversation about women” in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush engaged in 2005. It even includes a Gategate involving British MP Andrew Mitchell’s being asked to use a different gate in order to leave Downing Street on his bicycle.

Watergate itself was once a gate, as it turns out: the 40 stone “Water Gate” steps that led up from the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial, from which audiences would listen to floating concerts in the 1930s. But few outside Washington knew the term until the Watergate became host to Nixon’s “plumbers.” True to –gate’s origins, most of the scandals listed in Wikipedia fall into the realm of politics, but the worlds of sport, technology, and arts and entertainment have their share. Even academe gets a piece of the -gate. Remember Climategate? Facebookgate?

Like any term that gets diluted over the years, the slapping on of the appendix –gate to various moments of embarrassment or chicanery tends to conflate those strings of clickbait with the more complex and invidious series of events that marked the original Watergate. The Oxford English Dictionary has kindly included a definition of -gate as “A terminal element denoting an actual or alleged scandal (and usually an attempted cover-up), in some way comparable with the Watergate scandal of 1972.” The editors point out that the suffix can append to place names, proper names, and common nouns (or, as in Deflategate, other parts of speech). To be comparable to Watergate, it seems to me, the scandal needs to involve nasty clandestine activity that comes to light and is followed by an almost equally nasty attempt to cover up or pass blame.

Bridgegate passes that test. So does Deflategate. Pussygate doesn’t meet that bar, though. Though the Donald has been blaming practically everyone but himself, his activities weren’t really clandestine. Other scandals to which Wikipedia called my attention prompted nostalgia more than the horror I still feel at the machinations of Watergate. Remember Closetgate, the furor over South Park’s spoof of Scientology? Or how about Billygate, the revelation that President Carter’s colorful brother had been representing Libya? My curiosity was sufficiently roused by Grangegate (“A political scandal involving New South Wales’ premier Barry O’Farrell and a $3,000 bottle of Penfolds Grange”) to look it up and discover that it had resulted in the unfortunate politician’s resignation, though presumably he drowned his sorrows nicely. And remember when we worried about Presidential haircuts? That would be Bill Clinton’s Hairgate, the worst scandal to affect him until … well, you know.

I think it’s time to retire the –gate suffix. Wikipedia is suggesting -ghazi, but that’s hard to spell and more apt to sink into the abyss of history. Surely someone can do, and spend months denying, something sufficiently invidious, illegal, and dangerous to claim its place in the 21^st century lexicon. Vladimir, you got any ideas?

A colleague of mine assigns one paper each semester that must be handwritten. He doesn’t just require students to hand-write a draft; they must write the whole paper by hand, and after he corrects it by hand, they must rewrite a final copy of the whole thing. I’ve expressed astonishment that he’s able to read his students’ handwriting. “I’m used to it,” he says. “And everyone who takes my classes knows, now, about the handwriting assignment. They ask, ‘When are you going to assign that paper?’ They dread it. And afterward, they love having done it. They think differently.”

Many of us suspect that our mode of thinking while writing changes depending on the technology we use. I initially began using a computer in the 1980s with precisely that trepidation. And many express anxiety about the disappearing art of handwriting — by which we mean, generally, cursive, the Palmer method that elementary students learned, by rote and painstakingly, for many decades in American schools.

But Anne Trubek, the director of Belt Publishing, investigates that nostalgia in her charming and informative book, The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, and unmasks several canards. The first is that handwriting has always been a treasured mode of self-expression. Not so, according to Socrates, whom Plato quotes as saying that men’s acquisition of writing “will implant forgetfulness in their souls” and that writing’s value pales in comparison to the living art of conversation: “If you ask a piece of writing a question, it remains silent.”

Taking us all the way back to cuneiform, Trubek points out that most manual writing had nothing to do with self-expression, but was a continual attempt to make handwriting as uniform and devoid of personality as possible. Hieroglyphics, medieval illuminated manuscripts, Roman capitals, the Spenserian “scrivenings” of Melville’s Bartleby, the simpler loops and slants of Palmer cursive — all these were taught, and acquired, by careful rote. Good penmanship was, at different times, lauded as a quality of the highly born (and later decried as a quality with which the highly born needn’t be bothered); praised as a form of religious devotion; inculcated as a moral duty; and praised as a muscular expression of manliness in a capitalist age.

But neither at the invention of the printing press nor during the introduction of the typewriter almost half a millennium later did a great hue and cry arise about the lost art of handwriting. On the contrary, people were generally glad to have writing that was readable and that did not cause, as one ad put it, “pen paralysis, loss of sight, and curvature of the spine.”

Funnily enough, between the typewriter’s introduction and the invention of voice-recognition software, authors who could afford “type-writers,” that is, generally female typists who could tap keys faster than anyone could scribble, often reverted to the spoken word. That is, they dictated their prose, and as Henry James remarked, it seemed “to be much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing.”

(Coincidentally, as I was perusing Trubek’s book, my brother was visiting, and we waxed nostalgic, not over cursive, but over those early typewriters, whose developers, as Trubek points out, devised the QWERTY keyboard in order to retard typing. Otherwise those hammers that struck the paper on our mom’s manual typewriter would have jammed up because she typed so fast. I also learned that a typing class was required at my brother’s all-boys’ school. It was offered at my all-girls’ school, but my mother dissuaded me from taking it. “If you never learn to type,” she said hopefully, “you’ll never be tempted to take a job as a secretary.”)

Handwriting as personal expression evolved, finally, in the 20^th century, perhaps as one of Freudian theory’s many stepchildren, perhaps along with the pseudo-science of graphology, which arose around the same time as phrenology and eugenics. If our handwriting could reveal our inner moral character, then surely it was an expression of our unique selves. And if our unique selves are our best and brightest selves, then surely … well, Trubek reports, no. Handwriting does not make us smarter: “There is is no convincing empirical evidence that handwriting is superior to keyboarding.” Our attachment to cursive is emotional. We learned it at a formative part of our lives, and it’s hard to accept that the formative part of children’s lives now will not include that element. Building, as commercial enterprises so often do, on our emotions, National Handwriting Day (January 23, 2017; mark your calendars!) and the lobbying for handwriting as a lost art are largely sponsored by manufacturers of writing implements and publishers of penmanship curricula.

So I won’t get weepy about the passing of cursive. I will note in closing, though, that as an avid follower of the tribulations of the billionaire murder suspect Robert Durst, I was disappointed to learn that the discovery of the shockingly similar pieces of Durst’s block handwriting pictured here may not prove effective evidence against him in a forthcoming trial for the murder of Durst’s friend Susan Berman. According to Anne Trubek, following a 1993 Supreme Court decision, ”handwriting analysis, always on shaky scientific grounds, became particularly dubious.”

Maybe it’s because I’m in the midst of teaching Mary Karr’s groundbreaking 1995 memoir, The Liars’ Club, but when I hear about studies that purport to determine the differences between how men and women speak, I want, in Karr’s inimitable lexicon, to earp.

Granted, these studies do not decree that biology is destiny. But they do claim to have sifted through thousands of language samples looking for language that is “aggressive” and language that is “tentative” and studying the parts of speech favored by men or by women (women, more “common verbs”; men, more prepositions). I am not in a position to judge the soundness of these studies. As with almost anything reporting on men and women who have been educated in a society with certain expectations about male and female behavior, I have my own doubts about their proving anything innately different between the sexes, only because social conditioning begins at a young, no doubt pre-verbal age. And one always wonders how a study might have turned out if it had been looking at factors that draw on no preconceived notions (like, for instance, “emotion words,” correlated with female speech, a list that includes the verbs agree and disagree). When the researcher Jennifer Jones writes that feminine language is “more socially oriented, expressive and dynamic” compared with masculine language’s being “more impersonal, long-winded and unemotional,” I do wonder if there isn’t some question-begging going on.

But as we approach the bitter, chewed-up end of one of the most acrimonious presidential campaigns in history, accepting researchers’ conclusions about masculine and feminine speech produces at least two surprising results:

1. Donald Trump talks like a girl.
2. Talking like a girl may have helped the Donald do as well as he has.

The first point carries some dubious associations, in that nine politicians, all male, apparently use more feminine speech than Hillary Clinton, and of 35 major politicians, only 10 men use more masculine speech than Carly Fiorina. But at least according to the terms set forth by the linguists doing these studies, Trump is a feminine outlier, more girly than any of the others. Apparently he uses more auxiliary verbs and fewer articles than a more masculine-sounding politician like Hillary Clinton. His language is, per the terms of the studies, emotional.

On the second point, volunteers responded to fictitious speeches, not gender-identified, whose language was more “feminine” by judging those candidates to be warmer and more trustworthy. Apparently those traits matter more in an anxious political landscape, whereas so-called masculine language may draw more fans in stable times. As we live, gentle readers, in anxious times, it’s easy to conclude that Trump’s girl-talk calms our nerves despite such content as “I could … shoot somebody & I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Of course, whatever volunteers may be told in a study, I suspect we tend to conjure an image of a man when we think of a politician, and so it may be that “feminine” language spoken by a man is a good thing. After all, we like it when male politicians cry, whereas we deride female politicians for doing so. If my hunch here is right, it may account for the other bit of linguistic research marking this particular election, which studies how Hillary Clinton’s language has evolved. Over the past 20 years, she has apparently gone from using a “feminine” number of auxiliary verbs and emotion-laden words to a lexicon heavy on first-person plural, prepositions, and swear words. Her feminine/masculine ratio has declined from 2.5 to 1.9. It may be, as Jones argues, that “changes in [Clinton’s] linguistic style reflect the reality of the political environment, the masculine norms of behavior that permeate our political institutions as well as our expectations of political leaders.” Or it may be, as Jones acknowledges in her paper, that aging could be a factor affecting changes in linguistic style. Anecdotally speaking, I play tennis all summer long with a gang of men over 50, and I have been struck by how little pressure they seem to feel, as they grow older, to sound authoritative or macho. (They do, on the other hand, still talk less than their female counterparts; even calling out the score before each point seems to constitute unnecessary jabber.)

Karr’s memoir makes a particular point of linguistic bluntness, as when she writes that her Texas mother “would have smacked the dogshit out of any yahoo who even approximated getting ready to bother her.” That sentence probably couldn’t make its way into any politician’s mouth. But if it could, I’d be pleased to note that it was spoken by a woman.

Every election has its own lexicon, or sublexicon, a cohort of words and phrases that go beyond my opponent and interest groups. In 2008, we had financial meltdown, change, country first, aloof, that one, yes we can, and other tidbits that were mostly returned to the stacks once the dust had settled on the campaign. The same held true for lingo that has lingered only as historical slogans now removed from their context—Tippecanoe and Tyler too; rum, Romanism, and rebellion; morning again.

Today, we hope, we lay to rest, not the bon mots of this election season, but its mots laids, its ugly words. For ugly they have been, uglier than most of us can remember, regardless of our political views.

There’s crooked, as in crooked Hillary, which calls to mind not only the contemporary use of the term to denote a crook, but also the hunched back of an old crone, from its original meaning of bent from the straight form.

There’s that really odd neologism cuck, which apparently comes from cuckold and is a newly favored term of the so-called alt-right to malign a politician (usually a cuckservative) who allows liberals to ride roughshod over his principles. The idea here is that the right-wing politicians are the husbands, the left-wing politicians the wives, and that members of the GOP establishment who fell away from Trump have allowed themselves to be, as it were, cuckolded. Does this metaphor make sense to you? Me neither. I deeply hope it will RIP after today.

There’s white genocide. I don’t even want to give this one a decent burial. Let it decompose in the woods.

There’s deplorables. Though the original meaning has to do with weeping, wailing, lamenting, Samuel Johnson’s footnote (“It is sometimes, in a more lax and jocular sense, used for contemptible; despicable: as deplorable nonsense, deplorable stupidity”) seems to apply to most of the tweeting and media lip-smacking over this term, used famously with basket. I’d like to think we could wax jocular here, but I am trying to conduct a burial for these terms, so best not. Perhaps we can simply replace it with a basket of delphiniums, for the grave.

There’s unfit. I know, you like this word. I do, too. Simple, straightforward, rendering judgment without seeming opinionated. But there’s also something Darwinian here. Survival of the fittest, rather than the unfit. I’d like to think of public servants, from now on, as fit, if not for their particular assignment, at least to survive. With any luck, fit will rise from the ashes of unfit, so our elected representatives might once again claim, as Kent did to Lear, “That which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in, and the best of me is diligence.”

Finally, nasty. Women, especially, have tried to reclaim this one, just as we got hold of badass and made it ours. But it’s not as euphonious, and speaking for myself, I’d like to keep its pejorative sense alive. So let’s cremate its application to strong-minded, ambitious women, and keep it for things that are filthy, disgusting, and spiteful. Like, for instance, a nasty campaign season.

Other words you hope you won’t be hearing much after today? Let’s lay them all out here, where they can expire naturally. I certainly hope they rest in peace. We don’t need zombie language haunting our attempts to rebuild civility after the ballots have been counted.

Votes did not save us from the precipice last week. Yet, so often, language has buoyed us — given us wings, or perhaps simply currents of warm air, to carry us onto steadier ground. I have no such words of my own, but in the past 10 days I’ve been hearing some wise voices, from other dark times. Here are a few:

From W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

From the Blessed Giles of Assisi:

Blessed is he who loves and does not therefore desire to be loved; blessed is he who fears and does not therefore desire to be feared; blessed is he who serves and does not therefore desire to be served; blessed is he who behaves well toward others and does not desire that others behave well toward him; and because these are great things, the foolish do not rise to them.

Surprisingly (to me), from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

From Aeschylus:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us.

From Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis letter:

But were things different: had I not a friend left in the world; were there not a single house open to me in pity; had I to accept the wallet and ragged cloak of sheer penury: as long as I am free from all resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face the life with much more calm and confidence than I would were my body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within me sick with hate.

From Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.

From that wise bard, Bill Shakespeare, in Hamlet:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? …
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

And speaking of action, from Alfred Hayes’s “Joe Hill,” sung by so many:

And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Says Joe, “What they can never kill
Went on to organize.”

From Winston Churchill’s address at Harrow School, October 29, 1941:

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

From Mary Wollstonecraft:

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties as much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.

From Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov:

Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love of humanity I don’t want it. … Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket.

From Susan B. Anthony, whose grave was festooned with voting stickers on November 8:

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.

From Maya Angelou:

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

And finally, from the usually morbid, brilliant Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

What wise voices are you hearing these days, Lingua Franca readers?

I’m a very recent convert to the idea of normal.

My allergy to the word has come from two separate strands. One is a trend I’ve noticed among students for at least 20 years, wherein they apply the word normal to forms they consider standard. My creative-writing students, for instance, decry John Barth’s as being “not normal” stories. My literature students ask if I want them to write a “normal” essay. I want to shake them by the shoulders and say, “There is no normal story! There is no normal essay!” Complicating this trend is students’ confusion of normal with normative, which is a term of art in philosophy and the social sciences. In philosophy, a normative statement is about how things “ought” to be, according to the one making the statement, and is far from synonymous with whether the thing referred to is standard or traditional. Social scientists speak of beliefs like family values having “normative” effects, that is, pushing behavior in the direction of societal norms, but it makes no sense to say, as some students do, that sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with your family is normative … unless you mean that it’s obligatory. (I’ll get back to this point in a minute.)

The second trend making me allergic to normal is, in theory, outdated, though recent events make it loom large again. I’m referring to the conformist notion that majority beliefs, actions, or orientations are “normal,” rendering the beliefs, actions, or orientations of the minority “abnormal.” Thus it becomes normal to be straight, abnormal to be gay, normal to be neurotypical and abnormal to be autistic, normal to be white and … you get the idea. Normal implies its opposite, and abnormal begs to be treated. If you spent your childhood, as some of us did, being instructed to “act more normal,” you may share my allergy.

Now, though, I count myself among the resistance to attempts to “normalize” the results of our presidential election. I nod my head whenever someone points out that this is not normal. Headlines, of course abound: media from Mother Jones to John Oliver to The New York Times decry the normalization of the current state of affairs. What’s odd, here, is that normalizing normally means changing something to bring it in line with whatever norms are prevalent. When we normalize relations with another country, we don’t simply call our relations with them “normal” and act as though everything’s fine. We change something about our relations, like sending diplomats to each other’s capitals. The Oxford English Dictionary’s examples refer to an 1880 “scheme for simplifying and normalizing orthography” and to a bodybuilding manual’s instruction to wait a minute “for your breathing to normalize.” On the other hand, under the definition “make normal,” it does include a New York Times note of 1864: “These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive.”

My point here is that “normalizing” the results of this election has nothing to do with changing Donald Trump’s ambitions or attitudes to bring them more in line with the norms of our country. It has to do with whitewashing those ambitions or attitudes so as to assume they are already in line. More dangerously, normalizing may mean shifting the norms themselves, so that we are, in effect, not normalizing Trump but bringing our own ethics and mores into accordance with a very different set of standards — standards that we previously regarded as anything but normative.

Which brings me back to normative. Clearly, broad-based acceptance of the Trump Administration on the basis of the Electoral College win is having a normative effect. That is, it is moving the words and actions of other elected officials and media pundits away from blistering attacks on this bizarre ascendancy and toward the kinds of language and ritual that are the norms for presidential transitions. We even find opinion setters making normative statements, in the philosophical sense, about how the rest of us ought to be behaving — for instance, showing our respect for the office by respecting the man who is slated to occupy it. For this sort of normativity, I have no use.

Finally, as I complete my conversion to a lover of what is normal — as opposed to what has been normalized, as opposed to normative pressures — I’m ready to accept, in this instance, both the term and its antonym. Broadly speaking, in my lifetime, regardless of my approval or disapproval of the ideologies and practices of the administration in power, our government has fallen within the parameters of normality. What we’ve got coming is abnormal. I don’t know the treatment for it, but calling it “normal” is a mighty ineffective cure.

I don’t know when prefixes stopped meaning what we think they mean, but it was a long time ago. I’m just wrapping up a course in recent American prose, for instance, where the term postmodernism keeps coming up. The students initially thought, quite logically, that postmodernism was a movement that came after modernism — even though, since they look around at a world they consider to be modern, they had a hard time wrapping their minds around its post- period’s being in the recent past. We worked hard to get to the place where modernist work could exist simultaneously with postmodernist work; to understand that postmodernism was following, reacting to, and in a kind of dialogue with modernism that relied only tangentially on chronology.

Many of us have had a similar reaction to alt-right. As I’ve written before, the alt-  sounds as if it’s proposing some sort of alternative to right-wing positions. Instead, its relationship to right-wing ideology is somewhat similar to the relationship of the moon hanging off the right end of the horizon to the right field of a baseball diamond.

Now we have, thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary, at least one Word of the Year: post-truth.  Here, we do seem to find ourselves in a Looking-Glass World. Isn’t truth eternal? How can something be post-truth unless truth itself has somehow become extinct? The OED’s definition takes a first stab, defining post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The definition reminds me most of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and Keats’s dictum, in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Are the post-truthers Romantic poets, then? Somehow I think not, but I suspect we have arrived at this confused place in part because of a deep misunderstanding of the relationship of invention to truth. Other creative types have tried to get at this. Albert Camus wrote, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Pablo Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”

My own experience has been rather more quotidian. Called upon, years ago, to testify in a court of law against an unscrupulous Manhattan landlord, my veracity was openly questioned by a defense lawyer who was a dead ringer for Dom Deluise. “Ms. Ferriss, you write fiction, isn’t that right?” he said, strutting up and down before the witness box.

“That’s right,” I admitted.

“You make up stories,” he continued, “isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I said, and my heart began sinking.

“Some of these stories,” the Dom Deluise clone said, stopping to fix beady eyes on me, “are so good, they’ve been published. Isn’t that right?”

I couldn’t resist. My ego rose to the fore. “That’s right,” I said, and sat up tall.

But the landlord was sent to Rikers, anyway, because the jury knew a fiction writer was not a habitual liar; her fiction might be a conduit toward metaphysical or moral truth, but what she testified in court had to do with facts, and facts alone.

Recently, the philosopher Michael P. Lynch, writing in The New York Times’s Stone column, has tried to address the post-truth paradox. He describes an atmosphere of deception, like the infamous shell game, in which facts are lost not only by our being persuaded of the factual basis of a lie, but also by our doubting every bit of information that comes across our path. He writes, “Faced with so much conflicting information, many people are prone to think that everything is biased, everything conflicts, that there is no way to get out of the Library of Babel we find ourselves in, so why try?”

Lynch’s explanation seems right to a point; that is, when everything could be fiction, we follow our so-called gut and pick, almost at random, certain stories in which we choose to believe, and that assemblage constitutes post-truth.

But I think Lynch is missing an element that constitutes the other side of the coin, if you will, from Picasso’s and Camus’s statements, from the Romantic poets’ lofty claims, and from my own experience in court. Poets, fiction writers, and painters all attempt to harness emotion in the service of truth. Truth is the end goal; there is nothing that lies beyond it. We select among the emotions we choose to excite — desire, fear, nostalgia, hunger, curiosity — but we hold to the final truth we are attempting to unveil as a traveler holds to the North Star. Those engaging in what the OED has held up as post-truth are doing something of the converse. They choose among truths — that Hillary Clinton gave a speech, or an undocumented immigrant committed a murder — and work those truths up, adding and subtracting as they see fit, in the service of emotion. The chief emotion they cleave to is fear. But just as a particular artist’s work might frame truth as our capacity to heal, or as the constancy of change, the emotion these scam artists (post-truthers seems far too polite) aim at may not always be fear but could now and then be hope, or pride, or disgust.

Truth, in other words, is a thing — a goal, a bedrock, a provable hypothesis, a conclusion from evidence, an insight to which, per Keats, the perception of beauty can bring us. Post-truth is a strategy. Its relationship to truth is strategic. Its goal is the exploitation of emotion. And while it cannot kill truth, it does in a way look past it, as a hubristic traveler might try to look past that North Star, and find beyond it utter darkness, nothingness, chaos.

I’ve been studying Italian, a language that gets me thinking about etymology even more than I usually do. The other day I learned that the word for root  is radice. “Funny,” I said to my husband as we were fixing dinner that night. “It’s like a cross between radish and radical.” I was — I swear to you — chopping salad as I said this. I held up a radish to examine. “Well, duh,” I said. “It’s a root.”

Linking radical to radice felt more complicated. In mathematics, it makes sense as the root, say, of a polynomial equation. Other meanings in fields like geometry (“having a relation to two intersecting spheres”), linguistics (“belonging to the root of a word”), medicines (“directed against the root of a disease”), and music (“belonging to the lowest note, or root, of a chord”) likewise reflect their etymology. But these aren’t the most common use of the word radical today.

More likely, you’ve heard the word as part of that phrase-that-supposedly-will-not-be-uttered-by-Democrats, radical Islamic terrorism. Or in terms of a process, as with the recent attack on the Ohio State University campus, which, in the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, “bears all of the hallmarks of a terror attack carried out by someone who may have been self-radicalized.” Most of the radicalizing, if we believe the press, comes from the outside, as when CNN reported on “a dark and growing underground world of jihadi rap that uses hip-hop culture to radicalize young men in the West.” Commonly, we think of radical, in the political sense, as the opposite of reactionary. Wanting to go back to old-fashioned ways, a reactionary opposes political or social liberalization or reform; a radical, per the Oxford English Dictionary, “advocates thorough or far-reaching political or social reform.” That same dictionary points out that radical thoughts or attitudes are “characterized by independence of or departure from what is usual or traditional.”

These qualities seem to have little in common with roots. Ditto the notion that a radical is “a (esp. left-wing) revolutionary,” a qualification to which Jack Hitt recently objected in The New York Times. As Hitt points out,

In current discourse, “radicalization” tends to limit unthinkable attacks to those carried out by anyone of Middle Eastern descent — but why? Micah Johnson, an African-American man in Dallas, murdered five police officers in the wake of new YouTube videos showing black citizens being fatally shot by the police — was he self-radicalized?

Hitt encourages us to think of the actions perpetrated by those who may have heard purportedly metaphoric calls for violence, like the cross hairs over Gabby Giffords’s Congressional district in Sarah Palin’s infamous map, as just as much the work of radicals as the attack on a Parisian nightclub:

Distant authorities talking in a deniably cryptic way contribute to the rationalization for violence. This shift toward violence can have an effect at just about every level — from the lone-wolf killer, to couples, to hidden cells. And although it’s a more esoteric field of study for policy-center professionals, radicalization of an entire nation is possible, too — typically after reckless innuendo from political leaders becomes acceptable and then routine.

I agree completely with Hitt, and at the same time I have trouble reconciling the original meaning of radical with a sense that radicalization means becoming extreme, on the edge, far from the roots of one’s culture or beliefs. It seems a contranym, similar to a word like sanction, which means both to punish and to reward.

Perhaps there is a way to reconcile radical and root, even in these troubled times. One of the OED’s examples of radicalization is the Radical Republican Party in the mid-19^th century, a group that went beyond Lincoln in its opposition to slavery and its advocacy of action against the South. One of its official pronouncements stated, “The word Radical as applied to political parties and politicians … means one who is in favor of going to the root of things; who is thoroughly in earnest; who desires that slavery should be abolished, that every disability connected therewith should be obliterated.” In other words, the radicals’ own sense of themselves was that their ideology, while extreme compared with the norms around them, in fact represented a return to fundamental values. Islamic terrorists, rejected though they may be by all the mainstream branches of Islam today, make a similar claim of adherence to “pure,” fundamental values. And the so-called alt-right, with its white-nationalist manifesto, makes all kinds of claims about the European legacy in America, its founding as a white Christian nation, and so on.

These roots are rotten. But it may be important for those of us who worry about a radicalized political culture to remember that those at the extremes, whether they wield power or simply throw bombs from the fringes, believe they reach deeper into the soil than the rest of us. At the moment, it’s probably impossible to recover the sense of radical as it was used by the Puritan cleric William Whately, who said, “This grace of faith is the radicall grace, that upon which all other graces grow as on their roote.” But we can remove the label radical from descriptions of people or acts that diverge from or seek to destroy what we consider the fundamental principles of our society. We can call them toxic, extreme, dangerous, unhinged, fanatical. But rooted they are not; there’s nothing worth watering there.

The writer Tayari Jones recently posted a question on Facebook about a phrase she’s planning to use in her forthcoming novel: “Won’t He do it!” I immediately felt the interest of, say, a cat in catnip, and followed along. Here’s what I learned, and what it made me think about.

First, “Won’t He do it!” is a statement, not a question. It’s a statement of faith in God, and it’s been popular, apparently, for several decades as a call and response in black churches. Jones’s initial concern arose when three editors flagged the phrase as one they (like me, a white Northeasterner) were unfamiliar with. The outpouring of response to her query demonstrated that “Won’t He do it!” is popular among African-Americans not only from the South but also from parts of the Midwest and Northeast, especially those with parents or grandparents from the South and especially those whose upbringing has been, as one person put it, “churchy.” There was some debate as to whether to include also the response phrase, “Won’t He will!” — which of course, syntactically speaking, doesn’t add up, but since when have popular slogans hewed to prescriptive rules?

Jones’s concern, once editors brought the phrase to her attention, was that people (like me) might read it and think, “Won’t who do what?” and that question would set them off on a tangent leading away from the story. True, some might argue, as one respondent did, that the phrase isn’t “interesting or colorful enough to risk waking a reader from a fictive dream.” But there is that capital H in “He,” which believers and nonbelievers alike seem to recognize as Christians’ preferred style for the pronoun referring to the Christian deity. And most who got involved in the question felt that terms of art are used everywhere. As one person pointed out, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is full of tennis references that the uninitiated surely don’t get. We read at least in part to expand our world, and if we can’t capture the meaning via context, there’s always the chance to look it up. The cost of removing the phrase is that a particular character’s idiom or world view may fail to come across with the clarity and verve the author wants.

At the same time, it’s good to cross-check phrases that are familiar to us in a particular context, not so much to determine if they’ll be understood at all, but to be aware of how understandings may vary. In Tayari Jones’s case, one in-the-know writer’s view that the phrase connoted characters who were “religious, first generation college-graduate-at-most, black, not very affluent, low on analytical reasoning skills” drew plenty of controversy, suggesting that an expression used by poorly educated people in one district may be popular with well-educated people in another. The reverse side of that problem is the way phrases that may have been in the culture a long while can go viral when one movie moment or one pop star makes a signature of them. This happened with “Make my day,” after Clint Eastwood snarled it in Sudden Impact. And it’s apparently happened with “Won’t He do it!” because of the African-American pop star Tamar Braxton’s frequent use of the phrase. If the expression acquires enough fame or infamy, it can be a long time before a fictional character can use it in innocence again.

Writers weigh these questions whenever they create characters living in the contemporary world, with its cultures and subcultures. We are forever trying to distinguish between the culturally specific and the obscure, looking to create verisimilitude, possibly to assert an idiom as one worth knowing, but not to thumb our noses at our readers’ ignorance.

Meanwhile, “Won’t He do it!” should stay in Tayari Jones’s story, if you ask me, and I’ll be listening up for it from now on.

In a moment of exasperation when a third of my first-year seminar class failed to show up for a library research session, I asked — rhetorically, I thought — in class the next day, “Who here doesn’t know what mandatory means?”

To my dismay, three hands went up.

I’ve been thinking about that moment over the past couple of months, as the debate over the incoming president’s mandate has raged. Hundreds of news sites and blogs have claimed that, having lost the popular vote by nearly three million, he has no mandate. As Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson put it in Time magazine, “this election wasn’t a popular rejection of Democrats at large or even Hillary Clinton in particular. Nor was it an affirmation of Republicans and Donald Trump.” Other, conservative media have argued, instead, over what the incoming President’s mandate is. Asche Schow, writing in the Jared-Kushner-controlled Observer, summarized the mandate as “making America great again”: specifically, “immigration reform including a border wall, as his campaign revolved around the ‘build the wall’ promise. He also promised ‘big league’ jobs and the restoration of American manufacturing and prosperity for the working-class. He’ll definitely have to deliver for him or he can kiss a second term goodbye.” In other words, the mandate isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it matches the campaign promises.

Here’s where this gets interesting, for me. On the one hand, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, a mandate occurs when one party authorizes another to act on its behalf. The root of the word is the same as the Latin word for hand, which puts me in mind of a contested position on the popular HBO series Game of Thrones: the Hand of the King. Like the monarch’s “right-hand man,” the Hand has been chosen (wisely or not) because he understands the king’s preferences well enough to execute them without having to consult. When the Hand of the King acts against the monarch’s interests, he does well to watch out for his head.

In this sense, a mandate is sort of mandatory. To steal one of the OED’s references, a writer noted in the Hansard Commons in 1886 that “I am perfectly aware that there exists in our constitution no principle of the mandate. …  But … I maintain that there are certain limits which Parliament is morally bound to observe, and beyond which Parliament has morally not the right to go in its relations with the constituents.” In other words, the mandate (if it exists) not only authorizes, but also limits. Moreover, according to most uses I’ve found in the last couple of years in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a mandate directs. John Kerry, for instance, wrote of the State Department, “The office works to execute its Congressional mandate to monitor, report on, and promote the human right of religious freedom across the globe.” Angela Dorn of the nonprofit Single Stop said in an Essence interview, “While I am involved in strategy, human resources, development, and board governance, my most important mandate is heading the legal department.” And The Saturday Evening Post observed in 2015, “Before the ACA there was no employer mandate. No law required employers to provide health insurance to their workers.”

To have a mandate, in this common sense, is to have a set of unavoidable responsibilities that you owe to a person, an organization, a government, a population. That’s very different from the way The Washington Post, for instance, used the term when it  claimed, “Trump’s political mandate is very, very small.” Or when U.S. News & World Report pointed out that Republicans were incorrectly claiming that “the president-elect did in fact win that mythical treasure, an electoral mandate.” It’s also different from the “legislative mandate” referred to by National Review, which obtains “when [a president’s] popular support is such that other people in the political system feel compelled to help him do things that he wants to do, and that they don’t.” That last mandate is actually a mandate for the “other people” who “feel compelled”; the president, relying on popularity joining his will to the people’s, gets to mandate. (And, just to be clear, NR points out that a legislative mandate “is irrelevant if you have enough votes to pass things through Congress just with the support of people who already agree with you.” That is, if the Hand of the King is deeply enough in cahoots with the king, no pesky threats of executing the people’s will, or executing the Hand, are necessary.)

When you have an incoming administration whose plans and promises have been either narrow or ridiculous, however, it becomes convenient to treat a mandate as a blanket authorization rather than a set of directives. When Kellyanne Conway says, “There is a mandate there,” she might be talking (seriously?) about rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants. Or she might be talking about cutting Medicaid, which was not on the table during the election. She might be talking about the extensive hiring of lobbyists for the presidential transition. In other words, to the winning team right now, a mandate is less like a series of marching orders and more like a pennant. How this individual and his loyalists will react if and when they learn, like my students, what mandatory means, we can only begin to imagine.
 

My New Year’s resolution is to write less about politics. But Orwell has hardly been the only one to note how deeply entwined are politics and language. Today I’m obsessed with the difference between typos and misspellings.

Why? Because the storm of tweets sent out by our president-elect reveals an unusual number of orthographic oddities. Let’s put aside, for the moment, the claim that these are “grammar errors,” grammar being another province from orthography. I’m interested in the subtle difference between, say, the word Phoenix being spelled Phoneix and the word paid being spelled payed.

Typographical errors are rarer these days because of the prevalence of auto-correction software, which generally replaces teh with the, though it has yet to find a fix for words that accidentally form other words, like form and from. Where typos do occur (because that software isn’t activated, or can’t guess at the word intended), it’s generally due to a slip of hand or finger, especially in what’s unkindly been dubbed “fat-finger syndrome,” a problem especially with the onscreen keyboard of smartphones. That some people are faster, sloppier typists than others says little beyond the obvious. Back in the transitional period between typewriters and computers, when the electronic typewriter made its brief appearance, I owned one with a glitch in its program: Anytime I typed too fast, it would replace the letter n with the letter k, so that a character leaked, rather than leaned, against the door.

This isn’t to say that typos don’t matter. An international crisis ensued when a typist accidentally transcribed Sedan as Sudan in the March 2, 2005, Congressional Record. And the email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta reassuring him that a message he had received to change his password was “a legitimate email” was no doubt a typo. The helpdesk staffer had meant to write an illegitimate but went about it too fast. Sic transit.

But a misspelling differs from a typo in that the typist either believes the word to be spelled differently or has no clear idea and is simply guessing. We professors see errors like those in the president-elect’s tweets far more frequently than we’d like. At the same time, we’re sometimes hard pressed to distinguish misspelling from badly auto-corrected typo. Using a few of the tweets as examples, let me unpack:

Looks to me like the Bernie people will fight. If not, there blood, sweat, and tears was a total waist of time. Waist for waste could conceivably be a typo, if the author omits the final e and the autocorrect function supplies an interior i instead. Mine doesn’t do this, but programs differ. There seems a misspelling, albeit one that derives from inattention more than ignorance.

The Democrats, lead by head clown Chuck Schumer, know how bad Obamacare is. A misspelling. Typographical sloppiness would not lead to the insertion of the extra letter a. Most of us understand that this mistake comes from the oddity of English spelling, where the past tense of read is read and the identically pronounced past tense of lead is led. More on this sort of error below.

Keep you doctor, keep your plan! A typo, omitting the r.

Ted Cruz is totally unelectable … Will loose big to Hillary. Surely a misspelling, and again, we understand that the rhyming of lose with choose rather than with hose, combined with the existence of the word loose, makes this a common error, despite the fact that spell-check software generally flags it (which implies that the typist doesn’t know an alternative).

All of the phony T.V. commercials against me are bought and payed for by SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS. A misspelling with no obvious explanation other than lack of knowledge about the irregular past-tense spelling of the verb to pay. Interestingly, this is the only error thus far that my own spell-check function has failed to mark.

Wow, every poll said I won the debate last night. Great honer! (to which a producer at Vox responded, “Is that your honer or are you just happy to see me?”). Misspelling. The key for e is nowhere near the key for o. To be fair, other -or words, like adapter/adaptor, have alternate spellings, but –or/-er is a suffix in those cases.

Leightweight chocker Marco Rubio (tweeted three times, same spelling). A double misspelling. While English is notorious for its apparently illogical gh spelling and pronunciation variations, you’d have to be thinking light is spelled like height to add the extra e, and the long-vowel rule makes chocker for choker particularly odd.

China steals United States Navy research drone … in unpresidented act. A misspelling, possibly with Freudian implications.

Why does it matter if the mistakes are typos or misspellings? As our interface with writing evolves, people who study spelling are scrambling to keep up. But there has been a consensus that, in general, people who read a lot will be better spellers than those who do not, regardless of formal spelling instruction; and recent studies have shown strong neural correlations between written language comprehension and language production, or spelling. In other words, if you see a word correctly spelled millions of times, then regardless of the peculiarities of English orthography, you’re apt to know when it looks “wrong.”

Conversely, we tend to assume that people who misspell a great deal — as opposed to those who make typographical errors — are not just sloppy typists or proofreaders, but less literate than those who spell well. This is not always the case. Dyslexia could be a factor. And while I have not read studies on the connection between auto-correction and spelling, it strikes me as reasonable that readers who grew up with the assumption that the computer would fix their misspellings might not process the words they read in the same way as those of us who grew up without computers. But our president-elect not only grew up without computers, but apparently does not use one (except, that is, the hand-held version with which he tweets).

So, while it is not impossible that a highly literate person would produce the tweets I have just cited, it is reasonable to infer that the person producing them may not be highly literate. May not, in fact, read much at all, or may never have read very much. And for those of us who believe that critical thinking, the absorption of complex information, and an engagement with nuance are presidential qualities that most likely evolve through frequent and prolonged contact with the written word, this prospect is terrifying.

A confession: Before this political season, I had not understood the term gaslighting, so eloquently explained on Friday by my colleague Ben Yagoda. I may have heard it, but only as a conniving manipulation by some politician of whom the writer didn’t approve. Not knowing its provenance, I thought maybe it had something to do with leakage from old-fashioned lighting, such that those who inhaled it sort of lost their minds.

In fact, as Ben points out, the term gaslighting originated with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light, in which a scheming husband keeps dimming the lights in the apartment while insisting to his wife that they are as bright as ever. The play evolved into a 1944 film starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Boyer’s character had been convincing his wife that she must be going mad, since reality is no longer what she can perceive with her own eyes and ears.

In the climactic scene, Bergman manages to turn the tables:

As pointed out recently in Slate, the trick is not unlike the swindling tailors’ feat in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” telling people that their naked emperor is clothed in finery. But Hans Christian Andersen’s story has an instructive twist: The tailors began by claiming that their magical cloth would be invisible to any who were unfit for their roles. The people didn’t consider that they either were being fooled or had gone mad; they considered that they could be judged incompetent and (even the emperor himself) fired.

“Everyone did his best,” Andersen writes, “to seem well pleased.” In other words, they were all lying in order not to lose their grip on their place in society. Whether each thought his neighbor was also lying is left unsaid in the story; Andersen writes only, “Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool.”

We find a more pointed example of what political scientists call “pluralistic ignorance” in the former Soviet-bloc countries, where a majority held views contrary to the regime but supposed that their neighbors accepted the regime’s legitimacy. But in both “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and, say, the reign of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the authority of the government crashes quickly once the con is exposed, because people are never truly convinced of a narrative that contradicts the evidence of their senses and reason.

In 1951, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which a subject entered a room full of people who “agreed” that, of the three lines in Exhibit 2 in the box below, either line B or line C, but not line A, matches the line in Exhibit 1.

Out of 50 subjects, 37 concluded that the others in the room were correct. Interviewed after the experiment, most admitted that they had falsely reported their own conclusions, going along with the group in order not to be ostracized; only a few had been truly convinced of a conclusion that defied the evidence of their own eyes.

Those few were being gaslighted. In view of the Patrick Hamilton play, and of the term’s increasing use to describe cases of domestic abuse, it’s not surprising that only a small percentage of random psychological subjects, albeit conformist, were not truly persuaded that their own cognitive processes were off-base.

To gaslight effectively, I suspect, your victims must be somehow emotionally cathected to you. Thus a beloved husband can gaslight his wife; thus a charismatic dictator can gaslight many of his subjects. By fostering insecurity, by loudly asserting as truth various “facts” and narratives that make no sense, the gaslighter gains a kind of emotional access that will eventually trump his victims’ reasoning.

The term has become so popular that we risk misusing it. Take the account of a staff member of Senator Ted Cruz being publicly subjected to false rumors of a sexual affair: “I was gaslit,” she wrote. “I was trapped inside an alternate reality. But … I was surrounded by friends, family, and colleagues who helped me stand firm in my truth.”

Yes, a community of support can deflect efforts to gaslight. But the term itself was misappropriated in that instance: Slander and smearing are not the same as gaslighting. On the other hand, for example, given our attachment to sugar and the emotional persuasiveness of advertising, it’s fair to say that industry-sponsored claims are managing to gaslight those who would otherwise (and reasonably) trust the enormous evidence of sugar’s harmfulness.

Meanwhile, when we consider new political positions being taken by apparently intelligent figures, it’s impossible to tell, from the outside, whether they have subsumed their own reasoning powers to the narrative of someone who has emotional control over them, or whether they are merely playing a part, like the noblemen who took hold of the emperor’s “mantle”: “Then they pretended to lift and hold it high. They didn’t dare admit they had nothing to hold.”

Somehow I am getting news announcements from The New York Times on my iPhone. I don’t know how I elected this option, but it’s interesting to see what they choose to send me and how they choose to word it. Here’s what floated in on the morning of January 17:

18 million would lose insurance and premiums would soar in 2018 if Obamacare is partially repealed, a congressional study says.

Now, I know we get our panties in an unnecessary twist when it comes to things like the conditional tense and the subjunctive mood, now known by other terms as linguists like my colleague Geoff Pullum have established a more robust framework for discussions of English grammar. But regardless of what we understand, technically, about these constructions, we native speakers understand that a sentence with if introducing an antecedent clause and would as the modal verb in the main clause is one of two things:

1. A past-tense statement, e.g. “If we were spending the weekend at Grandma’s, she would make us pancakes.”
2. A contrary-to-fact statement, e.g., “If I were hungry, I would eat those pancakes, but I’m not so I won’t.”

There are also if clauses serving as antecedents in sentences in which the modal verb is in the indicative. They could be past tense, e.g., “If we were spending the weekend at Grandma’s, she made us pancakes.” But when the main modal verb is indicative and in the present tense, the statement is generally hypothetical, e.g., “If I get hungry, I will tackle those pancakes.”

Or, to return to the hypothetical fate of health-care insurance in America, “18 million will lose insurance and premiums will soar in 2018 if Obamacare is partially repealed, a congressional study says.”

Often, as language has evolved, we use a plain old indicative verb following if in a contrary-to-fact statement, e.g., “If I was hungry, I would eat those pancakes, but I’m not so I won’t.” But rarely, and only in very particular circumstances, do we use the modal verb would following the use of a present-tense indicative after if.

Bear with me. This matters. Not a lot, but a little.

Some examples, to help us picture this. We don’t tend to say, for instance, “If I get hungry, I would tackle those pancakes.” Someone paying attention might respond, “Well, are you or aren’t you hungry? You eating them, or should I give them to the dog?” Similarly, we don’t tend to say, “If he is ready to go, he would come downstairs.” (We might say he should  come downstairs, but that’s a different verb and a different matter.) Instead, we frame his readiness as either a hypothetical or a counterfactual:

1. “If he were ready to go, he would come downstairs,” or, if we’re being less snooty about it, “If he was ready to go, he would come downstairs” = he’s clearly not ready to go, which is why he’s not downstairs.
2. “If he is ready to go, he will come downstairs” = watch those stairs, because he may be ready to go any second and will appear.

The New York Times didn’t choose any of these options. Why not? you ask. Indeed. I asked myself the same question. And here’s what I think:

When you’re setting forth a hypothetical whose consequences are such that no one really wants to be thinking about them, you’re tempted to play down those consequences — to make them appear, as it were, contrary to fact rather than entirely possible. To take my last example, if “he” is a cannibalistic monster, and I’m worried about his being ready to go before I can beat a retreat, you might wish to reassure me while not closing the door to the possibility of the monster’s appearance. That inherent tension might cause you to say (or write), “If he’s ready to go, he would come downstairs.” Thank goodness, I think. He’s not downstairs now, and he’s probably not coming. I’ll hang around for tea.

Similarly, the bit of news on my iPhone, “18 million would lose insurance and premiums would soar in 2018 if Obamacare is partially repealed,” doesn’t frighten me so much as the statement “18 million will lose insurance and premiums will soar in 2018 if Obamacare is partially repealed.” At the same time, the Times is not claiming in any way that Obamacare will not be repealed, as the statement “18 million would lose insurance and premiums would soar in 2018 if Obamacare were (or was) partially repealed” would indicate.

This matters because, if the possibility is frightening, the news of it should alarm us. Fudging the verbs removes the alarm just as the alarm should be sounding. Yes, it sells more newspapers. Yes, it prevents your detractors from selectively quoting the consequent without the antecedent (NYT CLAIMS 18 MILLION WILL LOSE INSURANCE AND PREMIUMS WILL RISE) and accusing you of “fake news.” But grammatically and journalistically, it ushers us into a gray area just at the moment when we need as much clarity as we can muster for the days ahead.w

They were hard to ignore, those square-shaped pink knit caps carpeting the Mall in Washington and flooding the streets of New York and other major cities around the world. Weeks before the Women’s March, when I first saw organizers sporting these things, I thought they looked stupid, an awkward flop of pink atop the head. Then a crafty friend knit me one, and it not only kept me warm through a gray, blustery day in Washington; it empowered me.

The Pussy Hat Project is a classic example of appropriation, taking a term that has been used as a slur and turning it into a badge of group identity and cohesion. Queer, for instance, was a derogatory epithet, reclaimed by the LGBTQ community to mean not only homosexual but emphatically different in one’s very approach to sexuality. Of course, that word, like the word pussy, did not always or in all circumstances carry a pejorative meaning. I grew up with an Edwardian book, Queer Stories for Boys and Girls, on the bookshelf, and what we expected of those stories was a strange plot twist, perhaps some magic. Other epithets, like what we call the n-word today, however casually used, bore insulting overtones from an early moment — and not surprisingly, have been more problematic to appropriate.

Each example of appropriation, one might say, has its own story. Some, like feminists’ appropriation of nasty woman, are true examples of semantic inversion. Others retain several original meanings, including the pejorative one, even while being reclaimed. The pussy of pussy hat begins with a sound used to call a cat, or perhaps a rabbit. (I have owned both cats and rabbits and have never known either to respond to a call, but that’s another matter.) Slowly, at least in English, it comes to refer to the animal itself, and from there, to those who behave in ways associated with pussycats.

I say “ways associated,” because cats, of course, are predators, armed with sharp claws and teeth and apt to pounce when the prey is most vulnerable. But those aren’t the qualities evoked by the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition, “A girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp[ecially] sweetness or amiability. Freq[uently] used as a pet name or as a term of endearment.” Indeed, young girls in the 19^th century often acquired the nickname Puss or Pussy, much as they might be called Kitty.

Just as the call for the cat evolves into a term for the cat itself, so the “amiable” quality of a girl called pussy becomes the term both for the most “amiable” part of that female’s anatomy and for the supposedly “girlish” quality of cowardice, e.g. “Don’t be a pussy.” At this point—which, again according to the OED, began sometime around 1699 — the term, like many sexually charged terms, owes its pejorative quality mostly to the context in which it is used.

Enter humor; enter irony. My earliest encounter with pussy as double entendre came in watching W.C. Fields’s brilliant evasion of Hollywood censors in the film International Hotel, where Peggy Hopkins Joyce finds herself “sitting on something,” and he reaches down to retrieve . . . a “pussy”:


International House W.C Fields Trailer by NilbogLAND

The pussy hats themselves respond to Donald Trump’s infamous bragging about sexual assault, but they do so with more ironic subtlety than Fields. The square corners of the hat, when it’s worn, vaguely resemble cat ears, but the hat itself is pink — hardly a cat color, typically “girly,” and slyly connoting private parts. The hat of Pussy Hat Project itself replaces the word cat in pussy cat, so that the kittenishness, if you will, can be put on and off, not an essential part of your identity. The vast majority of the hats in the march were handcrafted using traditional women’s skills, establishing an “ownership” of both the term and the object that goes beyond semantics. The predatory feline qualities overlooked during centuries of pussy references found expression in symbolic claws, shredded images of the new President, and references to cats’ “grabbing back.” Meow, indeed.

Finally, pussy hats appeared not just atop women’s heads during the march, but also sported by men — bald men, bearded men, old and young men. They thus appropriated the term as well. If “sweetness and amiability” are pussy traits, these men did them proud.

I don’t know why the Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch diagrammed part of a sentence in one of his legal opinions. Following the Reed-Kellogg norms that Mark Liberman of Language Log once described as “intellectually obsolete for a hundred years,” Gorsuch diagrammed his selection sloppily. It’s unclear how the diagram really informed his opinion. But more to the point, those merry few who have followed this revelation of Judge Gorsuch’s affinity for diagramming seem to be judging his fitness for the Supreme Court accordingly.

Let’s begin with the sentence, the question before Judge Gorsuch, and the diagram. The judge was rendering an opinion on a freak occurrence during a crime, when a fellow named Rentz fired one bullet that went on from injuring one individual to killing another. The question at hand was whether Rentz could properly be charged, not only with having committed two violent felonies (assault with a deadly weapon and homicide), but also with two violations of a certain statute. The state wanted to find Rentz guilty twice; Judge Gorsuch deemed only one violation to have taken place, and ruled that any other decision produced a situation of double jeopardy. The statute in question reads: “any person who, during and in relation to any crime of violence or drug trafficking crime … uses or carries a firearm, or who, in furtherance of any such crime, possesses a firearm, shall, in addition to the punishment provided for such crime … be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not less than 5 years.”

Here’s Gorsuch’s diagram:

 Here’s the correct diagram:

The difference isn’t terribly meaningful, though the correct diagram does illustrate the key conjunctions that matter to the charge. That is, the punishment is only for using the firearm both during the crime and in relation to it; if I shoot a clay pigeon while I’m robbing a bank, this particular statute doesn’t apply, nor does it apply to my knocking off one of my co-conspirators with a firearm the night before as we were discussing his dalliance with my wife. At the same time, the charge is relevant whether it’s a crime of violence or one of drug trafficking, take your pick; it doesn’t have to be both.

Judge Gorsuch’s point, though, was different. He was arguing, as he put it, simply that “Just as you can’t throw more touchdowns during the fourth quarter than the total number of times you have thrown a touchdown, you cannot use a firearm during and in relation to crimes of violence more than the total number of times you have used a firearm.” He could have made this point merely by observing that the adjectival clause “who uses a firearm” was restricted by its adverbial modifiers. The parlor trick was fun but unnecessary, and while Judge Gorsuch’s opinion may have earned its distinction for “Exemplary Legal Writing,” it didn’t do so by virtue of Reed-Kellogg.

And yet, the response to this juicy tidbit (to be honest, there’s not much “juicy” about Judge Gorsuch otherwise) says much about what we value and disdain in court nominees. NPR cited the diagramming as evidence that Gorsuch “has an affinity for the English language.” Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, opined that “All of my diagrams looked like plans for the Erie Lackawanna railroad. I’d filibuster this guy just because he’s able to do it.” And Twitterers responded to lawyer Bryan Gividen’s tweet of the diagramming anecdote with comments like “My 8th grade english teacher just raised up out of the grave and said i told you diagramming was important!’,” “I’d love to see him do this in the next 2^nd Amendment case (Lesson 1: Dependent and Independent Clauses),” “Priceless and who among the Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee could do that,” “I am so jazzed from seeing this that I should perhaps be worried,” “After seeing this, I support him, even though I’m pretty uninformed otherwise,” and “He reminds me of my 5^th grade teacher who flunked me. No way.”

I would very much prefer that we judged Supreme Court nominees on their judicial temperament and their record of wise, nonpartisan decision making. But if we must regard Reed-Kellogg sentence diagramming as the bright, clever little bauble that will make or break Judge Gorsuch’s reputation, at least among certain factions, let me go on the record with this: It was a sloppy diagram that he didn’t need to prove his point. Now tell me, children, what does your inner Miss Gradgrind say to that?