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When 2 Negatives Don’t Make a Positive

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WouldsThose of us who learned about double negatives in grammar class understood them as grammatical no-nos. You were not to say, “I don’t have no bananas,” because, by denying the absence of bananas, you were confirming their presence rather than (as you presumably intended) confirming their absence.

The issue of double negation has arisen in recent decades because African American Vernacular English uses double negatives frequently. Other languages, as many have observed, regularly employ what would translate literally as double negatives. For instance, the standard French sentence Je n’en sais rien literally translates as “I don’t of it know nothing.” We all understand Mick Jagger when he croons, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Another type of double negation is useful rhetorically, as when Barack Obama said of the window for resolving Iran’s nuclear issues, “that time is not unlimited.” This very example suggests another truth found mostly in discussions of logic. When a double negation involves a so-called contrary, rather than a contradictory, we cannot annihilate both the “nots” and come up with a positive statement. To wit: If I write, “No apples are not red,” then we can cross out both nots to conclude that apples are red, because, as the logician Alex Scott writes, “The statement that ‘apples are not red’ is contradictory to the statement that ‘apples are red,’ because both cannot simultaneously be true and both cannot simultaneously be false.” But if I write, “She is not unhappy” or “I wouldn’t say he’s not angry,” we cannot form a conclusive statement by removing the negatives. We cannot conclude, that is, that she is happy or he is angry, because one might be neither happy nor unhappy, neither angry nor devoid of anger.

In his statement about the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is making rhetorical use of this logical nicety. While it’s surely true that time cannot be both limited and unlimited, it’s possible also that time is neither limited nor unlimited, because no one has set limits yet. The statement works as an implied threat that’s not yet showing its teeth.

OK, we all know where this is going. Last week, after his infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin, the President of the United States was asked about Russia’s involvement in election interference in 2016. He responded, “My people came to me. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Two days later, he tried to walk back that statement, saying, “The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.”

Pundits have seized on this denial. Most have pointed out the absurdity of shoehorning the “corrected” statement into a larger context that clearly meant to disparage claims of Russian interference. The Economist speculated on the possibility of Trump’s engaging in so-called misnegation, a tendency to misspeak because of the number of negatives in a sentence. Referring us to Mark Liberman at Language Log, they point to former CIA chief Michael Hayden’s confusing statement, “I would not be surprised if this were not the last indictment we see that doesn’t mention an American.” Clearly, with Trump’s original sentence containing exactly one not (as opposed to Hayden’s three), misnegation is an unlikely explanation.

But I’d like to point something else out. Let us suppose, absurd as it seems, that Trump meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” Can we flip this sentence, as we can with the red-apples sentence, to read, “I see a reason why it would be Russia”? I don’t think we can. I don’t see any reason is itself equivocal; it’s not at all the same as claiming there are no reasons. Trying to resolve the sentence by eliminating the negatives is no more possible than it is to claim that She is not unhappy means that she is happy.

Why does this matter? Because neither the sentence Trump actually said — I don’t see any reason why it would be – nor the sentence he claims to have intended — I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be — confirms the findings of American intelligence agencies: that robust evidence points to Russia’s interference in our election. Say you are indicted for murdering your wife. A video you claim to be fake shows you stabbing her multiple times with a kitchen knife. In the courtroom, you say, “I loved her. I don’t see any reason why I would be the killer.” When someone points out the existence of the video, you say, “Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be the killer.’”

Have you confessed? Well, not quite yet. Give the investigation time.

 


Getting a Fix on ‘Fixers’

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Cohen fixerOne of the many astonishing developments, for language mavens, in the unfolding drama of the Mueller investigation has been the casual use of the term fixer. Mainstream media outlets have taken to calling Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, Trump’s fixer. Several times, I’ve heard that Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, has replaced Cohen as Trump’s attorney and fixer.

I’d always thought of the term as more pejorative than descriptive, so I went looking. One of the most famous uses of the term, of course, is Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel, The Fixer — which, if you ask a typical literate person, is about a guy who gets into legal trouble for making illicit arrangements for his client. Wrong. It’s about a handyman, a guy who fixes things in a brick factory. A similar sense is embodied in the Marvel Comics hero Fixer, who’s a technological genius now turned to a life of good deeds. But the Yiddish term macher, or “maker,” generally does translate as “fixer,” notably in last year’s Richard Gere vehicle, “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer,” where Gere plays an aspiring, amoral confidant to the powerful.

Though the term doesn’t even make it into my ancient (1967) Random House Dictionary, it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in the sense of “one who arranges or adjusts matters (often illicitly)” as early as 1909, when Will Irwin wrote in Confessions of a Con Man: “At the head of the outfit stood the ‘fixer’, whose job it was to bribe or stall city officials so that the gamblers could proceed with reasonable security.” A reference to a “fixer of elections” is even earlier (1889), but that meaning seems slightly different to me. An election fixer, like a fight fixer, fixes the election or fight much the way that fixative fixes a charcoal drawing, or a statue is affixed to the floor: He sets the result so that it cannot be changed.

You might argue that the fixer played by George Clooney in the 2007 film Michael Clayton fixes situations much the way that Malamud’s fixer tries to fix his broken wagon wheel. Something has broken or gone wrong, and the fixer’s job is to make it whole or functioning again. But functioning, in Michael Clayton’s case, means operating the way his firm, not any objective standard, means for it to operate. Malamud’s Yakov is an upright man; George Clooney’s Clayton is not.

Full disclosure: I do not think Michael Cohen is an upright man. As my colleague Ben Yagoda put it in his April prediction of Cohen’s “flipping,” Trump’s former lawyer is “a fixer of the old school.” But as recently as 2014, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the term fixer failed to carry opprobrium only in its handyman connotation, or when referring to practical necessities in corrupt regimes. For instance, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” the journalist Matthieu Aikins described the tragedy of James Foley in part this way:

It’s not like the magazines that I write for have bureaus overseas or security consultants or anything like that. Places like Rolling Stone do give you a good expense budget which helps a lot ’cause you can hire the right fixer and pay for, you know, things that bring more security as compared to, you know, freelancers really on a shoestring budget. And actually, you know, that was one of the reasons why James Foley was kidnapped, was because he wasn’t — didn’t have, you know, proper fixer and transportation, and they were stopping in an internet cafe in Syria. You know, the problem of inadequate support for freelancers is a tricky one.

It’s true that Anthony Bourdain referred unabashedly to his Detroit “fixer” on CNN in 2014, but Bourdain was always one to sling argot. Otherwise, fixers are bad-boy characters on TV shows and in movies, or gangster associates now doing time; often, they are “fixers,” the term contained within quotes so we can all identify it as a euphemism … until you get to 2018.

Granted, an early 2017 reference by none other than Sean Hannity, talking about the Women’s March, reads ambiguously:

I’m talking about women because I was acutely aware of the, quote, “women’s march” this last weekend, and I thought of all the things that we can count and quantify, all the items that they could have listed on their list of grievances from the podium about President Obama, who was president for eight years. President Trump has been here for about eight hours. And you know, if this is your list of grievances, then at least help is on the way. At least you’ve got the greatest fixer and rescuer and brilliant businessman in Donald Trump to help fix it.

Presumably Hannity means fixer in the sense of repair person, though you never know. But with the rift between Trump and Michael Cohen making the news, articles regularly refer to Cohen (and often Giuliani) as Trump’s fixer — as if every president has had a fixer, just as he’s had a secretary of state. As Ben Zimmer recently observed, The Wall Street Journal set the trend. Since then, at least six news articles in The New York Times have simply named Mr. Cohen as the president’s fixer; only one, by way of the Associated Press, puts the term into quotation marks as if it’s something to hedge about. The Washington Post logs 14 uses of fixer in the past 10 days, with only the AP stories putting the term into quotes. Fox News’s use of fixer is confined to the canceled TV show “Fixer Upper,” but CNN is not only replete with ordinary references to Cohen as Trump’s fixer, but also to Bill Shines, the new head of White House communications, as having been Roger Ailes’s fixer. This isn’t to say that a mainstream media outlet like CNN has abandoned the notion that fixer is a pejorative term; this past May, it ran a piece about the spokesman for the family of the slain Democratic consultant Seth Rich, in which CNN said, “Conspiracy theorists portrayed Bauman as a fixer forced upon the family by the DNC to cover up a supposed crime. In the lawsuit, Bauman says he was never hired nor paid by the DNC.”

So maybe it’s legitimate to be a fixer these days. Or maybe there’s so much illegitimacy in the air that describing someone as a fixer, plain and simple, no longer raises eyebrows.

Next up: bagman?

 

 

 

 

Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow-Polka-Dot Emoji

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French dancer Micheline Bernardini modeling the first bikini

I have only recently started using emojis, and I often choose the wrong ones — the other day, for instance, I meant to send an "astonished" face (😲) and instead sent an "embarrassed" face (😳). Circumstances that would cause me to include something like "cute tiger" (🐯) have thus far eluded me.

So I don’t know when I might want to use the female-swimsuit emoji, but I can still appreciate how exercised Florie Hutchinson of Emojination has become at the sole depiction of this attire, a pink bikini with yellow polka dots shaped for a D-cup bra size (👙). Hutchinson and her co-founder, Jennifer Lee, have proposed to the Unicode Consortium the alternative of a pink maillot in the shape of a normal woman’s body.

We can all imagine the directions this argument might take. If a maillot, why a pink maillot and not black or red? Why not a burkini or a skirted suit? But since this is a language column, I’m more interested in two curious aspects of this kerfuffle. One is the polka-dot bikini itself; the other is the female-slanted language of emoji clothing.

First, to the bikini. Its name originally came from the Bikini Atoll, most famous as a site of nuclear testing in the 1940s — the idea being that, like the atom bomb, the scanty outfit would be explosive. (My own favorite play on the word comes from Beany and Cecil’s cartoon encounter with "No Bikini Atoll.") The suit itself was apparently conceived by the French designer Louis Réard, who worked in his mother’s lingerie shop in France during the postwar global textile shortage. The history of swimsuits had mostly been one of modesty. While Esther Williams had worn a two-piece in the 1940s to show off her Olympic-quality abdominal muscles, and Réard convinced a nude dancer to model his four patches of cloth, the bikini remained banned from many public pools and beaches in the U.S. even after (or perhaps because) Brigitte Bardot starred in Manina, the Girl in the Bikini in 1952.

I’m fairly certain that the current emoji swimsuit owes its particular design to Brian Hyland’s 1960s hit "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini," which is actually about a shy girl who slowly emerges from the locker room and onto the beach, only to seek refuge in the cold ocean, which is where the song leaves her. The yellow polka dots contribute little beyond meter, but polka dots, like bikinis, take their name from an item in the news — in their case, the 19th-century craze for the polka dance that led manufacturers to add the word polka to just about anything (dotted fabric, for instance) that needed extra marketing.

So much for the polka-dot-bikini emoji that we are apparently stuck with until and unless the Unicode people grant another emoji. As I started to think about this post, though, I wondered what color they had assigned the men’s swimsuit emoji. But for "men’s swimsuit" or "swim trunks," you get nothing. "Swimwear" brings up the bikini. Finally, frustrated, I searched the emoji dictionary for women’s and men’s clothing. To my perhaps naive astonishment 😲, I found that men’s wear comprises a kimono, jeans, and T-shirt, all of which can be "worn by women or men." Women exclusively get a blouse, a dress, and the bikini. For shoes, women get a boot, a sandal, a high-heeled shoe, and (recently, thanks to the Emojination women) flat shoes; men get a shoe; both sexes get a running shoe. I strongly suspect that the ballet shoe now being considered for inclusion will be a pink women’s toe shoe. My point being that, so long as we’re expanding the emoji lexicon to include less sexist imagery, let’s open things up on both sides. Give the guys Speedos or trunks, and maybe some sandals that fit their feet. And give us all bow ties, while you’re at it.

The Privilege of Language

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maxresdefaultWhen Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky announced that he opposed public funding for humanities curricula, citing the study of French language and literature in particular as a discipline he’d like to take off the table, a hailstorm of criticism ensued. “The study of world languages, literatures and cultures is a valuable pursuit that has led countless college students to successful careers,” wrote Jeffrey N. Peters, a professor of French at the University of Kentucky. “At this moment of rapid globalization, majors in our department learn to become well-rounded citizens of the world.”

In fact, Bevin wasn’t suggesting that studying French can’t lead to a successful career. He argued that preparation for those careers, or working toward the goal of “understanding the world around us,” as one local columnist put it, is not the purview of public education. “The purpose of public education and of public dollars going into education,” he said on July 26, “is to ensure that people who need to hire people to do work actually have the skills necessary.”

(Bevin’s wording suggests that employers, “people who need to hire people to do work,” are the ones in need of skills offered by taxpayer-funded education. No doubt he meant those being hired; let’s proceed on that basis.)

What strikes me about Bevin’s position is how carefully he distinguishes between those being educated publicly and those being educated privately. Bevin himself, as several critics have pointed out, majored in East Asian studies, but he did so at Washington and Lee University, a private institution. So when he says, “All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so; they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer,” he’s disingenuously enforcing a class distinction, since “all the people in the world” clearly can’t study French literature unless they have the funds for private education and foreign travel. (Yes, I know, there’s Duolingo. Enough said.)

Plenty of studies have been done on the advantages of speaking a second language, many of them demonstrating that “people who speak more than one language fluently have better memories and are more cognitively creative and mentally flexible than monolinguals.” But that’s the “well-rounded” argument again. Lots of advantages accrue to those who grow up in financial comfort; why shouldn’t the pluses of language learning be among them?

My own answers hinge not on French, a language I happen to love and speak fluently, but on English. With the blinkered attitude available only to those for whom the world’s lingua franca is their mother tongue, we insist on the essential requirement of learning English even as we downgrade the importance of Americans’ learning other languages.

Note, for instance, that while Governor Bevin talks about public education generally, the responses to his derision of French-language learning have come from higher education. Even though we know that the most effective language learning takes place at a young age, Kentucky (like most states) does not require any foreign-language credits for graduation from high school; only to enter or graduate from a public four-year university in the state. But anywhere in the United States —and elsewhere, too — woe betide the student or aspiring employee who cannot communicate in English. The head of Japan’s leading ecommerce company has ordered that all business within the corporation would henceforth be conducted in English.

English clearly is considered to be of practical use, like electrical engineering — one of Bevin’s favorite examples of a worthwhile subject to teach. French is not. But the elegant and forceful deployment of English, the sort of facility that enables the speaker or writer intentionally to invert syntax, consult a wide vocabulary, pepper speech with literary or historical references, use rhetoric to advance argument — that level of English is no more encouraged for the worker bees envisioned by the governor than French is. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the study of a foreign language and the mastery of one’s own often converge at this very point. It’s possible to speak and write English at a level that leads to advancement in the working world without knowing a foreign language, of course. But I’ve yet to meet any speakers of a second language who have not found their study to enhance an understanding of their first language.

So maybe it’s not learning French that bothers Governor Biven. Maybe it’s the ability of language itself to open doors beyond those that lead to one job description or another. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Henry Higgins’s mother warns of teaching Eliza Doolittle “the manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living.” As it turns out, she was wrong. Eliza, Shaw tells us, “grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.” She becomes successful, not as the HR department’s dream candidate for a skilled slot, but on her own terms.

What Is the Origin of ‘the Worm Has Turned’?

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the wormhasturned
A friend asked me the other day about the origin of the phrase the worm has turned. I was too embarrassed to admit that not only did I not know the origin, I wasn’t even sure what the proverb meant. “It probably started with Shakespeare,” I said, hoping to sound more learned than I felt.

My friend’s husband got in on the discussion with the idea that worms were turning as they chewed their way through old books — that we were, in other words, talking about bookworms.* Challenged, he looked up the phrase on his phone and announced that the worm will turn came not quite from Shakespeare, but close. A 1546 book of proverbs by John Heywood, he said, contained this gem: “Treade a worme on the tayle, and it must turne agayne.”

“But that’s not the same thing,” my friend said.

“Not at all,” I said — still unsure what the same thing would be, much less its origin. I promised to check the Oxford English Dictionary. Before I did, though, I asked another friend what he thought the worm has turned meant. Revenge? he guessed. Someone nefarious has changed tack and is seeking revenge?

Sort of like Michael Cohen, I suggested.

51Tp515tDyL._SX334_BO1,204,203,200_Exactly, he said, and I immediately thought of Trump’s former lawyer waking up one morning to find himself changed into a giant worm, pace Kafka.

Confusion over the expression’s meaning, variations, and origin, I suspect, begins with the word worm. Like the association of bug with anything vaguely insectlike, worm has referred not just to “a member of the genus Lumbricus; a slender, creeping, naked, limbless animal, usually brown or reddish, with a soft body divided into a series of segments,” but also to just about any creeping, crawling, slippery thing. And these creatures don’t just live underground; sometimes they climb, run, or fly. When Lord Clifford opines, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3

The smallest worm will turn being trodden on,
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

– he clearly refers to a lowly creature who will twist around … and do what? Not having a mouth, it can hardly bite you on the toe. Still, symbolically, the phrase does suggest a reversal of fortune for those who have been treated badly.

But Nancy Sherer of the Salmon River Gazette takes worm in its sense as dragon, an admittedly archaic meaning but one that could still spark fear in medieval readers with lines like this, from Romans of Partenay (1475):The serpent fill don dede … Which worme was ny ryght ten hole feete of lenght.” The worm was often also configured as the Devil. Per the OED, Milton refers to the serpent in Eden as “that false Worm,” and, as late as 1867, William Morris wrote of “a fearful battle betwixt worm and man.” In this sense, Sherer argues, the worm has turned betokens good fortune, since you might have been in the dragon’s path had it not thus veered off course.

Judging from actual uses of the phrase — the worm has turned or the worm will turn – we either haven’t made up our minds what it means or we bend the meaning as needed to fit the situation. Six recent references in the Corpus of Contemporary American English use the worm has turned to mean, variously, an ironic change of fortune (“George Bush intended to turn this campaign into another mud-toss rather than defend his awful domestic record. Now the worm has turned and he cries foul”); a moment of revenge (“Honeycutt races onto the stage to pull off the still tap dancing Mantan as the Harlem natives BUMRUSH the stage. THE WORM HAS TURNED”); the start of good things for the underdog (“‘You have to think the worm has turned,’ [Cubs] manager Lou Piniella said after [the Cubs beat the Astros]“); victory for the bad guys (“Whether they are dismayed by the way things played out in Egypt or by the growth of Al Qaeda in Syria, the worm has turned in the Middle East in the minds of American foreign policy makers”); or stool pigeons (“Renko’s illicit connection to the mayor would’ve trumped any charges. Not to mention, not a single worm has turned.”).

Google’s N-gram viewer provides more evidence of confusion. While the worm will turn has been on a sharp rise since the turn of this century, those who have looked closely at the proverb have come away with analyses like this one, from Shankar’s Weekly:

If you meet a worm somewhere and try to scare what you think is its anterior, it promptly takes a head start from its posterior. Thereby proving false the proverb “the worm will turn.” It just does not need to turn. You are then left wondering whether the interior, i.e., the middle part, also has anything to do with decision making or direction.

Seems a little clinical to me. Perhaps we can start by agreeing that these turning worms are not, strictly speaking, earthworms. But then what are they? What comes to your mind when you hear that the worm has turned — other than, say, a crowd of Yankees fans on Rudy Giuliani’s birthday?

 

 

*Maggots, actually, but let’s not get fussy.

Gals, Guys, and Speech

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CampagneEdenParkWEB-610x840Last week, I read two provocative articles about women and speech. One concerned how women talk, the other how women are talked about.

The first article, by Rachel Thompson, on Mashable, noted the stream of criticism for women’s use of so-called uptalk, vocal fry, and filler words. Various linguists consulted by Thompson pointed out that men exhibit these same tendencies but receive far less criticism for them. The most surprising statistic, for me, was the the “generation specific” finding that, in women’s voices from the 1990s compared with those from 1945, the “fundamental frequency” of women’s voices “dropped by 23 Hz” over 50 years. To my ear, older women’s voices are now higher and lighter than they were in my mother’s generation, simply because so few of us smoke. But the criticisms — of “shrillness,” “Valley Girl” talk, and the like — are too familiar. I can attest that in professional meetings where I am the only woman, I sometimes catch myself speaking more slowly and at a lower pitch than I do when in a meeting with other women.

I will also, if the meeting is informal, use the expression you guys to refer to the (male) others in the room. As Allan Metcalf observed just a few weeks ago, you guys is replacing y’all in some regions of the country. But last week, Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic wrote of efforts to replace you guys with y’all as a less gender-specific way to refer to a group of people. As Pinsker writes, “Guys is an easy-going way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion — a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves ‘guys.’” Women use the phrase among themselves almost as much as men use it, so it’s fair to claim, as some of Pinsker’s contacts do, that the term has evolved to be gender-neutral. Certainly, in my regular tennis matches with other women, I’ll hear “You guys!” fairly frequently. Other previously male terms have evolved to include women — actor, for example, or fellow. In 1980, when I was the Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, I was frequently teased for being a “fellowess.” I doubt that would happen today.

Others, though, still find guys exclusionary, especially in male-heavy professions and customer-facing industries. Without having formed a firm opinion, I do find that I avoid the term with mixed or women-only groups. I would never use it with my students, for instance. Lacking a plural second person, English doesn’t have a ready gender-neutral equivalent, but I find myself using folks, people, andall (that’s in you all, not y’all, which to me still sounds distinctively Southern). When I have an exclusively female group of students, as I did last spring, I tend to say you ladies, for which I apparently developed something of a reputation. Here again, the alternatives are less than satisfactory: you gals sounds a bit 1950s or Western; you girls seems condescending; you women, while the choice of one of my tennis partners, to me carries a ring equivalent to you men, drawing more attention to womanliness or manliness than the situation warrants.

When it comes to gender, we live in an imperfect world, armed with an incomplete vocabulary and prone to prejudicial judgments. For feminists, the instinct is to correct the blinkered views of the other. When people remark of female candidates for office that they’re shouting or peppering their speech with “like,” we want them to consider how critical they would be if the candidate were a male with a baritone. When they jocularly call out you guys to a mixed or female group, we want to remind them that we are not, strictly speaking, guys. But if we do so, we open ourselves to a charge of policing speech, of which women have been the victims for centuries. Let’s go a little easier on ourselves by proposing alternatives, imperfect though they may also be. When he says that Candidate X talks like a Valley Girl, let’s point out her refreshing candor or the practicality of her policy position. And when they say, “Hey, you guys, let’s get going,” let’s propose that the ladies — or gals, or women, or double-X chromosomes — get going, too.

A Hurrah for the Long Sentence

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the-short-and-the-long-of-itI am once again teaching Gertrude Stein in Paris. Struck anew by the modernity of her sentences (of Ezra Pound: “She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not”), I ran across this recent essay on the sentences of Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is by now a well-known feminist political writer, who originated, for many, the term mansplaining. But Neiman Storyboard’s analysis focuses not on her political views but on the length and shape of her sentences.

I’m increasingly aware of the steady march toward shorter sentences. Writing fiction, I find myself knocking out what 30 years ago would have been a semicolon and replacing it with a period. Then I knock out a comma followed by and and replace them both with a period. I entertain fragments. Words. You get the idea.

The only long sentences we’ve been looking at recently have been the word salads composed by Donald Trump. Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, these aren’t really sentences but conglomerations of words — self-interrupting, running on, creating collage more than idea. You don’t read them so much as you read through them.

A sentence, we’re often told, conveys an idea. Often, though, it also conveys , or creates, an emotion. T.S. Eliot, speaking of poetry, calls this the objective correlative: the creation in the listener, not of understanding the encounter you are writing about, but of the feelings you experienced in the original encounter. In Solnit’s 88-word sentence opening her recent essay on presidential impeachment, the Neiman critic observes, “the effect … is to make me feel overwhelmed and crazed – manic – just as the news does today.”

Such sentence writing comes with risk. I sometimes give writing students the opening pages of Flaubert’s chapter on Yonville-L’Abbaye, in Madame Bovary, and ask them to respond to the description of the village. Trying to be respectful of the great French writer, they proffer weak, strained comments on how complete and detailed Flaubert’s word picture is. Finally, I ask them if they did not feel a little bored by descriptions like this one:

At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge and then a wheelwright’s, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way.

Yes! cry the students. We were bored out of our minds!

Then, I say, you have some idea of what drove Emma Bovary to adultery and suicide.

Nieman focuses on the opener of Solnit’s essay, but its second sentence is even more striking:

The commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another crime, but if they keep them coming, it’s hard to keep your eye on any one or keep track of them all, or so it seemed on that day last week when the president had tweeted out some white supremacist bullshit about South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people from the fact that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named him as a co-conspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist dogwhistles and shouts he’d broadcast while some people waited for evidence that he had said the n-word as though his constant insults to black people from Maxine Waters to LeBron James to Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on Latinos and immigrants and voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day that the White House had, with a tweet, turned the murder of a young white woman into an attack on undocumented immigrants even though the alleged murderer’s immigration status was unclear and there had been a more recent and more spectacular murder by a native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant wife and daughters and dumped the little girls’ bodies in oil tanks belonging to his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment of that murderer’s category, because collective punishment is never for straight white men (and should not be for  anybody).

This is, I would argue a sentence, unlike Molly’s soliloquy or the oft-quoted word salads. The point Solnit is making, about the way distraction works as coverup for certain crimes whereas attention turns other crimes into broad indictments of whole groups, requires both evidence and comparison. True, one might argue that in a paragraph (which the sentence constitutes), such an argument could be made using several sentences cheek by jowl. But as the Neiman piece points out, the rush of the one long sentence echoes the very rush of news that distracts and confuses us; by being chary with her periods, Solnit demonstrates how “the news emanating from the White House never stops.”

Other writers use the long sentence to other useful effects. The Nieman piece cites Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O’Brien, and Ken Fuson, but one could just as easily cite Stein. While “Alice” begins her “autobiography” with “I was born in San Francisco, California,” by the end of the book she is writing like this:

[Hemingway] came to the house about ten o’clock in the morning and he stayed, he stayed for lunch, he stayed all afternoon, he stayed for dinner and he stayed until about ten o’clock at night and then all of a sudden he announced that his wife was enceinte and then with great bitterness, and I, I am too young to be a father.

Hemingway himself, supposedly the godfather of today’s short, terse sentences, often wrote long:

I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watch the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors.

What we too often forget, in the move toward concision and clarity that has affected so much contemporary writing, is that sentences have effects. Words are never transparent. Read short sentences and you breathe often. Shorter sentences? Hyperventilation. But when you begin a longer sentence, sensing that a larger idea will get its play, much in the way that George Eliot once wrote, in Silas Marner, a sentence that my seventh-grade geeky self took seven blackboards to diagram, your breathing mellows and goes deeper, as if you’re plunging into dark water, and just as your lungs begin to press against your ribs, you let the air in them pull you back up, until you see the world above the surface in a whole new way.

New French Lingo: du Coup

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du coup.jpg-Deposit PhotosEach time I stay in France for an extended period, I become aware of a new expression that’s infiltrated the language. Just as the occasional sojourner in America might be surprised to discover woke or the ubiquity of like, I’ve found myself suddenly hearing a phrase I thought I understood, used with almost alarming frequency in contexts that don’t quite add up.

This time, the phrase du coup, which technically means “at a blow” or “suddenly,” most familiar to French language learners from the expression tout d’un coup, now echoes from sidewalk cafés, métro trains, meeting rooms, and hallways.

On ne sort pas ce soir. On fait quoi du coup?
We’re not going out tonight. So then what do we do?

il ne veut pas manger de salade, du coup je fais des haricots.
He doesn’t want to eat salad, so I’ll cook green beans.

Je suis hors du coup.
I’m out of it.

Du coup je suis responsable.
So now I’m in charge.

Et donc, du coup, j’ai terminé le projet.
And so, in effect, I’ve terminated the project.

Du coup, on va pouvoir planifier un rendez-vous.
In that case, we’ll be able to plan a rendezvous.

It was a relief to discover I wasn’t alone in suspecting this once-meaningful phrase had become a discourse marker. The French, so often devoted to prescriptivism (I’m looking at you, l’Académie Française), have had a field day recently with the proliferation of du coup. Writing in Le Figaro, Quentin Périnel, the “bureaulogue,” suspects that his readers screamed at the sight of a headline proposing to examine du coup:

To face great evils requires great means. I would say even more: very great evils, very great means, since the language tic inspiring me this week feeds your daily anxieties in the office. “Du coup” at the beginning of the sentence, “du coup” at the end of the sentence … The greatest champions can use it three times in the same sentence or a hundred times during the same meeting. Du coup, it was high time to stage a coup. First observation: by ear, it’s not so easy to know what we are talking about. By the neck (le cou)? Unless it’s cost (coût)? Or maybe suddenly (du coup)?. . . It’s a language tic that stifles conversation and prevents any possibility of debate. Du coup, it makes you seem a boor with a high opinion of himself.

Writing from Canada in Brain, Vincent Glad observes that widely sprinkled du coups are the sure sign of a French traveler.

This improper expression that’s contaminated our language for several decades has become the symbol of the French in Quebec. In the streets of Montréal, people sometimes mockingly call us “the du coups.” That’s certainly better than “the whores,” another distinctive label for the French, but in the end it’s not something to be proud of.

As one of his Quebecois interlocutors put it, “They [the French] don’t know exactly what they mean and still they use it all the time. That amuses us because we never say it. When I was young, if you wanted to imitate a Frenchman, you used a sort of pig Latin or you repeated expressions from French films. Now it’s easy to imitate a Frenchman: It suffices to say du coup.”

In 2014, du coup had already become so ubiquitous that the Académie Française did indeed weigh in, writing:

The adverbial phrase “du coup” was once used in its proper sense: A fist hit him and he fell “from the blow.” Since then, we have used it to introduce the consequence of an event: A tire burst and “all of a sudden” the car skidded. But as usage guides indicate, the term expresses “the idea of a cause acting suddenly,” and to its causal value is thus added a temporal value conveying quasi-simultaneity. “Du coup” is thus very close to “immediately.” We must not, then, use “du coup,” as we often hear, in place of “therefore” or “consequently.” We must also avoid making “du coup” a simple adverb of speech without particular meaning.

Good luck with that. Even though, as the French writer Claudine Chollet has observed, the expression poisons intellectual discourse because it “has the appearance of a logical expression but hides any real argument [as to cause and effect] in order to win approval from others,” du coup is not going away. I’ve decided to treat it much as I do the omnipresent sound of pigeons tucked into the recesses of Paris’s old buildings. Du coup! they call. Du coup, du coup, du coup, du coup!


Where Do We Begin? Language Learning and Grammar

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frenchThis fall, I am not only teaching in Paris but temporarily directing a program of study abroad. Among the many other changes this shift has produced in my daily life, I find myself no longer on the sidelines of students’ acquisition of French. I am now in charge of the French classes, or FLE (Français comme langue étrangère), that the students take through a branch of the Sorbonne.

As many Lingua Franca readers know, American programs of study abroad divide into two basic types: those that require a working knowledge of the local language before coming to the country, and those that accept English speakers and teach their courses in English. The program I am directing falls into the second category, but all students are required to study French here, and several are sufficiently fluent to take university courses in French. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on the balance between grammar, or structured learning, versus a more conversational approach in learning a language.

Our partners in the French-learning business are most adept at teaching classes at the “B” and “C” levels, according to the European Reference Framework for Language Learning. Students who arrive in Paris hoping to take classes at the Sorbonne or other institutions need generally to get their expertise up to the B2 level, so they tend to arrive with the basics already under their belt — not to mention that most Erasmus students or students from former French colonies often arrive speaking at least two other languages. But American students, even those with a couple of years of college French, often do not attain a B2 or even B1 level. In our case, the French program was game to initiate classes at A levels, and so I have been able to witness the built-in tension between formal and conversational language learning — or, put another way, between beginning with grammatical structures or beginning with casual modes of communication — that seems to haunt language learning. I am not a teacher of French, or any foreign language, so mine is only a bystander’s view, but I suspect that the problem for American students is compounded by their confusion about grammar in their native tongue.

Here’s the issue, I think, in a nutshell. On one side, you have language teachers and learners who point out that babies don’t learn their mother tongues by learning grammar first. They acquire the language by being immersed in it, and the grammar follows naturally; later on, perhaps, they can learn to make sense of why they use several different forms of past tense or when fewer is preferable to less. On the other side, you have those who point out, like one Swedish blogger, that “we, as adults, do not learn foreign languages the way babies learn their native language. And hence, speaking without any grammatical backbone whatsoever can only get us so far.” I’ve experienced this frustration myself, in trying to learn Italian via phone app. The program with which I experimented was happy to teach me the phrases Voglio un bicchiere di vino and Vorrei imparare l’italiano, but only because I know the difference between indicative and conditional do I understand that voglio and vorrei are different forms of the same verb, denoting the difference between “I want a glass of wine” and “I would like to learn Italian.” Understanding that the root verb exists makes learning its other forms far easier than trying to memorize several dozen different words.

My students in beginning French classes are generally having an immersive, conversation-based experience — following the philosophy, articulated on the website Fluent in 3 Months, that “Grammar acts as a wall between you and fluency – holding you back from the language rather than being a vital part of it.” Like most people thrown into a foreign language, they spent most of their first couple of weeks chaotically confused. Now, I find that their response to their mode of learning depends on how they have studied other languages and the extent to which they have refined their knowledge of English grammar. Those who learned, say, Spanish in American schools find the French language classes frustrating, inefficient, and less than helpful. “I need a structure,” one student complained to me, “or it’s all just a jumble of words.” Those who have had little interest in English grammar and little experience with foreign-language study tend to find, as one student put it, that “I can just go out and speak in the shops. I can order in restaurants. That’s all I need. The rest can come later.”

But what is “the rest”? In French, it entails the difference between the perfect and the imperfect, with no simple past tense to bridge the gap; if you don’t know what perfect means in English, you have a concept to learn before you can start using the structure to help your French learning. Ditto conditional, subjunctive, possessive pronoun (which, importantly, becomes possessive adjective in French), reflexivity. Whether we like it or not, very few high-school students, and only a minority of college students, grasp these ideas in English. Should the foreign-language teacher, then, be tasked with introducing the concepts themselves as well as conveying vocabulary, accent, useful phrases, and so on? Or should they skip all that, putting at risk their students’ ability to build on the structure of the language? To these questions I have no answer — but this fall has shown me more than ever that teaching a foreign language to 20-year-old American students is a daunting, even confounding task.

The ‘Sherpas’ of the Beltway

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67_305141526990128Retired Senator Jon Kyl is now a Sherpa. As The New York Times writes, “In Washington, a Sherpa is an informal but widely known term for a nominee’s guide to the political tundra in the Senate.” Widely known inside the Beltway, perhaps. But although the Times lists Sherpa several times in a search for the term over this last month, if you go back to 2009, the year of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Sherpa gets hardly any play.

I first heard the term in this sense only this past week, when National Public Radio’s Ailsa Chang interviewed former Senator Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican who accompanied Neil Gorsuch on his rounds of the Senate. They had this exchange:

CHANG: So what does a Sherpa exactly do? What is your role?
AYOTTE: Well, it’s kind of a funny name, right…
CHANG: Yeah.
AYOTTE: …’Cause a Sherpa means bringing someone up a mountain. And I guess often the…
CHANG: (Laughter) And carrying all the bags.

As many readers know, the Sherpa are an ethnic group who live on the borders of Nepal and Tibet. The name means “eastern people.” Sherpa are known for their extraordinary skills in mountaineering, and as a result the family business for many decades has been to lead hopeful climbers up the dangerous slopes of the Himalayas. The first Sherpas were hired in 1895 to help a British expedition scale the 26,600-foot peak Nanga Parbat. Both guides died on that climb, setting a pattern that has resulted in an industry with one of the highest rates of injury and mortality in the world. And neither the Sherpas’ extraordinary expertise nor the risks they take always find their proper due in the global climbing community.

As the Sherpa Norbu Tenzing Norgay puts it, “If somebody in America climbs Everest 19 times, he’d be all over Budweiser commercials. Sherpas don’t get the same recognition.” Death and disability benefits for Sherpas, who take the greatest risks on the mountain by setting the ropes and breaking trail, are rarely enough to support their families. Then there is the simple matter of respect. Following an ugly brawl between foreign climbers and Sherpas on Everest in 2013, the veteran guide Norbu Sherpa said of outsiders’ attitudes toward Sherpas: “Many think Sherpas are just porters, which is not true. Sherpas are a community and a cultural entity.” Scientists have learned that after so many years of living at high altitudes, the Sherpas’ mitochondria have evolved to use oxygen more efficiently. As Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, explains, “The work Sherpas are paid to do — carrying loads, installing the aluminum ladders, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope — requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Khumbu Icefall. … high-altitude climbing Sherpas [serve] an élite profession that deservedly commands respect and admiration from mountaineers around the world.”

Given this background, how appropriate is it to call Kyl, an Arizona Republican, a Sherpa — or, as many publications would have it, a sherpa, rendering the term as a generic descriptor? I suppose you could liken Brett Kavanaugh’s tour of Senate offices to scaling a mountain. The loose rocks and crevasses are perhaps labeled Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade, and veteran political operators know their way around those high-risk zones. The summit, presumably, is Scotus. But Jon Kyl, at 76, is not about to shoulder Kavanaugh’s baggage. In fact, the way both Chang and Ayotte describe a Sherpa makes the expert guide sound like what Norbu Sherpa objected to: a porter.

Western prejudice may account for this condescending description. So might the genericizing and name-branding of the term elsewhere in our culture — mama sherpas, parking sherpas, sandwich sherpas, cocktail sherpas, the Sherpa 50 solar panel, Sherpa Adventure Gear, Sherpa Pet Trading. I also wonder if we Westerners sometimes get confused about certain words’ ethnic origins. The individual described by Chang and Ayotte sounds to me less like a Sherpa than like a schlepper, a Yiddish term for a porter. Additionally, a schlepper denotes a person so worthless or stupid that he has no choice but to fetch and carry for others. I don’t know if we collapse the meanings of these terms when we talk about Sherpas in general, but when we talk about, say, doggy carriers, I suspect we do.

As to Jon Kyl — he may know a lot, and Brett Kavanaugh may depend on him for survival as a prospective Supreme Court Justice. But I don’t see him risking his life as he takes the nominee through the ice fall.





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