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Literary Judgment, Literary Luck
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...
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Scabby at the University
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...
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The Whaughts?
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 21st century as far back as January 2000 — but for...
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Pronoun Challenge in Ann Arbor
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...
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Trumpadocious Apologies
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...
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-Gated Out
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...
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Bye-Bye, Cursive
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...
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Girl Talk
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...
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Election Lexicon RIP
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...
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Words of Solace, Words of Action
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...
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Not Normal
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...
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Post-Truth and Chaos
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...
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A Radical Contranym
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...
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Won’t He Do It!
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,...
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The Hand of the People
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...
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Tpyos vs. Mispelings: a Presidential Matter
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...
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Seeing Through the Gaslight
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...
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Hypotheticals vs. Contrary-to-Fact
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...
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Pussies and Appropriation
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...
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Diagramming Gorsuch
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...
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