An ad for a new Apple Macintosh antivirus program found its way into my inbox this week and drove me up the wall: “Optimise (sic - British spelling) your Device (sic - capital D) to it’s (sic sic sic) Full Potential (caps on both words). I copied and pasted it into an e-mail which I sent around to friends under the subject title: “Aaaaaaaargh” - give or take an a. “Look at that!” I wanted to say (but felt I didn’t need to). That phrase came to mind my friend Jerry came out with one time when we were in the army and he found everybody around him a bit of a strain: “Here I sit, surrounded by plebeians.” Loved that about Jerry. Had a giant heart. And a wonderful ability to outsnob the rest of us and do it with class.
The school ma’arm in me is at constant loggerheads with the descriptive linguist. On the one hand, I squirm at every misuse of “their” for “they’re” or “there,” and at the failure of people to distinguish between the third person singular neuter pronoun its and the conjunction* it’s, which is “it is” writ short.
(I meant to say "contraction" but lost my way after the first syllable. A useful reminder that when people lecture you on "writin' proper" you may need to keep your guard up.)
And on the other hand, I’ve had a lifelong academic career in language, literacy and culture - or “philology” as it was once called. And I know that when it comes to language, the Buddhists are right: the only constant in life is change. What to one generation is sloppy use of language is to the next generation simply the way things are said and written - no big deal. When I went to high school teachers would have a hissy-fit over a split infinitive. An A-paper could quickly become a B-paper if I should be so careless as to write “It’s important to never miss a chance” instead of “it’s important never to miss a chance…” These days, fussing over that distinction is just that: silly fussing.
I have a weekly zoom meeting with four near-and-dears. This week one of the topics that came up was the fact that one of us said she was uncomfortable with the use of “they” in the singular.
I spotted what some might call an inclination to be “conservative” about language use” and immediately switched to school-ma’arm mode to stress what I believe is an important distinction to be made between sloppy, undisciplined language change and change that is defensible.
English, like French and other European languages, has a history of moving plurals into the singular as a way of expressing politeness, but also because speakers simply found the distinction to be no longer worth making. We once had thou and thee for second-person singular and ye and you for second-person plural, but over time we’ve decided, collectively, that distinguishing between singular and plural and between nominative and accusative (objective) cases isn’t worth the effort. We let the pronoun you serve all four functions.
French did something similar, as did other Germanic and Romance and Slavic languages. They kept the singular-plural (tu - vous) distinction, but began using the plural form in the singular as a means of putting a bit of distance between speaker and hearer and keeping tu for intimate connections. German went one step further: they began using the third person plural (i.e., “they”) as a “polite” way of addressing a person in both the singular and the plural, writing the pronoun with a capital letter when it refers to “you” and leaving it in lower case when it means “they.” “Möchten sie eine Tasse Kaffee?” is “Would they like a cup of coffee” and Möchten Sie eine Tasse Kaffee?” is “Would you like a cup of coffee?” In the spoken language, there is rarely any ambiguity, since the question is pretty much always directed to “you” and not to “them.”
When our consciousness was raised back in the 60s about the effects of using the masculine pronoun to represent men and women both, we started saying “he or she” where once we said only “he.” But that has proven too cumbersome and in reaching out for a better solution, we’ve pretty much settled on using “they” to mean “he” or “she” or “he or she,” he/she,” “(s)he,” etc. On precisely the same pattern as the transfer of “you” from plural to singular.
An obvious solution, and a much less cumbersome way of bringing women out of second-class status than the German practice of virtually always using both masculine and feminine forms of nouns in the plural when speaking publicly. “Bürger” is the German word for “citizen” - singular masculine. The feminine form is “Bürgerin” and the plural forms are Bürger (no change from the singular) and “Bürgerinnen,” respectively. No modern-day politician who values their career would be caught saying “Bürger” to mean “all citizens, male and female” as was routine only a generation or two ago. These days, the universal practice, if you want to say, “That applies to all citizens,” is to say, “Das gilt für alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger,” - and by the way, use the feminine form first.
There is language change, and then there is language change. My mother used to sign my report card, “Mrs. John S. McCornick” and think nothing of it. It wasn’t like in India, where women needed their husbands’ permission to go to the movies, but they did need their approval to get a credit card. And we’ve marked the evolution of our consciousness of sexism by language change.
But what about using “it’s” as a third-person singular pronoun, parallel to “his” and “hers”? To me that’s a horse of a different color. That strikes me as undisciplined. It gives off a smell. It’s like writing tuesday with a small t. Language conventions have a function. As a writing teacher I used to explain to students that writing Tuesday with a capital T is not just a question of “correctness.” It’s that when you don’t do it, you grab the attention of your reader, and take it off the subject at hand. “Why is this person doing something unconventional?” It is pragmatically self-destructive, in other words, and not merely “dumb.” e.e. cummings and bell hooks chose to write their names all in lower-case letters to make a point. I don’t remember now what that point is - if I ever knew. But these are harmless eccentricities, in any case, and not show-stoppers, as writing tuesday with a small t or leaving out the r in Febuary is.
Here’s where I get all authoritarian, in other words. OK, so putting an extra r in February requires some effort. Get over it. Just do it.
I have a whole bunch of things that get under my skin when it comes to language use which no doubt are signs of the modern American language in transition. Less people gives me a belly ache. It’s fewer people - people are countable and I feel inclined to put people who say “less people” in the same category as people who eat Wonder Bread.
Irregardless is a walking canker sore. A double negative. It took me forever to learn that one “pores” over books - one doesn’t “pour” over books. But I learned to make the distinction. And since I did, I figure you all can jolly well learn that “they are” when mushed together becomes “they’re” and not “there” or “their.
In this day when everybody and their cousin Jack has an opinion to express on the internet and sees no reason to distinguish between the apostrophe-s of the possessive and the no-apostrophe-s of the plural, I feel a sense that the world is going to hell. It’s like watching abusive parents go at their kids - you want to urge congress to pass a law. Nobody should be allowed to have children who don’t immediately put their well-being front and center. Nobody should be allowed to own a dog who doesn’t shower it regularly with affection. Nobody should be allowed to write a sentence like “I’m going to the party with two other girl’s” without at least a night in jail. And the plural of walrus, by the way, is walruses, not walrus’es, not walrus’, and not walrus’s. Learn the damn form.
So listen up, Apple. Your marvelous new antivirus program may be the best thing to come down the pike in years, and I may be shooting myself in the foot by refusing to install it, but until you get your shit together, ain’t no way you’re going to persuade me to become a customer.
I’ve been duped by many a silver-tongued devil.
But no way I’m going to be taken in by a lazy mush-mouth.
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