Zs and Apostrophes

I doubt anybody gave much thought to the fact that when Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that linguists and English teachers were about to be called on to explain a couple mysteries of the English language as she is written. Let me try to get ahead of the game.

Vice-presidential candidate-to-be is Tim Walz, from Minnesota.  By some counts, nearly a third of Minnesotans have German ancestry, so it's not surprising the state's current governor should have a German family name.  It is apparently the most common ancestry in the state and according to the World Population Review website, more than ten percent of Minnesotans over the age of five actually speak German at home, which I find really hard to believe in this day and age. But moving on...

Everybody knows what a waltz is - it's a dance where you go one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two three and people immediately think of Johann Strauss and the (beautiful) Blue Danube. So even though Tim Walz leaves the t out of his name, most people will want to pronounce it like the dance. But don't. His name got Americanized at some point and it is now pronounced walls, as in a room has a ceiling, a floor and four walls.

It's not that we can't say waltz. We may not have a letter for the sound of t and s (or t and z) put together like Hebrew does with the 18th letter of its alphabet צ, which the website "Hebrew for Christians" is happy to inform you is pronounced "like ts in nuts." Or the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet ц, which does likewise.  Japanese also has っ, but enough of this tangent.   My point is Walz uses the English spelling pronunciation of z as in zebra and not the ts sound of the tse-tse fly.

And, for my fellow Germanophiles (für meine deutschbegeisterten Kollegen), let me acknowledge in passing that the German word for Waltz is not Waltz, but Walzer.  The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz is simply Der Donauwalzer. And note that the addition of a t wouldn't change the pronunciation. It's not there in German probably because it would be redundant. I have no idea why one got added in the English word waltz (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the German word came first), but because it was, we can now draw a distinction between waltz and Tim Walz that can't be made in German.

OK.  Now for the second issue, where to put the apostrophe.

Historically, the apostrophe in English was used either to show a place in a word where a letter has been omitted, as in contractions such as don't for do not and couldn't for could not, or to mark the so-called "Saxon genitive," more commonly known as the possessive case of nouns as in Mary's lamb as opposed to the phrase the lamb of Mary, which is suggestive of a higher register such as biblical language. (Ever wonder why we say the Lamb of God and not God's Lamb?)  There are two more usages of the single apostrophe, to mark a quotation within a quotation, or as an alternate to double quotation marks around a single word, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.

Where the plot thickens is where spoken English and written English part ways. The apostrophe-s flows freely in both written and spoken English in the sentence: "Mary had a little lamb, and oh look there's Mary's lamb right there!"

But what happens when the possessive comes on a word ending in an s or z or sh or ch (a "sibilant") sound? Mary has a little lamb and so does James. I see Mary's lamb but I don't see James's.

In this case, there is no problem. We have a name for this. It's called the epenthic schwa. A schwa is the sound we make when we're looking for a word and can't quite come up with it, a sound commonly written as "uh".  "I'd like to, uh, maybe, uh, kind of, uh, get your permission to spend the night with your daughter." James's lamb is pronounced "James-zus lamb," 

Lost in the sands of time is the explanation for why we have an alternative in which we are all left to wonder how the wee little apostrophe got to not only play its stand-in role as an epenthic schwa but actually create another s-sound on the word as well: We can write this without the second s: James' lamb.

Here's where people go running to dictionaries and books on style, hoping to find an authority to tell them how to do this properly.

I'm not going to do that because my linguistics training has made me a descriptive linguist, and not a prescriptivist. I consider telling people what to do is not science; describing what people do is.

Problem is I'm also trained as an English teacher (i.e., as a "prescriptivist") and am a bit of a fussy queen to boot. I cringe whenever I see people confuse it's with its. All my linguistic training is for naught when I see a student composition with a sentence like, "The cherry tree in my front yard is so beautiful in the spring before it starts to lose it's blossoms." Or when I see an apostrophe used with plurals, as in, "This parking lot has room for fifty car's."

But back to James's lamb.

Consider the sentences "Henry James and his brother William live next door.  I've known the James brothers all their lives." They pose no problem. But what about if the two brothers own a car in common?  Is it the James car? The James' car? The James's car?  Many will want to write this as the James' car and cite the grammatical rule that an  apostrophe is used to mark plural possession. 

I can't tell you what's right. I can't even tell you what most people do, although I'm sure somebody can, since we now have the ability to count no end of trivia to the last jot and tittle.

There. How nice to get back to fussing over language and language usage.

I'm looking forward to the Democratic Convention in Chicago when the Harrises come out (one of whom kept his bachelor name, Emhoff) with the Walzes (Walz'?) (Walz's) to the roar of the crowds.

It feels so good not to have to fight the depression that trumpism has spread across the land and to feel a bit of hope again. And freedom to turn my attention to things like punctuation instead of a possible loss of democracy.

P.S. (added Aug. 13) - I apologize for leaving the impression that the English word for waltz and the surname Walz both come from the same German origin. That is not the case.  The surname is apparently a derivative from the name Walter, and the verb to waltz comes from the proto-germanic word walt- meaning to turn, revolve and only in the 18th century became applied to "that riotous and indecent German dance."

The Boyfriend - a review

A gay reality show?  From Japan?  You've got to be kidding.  Could Japan's essentially conservative nature really have undergone this dramatic - not to say unbelievable - transformation in recent years?  I thought Japanese society was an inherently homophobic society.  Not of the thuggish Islamicist sort where gays are thrown off of tall buildings, or even of the gay-basher sort common to many parts of Europe and America, but of a kinder gentler sort, where gays are simply shunned for being just a bit too far over the line from "normal" behavior.

That's one possible reaction many will likely have after watching the Netflix production just out called The Boyfriend. And it was my first reaction, as someone who has spent twenty-four years of his life in Japan in two segments, one from 1970 to 1974 and a second one, after a hiatus of fifteen years, from 1989 to 2006, plus several shorter stays in between. I was an out gay man from San Francisco, but I determined it was in my best interest when I took a job as a professor at a Japanese university to go back in the closet. True, that may have been an unduly fearful decision on my part - and I did come out again in time - but I had plenty of confirmation from other LGBT men and women that I was doing the smart thing.

But - to return to the topic of the Netflix ten-episode series The Boyfriend, there are at least a couple of much simpler, more straightforward explanations for why a reality show with gay characters should suddenly appear on Japanese television. One is that gay liberation is finally catching up with Japan. It's not ready yet to allow same-sex marriages, but five months ago, in March of this year, both a Tokyo district court and a Sapporo high court challenged the ban on same-sex marriage, and it would appear it's only a matter of time. Netflix is probably seizing the moment.  Whether for cynical reasons (gays are still an entertaining curiosity) or profit-motive reasons (romance sells and the general population is now ready for LGBT love stories) I leave for others to figure out.

Another explanation is that it's not a particularly remarkable event in the first place. Japan has traditionally allowed parallel worlds to exist between people in the everyday world and people in the arts. Japan is the land of the geisha, after all, and men in drag appear regularly on modern-day television, especially in talk shows dominated by people known as "talents" - people who dress in unusual costumes selected to push the envelope into shock, outrage or simply silliness. These folk assume the role of soothsayers, supposedly insightful social commentators, although their contributions sometimes get so sophomoric and inane that you find yourself thankful people don't wear shoes inside the house or you'd be flinging them at your TV screen. 

The presence of such a group in this show - call them the Japanese version of a Greek chorus - begs the question of what exactly a so-called reality show is anyway.  And invites the observation that it is anything but real, but rather nothing more than a form of performance art designed to stimulate and titillate a bored audience looking for ever new and original entertainment. The group includes Otake Masaki, who goes by the stage name Durian ("the king of the fruits") Lollobrigida, who comes out in normal male dress at the start but gets more and more into his drag personalities as the show goes on.

The set-up is a simple one: nine unattached gay men, raging in age from 22 to 34, gather together at a resort by the sea for a month, allegedly to find friendship and love - with a camera following their every remark and facial expression.  Believe that's "reality" and I've got a bridge to sell you.  To build a closer bond between them, they are assigned the job of driving off to the beach each morning to sell coffee and cookies to the general public, although "general" isn't the right word, since the number of customers is small enough for the focus to remain on the personalities of the two gay characters in the coffee truck as they interact with customers one at a time, even bringing cups of coffee to their table. Camera running, of course.

An obvious question is why anybody would think you can simply throw people together and expect them to fall in love with each other, or, at minimum, form lasting meaningful relationships. That question is addressed directly by a member of the Greek chorus who makes the observation, "Anybody can fall in love with anybody."

In addition to the nine love-seekers and the "talents" (Greek chorus) there is another important but unseen character: from time to time a laptop dings and somebody opens it and reads a message from on high. This godlike character determines their daily activities, chiefly who will take the coffee truck out on any given day. He (it is a masculine voice) also has them do such things as write anonymous notes as a secret admirer and drop them in the mailbox each one has on their door. On several occasions, the boss-man decides they will have an overnight with a person of their choice who agrees to the arrangement.

As simplistic as the notion is expressed by the authority in the machine (the laptop) that "We hope you will find an irreplaceable partner," the reality performers play along. Rather than understanding that friendships take years to form and depend on observing the other in all kinds of character-revealing situations, they seem willing to believe the observation of a simple act of kindness, or generosity, or even politeness, is sufficient to make one fall in love. It marks them as astonishingly superficial.

At the same time, because the filmed interactions are so sanitized, we only get to see these guys on their best behavior. There is no cruelty, no harshness, no violence, no meanness. If anything, they display the stereotypical Japanese feature of being other-oriented to such an extreme that you need a Greek chorus to speculate over what's going on behind the masks of politeness they are all wearing.

At the same time, they do reveal markedly different character differences over time, giving some credibility to the producer who claims he selected the characters for their diversity of type. Two of the more extreme differences show up in the connection established by the two youngest participants, Dai and Shun, who do (spoiler alert) actually become a couple by the end of the series. Dai is outgoing and assertive (he sends Shun a dick-pic at one point); Shun is pathologically shy and suffers from an obvious inferiority complex. Shun is the kind of guy you'd expect to say, "I couldn't possibly fall in love with somebody stupid enough to fall in love with me."

Kazuto is everybody's first choice of a best-friend type. He comes in on Day One with food and continues to prepare meals for his colleagues - he is a cook and restaurant owner in real life. Another stand-out is Usak, a nationally well-known go-go boy who enters in Episode 2 and leaves early in Episode 5. He has a handsome face and is built like a brick shithouse. He lacks articulateness initially, but manages to bring everybody to tears when he leaves, and clearly has what it takes to break down the cool of Chef Kazuto, who otherwise plays his cards close to his chest.

And I trust my remarks in the previous paragraph reveal what I think the show has going for it, despite the charge of superficiality and banality: the characters may be not all you'd like them to be, but they are by and large sympathetic characters you come to root for. If this program is in fact staged, which Durian Lolobrigida claims it is not but I nonetheless suspect it is, it is well-staged with a well-composed plot line.  And that makes it worth watching. I've heard many non-Japanese comment over the years that they find Japanese too anodyne to actively like or dislike, and that was my first take on Japanese too until I made Japan my home and came to understand that its rich and complex culture makes it a world-class civilization, which contains the full range of human personality differences, unlike the manicured personalities in The Boyfriend.

Watching "gay boys" as they go about looking for love will not be everybody's cup of tea, even if this so-called reality show does turn out to be real. But in notable contrast to all the violence, blood, gore and duplicity in the shows Netflix brings to market, this one is refreshing, uplifting, and in the end, immensely sympathetic. I am not sure I share the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. It moves slowly and youthful indecisiveness isn't at the top of my list of fun things to spend your time on. But if you have the patience, I think you will find it is worth the watch.

The characters are, in order of introduction:

1. Dai, age 22, a college student

2. Taeheon, age 34, a designer originally from South Korea, notably not out to his parents as a gay man

3. Ryota, 28, a model, a barista - considers himself a bisexual

4. Gensei, 34, a hair and make-up artist

5. Shun Nakanishi, 23, musician

6. Kаzuto, 27, cook and manager of an izakaya-type restaurant, everybody's favorite among the group 

7. Usak, 36, a nationally known go-go dancer

8. Alan, 28, a mixed-race (Brazilian/Japanese) guy who grew up in Japan, works for an IT company

9. Ikuo, 22, the late-comer, works in the food industry

Giving up on the Two-State Solution

Good news: With Biden agreeing to sacrifice his personal goals for the good of the country and his party, we can stop with the dread and allow ourselves to hope once again that the United States of America might regain the place it once held, rightly or wrongly, as a beacon of democracy for the world.

Bad news: Kamala has to choose a vice-presidential candidate to run with and soon. Well, that's not really bad news so much as it is discomfort-making news, because although she has a pretty good selection of democratic politicians to choose from, the fact that she can choose only one of them is going to piss a bunch of people off.

My favorite human being among the candidates is Pete Buttigieg. How could I not love this guy?  A fellow gay, he has done more to further a positive image of LGBT people than anybody else I can think of. I just love the guy to pieces. Love his husband, Chastain, love his cute kids, swell with pride when I observe how articulate he can be in talking back to the trumpist me-me-me crowd.

I hope Pete isn't selected, though, because I'm among those who worry the country isn't ready for a gay man a heart-beat away from the Oval Office. There are others with more experience; Pete can wait four or eight more years and continue to build his resume. He appears to be doing a bang-up job building bridges and making trains run on time.

My favorite among the candidates who I think would make a great companion party leader is Tim Walz of Minnesota. He comes across as warm and caring, and when you dig into his record, he's clearly been walking the walk and not just saying nice things as governor of a very civilized state.

If I were putting money on her choice, I'd go with Josh Shapiro. Also articulate.  And I understand that people like him for his potential for carrying Pennsylvania and its large number of electoral votes.

And, by the way, back to Pete Buttigieg for a minute, can't we more of us get on the bandwagon he's driving to rid the country of this undemocratic idiocy of allowing a minority of rural voters more say in the direction of the country than the rest of us?

But let me get back to my intended point of this morning's ramble: choosing Josh Shapiro as VP candidate. While he's got so much going for him, looks, smarts, political creds, he's also got his Jewishness going against him. Just as I fear the country might not be ready for a gay man, I fear Shapiro's pro-Israel remarks might lead too many Americans pissed off at our lockstep support of Israel, right or wrong, to pull the lever for the other party - or maybe for the current political buzz-kill, Robert Kennedy's child wandering in the no-vaccinations wilderness.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place... Hamas gets it all wrong. They start with a legitimate cause: the fight against Israeli injustice vis-a-vis its Palestinian minority and fuck it up with its policy of kidnapping, rape and murder on October 7th.  And what does Israel do?  Come back with a policy Israelis can be proud of?  Not on your life. They fall into the trap Hamas sets for them by using its own people as shields, and mows them down. The nation formed to provide a refuge for a people victimized by thuggish fascists now drops bombs on Gazan civilians and has already killed more children there than the number of Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion of their country - just to get some perspective here.

Kamala Harris has to tread the thin line between showing support for Israel as a nation of Jewish people like her husband without losing the support of not just Arab-American voters who worry about what they see as an unjustifiable "Israel right or wrong" approach to American diplomacy. With or without Josh Shapiro next to her in the front seat.

Since this is a blog, and not an academic article where expository writing rules ought to apply, allow me to spin off on an update in my views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which I just sent off to a friend of mine:

Two comments come to mind each time the conflict grabs my attention. One is the Abba Eban observation, "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" and the other is Golda Meir's insight: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." 

My focus on these two remarks reveals the fact that I am drawn emotionally to the culture of Ashkenazi Jewishness but feel neutral, at best, toward Sephardic Jews and Palestinians. Back in the day when Leon Uris published Exodus, I had total sympathy with the Zionist project of building a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust. And ever since then I've felt that unbalanced enthusiasm for one side over the other slip away as I watched the Israelis use their material (and intellectual) superiority and organizational skills over the Palestinians to grind them into the dust - all with the dubious justification that Jewish survival as a people depended on it.

It doesn't. Jews live well in the United States and Canada and many other countries as well, whether being Jewish means lighting candles on shabbat or simply preferring lox and bagels to fried rice; they are no longer in danger of extinction. And if the project of trying to out-birth their Palestinian neighbors (on the part of the ultra-orthodox among them) flops as a means of achieving their ends, you won't see a tear in this eye.

The nationalist goals of the 19th century are no longer valid, in my view.  I have serious doubts they ever were, although I won't take a stand on that.  In any case, they seem to have screwed the pooch by (apparently) ruining any chance of a two-state solution and must now deal with a one-state solution or endless war. So be it.

Long live Israel, I say.

Home of Jews and Palestinians and anybody else who is ready to do what it takes to make it their home.

I would prefer to say "not my farm; not my animals" except for the fact that my country insists on spending billions of U.S. tax dollars to maintain an only-Jews-as-first-class-citizens state and to prop up sleazeballs like Bibi Netanyahu simply because he has managed to get control of the reins of power.  (And because using a metaphor which will no doubt lead people to call me an anti-semite for allegedly referring to Jews and Palestinians as animals is something one ought not do in such a humorless day and age.)

A.