blog posts

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  It’s National Handwriting Day: there’s an app for that

  Jan 23, 2020 11:00 am0 views

  Now that we keyboard everything from novels to shopping lists and texting on our phones has become the main way to reach out and touch someone, the digital age has stirred a nostalgia for the good old days when everything was writ by hand (apparently no one wants to bring back making actual phone calls). And so we have National Handwriting Day, January 23, the supposed birthday of John Hancock, who penned the signature heard round the world. It may seem ironic, but the only way to find out about National Handwriting Day is to go online.

  That’s not the only problem with National Handwriting Day. It’s sponsored by the makers of pens and pencils, and not surprisingly their message is a commercial one: writing with a pen is personal and typing on a machine is anything but. But even though we still buy pens and pencils, no one actually wants to re-learn handwriting, which was nobody’s idea of fun. For some of us it was actually torture. 

  Enter handwrytten.com, a start-up that will turn keyboarded text into a personalized note so you don’t have to. 

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  Will the Word Pedometer make babies smarter?

  Dec 22, 2019 1:15 pm4036 views

  It’s the giving season, and the most intellectually woke gift for that underprivileged infant on your list is the Word Pedometer®. Just attach its voice-activated mic to a bit of clothing and the pedometer counts every word the baby hears. People will want to talk to the baby just so they can watch the the baby’s daily word-count soar. Because according to the manufacturer, hearing lots of words before age five is the key to success in school and later in life—it’s even better than Mozart for developing the infant brain. So increasing the number of words a baby hears will make that baby smarter, especially if they are from a poor or minority family that normally can’t afford extra words. 

  At least that’s the theory behind what is essentially a Fitbit for Words. But the theory is wrong. It perpetuates the long-discredited belief that economically deprived minorities are also linguistically deprived. Talk is cheap, so give them words, not food stamps, and babies will succeed. Yes, babies need to be talked to, but metering the words they hear won’t make them baby Einsteins.

• Thats all Folks: The Apostrophe Protection Society Gone for Good

  Dec 2, 2019 7:00 pm809 views

  With all that’s going on in the UK—an election, Brexit, terror on London Bridge, another Donald Trump visit—it was surprising to see the British media so eager to report the death of the Apostrophe Protection Society. The Times, the Standard, the Independent, the Daily Mail, BBC radio and TV, and RTE all ran stories about it, as did the Guardian (two articles on two consecutive days), together with outlets as far flung as Australia and New Zealand, not to mention the Washington Post and the New York Post. 

  What happened was that the society’s 96-year-old founder announced that the ignorant had won, and he, the nation’s self-appointed pedant-in-chief, no longer had the energy to campaign against the rude, apostrophic errors of the ignorant. So he called it quit’s.

• Gender conceal: Did you know that pronouns can also hide someone's gender?

  Nov 9, 2019 4:15 pm1513 views

  Gender reveals have been exploding in the news recently, but there are also a growing number of gender conceals—using a pronoun to hide someone’s gender. Historically, two English pronouns have been used to mask a person’s gender: it and they. But so far the definitions of it and they don’t include the gender conceal.

  First let’s look at they. The Oxford English Dictionary lists three senses for singular they: 

  • referring collectively to members of a group (everyone, everybody)
  • referring to an individual generically or indefinitely (someone, a person, the student)
  • referring to someone who is nonbinary or gender-nonconforming (Sam Smith’s pronouns are they and them).

  I think it’s time to add a fourth sense:

  • referring to someone whose gender needs to be concealed (the whistleblower…they).

• Grammar-shaming Trump

  Nov 1, 2019 12:00 pm1067 views

  Donald Trump is torturing the English language. Says New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, the president “is as inept at English as he is at governing,” adding, “He’s oxymoronic: a nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue.” What got Bruni riled up was not just the nonstop alt-right ravings, but also Trump’s constant misspellings, his oddball capitalization and bizarre punctuation, and his word-manglings like hamberder and covfefe. 

  Berating someone for making language mistakes is called "grammar shaming." Grammar shaming ordinary people doesn’t work: their English still won't meet your expectations and they'll resent your superior attitude. And there’s no point grammar shaming Trump because he’s incapable of feeling shame....

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  Teachers' pronouns

  Oct 22, 2019 12:15 pm3918 views

  I’m a teacher; my pronoun is _______.

  If you answered, My pronoun is they, you’ve done nothing wrong. Yes, teachers are expected to model good grammar as well as teach it—sometimes the job depends on it—but no matter what you’ve been told before, singular they is grammatically correct, and the American Psychological Society’s influential Publication Manual (7e) is the latest authority to agree. The APA manual stresses correct grammar in writing, and it approves the use of they, them, their, themselves, and even themself, when an individual’s pronouns are unknown or irrelevant.

  Teachers have a reputation for stressing grammatical correctness, but the last time the National Education Association had a style manual, back in 1974, it didn’t even consider singular they as an option. At the time, Mildred Fenner, editor of Today’s Education, reported that for many years the NEA journal used generic she for teachers because most teachers were women. But in the 1960s men began to complain that expressions like the teacher . . . she were responsible for teachers’ poor public image and their low salaries. One man objected at an NEA meeting that generic she was both bad English and a bad look for the profession. . . .

• Pronouns and the law

  Oct 10, 2019 1:45 pm1071 views

  A Virginia teacher was fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s pronouns. Now the teacher, Peter Vlaming, is suing his former school for violating his First Amendment rights. Does he have a case?

• The Song of Singular they

  Sep 14, 2019 1:15 pm1035 views

  When the singer Sam Smith announced on Instagram that their pronouns were they, them—which got more than half a million likes in less than a day—the Oscar and Grammy winner acknowledged “there will be many mistakes and mis gendering but all I ask is you please please try.”

  Smith was correct that there would be some misgendering. In reporting the story, CNN, the BBC, and the Guardian all referred to Smith as “they,” but over the course of a 5-sentence story the Associated Press called Smith “he” and “his” seven times.

   

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  Can a Swedish pronoun cure sexism?

  Aug 29, 2019 10:45 am1236 views

  Can a coined gender-neutral pronoun reduce sexism? A recent study by Margit Tavits and Efrén O. Pérez published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is optimistic that it can. According to Tavits and Pérez, now that the new, ungendered Swedish pronoun hen is official, Swedes will be more open to women in public life and more likely to support the rights of LGBT people. Only hen is not really official in any meaningful sense, and Sweden was already socially progressive decades before hen gained prominence.

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  Forget Rees-Mogg, Fowler, and Strunk & White, the arbiter of English today is Autocorrect

  Jul 31, 2019 11:45 am802 views

  Jacob Rees-Mogg, the foppish MP newly-appointed Leader of Britain’s House of Commons and sometimes called the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century, has issued a no-nonsense style guide for all writing done by his staff. Like any set of language do’s and don’ts, Rees-Mogg’s guide to utterly correct if somewhat outdated English, prepared some years ago for use in his Somerset constituency office and now to be used in the leader’s new office, includes rules to be followed and words to be banned.

  But all style guides are doomed to fail--except maybe Autocorrect, whose decisions prove difficult to reverse.

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  Commas don't kill people

  Jul 23, 2019 3:45 pm6770 views

  According to one legend, the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement, convicted of treason for supporting the Irish rebellion, was “hanged on a comma.” But that's wrong, the comma didn't kill him.

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  In the event of moon disaster, and other speeches our presidents never gave

  Jul 17, 2019 10:00 am940 views

  Two days before the first astronauts walked on the moon, H. R. "Watergate Bob" Haldeman directed Nixon speechwriter William Safire to come up with something for the president to say to the astronauts' widows. Just in case.

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  Google's Panopticon will make you a better person--just click to agree

  Jul 13, 2019 12:15 am1043 views

  The Fourth Amendment protects your right to privacy, and the Fifth protects you from self-incrimination. That’s why the government has to get a warrant before it can snoop inside your house and warn you that you have the right to remain silent when questioned by police. But in the Fall of 2018 Google filed a patent application for a system that will monitor and evaluate everything you say and do and take corrective action if you stray from prescribed norms. All you have to do is click to agree and you’ve signed away your privacy and your protection against self-incrimination.

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  It's National Grammar Day, not National Pedant's Day

  Mar 3, 2019 10:00 pm1434 views

  National Grammar Day is celebrated every year on March 4th because it’s the only day of the year that is a complete sentence. Get it? March fourth/March forth? As they say on the internets, hahaha.

  But like many celebrations, National Grammar Day is founded on a myth. There is no Tooth Fairy, and most of the language we produce has nothing to do with complete sentences.

• What do you call a retired professor?

  Feb 26, 2019 6:00 pm1007 views

  Emeritus? Emerita? Emeriti? Emeritae? Emeritx? Emerit? Maybe we need a gender-neutral word for retired academics?