blog posts

• The Song of Singular they

  Sep 14, 2019 1:15 pm259 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 am569 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 am613 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 Like any set of language do’s and don’ts, Rees-Mogg’s guide to utterly correct if somewhat outdated English, prepared some years ago for use in his Somerset constituency office and now to be used in the leader’s new office, includes rules to be followed and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 pm6273 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 am713 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 am809 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 pm1355 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 pm708 views

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

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  NPR Poll: Americans don’t want to be politically correct. Tote bag, anyone?

  Dec 23, 2018 12:30 pm1573 views

  A new NPR-Marist poll finds that 52% of Americans don’t think the country should become more politically correct. Only 36% think that more political correctness is needed. The rest are either unsure or don’t care.

  That response is not surprising, since politically correct has always been a negative term. But two things about the NPR poll are bizarre. The first is that NPR, which has long promoted the idea that carrying its tote bag was the right-thinking, liberal thing to do, had replicated a 2010 Fox News poll, Fox News being the network that attacks anyone with a public radio tote bag as politically correct. The second is that the question NPR asked is long, confusing, and designed to produce a negative response:

  In general, are you in favor of the United States becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others or are you against the country becoming more politically correct and upset that there are too many things people can't say anymore?

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  In Silicon Valley’s version of the nanny state, the nannies are all offline

  Oct 28, 2018 10:00 am1089 views

  As the techies of Silicon Valley rake in the profits from our inability to live without devices, they’re cutting their own children’s screen time down to zero to ensure that at least one group of privileged kids can spend quality time—with their nannies. And to make sure the nannies of Silicon Valley are off-line as well, parents are forcing them to agree not to text, call, or surf on the job. According to the restrictive contracts nannies have to sign, a logon in the presence of their charges—even when the nanny is responding to a parent’s text—may be grounds for dismissal. Which is odd considering that nannies, like the parents who hire them and almost everyone else in the digital age, rely on texts, email, and the internet to find work, arrange their schedules, and deal with everyday details and emergencies, both personal and work-related.

• Countering the backlash against nonbinary pronouns

  Oct 16, 2018 11:15 pm4840 views

  Today, Oct. 17, is International Pronouns Day. You can follow my earlier pronoun posts on singular they here, on Winnie the Pooh and gender-neutral heesh, here, on the violence of pronouns, here, on some of the first invented pronouns here, and on the politics of generic he, here.

  In this post I want to look at the backlash against gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns.

  Singular they and invented pronouns like ze, hir, E, and per highlight the need for respect and inclusion, so it’s not surprising that they generate backlash from the enemies of respect and inclusion. The objections to the pronouns are unconvincing, occasionally bizarre, and totally wrong.

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  Nonbinary pronouns are older than you think

  Oct 13, 2018 5:15 pm1302 views

  October 17 is International #PronounsDay. We have grammar day, mother language day, dictionary day, punctuation day! apostrophe day’, talk like Shakespeare day, even talk-like-a-pirate day. But this is the first time ever that a part of speech gets its own day. And not just a part of speech, but a part of a part of speech. Oct. 17 is not a day to celebrate all pronouns. We don’t celebrate the interrogatives, demonstratives, and relatives, worthy as they may be. We don’t even celebrate all the personal pronouns. Instead, October 17 is set aside for just the third-person singular gender-neutral and nonbinary personal pronouns.

  It’s the day for ze, hir, E, per, xi, ip, thon, heesh, co, um, le, and singular they. These may seem new, but they’re older than you think.

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  International Pronouns Day

  Oct 9, 2018 10:30 am429 views

  October 17 is International Pronouns Day, a whole day devoted to a part of speech that comes with its own website and a dedicated hashtag, #PronounsDay. Since it’s the first-ever pronouns day, many people are not sure how to celebrate, and so the organizers offer some suggested activities: tell people your pronouns; ask people their pronouns; have a pronoun party.

  A party? Pronouns, a part of speech that probably made your eyes glaze over in English class, are now highly-contested, high-profile symbols in the ongoing struggle for human rights. Maybe not worth a pronoun party. Certainly worth a #PronounsDay.

• Hey, you guys, you is already plural

  Aug 24, 2018 10:15 am1069 views

  Should we get rid of the plural you guys because it’s sexist? Joe Pinsker, writing in the Atlantic, reports a growing resistance to the common use of you guys—along with hey guys, and just plain guys—to address mixed groups of men and women, as well as single-sex groups of only women. Pinsker finds that trans and gender-nonconforming people feel excluded by you guys; that teachers and business people reject you guys as not inclusive; and that lots of people want to ditch you guys in favor of something gender neutral, like folks, or people, or comrades. Then Pinsker adds this peculiar observation by way of explaining why you guys is so popular: “English lacks a standard gender-neutral second-person plural pronoun.” He actually says this twice.But that is flat-out wrong. English has always had a gender-neutral second-person plural pronoun: you.

• In which Pooh tries a nonbinary pronoun

  Aug 11, 2018 5:30 pm858 views

  In 1929, a year after a new voting law extended suffrage to all women in England, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin delivered a radio address on education in which he referred to children—boys and girls—as he. This prompted the well-known suffragist, Lady Annette Matthews, to write a letter to the Times complaining that Baldwin’s gaffe demonstrated “the need for a bi-sex pronoun, which would remove from the newly enfranchised woman elector the absurd position of being left to the imagination, or appearing as an afterthought in parenthesis.” . . .

  Then, in 1930, A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, addressed the pronoun issue in his introduction to The Christopher Robin Birthday Book. According to Milne, in a perfect world English speakers would say heesh.