blog posts

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  From they to tey to te: pronoun mansplaining in the 1970s

  Feb 28, 2020 2:00 pm0 views

  In 1971, Casey Miller and Kate Swift coined the gender-neutral pronouns tey, ter, and tem. Writing in the preview issue of Ms. Magazine, Miller and Swift called their creation “the human pronoun” which would help women to be recognized “as full-fledged members of the human race.” Three years later, Warren Farrell came up with te, tes, and tir, barely acknowledging Miller and Swift's coinage, but explaining in great detail why his "human pronouns" were superior. 

• Will the real Gettysburg Address please stand up?

  Nov 16, 2013 1:45 pm187 views

  Nov. 19, 2013, is the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Or, to put it another way, the best-known American speech is seven score and ten years old. Although it’s famous, and was often memorized by school children (schoolchildren in the north, that is), the text of the Gettysburg Address is uncertain: we have no one hundred percent accurate record, spoken or written, of the words that Lincoln said that day.

• The right to read

  Jul 30, 2018 11:30 am203 views

  It’s been a bad few weeks for reading.

  First a South Carolina police union pressured a high school to drop two books from its summer reading list. The problem? The books depicted cops as violent racists. The union defended its foray into censorship because, “when people don’t like the books their kids are asked to read, they call the police.”

  Then, as if the book police wasn’t bad enough, a Detroit federal judge ruled that there is no constitutional right to read. Guns, yes. Books, no.

• Ghostwriters . . . who ya gonna call?

  May 12, 2018 2:00 pm243 views

  The New York Times reports that people are turning to ghostwriters to help them write text messages, dating profiles, and status updates, the kind of personal writing that most of us used to do for ourselves along with our shopping lists, thank you notes, and diary entries. . . .

  But now that the internet has turned us all into writers, ordinary people are calling ghostwriters to help them post online. . . .

  The internet began as a free-wheeling, we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-rules space that would democratize writing. Turning everyone with a keyboard into a writer would take writing out of the hands of specialists. Along the way, you could ditch those school rules. Upper case, lower case? Who cares? Spelling and punctuation? No, thank you. Subject-verb agreement? It’s for losers. No teacher was going to cover that email in red ink; no boss was going to send that .pdf back for revision.

  But that’s not what happened. . . .

   

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  The new digital censorship: Writers blocking readers

  Dec 5, 2017 5:00 pm389 views

  In a new form of censorship, social media lets writers block their readers.

  I found out recently, and quite by accident, that a writer whose work I’ve read from time to time had blocked me on Twitter. It’s a digital first: never since the invention of letters have writers had the option of preventing readers from accessing their work. 

  I’m not talking about private diaries, personal letters, or eyes-only top secret communiqués. I mean writers who write for the public. These writers—who used to be grateful that anyone was willing to glance at their work let alone read it all the way through—now have the power to say, “My words are for everybody else, but they’re not for you.”

• Marriage equality, guns, health care, and the myth of judicial objectivity

  Jun 29, 2015 1:15 am445 views

  In Bread and Jam for Frances, a children’s book about a family of badgers, Frances’s best friend, Albert, eats his lunch bit by bit so that the sandwich, the pickle, the egg, and the milk come out even. Supreme Court decisions are a bit like that. In decisions on marriage equality, health care, and the Second Amendment, the justices interpreted the facts of each case and chose their arguments to make their decision come out right.

• Charlie Hebdo shows there’s always some speech that isn’t free

  Apr 5, 2015 4:15 pm449 views

  On January 7, 2015, terrorists attacked the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve, including the editor and several cartoonists. Much of the world denounced this brutal attack. French president François Hollande expressed outrage over the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists, and millions of ordinary people rallied at the Place de la République in Paris, in the squares of other French cities, and in cities abroad as well, to reassert their commitment to free speech. Je suis Charlie became the chant of the day. 

  But Charlie fever proved all too brief. On January 11, the same world leaders who were chanting “Je suis Charlie” called for increased police powers to spy on the internet activities and mobile phones of terrorists, suspected terrorists, people who might one day become terrorists, and for good measure, just about everybody else on the planet, including cartoonists. There was little outrage that this surveillance, calculated to protect everyone’s speech, could actually wind up suppressing speech. And by the time the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre published a new issue on January 14, with a cover of Muhammad shedding a tear and holding a sign that says, “Je suis Charlie,” many of those who had condemned the murder of cartoonists now said, free speech is important, but insulting religion invites serious consequences. 

• "She" -- Chelsea Manning and the first-ever court-ordered pronoun

  Mar 6, 2015 4:15 pm459 views

  In what could be the first-ever case of a court-ordered pronoun, a U.S. Army tribunal has ordered prison officials to use a feminine pronoun when referring to Chelsea Manning, who has changed her gender identity from male to female. . . . In plain English, the Army doesn’t have to call her Chelsea, but it does have to call her ‘she.'

   

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  Dictionaries are trending

  Apr 22, 2017 3:30 pm526 views

  When people don’t understand something in the news, they no longer wait for the Sunday talk shows to tell them what it means, or the next issue of Time, or even the Daily Show. With just a click, they look it up in the dictionary.

• The internet of things? More like the internet of snitches.

  Mar 15, 2015 10:00 pm528 views

  We call it the internet of things, but it’s really the internet of snitches, because snitches reveal things about us we might prefer to keep under wraps. These devices in our cars, refrigerators, and DVRs regularly track and report not just their status, but our status as well: what we’re doing with the devices, and where. It’s an indirect report, to be sure, but it erodes our privacy all the same. Now, two new web-enabled gadgets— a TV and a doll—directly record and report what we say, which is the very definition of snitching, and our ebook readers, which have been around a bit longer, can even peek inside our heads to expose what we think.

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  International Pronouns Day

  Oct 9, 2018 10:30 am586 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.

• <CTRL>, <ALT>, and especially <DELETE>: Proposed Cybersecurity Act gives president power to unplug the internet

  Apr 17, 2009 11:45 am599 views

  On April 1 (that date may be no accident), Sen. Jay Rockefeller and his co-sponsors introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.B. 773) with companion legislation creating the office of Cybersecurity Advisor to the president (S.B. 778). 

  One blogger warns that if these bills pass, the president will have the authority to unplug the internet and federalize private computer networks.

• Trump University’s plagiarism policy

  Jul 19, 2016 7:45 pm611 views

  Apparently Trump University had no plagiarism policy, because, when Melania Trump addressed the Republican National Convention Monday night, she copied several sentences from Michelle Obama’s 2008 “First Lady” speech. Initial responses to Ms. Trump’s speech were positive, but shortly afterwards the plagiarism came to light, and the Republican Convention got the dose of show biz Donald Trump had promised.

• What if printed books went by ebook rules?

  Apr 20, 2015 11:00 pm627 views

  I love ebooks. Despite their unimaginative page design, monotonous fonts, curious approach to hyphenation, and clunky annotation utilities, they’re convenient and easy on my aging eyes. But I wish they didn’t come wrapped in legalese.

  Whenever I read a book on my iPad, for example, I have tacitly agreed to the 15,000 word statement of terms and conditions for the iTunes store. It’s written by lawyers in language so dense and tedious it seems designed not to be read, except by other lawyers, and that’s odd, since these Terms of Service agreements (TOS) are all about books that are designed to be read.

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

  Jan 23, 2020 11:00 am633 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.