Louis Menand’s recent NYkr review essay (archived; ostensibly a review of Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary) has some good things to say, but on the whole it irritated me, so (as is my wont) I will share my irritation here. Mind you, this is the same Menand who so sharply took Lynne Truss to task for her idiocy about language, so it’s not that he’s ignorant, in this essay he just doesn’t pay attention to what he’s writing beyond making sure it sounds clever. At any rate, I’m going to go through and pick out idiocies to flog, much as I did with Simon Winchester back in 2004; I do not regard Menand as a terrible writer tout court, like the egregious Winchester, but that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t have perpetrated this stuff.
There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it.
What? Words are misspelled and commas misplaced all the time; I guess what he means is that if you care about such things and pay attention to the squiggly red lines, you can avoid many mistakes, but if you care about such things you weren’t going to make many mistakes in the first place. Has he ever looked at internet sites other than carefully curated ones like newyorker.com?
As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.
We’ll let the pointlessly exotic Bildung slide, but what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”? Does he mean it seems like a normal word? Yeah, that’s the point. And what does he mean by “radioactive”? Is it just a fancy would-be synonym for, say, “contentious”? Frankly, the only thing that unites those words is that they were created by progressives, which, well, I will be charitable and not be mean about. But I wrinkle my brow.
Most free online dictionaries (the free merriam-webster.com was originally based on the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate; the company also has a subscription site) are not heavy on lexicographic detail. They are mainly for people who enjoy playing with words. Definitions and correct spellings are no longer the principal attraction. Websites feature a “word of the day,” crossword puzzles and word games, lists of emojis, trending slang, usage tips (“Is it ‘nip it in the butt’ or ‘nip it in the bud?’ ”), translation programs, and, of course, ads.
What does he mean by “not heavy on lexicographic detail”? The online merriam-webster.com gives exactly as much lexicographic detail as the physical dictionary; yes, it also features fun stuff “and, of course, ads,” and the reason for all that is that they have to pay the bills, as he acknowledges in the next paragraph (“It needs eyeballs to survive”). So the choice is between an online site with lexicographic detail, fun stuff, and ads, or no site at all. Which would he prefer?
Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, another big print-era brand—the original edition was published in Scotland in 1768—that is struggling to compete in an online realm dominated by the nonprofit Wikipedia. Britannica has been losing market share since 1993, when Microsoft released its digital encyclopedia, Encarta. Fatsis quotes a Britannica editor comparing Wikipedia, disparagingly, to a public rest room—a comparison that’s not entirely wrong. It’s not the most elegant website, but everyone uses it.
What the fuck does he mean by “a comparison that’s not entirely wrong” and “not the most elegant website”? Here’s Wikipedia and here’s Britannica: is it obvious which is more elegant? The “public rest room” thing is slander, pure and simple, and shame on Menand for quoting it approvingly.
On the attacks on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:
The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.”
But “ain’t” was in Web. II as well — you can see it right here on p. 54! And Web. III doesn’t present it as standard usage: “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech…” Like all attacks on Web. III, this was sheer elitist know-nothingism dressed up as educated disapproval. Come on, Menand, this ain’t hard to check. (N.b.: I had to chide him for his remarks on Webster’s Third and “disinterested” back in 2011.)
I don’t want to give the impression that Menand is a prescriptivist like DFW — his heart is in the right place — but he seems to be writing on autopilot and not paying much attention to whether what he says holds together or even needs saying. Here’s an extended passage about an ever-interesting question:
Of all the words that human beings use, publicly or privately, written or spoken, which ones belong in a dictionary? Does a frequency threshold need to be crossed for a word to make it lexicographically? Does it have to be accepted first by whatever gatekeepers may still be out there—professors, editors, podcasters . . . influencers? And does a particular level of disuse have to be reached for a word to be dropped into the lexical dustbin? Fatsis reports that the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, from 1944, has five pages of terms starting with “buffalo.” Today, you could probably find many “cyber” words and “bro” words. How much longer will these combinations be in use?
Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.
It does have an entry in Wikipedia, whose policy of giving entries to everything helps it keep ahead of the dictionaries. It can also operate quickly because it’s crowdsourced. It does not employ experts. Having found the definition for “groyper” somewhere, you might care to know how to spell it. In Wikipedia, the word is capped as a proper noun, but the Washington Post lowercases it in most uses. Normally, you’d look to a dictionary to tell you which is correct, but, since most popular online dictionaries do not recognize “groyper” as a word, this can’t be done. Welcome to the desert of the virtual.
On the other hand, the free Merriam-Webster online does list “cheugy,” a word meaning uncool, used especially as a put-down of trends associated with millennials. It is possibly related to the excellent Australian word “daggy,” but the coinage is credited to one Gaby Rasson, who is supposed to have used it with her friends at Beverly Hills High School in 2013. Not exactly Dr. Johnson territory. “Cheugy” has no etymology. It’s a nonsense word. Rasson said it just sounded right. “Cheugy” is pretty niche. It’s missing from Cambridge, the O.E.D., and even the American Heritage Dictionary, and it seems to have lapsed into disuse. It is also missing from the latest print edition of Merriam-Webster—the twelfth, which was released in November—and will presumably proceed to disappear down a lexical memory hole.
It’s not really “hard to grasp the principles” — a word has to be used a lot and exhibit staying power to be considered. Take “groyper” indeed: “the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.” Well, yeah, it’s only eight years old! If you want to know what flash-in-the-pan words like that mean (and I’ll bet cash money that one will be forgotten in another eight years), that’s what Google is for. He goes on to ramble about scientific and medical terms, product names, and the like, but all he does is basically say “dictionary A has word X, while dictionary B doesn’t.” So what? There is no theoretical discussion, nothing that would clarify your thinking about the topic. (Oh, and “Washington Post” is plain wrong — if you’re going to italicize the names of newspapers it has to be Washington Post.) And check out this paragraph:
Seventy-five per cent of English speakers speak it as a second language. They are likely to mix languages, even in the same sentence, or to speak a hybrid dialect. What about Spanglish? Or Ebonics, a.k.a. African American Vernacular English? Is that a separate language? How many Yiddish terms are in the English lexicon? Cambridge does not recognize “mishegoss,” which seems like an oversight. It does list “schmo” and “schmuck,” but gives them the same definition: “a stupid or silly person.” Those words are not synonyms. We can empathize with schmoes but never schmucks.
The last point is a good one, but he doesn’t bother to explain the difference between the two words; other than that, it’s just a salad of random thoughts. And this paragraph, the penultimate, really angered me:
Dictionaries rely on the belief that the word is the basic unit of linguistic meaning. It is not. The basic unit of meaning is the sentence, or, sometimes, especially in speech, the phrase. You can memorize vocabulary, but if you can’t make a phrase you can’t speak the language. This is not simply a matter of grammar, of syntax and morphology. It’s ultimately a matter of cultural literacy. The dictionary is like the periodic table: it can tell you what the elements are, but not how to combine them. Words take a lot of their semantic coloration from the words around them.
Dictionaries “rely on” no such belief; you just made that up! And who are you to say what the “basic unit of meaning” is? Is you a linguist? No! You is a pontificator! Once again, I am depressed by how eager people are to expound on language as though anyone who can talk knows all they need to know. Get a grip, people! Language is a subject just like physics, and you’d better learn something about it before you ascend the podium!
I assume by lame he means that “they” doesn’t work well for many speakers because it has a different meaning that many of us find fairly central to our use of language, and that the distinction that is the point of the existing usage (plurality) is lost with the new usage.
I said this once here, but I made the mistake of saying it didn’t feel “natural”, which must have sounded like an uglier argument about gender than I was trying to make.
To overcome the lost plurality issue, I tried out singular they a few times (“they is” / “they walks”) with friends of my kids, (that being the context where it sometimes comes up) but I end up sounding like either a goofy white person failing to speak convincing AAVE; or like Gollum.
I would favor a resurgence of “one” as a one-time singular program that is now rare enough that using it wouldn’t blur any useful, current meanings, but that seems unlikely to happen.
I’m sort of resigned to “they” but agree with Menand that it’s lame.
That’s because you’re not used to it. Do you find singular “you” lame? No? That’s because you’re used to it. Once again I insist that it’s fine, indeed inevitable, for us all to have our personal reactions to words and usages, but that’s all they are — personal reactions. They are not objective judgments, and it is a serious mistake to act as if they are.
On “Washington Post”: certainly you’re right and he is not for present-day conventions. However, wasn’t that a more common convention in the past, when people would refer to it as “the Post”, and likewise to the NYT as “the Times”, etc., with the city added only as necessary for dismbiguation? Exceptionally, “The London Times” seems not totally objectionable even today.
I will be charitable and not be mean about
Ooh! Ooh! Can I be mean about it? Somebody should.
[The Wikipedia thing alone is quite enough to justify the copious application of meanness.]
The point is that the name of the paper is The Washington Post (website), while the name of the London paper is The Times. It is therefore incorrect to omit the “Washington” in the first case, as it is incorrect to include the “London” in the second. Sure, you can casually refer to “the Post,” but if you’re including the city in the name both parts have to be ital.
Can I be mean about it?
You can indeed!
Sure.
But it is absolutely objective to state that the preponderance of mere personal reactions is how language usages are settled. It’s a more serious mistake to pretend they don’t matter.
You didn’t even seem to recognize a mere personal reaction so common that Menand mentioned it and his editors saw no reason to clarify it. While I do use “they” when I find the need, I think it is less likely to reach normative use because it contradicts a core part of how many people employ the word.
And something like 10% of the country does reject the loss of the 2nd sing./pl. distinction, so they replace it. (though still another group uses the replacement term as a blanket term.)
You didn’t even seem to recognize a mere personal reaction so common that Menand mentioned it and his editors saw no reason to clarify it. While I do use “they” when I find the need, I think it is less likely to reach normative use because it contradicts a core part of how many people employ the word.
Of course I recognize it; it’s inevitable. I simply discount it, because in the end it won’t matter, any more than the equally natural resistance to pretty much every language change — people will get used to it and move on. I don’t mind singular “they,” but I hate counter-to-fact “may have” with a passion. So what? Nobody cares, and my hatred will change nothing.
Singular they has been perfectly grammatical for centuries. All that’s changed is that there are more good reasons to use it nowadays.
Being Old, I find that in several syntactic contexts this more frequent usage is not something that comes completely naturally to me. So I’ve been practicing to get better at it. And I’m succeeding!
Ambiguity? Pfui. I do not grammaticalise any singular/plural distinction in the second person when speaking English and the sky has not yet fallen in. Moreover, so extensive is my vocabulary that I find I can actually disambiguate utterances when necessary by adding More Words. (I wonder if I could monetise my advanced disambiguation techniques on Youtube?)
“Singular they” covers a variety of uses in different situations, some of which are indeed extremely “natural” (i.e. all but the most prescriptivist Anglophones will sometimes use them unselfconsciously if their superego is not actively prescriptivizing) and others of which are more novel and more awkward-seeming to many (although unlike hat I’m neutral about which way the arrow of causation points). A good dictionary should distinguish among these.
I wonder if by “lame” Menand is expressing disappointment that some more novel option like xe/xem/xyr is not sweeping the field?
They does suffer a deficit that you doesn’t, which is the lack of known conventions for re-establishing number akin to you guys or y’all (excepting perhaps them lot for right pondians). A fully general third-person pronoun is unlikely to last as such for long, so taking one on is basically waiting (or hoping) for another shoe to drop.
There’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch with they, because activists will argue from the immemorial use of it for indefinite persons (which wasn’t contingent on unknowability of gender, pairing naturally with antecedents like somebody even where only one gender was possible) and treat the innovative, definite uses as if they’re one and the same: people know intuitively that there’s a distinction but lack the grammatical concepts to explain it, which tends to leave them feeling vaguely confused and can draw them into overbroad denunciations of singular they as a whole. In my experience even those who make an effort to follow the more deliberate uses of they manage it only with, well, deliberate effort, and tend to backslide as soon as they let their guard down.
I wonder if by “lame” Menand is expressing disappointment that some more novel option like xe/xem/xyr is not sweeping the field?
I suspect that that is indeed his “point.” Of course, the “lameness” of which he complains is, in fact, naturalness, which is the exact reason why “singular they” has succeeded at the expense of doomed-from-the-outset inventions like “xe.” He’s either too dense to understand this, or simply wanted to preen, as with his halfwitted dissing of Wikipedia, or his “edgy” nonsense about expressions like “anti-racism” being “radioactive.” What a prannock.
There’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch with they, because activists will argue from the immemorial use of it for indefinite persons (which wasn’t contingent on unknowability of gender, pairing naturally with antecedents like somebody even where only one gender was possible) and treat the innovative, definite uses as if they’re one and the same
Good point. I think the main awkwardness comes from using singular “they” anaphorically to refer to a definite specific antecedent, as you imply, and I think you’re quite right that this is an actual innovation. I think “bait and switch” is not an unfair characterisation of the Argument from Shakespeare version that people put forward.
So my “all that’s changed is that there are more good reasons to use it nowadays” was wrong.
I’d still say it’s a pretty natural extension of usage, though.
In my experience even those who make an effort to follow the more deliberate uses of they manage it only with, well, deliberate effort, and tend to backslide as soon as they let their guard down.
My experience is more complicated. In the case of one of my younger relatives, their father does “backslide” sometimes, but their mother never does. My daughter invariably uses “they/them/their” for one of her close friends: I’ve never once heard her “backslide.”
I wasn’t actually joking when I said I “practice” these things. As with other habits, those who claim that some linguistic habit is immutable often turn out to have ulterior motives (not always conscious) for claiming that real change is just not possible.
Ignorant or just not paying attention, either way Menand demonstrated in the Toni Morrison’s Genius Affair of 2003 that he couldn’t admit to his own mistakes when he was called on them, so I don’t trust him much on this topic.
That said, Menand could have done a lot worse here; at least he seems to regard Dwight Macdonald from a distance, as a voice from the past, not expected to be recognized as infallible today.
I’d still say it’s a pretty natural extension of usage, though.
Yes, and if it doesn’t last and people devise another solution, good for them! Let a thousand pronouns bloom!
That said, Menand could have done a lot worse here
My reaction as well. I hope no one mistakes my grumpiness for wholesale condemnation. I just enjoy being grumpy! (Also, Menand is, like, six months younger than I am, so I won’t let him get away with playing the old-fart card.)
Grammatical errors get squiggly lines of different colors — and not all writing software has grammar checks.
Nowadays, one can ask an LLM to check one’s writing, and it will note issues with grammar and punctuation. But I wouldn’t trust it
Trying to imagine a rest room where the owners can declare some graffiti to be semi-protected. And will erase nonsense and false claims, and scrawl [citation needed] next to dubious ones, and otherwise demand sources of claims.
Winces in “I’ve probably read too much legalese” — “slander” is spoken, “libel” is written, and “defamation” covers all possibilities.
Eh, I’d guess “chewy+oogy”
I posted Rosten’s three distinct definitions of “shmuck” from The Joys of Yiddish, of which #2 certainly seems to me to be roughly equivalent to “schmo”, while Menand seems to think that only #3 exists (besides #1), and perhaps, is the only meaning that ever existed (the forgotten meaning of schmuck?).
The Times, the London one, may have presented itself as THE Times, and the Washington Post, in its better days at least used to allow it was not the only Post, and though the New York Times lately sometimes refers to itself as the Times, which for internal reference shorthand I can abide, the NYT photographers and editors being let loose to present vibe (?) news photos without identifying pertinent individuals nor dates seems relatively closer to signs of the apocalypse.
Per its inventor, cheugy has no etymology: “There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and nothing to describe it and ‘cheugy’ came to me. How it sounded fit the meaning.”
(According to the article, “Things that are decidedly un-cheugy, according to its progenitors: thrifting, making your own clothes, handmade products, Levi’s jeans, Birkenstocks [!], home decor not found at Target.” Are Kids Today turning into… hippies? That your punk parents should have lived to see this.)
There have been several occasions in the recent past when I’ve had to explain to non-native English speaker colleagues why the word “they” appears in this context that they never studied. This includes young colleagues.
Yes, singular “they” was there hundreds of years ago, in Chaucer for example, but it wasn’t ever a common usage. For the last several hundred years, English, like many other Indo-European languages, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups, with no evidence of widespread confusion or exclusion in comprehension.
So it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything. Rather, it introduces an ambiguity regarding plurality that wasn’t there before.
So it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything.
It replaces the earlier “he or she” which was much worse.
Has Menand not hear of ‘autocorrupt’?, which turns correct spellings into misspellings, especially when coupled with nervous cluelessness about (say) its vs it’s.
They does suffer a deficit that you doesn’t, which is the lack of known conventions for re-establishing number akin to you guys or y’all …
Could they’all become a thing? I suppose risk of confusion with they’ll. them’all?
For the last several hundred years, English, …, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups,
Hmm. I hear ‘the customer … she …’ when talking about groceries; ‘the customer … he …’ when talking about hardware.
For the last several hundred years, English, like many other Indo-European languages, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups, with no evidence of widespread confusion or exclusion in comprehension.
You might want to survey some women about that.
For the last several hundred years, English, …, has used masculine forms as defaults for mixed or unknown groups,
I oppose this manufactured language innovation on the grounds that it introduces an ambiguity between “human male” and “human being” that was previously absent.* The ambiguity can only be resolved by awkward and ugly periphrases: how much better not to introduce it in the first place!
* In KONGO (the font of all languages) this unfortunate confusion does not arise.
There’s a lot to be said for the Ghanaian English solution: using “he” and “she” in free variation, regardless of biological sex. No “they” number-awkwardness! No outlandish neologisms! What’s not to like?
Re “devise another solution,” the “singular they” solution is in at least some degree of use as a “solution” to multiple and distinct “problems,” and while it is perfectly understandable why it might plausibly be extended from one to the next there may also be forces pushing in the other direction toward (at least implicitly in the practice of a speech community, not necessarily always via self-conscious reformers/advocates) having different solutions for different problems to avoid certain potential ambiguities, not to mention possible disagreements about whether particular situations are indeed problems in need of a solution in the first place.
Why, there may still be some place even for the deprecated-by-hat “he or she.” Consider, by way of imperfect parallel, how sometimes people say “sons [and/or] daughters” and other times (or maybe other people trying to say more or less the same thing) “children,” rather than universally substituting the latter for the former. The former involves more syllables but some find it more suitable in some contexts, so we let them bloom such flowers as they will.
Perhaps another solution might be to keep the gender distinction, but to make it speaker-oriented, so that a speaker who indentified as female would refer to all singular human beings as “she”, a presenting-as-male speaker would use “he” throughout, and anyone who couldn’t be bothered with all that would just use “they.”
Damn, now I’m wondering if there really is a language like that somewhere …
I am in the process of rewatching Inspector Morse saga and in one of the episodes (Last bus to Woodstock something like that) there is an elderly woman who is a very enthusiastic witness but cannot identify a person of interest as a man or a woman (dark, rain, raincoat, unisex clothing…). And she (yes, her, woman) settles on “it”, but it’s a whimsical choice.
other than that, it’s just a salad of random thoughts
Not quite. What Menand is grasping toward is a definition of Standard English. A language model that deliberately excludes some words and word variants of some speech communities. This is a usual second prong to the “word has to be used a lot and exhibit staying” desideratum. It should be used widely or at least widely enough.
The Talodi Kordofanian language Lumun has an elaborate system of noun classes marked by singular-plural prefix pairs, much like Bantu. Greenberg (bless his cotton socks) held that this feature of (some) Kordofanian languages, by itself, proved that the Kordofanian languages were in fact genetically related to Bantu, despite the total absence of lexical correspondences.
And I have to say that although the books dutifully line up Kordofanian noun class prefixes with Bantu ones and assert that they are cognate, a certain degree of lively faith is needed in order to actually perceive the cognacy …
I bring up this sad tale because the Lumun “human” class goes like this:
pʊl “person”, ʊl “people”
pamɪ́t “traditional healer”, amɪ́t “traditional healers”
However, in the light of this discussion, I now realise that the Lumun singular-human p- must be cognate with proto-Bantu plural-human *ba-. It is evident that proto-Niger-Kordofanian had a masculine-feminine distinction, just like respectable European languages do, but in an excess of wokery the original male/female noun class prefixes were replaced by originally-plural *ba- > p- in Kordofanian.
There is clearly a lesson for English speakers here. Excessive wokery leads to being displaced to remote mountainous areas in Sudan.
using “he” and “she” in free variation, regardless of biological sex
I had wondered for a while how non-binary people deal with Hebrew, wherein gender is marked on pronouns (third and second persons) but also verbs, nouns, and adjectives, which makes it hard indeed to avoid, and where a new gender would require extensive reconstruction of the grammar. And then I saw an article about someone non-binary, in which the author went and alternated the gender markers between male and female wherever they occurred. It was a bit vertiginous, but it worked. I don’t know how common that is, or what others do.
Back in the 7th century, Khan Asparukh and his Bulgar warriors swept southwest from the steppes into Moesia and defeated the troops of Constantine IV, speaking to each other in their extremely woke Turkic language that had been carefully scrubbed clean of any gendered pronouns. Alas, they settled down, diluted their wokeness, and were eventually beguiled by the gendered pronouns of the unenlightened Slavs they had subjugated. (The subsequently-invading Magyars did better in this regard.)
> what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”?
Also
> Of course I recognize it
Whatever
> it’s lame in the sense of being a manufactured language innovation that doesn’t improve or accomplish anything.
I don’t believe that nor does Menand. I use it because it is accomplishing something, allowing people not to be forced to pick a gendered pronoun. But I don’t think it’s a great outcome. I tend to agree that if it does catch on, we will likely see the development of a disambuguator along the lines of y’all.
it’s striking to me, reading this thread, just how much all of the griping about “they” as an ungendered singular pronoun that i’ve ever heard, including here, seems to go elaborately out of its way to ignore the basic prescriptivist principle of attending to actual people actually speaking in actual ordinary situations. in a quarter-century or so* of very regular use (and attention to others’ use) in contexts ranging from neighborhood dive bars to academic conferences** to union meetings to a right-wing gala dinner at the Pierre***, there have been vanishingly few times that any of the straw-man confusions or uncertainties that are so constantly trotted out**** have made any kind of appearance. these aren’t actual confusions or problems that actually happen, any more than any of the problems with “Ms” that william safire and his ilk trotted out were. they’re purely ideological objections, framed for palatability.
.
the ghanaian solution DE proposes would be lovely! but for it to work, we need first to actually get rid of the social system of gender, so that the people being referred to won’t have reason to care about which category they’re being put in.
(or we could just not structure grammatical elements based on social hierarchies, which english does a pretty decent job of aside from its singular personal pronouns)
.
* i’m hedging towards the conservative side, since my circles tended to lean towards other options until a ways into the 00s.
** by far the most hostile space, precisely because of that industry’s willingness to indulge straw men, even when the straw men are being used exclusively to apply improbable quantities of tar and feathers to the specific people indulging them.
*** we got thrown out (not a surprise); the lifetime ban on returning doesn’t seem to have stuck.
**** they’re always the same ones, too, from a very small repertoire. if i were making up straw men, i’d at least want them to be new and exciting.
Reconsidering, I actually think “you guys” is the more common 2nd s./pl. disambiguator, it’s never used in a reambiguating way (the way y’all now needs “all o’ y’all” in some dialects), and interestingly, no one seems to notice that it’s another instance of male synecdoche.
Who knows what Menand is really banging on about, but on going back to the block quotes hat provides to see what exactly he had said other than “lame,” I was struck by the phrase “the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral* third-person-singular pronoun,” because I was struck by the notion that in his rather snarky register “crusade” was likely to be an inherently pejorative label. Although it is I suppose perfectly possible to be in favor of the wide availability of a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun while thinking that a “crusade” is a suboptimal or counterproductive way to get there?
*Possibly a more ambiguous specification that often thought? Maybe perfectly synonymous with rozele’s “ungendered” or maybe not?
> these aren’t actual confusions or problems that actually happen, any more than any of the problems with “Ms” that william safire and his ilk trotted out were.
Hey cool, show me where Safire said he was happy to allow the need for something like Ms and did use it, but wished there was another solution. I think you’re painting with too broad a brush.
And if there aren’t actual confusions in blending sing and pl why does English keep spinning up new pronouns like y’all, youse and you guys, despite the fact that the antecedent of a 2nd person pronoun is usually being spoken to, so the need for disambiguation is much lighter?
@Ryan: I’m not sure it’s exactly a male synecdoche. It’s just an interesting fact about words like “guy(s)” or “dude” that at present they usually seem to specify gender when used in third-party reference but are magnificently indifferent to gender when used in direct vocative address, at least in certain contexts. A good dictionary should explain this!
My wife is sometimes addressed with vocative “bro” by one of our sons, but that may still be too novel a use for the dictionaries. But maybe in five years hat will be telling everyone they don’t like it just because they’re not used to it and Change Is Inevitable?
Ryan says no one seems to notice that it’s another instance of male synecdoche.
In my circles they do, and have tedious arguments about it or just switch to “y’all”.
Yeah, I’ve been watching arguments go back and forth over whether “guys” does or should include girls for most of my life, since at least the 1980s. Search “you guys” site:languagehat.com, you’ll find discussions about that from the early days and the last few years.
It seems to have been overlooked that Ryan’s idea of “singular they“, as given in the very first comment, involves usages like “they is” / “they walks”. I would be surprised if that’s what other commenters mean by it, so there may be crossed wires in this discussion.
@jwb
Would your wife prefer “Sis”? I think not.
@Carlos:
Singular-reference “they” takes plural agreement on verbs, just like that regrettable manufactured language innovation, singular-reference “you.” The trick is not to confuse form and function.
Mooré does the honorific-plural thing for both second and third person, which always strikes me as overdoing it somehow. So you get e.g.
La nebã yaala bãmba.
and people.the mock them
“And the people mocked him [Jesus.]”
The resulting ambiguity has not, so far, led to the collapse of the Mooré language into outright incomprehensibility.
Fatsis quotes a Britannica editor comparing Wikipedia, disparagingly, to a public rest room
1. The earliest source I found for this is a Time magazine article— “An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don’t know who used it last”—published in May 2005. I hope that Fatsis, unlike Menand, makes clear that the quote is at least 20 years old, from when Wikipedia was in its infancy.
2. Do you really need that “disparagingly”? Even if you don’t observe the compare-to vs compare-with distinction, it’s obviously not a compliment. Maybe it’s too-subtle irony.
[ETA- apparently it was Robert McHenry in 2004, six years after he left Britannica. ]
“Dictionaries rely on the belief that the word is the basic unit of linguistic meaning. It is not.”
The word, or more accurately the morpheme, is indeed the basic unit of linguistic meaning. A sentence is not a basic unit. Sentences derive their meaning from the combination of words, grammar, syntax, and context.
(Word, like Potter Stewart’s pornography, is a tricky thing to define and is unreliable as a category. Dictionaries tend to also include morphemes that are not words as such, like affixes, combining forms, and set phrases.)
the author went and alternated the gender markers between male and female wherever they occurred
Stephen Jacobson does something rather like this in his teaching grammar of Central Alaskan Yup’ik (which has no gender at all, either “natural” or grammatical): when the reference is to people, he uses “he” or “she” in the English glosses, alternating by chapter.
for it to work, we need first to actually get rid of the social system of gender, so that the people being referred to won’t have reason to care about which category they’re being put in
I think this is the real issue. Language reflects culture: nobody actually decreed in the seventeenth century that “you” would henceforth oust “thou”: the change came about because of changes in society. Singular “they” will get established as an unremarkable feature of English once the people who think people who don’t want to be referred to by a gender-imposing pronoun should just suck it up are all dead.
However, it works in Ghana, not because Ghana is a feminist paradise, but because not one of the fifty-odd indigenous languages grammaticalises biological sex. It’s really just like the problem Russians have with using articles: it’s hard to internalise a distinction which is just completely lacking in your L1. The incomer languages, English and Hausa, have been adjusted to fit the norm.
The free-variation he/she thing in Ghanaian English is odd, though. Ghanaian Hausa just generalises the original masculine forms, so you say e.g. Ka zi ko? “Do you understand?” to a woman instead of “proper” Hausa Kin ji ko? The English-lexifier creoles do that too: there’s no gender at all, but the actual third-person pronoun forms go back to English “he/him”: A si am “I saw him/her/it.”
Dunno what happens in Burkina Faso French, now I think of it. All the people I spoke French to in Burkina seemed to use “elle” just like Parisians; but that may reflect the fact that the linguistic ideologies associated with French and English in West Africa are rather different. And I met far fewer French speakers in Burkina (outside Ouagadougou) than English speakers in Ghana: the colonial language hasn’t percolated down the socioeconomic hierarchy as far, or been so indigenised.
My wife is sometimes addressed with vocative “bro” by one of our sons
“bra(h)” would work better, IMO
To be fair to Menand, the weird italic choice on Washington Post was probably a fiat from The New Yorker’s quirky style editor.
Reminds me of buying from a bookstore a new hardback of The Island of the Day Before, with its unresolved mysteries. Turned out, the book contained fingerprints of a previous reader who was eating strawberry ice cream. But, before the book went to the Salvation Army, I figured that the fingerprints were not the fault of Eco.
the basic prescriptivist principle of attending to actual people actually speaking in actual ordinary situations.
Say what? That’s not any prescriptivist principle I’ve ever noticed; in fact, it reeks of descriptivism.
I was struck by the phrase “the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral* third-person-singular pronoun,” because I was struck by the notion that in his rather snarky register “crusade” was likely to be an inherently pejorative label.
Oh, it definitely is, and I should have pointed that out. Why are people so hostile to that idea? (I know, I know, sexism. It’s comparable to the indignant responses people used to have to the idea of gay marriage — or indeed of gay hand-holding in public — indignation unsupported by any actual arguments other than that if allowed to flourish unchecked it would somehow destroy “normal” marriage.)
@David Eddyshaw:
Quite, but maybe you meant to address Ryan, who wrote the comment I referenced?
I was taking your cue not to overlook it.
Eighteenth-century English distinguished “you was” (singular) from “you were” (plural), but Victorian prescriptivists spoiled this excellent distinction.