David Foster Wallace sometimes didn’t know what he was talking about

From a David Foster Wallace Fall 2002 class handout now online, Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work:

For a compound sentence to require a comma plus a conjunction, both its constituent clauses must be independent. An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought. In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

One mistake: the sentence “An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought” should not have a comma: it has only one clause.

A second mistake: “He ate all the food and went back for more” is a single independent clause, not two clauses. Notice that the sentence explaining an independent clause and the sample sentence follow the same pattern: subject-verb-and-verb. Neither sentence needs a comma.

But there’s more. Look carefully at the third sentence:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

That sentence needs a comma before because, for the very reason that Wallace explains later in the handout:

[B]ecause is a funny word, and sometimes you’ll need a comma before its appearance in the second clause in order to keep your sentence from giving the wrong impression.

Look again:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and [,] because the second clause isn’t independent.

The first version misleads by suggesting that you don’t need both the comma and and for some other reason.

There’s a fourth mistake in passing: afterwards and backwards are not prepositions. And I suspect that Wallace’s observations about a sentence being “nonstandard in the abstract” would set linguists howling.

Pedantry is always tiresome, but it’s especially tiresome when the pedant doesn’t know what he is talking about. I’m reminded of the poet Ted Berrigan’s comment about another Dave, a friend:

“Dave knows just enough to get himself in trouble. . . . He says her name is pronounced Gertrude SCHTEIN because that’s the way German is pronounced. He also thinks that Byron’s poem is called DON WHAN, because he speaks Spanish and that’s the way the name is pronounced in Spanish. When I told him it’s JEWUN, he told me I was a moron.”

Ron Padgett, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993)

[“Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work.” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)
E. B. White on W3 (with DFW on Webster’s Third)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

A [need + past participle] day

A bank’s LED sign: “Mortagage need refinanced?”

An invoice: “Tech was called out for water heater. Found needed reset.”

A localite, noticing some Asian honeysuckle that ought to be cut back: “It needs done!”

[Need + past participle] is a regionalism, found in many places, including downstate Illinois.

Related posts
“Need rescued” : “Needs studied” : “Need worked”

How to e-mail a professor

[By a professor, for students. As of July 2023, this post has been visited by more than 800,000 readers from at least 145 countries and territories. And it’s been anthologized in The Student Writer: Editor and Critic (McGraw Hill, 2009) and The Simon and Schuster Short Prose Reader (2011). If you teach, you might also want to read this post: How to e-mail a student. In 2023, email is about twice as common in print as e-mail, but I still like the old-school hyphen.]

I’ve read enough e-mails to know that many college students could benefit from some guidelines for writing to a professor. Here they are:

Write from your college or university e-mail account. That immediately lets your professor see that your e-mail is legitimate and not spam. A cryptic or cutesy or salacious personal e-mail address is not appropriate when you’re writing to a professor.

Include the course number in your subject line. “Question about 3009 assignment” is clear and sounds genuine, while “a question” looks like spam. “Question about English assignment” or “question about assignment,” without identifying the class you’re in, may leave your professor with the chore of figuring that out. For someone teaching large lecture classes, that might mean reading through hundreds of names on rosters. But even for a professor with smaller classes, it’s a drag to get an e-mail that merely says “I’m in your English class and need the assignment.” All your English professor’s classes are English classes; your professor needs to know which one is yours.

Consider, in light of this advice, the following examples:

An e-mail from “qtpie2005” with the subject line “question.”

An e-mail from a university account with the subject line “question about English 2011 essay.”

Which one looks legitimate? Which one looks like spam?

Think about what you’re saying. Most students are not accustomed to writing to their professors. Here are some ways to do it well:

Choose an appropriate greeting. “Hi/Hello Professor [Blank]” is always appropriate. Substitute “Dear” and you’ve ended up writing a letter; leave out “Hi” and your tone is too brusque.

Avoid rote apologies for missing class. Most professors are tired of hearing those standard apologies and acts of contrition. If you missed class because of some especially serious or sad circumstances, it might be better to mention that in person than in an e-mail.

Ask politely. “Could you e-mail me the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks!” is a lot better than “I need the assignment.”

Proofread what you’ve written. You want your e-mail to show you in the best possible light.

Sign with your full name, course number, and meeting time.

        Maggie Simpson
        English 3703, MWF 10:00

Signing is an obvious courtesy, and it eliminates the need for stilted self-identification (“I am a student in your such-and-such class”).

Two don’ts, and one last do:

Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.

Don’t send unexpected attachments. It’s bad form. Attaching an essay with a request that your professor look it over is very bad form. Arrange to meet your professor during office hours or by appointment instead. It’s especially bad form to send an e-mail that says “I won’t be in class today,” with a paper or some other coursework attached. Think about it: Your professor is supposed to print out your essay because you’re not coming to class?

Do say thanks. When you get a response, just hit Reply and say “Thanks,” or a little bit more if that’s appropriate. The old subject line (which will now have a “Re:” in front) will make the context clear. I don’t think that you need to include a greeting with a short reply, at least not if you refer to your professor in your reply. And you don’t need to identify yourself by course number and meeting time again.

It’s easy to overlook an e-mail message or have it disappear into a spam folder, so it’s always appropriate to acknowledge that someone’s message came through. It’s also plain courtesy to say thanks. (Your professor will remember it too.) When you reply, you should delete almost everything of your professor’s reply (quoting everything is rarely appropriate in e-mail). Leave just enough to make the original context clear.

So what would a good e-mail to a professor look like?

Hi Professor Leddy,

I’m working on my essay on William Carlos Williams and I’m not sure what to make of the last stanza of “Spring and All.” I’m stuck trying to figure out what “It” is. Do you have a suggestion? Thanks!

Maggie Simpson
Eng 3703, MWF 10:00

And a subsequent note of thanks:

>  “It” is most likely spring, or life itself. But have
>  you looked up “quicken”? That’ll probably
>  make “It” much clearer.

It sure did. Thanks for your help, Professor.

Maggie Simpson

[How to e-mail a professor is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 License. Revised September 26 and October 29, 2005; February 4, 2006; July 10, 2023; April 15, 2024.]

Other useful stuff for students:

Beware of the saurus
Grammarly and WhiteSmoke (save your money)
Granularity for students
How to answer a question in class
How to be a student a professor will remember (for the right reasons)
How to do well on a final exam
How to do horribly on a final exam
How to enter a classroom
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences
How to talk to a professor
How to unstuff a sentence
Is this honor society legitimate?
Rachel’s tips for success in college
“Rewording”
Rule 7
Seeing professors clearly
Slow down and read
Study = hard work
Studying alone, really alone
Syllabus week
Yo, professor!

And for professors:

How to e-mail a student

And if you want to read the most recent posts on Orange Crate Art, here’s the front page.

[Some further thoughts: I’m astonished by the amount of interest in this post--over 1,600 visits in the past two days. Then again, there really isn’t anything very similar on-line--or if there is, I haven’t found it--so if what I’ve written is useful, well, I’m happy.

My one purpose in writing these guidelines was to help college students write to their professors with greater ease and maturity and a better sense of audience (instead of “i am a student in your class”). They’re guidelines for writing to a professor, any professor, in the absence of other guidelines. And they’re meant to keep a student in the high esteem of any professor to whom that student is writing.

Most of the reasoning behind the guidelines is omitted for concision. But I’ll elaborate a little here. Why, for instance, write from a university account? A professor filtering spam will almost certainly also have a filter to okay mail from addresses from her or his “edu.” So if you want your mail to get through, an “edu” account is a smart choice. Many schools require students to use those accounts for official school business already. Writing from an appropriate address is smart practice for the future too. (I always say something when I see a tacky or juvenile e-mail address on an otherwise polished student résumé.)

Why say “Hi/Hello Professor [Blank]?” Well, what should a student call a professor? Some people like “Doctor”; some don’t. Some people don’t have a doctorate. Some people don’t explain any of that to students. There was a great piece in the Chronicle about this subject not long ago--“What Should We Call the Professor?” Professor, in the absence of any other guidelines, seems like a good choice.

Having received many telegraphic one-sentence e-mails, often with no greeting, no thank-you, and no signature, I find them weirdly depersonalized: “I need the assignment.” I do think a question is better, better even than a polite “Please send the assignment,” because the question is more conversational, more human. (But if a student e-mails me and says “I need the assignment,” I send it.)

Why sign with your name, class, and meeting time? It’s a courtesy, yes, but it also avoids the awkward “My name is . . . , and I am a student in your such-and-such class,” all of which is taken care of in the signature. It occurs to me that “My name is . . . , and I am a student in . . .” is telling evidence of the unfamiliarity of e-mail as a way for students to communicate with professors.

I appreciate the point several commenters have made about a follow-up thank-you being unneeded. Still, a lot of e-mail doesn’t get read, and the follow-up, to my mind, closes the loop. Many people do a follow-up by using the subject line to say thanks, often followed by the abbreviation “eom” (end of message). That seemed to me too arcane to recommend. But I do like the idea of closing the loop by saying yes, I got it, thanks.

I hope that this post leads to much more talking on the part of professors and students about communicating by e-mail. All reports from the business world point to enormous problems of clarity, correctness, and decorum with e-mail writing. Maybe things can start to go better in college.

Added September 30, 2005; revised October 29, 2005 and April 8, 2024.]

Moleskine, sono pazzi

In the continuing story (parts 1 and 2) of my attempt to receive a refund for a defective Moleskine planner:

Having had no response to a January 9 letter, I e-mailed the customer-care address yesterday and attached that letter. And I got an e-mail back with the offer of a replacement planner.

I replied, explaining, as I aleady explained in an e-mail (January 8) and in my letter, that I have requested a refund because, after being promised a refund, I bought a replacement Moleskine planner from Amazon. I don’t need another 2024 Moleskine planner. I don’t need another 2024 Moleskine planner. I don’t need another 2024 Moleskine planner.

See? I’ve now told them three times.

Somehow I get the impression that Moleskine doesn’t give sufficient attention to quality control (sixteen missing pages) or customer service. I would like to be proven wrong. But I’m pretty sure that I’ll be buying a Letts or Leuchtturm pocket planner for 2025. It’ll be my first non-Moleskine since 2005.

And I forgot to mention: fountain-pen ink bleeds through the pages. Badly.

*

Later the same day: I e-mailed Moleskine to say that if they will not refund my money, I will settle for a pocket notebook, black, squared. I received a reply offering me a planner (“the exact item”) or a voucher to be used on their website. I explained, for the fourth time, that I don’t need another planner. I pointed out, too, that the notebook has a lower price. And I asked: wouldn’t it be simpler to send a notebook rather than a voucher that I can use to order a notebook? No reply yet.

Fourteen e-mails so far. Two more and it’ll be one for each page missing from my defective Moleskine.

*

February 7: I found a customer-service number: 833-809-9087. (How come it’s not in their notebooks? How come it’s not on the company website?) They’re going to send a pocket notebook, black, squared. I still plan to switch to Letts or Leuchtturm next year.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)

[“Moleskine, sono pazzi”: Moleskine, they’re crazy.]

The Practical Stylist

[Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973). Click for a larger view.]

I like this cover. The assemblage, as the back cover calls it, is by Murray Tinkelman, an artist who works in a great many styles. (Here he appears to have assembled not pictures of type but type itself.) If you browse Leif Peng’s The Art of Murray Tinkelman, you may realize that you’ve seen this artist’s work many times before.

I like The Practical Stylist too. It is — or in earlier incarnations, was — an elegant book. It is a distinguished example of the “handbook,” the kind of book typically assigned in first-year college English. Sheridan Baker (1918–2000) recognized that brevity in a handbook can be a virtue, that brevity makes such a book engaging and useful. The first edition, in print from 1962 to 1967, weighs in at a modest xvi + 144 pages. The third (1973) edition: x + 182 pages. Longman’s most recent ghost edition (2005): 288 pages, still far smaller than the average handbook, which now often runs close to a thousand pages. A thousand pages! Such a book is like a black hole: it holds everything and gives no light. While it may be browsable, it is not readable. From Baker’s Preface:

I mean the book to be practical also in its brevity. Most handbooks on writing seems too big, too wordy, too involved. They seem to get mired in their own diligence and to stay stuck on the student’s shelf. This book aims to travel light, to cover the ground without inordinate deliberation. I have included only what seems useful and essential.

“This book aims to travel light”: what a lovely way to say it. And what a wonderful example for students: a teacher of writing who uses I. Here and elsewhere in The Practical Stylist, Baker writes with uncondescending intelligence. About words:

“What we need is a mixed diction,” said Aristotle, and his point remains true twenty-three centuries and several languages later. The aim of style, he says, is to be clear but distinguished. For clarity, we need common, current words; but used alone, these are commonplace, and as ephemeral as everyday talk. For distinction, we need words not heard every minute, unusual words, large words, foreign words, metaphors; but used alone, these become gibberish. What we need is a diction that marries the popular with the dignified, the clear current with the sedgy margins of language and thought.

About sentences:

Your style will emerge once you can manage some length of sentence, some intricacy of subordination, some vigor of parallel, and some play of short against long, of amplitude against brevity. Try the very long sentence, and the very short. The best short sentences are meatiest. . . . Experiment, too, with the fragment. The fragment is close to conversation. It is the laconic reply, the pointed afterthought, the quiet exclamation, the telling question.Try to cut and place it clearly (usually at the beginnings and ends of paragraphs) so as not to lead your reader to expect a full sentence, or to suspect a poor writer.

And about paragraphs:

You build the bulk of your essay with standard paragraphs, with blocks of concrete ideas, and they must fit smoothly. But they must also remain as perceptible parts, to rest your reader’s eye and mind. Indeed, the paragraph originated, among the Greeks, as a resting place and place finder, being first a mere mark (graphos) in the margin alongside (para) an unbroken sheet of handwriting — the proofreader’s familiar ¶. You have heard that a paragraph is a single idea, and this is true. But so is a word, usually; and so is a sentence, sometimes. It seems best, after all, to think of a paragraph as something you use for your reader’s convenience, rather than as some granitic form laid down by molten logic.

Sedgy margins, the laconic reply, molten logic: it kills me, as Holden Caulfield would say, that, not so long ago, a textbook writer could write with such verve — and could trust that he would be understood by college freshmen. The voice that speaks in The Practical Stylist is not that of a textbook: it’s that of an older writer addressing a younger writer, without condescension, offering insight and advice from long experience. Looking at the chapters about words and sentences and paragraphs in a recent 926-page handbook, I find a brief history of English; guidance on dictionary use; lists of commonly confused words; explanations of slang, regionalisms, and jargon; examples of coördination and subordination and parallelism; instruction in the importance of unity, organization, and coherence; and much, much more. But I find nothing comparable to the writerly intelligence in these passages from Baker. Nor do I find the word diction , or the suggestion that the student writer will achieve an individual style, or an explanation of how the paragraph began.

The cover, the prose, the absence of cheesy graphics and stock photos: The Practical Stylist, third edition, seems to me an artifact of a less colorful but far more sophisticated time.

Richard Marius’s A Writer’s Companion (1985, out of print), Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012), and Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (2013) are three recent books that share The Practical Stylist ’s virtues of brevity and a writerly voice. I’ve written briefly about Marius and Klinkenborg (whose Several Short Sentences wouldn’t be considered a “handbook”) and have recommended Harvey’s book in its first and second editions many times in passing.The alternatives to the book-as-brick are fewer than they should be.

A related post
Guy Fleming frontispiece, The Practical Stylist (first edition)

[The first course I taught as a grad student: Practical Stylistics, an ungainly name for “comp.” We grad students were given not Baker’s book to use but Frederick Crews’s The Random House Handbook, a dreadful book whose illustrative sentences ran to thickheaded athletes and cheerleaders and faculty complaints about parking. Brilliant, eh? About black holes: I don’t know how they work, or if they even exist. I’m just making a metaphor.]

On January 6

Here’s an opinion piece by Capitol police officers Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell: “The government we defended last Jan. 6 has a duty to hold all the perpetrators accountable” (The Washington Post ).

On Tuesday night the two men appeared on the The PBS NewsHour, interviewed by Lisa Desjardins. The interview begins at the 23:08 mark. Here’s an excerpt:

Desjardins: Officer Dunn, do you think this danger is still here? Where are we right now, in terms of the threat to democracy, from your view?

Dunn: You know, it’s scary to think about where we are. Sure, we succeeded as far as our mission that day. Democracy went on, late in the night, January 6th into January 7th. Democracy prevailed. But I think it’s very important for everybody now to realize how close and fragile democracy is, and that everybody, everybody, even anybody watching, anybody listening, has a job to do in protecting and defending democracy. That could be us police officers, we police; the legislators, the lawmakers, they need do their job and legislate; the judges judge; and the American people need to vote about who to put in those positions. We need accountability, and we need to make sure the right people are in office that want accountability also.

[My transcription.]

Flight need

A guest on MSNBC earlier this afternoon, commenting on airline woes:

“Does the system need repaired and upgraded?”

[Need + past participle] is a regionalism. It’s become one of my regionalisms.

Related reading
More OCA [need + past participle] posts

Illinoism

The American Heritage Dictionary offers this regional note:

When need is used as the main verb, it can be followed by a present participle, as in The car needs washing, or by to be plus a past participle, as in The car needs to be washed. However, in some areas of the United States, especially western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, many speakers omit to be and use just the past participle form, as in The car needs washed. This use of need with past participles is slightly more common in the British Isles, being particularly prevalent in Scotland.

This use is also prevalent in downstate-Illinois speech. The sentence above, from an ad in the local newspaper, has the first "need + past participle" I've seen in print.

A related post
Need worked

What commas don’t fix

There’s a mistaken clue in Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post Sunday crossword: 102-D, six letters, “What commas may fix.” The answer: RUNONS.

But no number of commas can fix a run-on sentence.

Here’s a lucid explanation of run-ons from Garner’s Modern English Usage :

Run-on sentences do not stop where they should. The problem usually occurs when the writer is uncertain how to handle punctuation or how to handle such adverbs as however and otherwise, which are often mistakenly treated as conjunctions.

Some grammarians distinguish between a “run-on sentence” (or “fused sentence”) and a “comma splice” (or “run-together sentence”). In a run-on sentence, two independent clauses — not joined by a conjunction such as and, but, for, or, or nor — are incorrectly written with no punctuation between them. Hence a run-on sentence might read: “I need to go to the store the baby needs some diapers.” Correctly, it might read: “I need to go to the store; the baby needs some diapers.”

With a comma splice, two independent clauses have merely a comma between them, again without a conjunction — e.g.: “I need to go to the store, the baby needs some diapers.” The presence or absence of a comma — and therefore the distinction between a run-on sentence and a comma splice — isn’t usually noteworthy. So most writers class the two problems together as run-on sentences.

But the distinction can be helpful in differentiating between the wholly unacceptable (true run-on sentences) and the usually-but-not-always unacceptable (comma splices).

Whichever way you define run-on sentence, a comma won’t fix such a sentence. If there’s no punctuation between independent clauses, a comma will only create a comma splice. If there’s already a comma between clauses, another comma tossed in somewhere won’t help.

Some years ago I wrote a two-part guide to punctuation that avoids almost all grammatical terms — even the term run-on sentence. The rules therein (just five) are meant to be especially useful to students, and they account for run-ons, commma splices, and, as they say, much more: How to punctuate a sentence, How to punctuate more sentences.

For a replacement clue, how about “Sentences that don’t mind the gap”?

[And, but, for, or, nor : add so and yet and you have all seven coordinating conjuctions, or as they’re known to teachers of writing, the FANBOYS. The words of course have other uses as well: Are we there yet? I’m so done.]

Kingsfield’s cup of tea

Elaine and I are making our way through our second year of law school. In other words, we’re watching the second season of The Paper Chase, Netflick by Netflick, and we just saw an episode we’d been giddy about getting to, “My Dinner with Kingsfield” (first aired July 24, 1984). The premise is wacky: a terrible snowstorm, and Charles Kingsfield (John Houseman) gets stuck driving to the airport. When he knocks at the nearest residence to use the telephone, who answers? James Hart, “Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield’s stellar student (James Stephens). Hilarity ensues, with broken plumbing, Bulgarian Beaujolais, and the spectacle of Kingsfield wearing Hart’s bathrobe as his own clothes dry. (“I just had it laundered,” Hart adds helpfully.) Later in the episode: a brief recitation from Bleak House and some memorable, even profound bits of dialogue about love and marriage and learning.

Elaine and I made some tea before sitting down to watch, and I chose Earl Grey. I said (and I have a witness) that if Kingsfield drank tea in this episode, it would be Earl Grey. So I went a little crazy when the professor set down his wine and asked Hart for a cup of tea, “anything that’s hot and sturdy.” Hart offers Earl Grey. Is that sturdy enough? Kingsfield says it will be fine. And as Hart calls to check on the whereabouts of a lady friend flying in from New York, Kingsfield stands and muses on a box of Twinings tea bags:

“Earl Grey tea . . . Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey, leader of the Whig opposition and largely responsible for the repeal of the African slave trade. He became prime minister of England in 1830.”

Hart, on the phone, asks distractedly, “Who?” And Kingsfield, fiercely: “Earl Grey.” It’s all true.

Here’s a Kingsfield observation about marriage:

“Let me tell you something: all those years I was married, of course I kept thinking I should have spent longer sowing my wild oats, but the longer my marriage lasted, the more convinced I became that being married to someone, no matter how banal it might seem on the surface, was infinitely more satisfying and more exciting than the wildest of affairs.”

And here’s another moment, when Hart admits that Kingsfield’s lukewarm response to his recent paper has made it impossible for him to begin work on a new project:

“James, for God’s sake, stop sulking. You’re an adult. You’re one of the better students in this institution: you should not need to be told that. You know your work is good: that’s all that matters. Doing your best should be its own reward, and you shouldn’t need me to tell you about it.”

But students do need to hear about it when they do well (and when they don’t); even Kingsfield knows that. (Notice the repetition of should.) And yes, he now offers the praise that he withheld. If he were a different person though, he’d be intoning, “Stop . . . worshiping . . . me, Mr. . . . Hart.”

[“My Dinner with Kingsfield” isn’t the first takeoff on My Dinner with André (1981): My Breakfast with Blassie appearted in 1983. Kingsfield’s remarks on marriage are reminiscent of what André Gregory says about the shallowness of affairs and the mysteries of marriage: “Have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years: that’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.” Major props to the writers of this episode, James Bridges and Lee Kalcheim.]

Other Paper Chase posts
“Do the work”
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“Minds, not memories”

Mitt Romney marching

The world may not be upside down, but it’s certainly tilting a bit more. Mitt Romney is marching in Washington. His words, my punctuation:

“We need a voice against racism — we need many voices against racism and against brutality. We need to stand up and say that black lives matter.”

Shelves, books off the, books on the

Elaine and I scored big at a nearby used-book store this weekend: nine Steven Millhausers. (We need two copies of everything.) We left one In the Penny Arcade on the shelf. It was like going through baseball cards: got it, need it, need it, got it.

The bookseller mentioned that he puts most of the books he buys and reads in the store, knowing that he’s never going to read them again. But, he said, he has a shelf of Steven Millhauser at home — those books stay. And now he’s going to reread Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

[I recently borrowed Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the from the library.]

Long-term care insurance: my 2¢

Now that my mom's long-term care insurance (hereafter, “LTCI”) has run out, I feel free to offer some observations. My observations are drawn from experience with a single company, Genworth (hereafter, “the company”), and everyone’s mileage varies. My mom has beaten the house, but my suggestion, nevertheless, would be to avoid LTCI. Here’s why:

~ The premiums are expensive and become more so. Stop paying in and you lose everything you’ve already put in: it’s the sunk cost trap. (My mom’s last premium, four years ago: $10,000.) No one counted on so many people living long enough to try to collect.

~ It’s necessary to have a persistent (and probably much younger) advocate willing to spend considerable time submitting a claim, submitting and resubmitting power of attorney documentation and other paperwork, making repeated phone calls to check on claim status, to argue, to report changes in living circumstances, and to spend lots of time on hold.

~ The company may be reluctant to pay up. Filing a claim begins a “elimination period” of 100 days or more before the claim can be considered. Elimination indeed: the company is no doubt wagering that the policyholder might die as those days count down.

~ When the elimination period is over, the company may still be reluctant to pay up. The two conditions for honoring a claim: (1) inability to manage two of the five so-called activities of daily living (bathing, dressing, eating, “toileting,” “transferring”¹) or (2) severe cognitive impairment. Even a statement from a doctor of geriatric medicine on hospital letterhead may not be enough to convince the company that (1) applies, because the company will perform its own assessment of the policyholder by way of a Zoom call conducted by an outside agency. It’s reported that such assessments may take a policyholder’s answers to questions at face value, though it’s well known that people with dementia will give the “right” answers to questions whether or not those answers are true. As for (2), what counts as severe cognitive impairment seems to be highly subjective. A representative of the company, offering an example: “You don’t need to know what year it is to fulfill the tasks of daily living.” One need not be a thoroughgoing cynic to suspect that the company might use the fuzziness of (2) to avoid paying a claim. Notice, by the way, that making a phone call and managing medication are two activities of daily living glaringly absent from the list. Their inclusion would immediately give more claims a shot at (1).

~ It may be necessary to submit a second (or third? or fourth?) claim as the policyholder’s abilities diminish.

~ If the company does finally honor a claim, the persistent advocate will need to keep up month by month. The monthly cost of assisted living or memory care is borne by the policyholder. The advocate then sends the monthly bill to the company and waits for reimbursement to show up in a bank statement. This paperwork is the easy part of the job, after all earlier obstacles are overcome.

I’m happy that I could do the work of dealing with LTCI for my mom. I don’t begrudge a minute of the time. And I don’t mind going up against a bureaucracy. But it’s far wiser to invest money elsewhere.

A bit of browsing will confirm that my observations about this company are not unusual. But they’re the ones I’ve got.

¹ “Transferring”: sitting down, standing up.

What’s an inflection point?

Because they seem to be everywhere.

Inflect, a transitive verb, is from the Latin inflectere, to bend. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest meaning (early 1400s): “to bend inwards; to bend into a curve or angle; hence, simply, to bend, to curve.” By the late 1500s, the word had taken on figurative senses: “to bend, incline, dispose.” By the late 1600s, the word had acquired a meaning in grammar: “to vary the termination (of a word) in order to express different grammatical relations.” By the early 1700s, the word had found a place in optics: “to bend in or deflect (rays of light) in passing the edge of an opaque body or through a narrow aperture; to diffract.” By the early 1800s, the word was used with reference to the voice and to music: “to modulate (the voice); spec. in Music, to flatten or sharpen (a note) by a chromatic semitone.”

All of which (thanks, OED ) is getting us closer to inflection point. For that we need the noun inflection, which, like inflect, takes on figurative, grammatical, optical, and musical meanings. But since the early 1700s, inflection has also meant something in geometry:

Change of curvature from convex to concave at a particular point on a curve; the point at which this takes place is called a point of inflection (or shortly an inflection).

That’s as much of the OED definition as is relevant here. A more readable definition, from Merriam-Webster: “a point on a curve that separates an arc concave upward from one concave downward and vice versa.”

The OED entry for inflection — apparently in need of updating — doesn’t account for the non-mathematical meaning of inflection point. For that we need M-W: “a moment when significant change occurs or may occur : turning point.”

So that’s an inflection point. I like the way a turning in space has turned into a turning in time. A curious difference between mathematical and non-mathematical inflection points: the one marks a fact; the other marks a fact or a possibility.

Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a marked rise in the use of inflection point beginning in 1948. A symptom of Cold War tension? In American English, the Ngram Viewer shows 1963 as the term’s peak year. In British English, it’s 1989. Perhaps Vietnam and Margaret Thatcher had something to do with that.

Is inflection point overused? I think that in many instances, crossroads or moment of decision might better apply. When I read this sort of nonsense — “There has been a strategic inflection point that we’ve all gone through as society” — I begin to think that the term has lost a clear meaning. We may be approaching an inflection point in the use of inflection point. We may even be at a crossroads. But I doubt it.

John Shimkus in the news

Our representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), is in the news, having questioned whether prenatal care should be part of the cost of men’s health insurance. After all, men don’t have babies. That’s like a totally female thing.

Here, from Consumer Reports, is a helpful explanation of why men should have to pay for prenatal care. An excerpt:

Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death—prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually.

So, as a middle-aged childless man you resent having to pay for maternity care or kids’ dental care. Shouldn’t turnabout be fair play? Shouldn’t pregnant women and kids be able to say, “Fine, but in that case why should we have to pay for your Viagra, or prostate cancer tests, or the heart attack and high blood pressure you are many times more likely to suffer from than we are?” Once you start down that road, it’s hard to know where to stop. If you slice and dice risks, eventually you don't have a risk pool at all, and the whole idea of insurance falls apart. [My emphasis.]

Notice though that Consumer Reports has limited the question to childless men. Shimkus was speaking of all men.

Heidi Stevens of the Chicago Tribune offers offers further reasons why men should have to pay for prenatal care:

Because lots of men have sex with women.

Because a lot of that sex produces babies.

Because men and women have an equal stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because all of us, even when we’re not the parents of those babies, have a stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because healthy babies, ideally, turn into healthy children.

Another Tribune item sums up matters in its headline: “U.S. Rep. John Shimkus’s foot finds warm welcome in mouth.” But Shimkus’s suggestion about prenatal care is not a mere gaffe, an “unfortunate choice of words,” as they say. His words reveal a fundamentally ungenerous regard for those who are not in his own comfortable shoes. It’s the same narrow, selfish thinking that underwrites, say, an older voter’s choice not to approve a bond issue for schools or libraries: “I don’t have children in school.” “I don’t use the library.” “Why should I,” &c.

*

March 11: Shimkus is standing by his remarks.

Three more posts with John Shimkus
Shimkus and the NRA : : Shimkus says that Bruce Rauner can make the trains run on time : Waiting for Godot Shimkus

In it and of it?

I was sitting at the kitchen table with an open bottle of Aurora Black, about to fill three fountain pens. I called up to Elaine:

“Do you have any pens that need filled?”

I was not trying to be cute. I was using the [need + past participle] construction with an utter absence of self-consciousness. It just came out. I may now be not only in east-central Illinois but of it.

Then again, filling German fountain pens with Italian ink isn’t exactly a regionalism.

Related reading
More [need + past participle] posts (Pinboard)

Washington Week in Review misses the point

Talk about missing the point: the important thing to say about Donald Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible is not that it’s expensive or that it’s tacky, both points made on tonight’s Washington Week in Review. The important thing to say, and what no one said, is that this Bible is an exercise in Christian nationalism.

Is it the case that “all Americans need a Bible in their home,” as Trump says? No, not all, and not all those who need “a Bible” need one in two parts. And printing this two-part Bible with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance included is an unmistakable effort to brand the United States as a Christian nation.

Bad job, WWiR.

[Slightly puzzling: Trump is hawking is a King James Version, not the first choice of evangelicals. But: the KJV in the public domain.]

Masonic [need + past participle]

“His hair needed cut”: so says a witness in the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Wrathful Wraith” (November 7, 1965).

[Need + past participle] is an Illinoism. The witness, Rosemary Welch, was played by Jeanne Bal, a Chicago native. Was [need + past participle] in the script? Did this verb form just slip out?

Paul, have one of your operatives out at the studios look into it.

Related reading
Other needs, other past participles

Barack Obama on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Barack Obama, speaking today at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on how Martin Luther King Jr. "led this country through the wilderness":

He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

That is the unity — the hard-earned unity — that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope — the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

The Great Need of the Hour (full text)
The Great Need of the Hour (video)

A4 Clipboard

I noticed my SYSMAX A4 Clipboard staring up at me from a horizontal storage area (the floor). It is a beautiful and sweetly incoherent thing, purchased from a United States outpost of the Korean stationery chain ArtBox. Down the right side of the clipboard, in right-justified sans serif:

Jeudi

There is only one

happiness in life,

to love and to be

loved.

LIVE THE LIFE YOU’VE IMAGINED

A4®

Mardi

The busier you are,

the more you need to take

time to do things right.

Jeudi

We need to record words

for our learning.

Vendredi

Have you given any thought

to your future? Let’s

do one thing at a time.

Samedi

Everyone is necessarily the

hero of his own life story.

SYSMAX

And that’s the end.

Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday?

The sentence “We need to record words for our learning” makes me think of Bob Perelman’s poem “China.”