Singular they

I have long disliked the use of singular they, partly because I associate it with banality (“Each person has their own ideas”), and partly because I find in he or she a still appropriate rejoinder to the language of patriarchy that permeated my undergraduate education. My first undergraduate philosophy course: “The Problem of Man.” The professor was a woman. A key text: William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958). And then there was William Faulkner: “Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Man oh man. I like humankind.

And I like he or she, while acknowledging that my insistence upon using these pronouns often leads me to recast sentences to avoid the clutter of too many he or she, his or her, him or her pairs. But in appropriate circumstances, he or she is far better than singular they. Consider these sentences, from a 2008 post, Reliving our learning:

Does the student bring to the task a history of accomplishment that fosters confidence in the face of difficulties? Or does he or she relive a history of failure and near-failure that fosters a hopeless fatalism?

Try it with singular they —

Does the student bring to the task a history of accomplishment that fosters confidence in the face of difficulties? Or do they relive a history of failure and near-failure that fosters a hopeless fatalism?

— and the passage’s parallelism looks and sounds dumb. I like he or she.

Still, I found myself yesterday realizing that I can make a little room in my life for singular they, seeing as I had already made such room without realizing it. Earlier this week, I gave a class a few pages from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to read. Here’s a passage from a page of questions and context-setting that I wrote to accompany the reading:

This excerpt is from one the novel’s greatest scenes, the Bal des têtes [masked ball]. The narrator, who has been away from society for many years because of long illnesses and hospital stays, is attending a party, sometime after the end of the Great War (which we know now as World War I). Upon entering, he thinks he’s attending a costume party and that everyone has been made up to look old. And then he realizes: no, they are old.

The singular they in the final sentence seems entirely appropriate, entirely reasonable. “And he then begins to realize: no, he or she is old” makes, of course, no sense. Thus singular they found a way to make me rethink a pretty firm habit. Pretty wily of them.

In 2003, the Vocabula Review published a long essay by Joan Taber Altieri, “Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold.” If it weren’t behind a firewall, I’d be linking to it now.

Update, April 21, 2010: The essay has been online for years just not at the Vocabula Review. (Now the essay is for invited readers only.)

[Note: Changing everyone to the guests in the Proust example would make they plural and make everyone happy. What interests me here is that I used singular they without thinking of it as a mistake.]

“Remedial Civility Training”

William Pannapacker:

I sometimes feel stung by students’ rudeness. I try to make my classes interesting and relevant, and I care about their learning. I try to conduct myself in a kindly but professional manner. But, more and more, I think the student culture of incivility is a larger impediment to their success than anything they might fail to learn about Western civilization or whatever it is I am teaching.

Pannapacker’s widely cited essay “Teaching Remedial Civility” disappeared behind the Chronicle of Higher Education firewall some time ago. Now the essay is again available to all. To my mind, it’s required reading for anyone involved in higher education in the United States.

Remedial Civility Training (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Make your own academic sentence

Like so:

The culture of post-capitalist hegemony functions as the conceptual frame for the legitimation of the image.

You too can make an academic sentence of your own with the Academic Sentence Generator, courtesy of the University of Chicago Writing Program. Advanced degrees not required.

The scary thing is that this kind of sentence makes sense to me, still. Old habits of reading (not writing).

Beeps in the night

At 2:15 this morning, our upstairs smoke alarm began to beep the intermittent beep that means “low battery.” A low battery seemed unlikely, as we had just changed our batteries when we (or rather the nation) switched to Standard Time.

I got up, got up on a chair, and looked at the alarm. I’m not sure what I expected to see. But the alarm stopped beeping. I took a look around the house, had a drink of water, and went back to bed. It was then that the beep recommenced. I got up, got up on a chair, pulled out the battery, and went back to bed. The alarm beeped one more time. I have a corroborating witness.

This morning, we found the almost certain cause of the beeps: a ladybug, walking in circles around a ceiling light fixture a few inches from the smoke alarm. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. My house is not on fire.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)

What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Father of Modern Anthropology, Dies (New York Times)

Van Dyke Parks in the Cool Hall of Fame

He’s #179, right behind Sean Connery.

My dad in 1942

[James Leddy. Union City, New Jersey, 1942.]

My dad at the age of thirteen or fourteen, from a scan of a photocopy of a 1942 photograph. The photograph recently came into his hands via an old chum. Reproduced here with permission. (Thanks, Dad!)

Worcestershire secrets revealed

“From the recipe of a nobleman in the county”: handwritten notes from the mid-1800s, some in code, contain what appears to be the secret formula for Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Read all about it:

Recipes for secret sauce emerge (BBC News)

That nobleman, his county, and the design of the Lea & Perrins bottle fascinated me in kidhood. Worcestershire Sauce seemed like the most sophisticated stuff imaginable.

PUSH

I keep this metal sign on a bulletin board in my office. I find “PUSH” a useful reminder when it comes to teaching and reading and writing: not to give up, not to settle, not to quit. PUSH, to be interesting, to be better, to do more.

I bought this sign in the 1980s at Benedict’s Well-Worth, a variety store that was going out of business. The price was 88¢. The lethal corners, dowdy lettering, and ancient-looking price sticker on the back suggest that this sign was already many years old when I found it. Also in my collection, from the same source: “NO Admittance” and “ROOMS FOR RENT.”

For anyone who doesn’t remember variety stores: they were wonderful places, literally. One could find all sorts of notions and sundries there. As a kid in Brooklyn, I bought my first Silly Putty at a variety store — Woolworth’s (the name that Benedict’s was aping). I remember buying Christmas presents for my grandparents at Woolworth’s: handkerchiefs, combs, pocket mirrors. I remember the colorful thread display and candy counter. I must have been six or seven.

I wish I had the “PULL” that once must have been for sale alongside “PUSH.” PULL too would be a good reminder for teaching and reading and writing: to draw all one can from the available material.

“Trailing-edge technology”

“We’re interested in trailing-edge technology,” says photographer Karl Kessler, who collaborated with Sunshine Chen to document the work of men and women in vanishing trades: felting, typewriter repair, watchmaking, and so on.

“Hands On: Matters of Uncommon Knowledge” opens November 3 in Kitchener, Ontario. Read all about it:

Exhibit honours disappearing jobs and traditions (TheRecord.com)

A related post
“Old-world skillz”