A case for singular they ?

At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum discusses a sentence from the Twitter account Shit Academics Say to bolster the case for singular they. The sentence:

We wish to thank Reviewer 2 for their critical feedback & sincerely apologize for not having written the manuscript they would have written.

Pullum’s comment:

Here’s a very nice case of modern sex-neutral pronoun-choice style, with the unusual feature that the antecedent for the two occurrences of singular they (which prescriptiv[i]sts hate so much) is not only a definite noun phrase, but a definite noun phrase denoting a unique individual. . . . The special feature here is that the people writing are not permitted to know the identity or the gender of the person denoted by the phrase. Academics submitting to a refereed journal never know who their anonymous reviewers were; all these authors know is that Reviewer 2 hated their paper and wanted them to write a different one. They have no way to know if the reviewer is a he or a she. And especially in the terse Twitter medium, saying “for his or her critical feedback” and “the manuscript he or she would have written” would be much too cumbersome.

Yes, repeating he or she, his or her would be cumbersome. But this sentence, even though it weighs in at 140 characters, twenty-two words, is itself ungainly, as sentences with singular they often are. Sometimes such sentences sound absurd: “A musician who practices will find that they improve.” And the painful repetition of singular pronouns isn’t the only alternative to they, as Pullum must know. One can arrive at a much better sentence by avoiding singular they altogether:

We are grateful for Reviewer 2’s comments and apologize for not writing the manuscript the reviewer would have written.

That’s terser still: 119 characters and nineteen words.

I’m not sure that what Pullum finds unusual — the mystery of gender — is all that unusual. It happens all the time online, where commenters and developers are sometimes anonymous, sometimes pseudonymous. When I asked my students to write about an infamous student-and-professor e-mail exchange, the student e-mailer’s gender was unknown to us. So we worked a bit on finding ways around the endless repetition of they. For instance:

Not so good: If this student wants to make a good impression, they will need to rethink their way of addressing their professors.

Not so good: If this student wants to make a good impression, he or she will need to rethink his way of addressing his or her professors.

Better: For this student, making a good impression should begin with thinking about how to address professors.

I wrote out my thoughts about singular they in this 2009 post. I haven’t changed my mind since then: I still think that they is sometimes a good choice and sometimes not. And I still think it’s wise to avoid singular they when one’s writing is subject to formal evaluation (at least without checking beforehand).

A related post
Pullum on Strunk and White

[About the original sentence: since it’s from Shit Academics Say, the ponderousness may be by design.]

How to improve writing (no. 52)

From an essay at The Atlantic. The brackets are in the original:

There’s a widespread idea that “People who make things are simply different [read: better] than those who don’t.”

Revised:

There’s a widespread idea that “People who make things are simply different from [read: better than] those who don’t.”

Different from, not than. Garner’s Modern American Usage explains:

Different than is often considered inferior to different from. The problem is that than should follow a comparative adjective (larger than, sooner than, etc.), and different is not comparative — though, to be sure, it is a word of contrast. Than implies a comparison, i.e., a matter of degree, but differences are ordinarily qualitative, not quantitative, and the adjective different is not strictly comparative. Thus, writers should generally prefer from.

Garner adds that different than is “sometimes idiomatic, and even useful.” But: “When from nicely fills the slot of than, however, that is the idiom to be preferred.”

How much more helpful than Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, which sums things up like so: “Though different than NP [noun phrase] is disliked by a slim majority of the AHD [American Heritage Dictionary] Usage Panel, it has long been common in carefully written prose,” followed by some Mencken snark about precisians. Garner’s Language-Change Index puts different than at Stage 3: “The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage.”

Garner’s Modern American Usage is different from The Sense of Style. Better than, too.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
Polident, different to and than (Or, what’s up with those commercials?)

[This post is no. 52 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Debbie Chachra on makers

At The Atlantic, Debbie Chachra explains why she is not a maker. Two excerpts:

Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not.

*

I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others — above all, the caregivers — whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.

Domestic comedy

[Late last night, as the state road went through a town and the speed limit dropped to 30. Elaine spotted a car, parked, lights off.]

“Five-o!”

“. . .”

“I can’t believe I just said that.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The Wire has taken over our lives, or at least some of our language. I’ve been saying five-o for weeks. Elaine has only just begun.]

Fare forward, Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan explains why he has stopped blogging.

I began reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog in 2001, after happening upon his essay “The Agony of the Left.” I felt honored when he posted a link to this OCA post. (I had sent him the link, of course.) Sullivan is often described as the liberal’s favorite conservative. That I find myself more often than not in agreement with him might suggest how unhelpful such categories are.

Fare forward, Andrew. I look forward to reading whatever you’re going to write.

Some atolls

The astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti photographed some atolls:

Three little atolls in a row - jewels of the ocean! / (IT) Tre piccoli atolli in riga come gioielli nell'oceano! pic.twitter.com/szhL45QGVm

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 28, 2015

For newcomers to Orange Crate Art: “some” is a crucial category for organizing reality. The work begins with rocks.

Thank you, Mathias.

The happiness of suspended coffee

Yesterday I had my first-ever suspended coffee. Elaine ordered a large tea, I ordered a small coffee, and the barista said that a previous customer had paid for a future customer’s small coffee. A suspended coffee! The barista too knew about the practice but she too had never before seen it in action. I took the free one and paid for the next one. As Elaine and I put caps on our cups, we saw a student ordering, yes, a small coffee. The barista told her that someone had just paid for one. The student turned, saw us, and thanked us. She thanked us at least four times. Laughter and smiles all around. It was the most fun I’ve ever had paying for a cup of coffee.

The tradition of caffè sospeso seems to have started as a way to help anyone in need. A customer without sufficient funds might come in and ask if there were any suspended coffees. In this east-central Illinois adaptation, it seems to be more a matter of kindness aimed in no particular direction. Pay it forward, random acts, and all that. I highly recommend paying for a suspended coffee and plan to do so again as soon as possible.

*

And now I have.

“What I Forgot”

There is nothing wrong with description, watching people pass by, remembering how things used to be. I suppose it’s always like that. On the other hand,

        there is no
        exact
        description

        of what
        is wrong with
        my hat

*

We say an expression misleads us, that we have been given “bad directions,” ending up in a tight corner of the cloakroom, a bright orange bowling ball now speeding toward us,

        Wang Wang Blues
        on the

        floormodel radio

*

Then the news is so matter-of-fact that there is no news, just years of patient inventory,

        bread milk and snow

*

        Snow what is
        snowing

        blank
        y brillante

        now I
        have it

        hat hat
        glove

[I wrote “What I Forgot” sometime in the 1990s. The poem was published in a chapbook of my work, Inventories (Oasii Press, 1997). Now I know why the trio bread milk and snow has been running through my head. “Wang Wang Blues”: an early Ellington recording.]

No Koch

The New York Times reports that the Koch brothers plan to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 elections: “The brothers’ financial goal, announced on Monday at the annual Koch winter donor retreat in Palm Springs, Calif., effectively transforms the Koch organization into a third major political party.”

If you oppose this style of radical will, don’t buy Koch products. Tell others to do the same. And give to the candidates of your choice.


[Angel Soft Toilet Paper, Brawny Towels, Quilted Northern Toilet Paper, Georgia-Pacific Paper Products, Dixie Products, Stainmaster Carpet, Sparkle Paper Napkins, Lycra Fiber, Zee Paper Napkins, Mardi Gras Products, Dacron Fiber, Vanity Fair Paper Napkins, Soft ’n Gentle Toilet Paper. Image found here. Irony of ironies: our local indie moviehouse, soon to show Citizen Koch, was using Dixie products at the snack bar. I clued the management in.]

Raise high the roof beam, Donald Meek

I may be lacking in imagination: I rarely if ever visualize characters in literature, and I’m always surprised when people report that they do. Indeed, there’s a book about it, whose title, What We See When We Read, takes it for granted that we visualize, even if I don’t.

But on occasion a visual image will present itself to me. When it does, I take it. Enter Donald Meek.


[Donald Meek, actor (1878–1946).]

I’ve seen Donald Meek in just two movies. In Little Miss Broadway (dir. Irving Cummings, 1938), a Shirley Temple vehicle (and fambly favorite), he plays Willoughby Wendling, an upper-crust fellow and member of a fuddy-duddy vocal quartet. In State Fair (dir. Walter Lang, 1945), he plays the mononymous Hippenstahl, a judge of pickles and mincemeat.

When I first read J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963), I instantly imagined the “tiny elderly man” of the story as Donald Meek. The little man is a member of an ill-fated wedding party: he is Seymour Glass’s bride Muriel’s father’s uncle. He is deaf and never says a word, communicating only with pad and pencil. He is never identified by name. Here are two descriptions of him, courtesy of the story’s narrator, Buddy Glass:

Twice, without any excuse whatever, out of sheer approval, I glanced around at the tiny elderly man. When I’d originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I’d had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window. He was tininess itself, surely being not more than four nine or ten and without being either a midget or a dwarf. In the car, he sat staring very severely straight ahead of him. On my second look around at him, I noticed that he had what very much appeared to be an old gravy stain on the lapel of his cutaway. I also noticed that his silk hat cleared the roof of the car by a good four or five inches.

*

The bride’s father’s uncle and I brought up the rear. Whether he had intuited that I was his friend or simply because I was the owner of a pad and pencil, he had rather more scrambled then gravitated to a walking position beside me. The very top of his beautiful silk hat didn’t quite come up as high as my shoulder. I set a comparatively slow gait for us, in deference to the length of his legs. At the end of a block or so, we were quite a good distance behind the others. I don’t think it troubled either of us. Occasionally, I remember, as we walked along, my friend and I looked up and down, respectively, at each other and exchanged idiotic expressions of pleasure at sharing one another’s company.

“Rather more scrambled then gravitated,” “looked up and down, respectively,” “idiotic expressions of pleasure”: what funny, wonderful writing. But you’ll notice that aside from short stature, nothing in these descriptions suggests Donald Meek. (According to his IMDb bio, Meek was 5'4".) Why his image floated into my mind, I’ll never know.

Via YouTube you can watch Willoughby and his cronies lip-sync with Shirley Temple on “Swing Me an Old-Fashioned Song” from Little Miss Broadway. Caution: the brief bit of “In the Evening by the Moonlight” may be cause for offense.

More from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
“A sort of jump-seat Mona Lisa”
“Love, Irving Sappho”