Overheard

[In a coffeeshop. Two young adults talking.]

“Have you listened to the whole album?”

*

[Not long after.]

“I can’t wait for their second album.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[There’s hope, at least if they’re paying for the albums.]

Yet another Sluggo

[Ludwig ”Sluggo” Wittgenstein.]

One more Sluggo, Inspired by the Sluggo variations and Gunther’s variation.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Students and technology

The developmental psychologist Susan Pinker, writing in The New York Times, wondering whether students can have too much technology:

More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.

Pinker points out that it’s not device use but the “give-and-take” of conversations with parents that predicts “robust vocabularies and school success.”

Still another Sluggo

Gunther’s Sluggo made me laugh out loud, loudly, too loudly.

+1!

National Adjunct Walkout Day

Inside Higher Ed reports on National Adjunct Walkout Day. It’s February 25, 2015.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education.

[I am not now nor have I ever been an adjunct instructor, and I’m fortunate to teach at a school that treats adjuncts well. Many schools do not. I imagine that schools of all sorts will respond to NAWD by announcing that anyone not teaching on February 25 will lose wages.]

Let’s go . . . places?

In my modern American lit class we were talking about the mannered “poetry voice,” that ineptly . . . musical voice? The one that rises? And falls where you least . . . expect it?

And someone mentioned this: 2015 Toyota RAV4 Beat poetry. Thirty seconds of good fun.

Thank you, Zayne.

Another Sluggo

[Truman “Sluggo” Capote. Artist unknown.]

I wish I had realized last December that there’s a whole series of Sluggos. Follow the link and keep on scrolling.

If anyone knows who created these images, I’d like to know too.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

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.