"For those unfamiliar with the acronym, the first letter stands for a certain curse word, followed by 'around and find out.'"

"It amounts to something like 'Don’t mess with me or you’ll regret it.' The implication, in this context, is that Nicolás Maduro unwisely did the former and now must do the latter.... Superficially, it may seem jarring that people entrusted to run our nation, suit-wearing people who take themselves very seriously, would throw around a term like this. But I actually think it’s a positive development. The normalization of that word — the one Hegseth abbreviated as 'eff' — is a sign of maturity in American English...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "The Trump Administration’s Coarseness Is a Sign That English Has Grown Up" (NYT).

Did he just call the New York Times immature?

"I’ve been saying for a while that the gender-neutral 'they/them' was going to become even more widespread. As a linguist..."

"... who studies the ways language changes, I noted the rise in people resisting the gender binary and got caught up in — and perhaps even biased toward — what I processed as a pronominal revolution. But surveys show that the number of young people identifying as nonbinary has decreased considerably over the past two years. Binary genders are on the rise again, and therefore so are the pronouns most closely associated with them...."

Writes John McWhorter, designating "He and she" as item #7 of the "Words and Phrases" list in his section of "The Year in Lists."

And that happens to be my last gift link of the year from The New York Times, so enjoy reading all the items on all the lists.

Jennifer Weiner has "9 Retrograde Moments for Women." I guess there were only 9, because if you'd had a 10th, wouldn't you go for the cliché of a 10 item list? And yet Weiner made a single item out of Erika Kirk and Usha Vance. Was it "retrograde" to put them together? Yes, but it wasn't Weiner's doing. Some people on the internet did it: they talked about JD Vance divorcing Usha and marrying Erika Kirk. Was that important enough to repeat? Weiner only purports to give us "moments"....

Somehow the first 2 articles I click to read in the NYT this morning both bring up Theodore Roosevelt.

1. "The Election Is Happening Too Soon" by David Brooks: "By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, society was heaving with change. The legislative program that we call progressivism — cleaning up local government, breaking up the monopolies, regulating clean food, water and air — grew out of the cultural and civic change that was already underway. The pattern was cultural change first, then civic revival, then political reform. Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?"

2. "It Sounded Like Dancing, Drinking and Sex. It Blew People’s Minds" by John McWhorter: "We moderns can’t feel ragtime as the hip, naughty thing it was to people when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Jazz, rock, hip-hop and so much else came in ragtime’s wake, all of them syncopated (and hip-wiggly) to degrees beyond anything [Scott] Joplin, who died in 1917, ever knew." (Interesting use of language: "hip, naughty... hip-hop... hip-wiggly....")

***

I sense a reaction to the immersion in 2024 electoral politics. Those who'd been hoping to leap forward are drawn instead into the past, and when they look back, the human marker of time who stands out is Theodore Roosevelt.

"As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had..."

"... has given way to the 'nowhere man' accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two). No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance, Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities, have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception. Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black...."

Writes Elizabeth Spiers in "The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy" (NYT)(free-access link, because she has a lot of other things to say and I'm not in the mood to summarize it).

And then there are the people who say she sounds drunk....

"'Ultimately, no coherent case could be made that apostrophes help with clarity,' said [John] McWhorter..."

"They are merely 'a kind of decoration,' he added. Dr. McWhorter said apostrophes were the 'fish forks' of punctuation. 'They sit there, you’re not quite sure how to use them; you’re almost sure to use them wrong.' Apostrophes crept into written English for arbitrary reasons, Dr. McWhorter said. 'It’s one more way to look down on people who never quite mastered "its" and "it’s" when really we should be thinking about how effectively they get their message across.' Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings because language is an important part of identity, said Ellie Rye, an English lecturer at the University of York in England. Still, in the history of the English language, apostrophes are 'quite modern,' she said. They were not used to mark possession until the 16th century...."

From "An English Town Drops Apostrophes From Street Signs. Some Aren’t Happy. The move has prompted some resistance, with someone writing an apostrophe on a sign for St. Mary’s Walk. 'What’s next?' one North Yorkshire resident asked. 'Commas?'"

"Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings...." Okay, then, let me express a strong feeling about that phrase "grammar usage." First, apostrophes are punctuation, and punctuation is not grammar. Second, usage is something else too. It is to be distinguished from grammar. Grammar, punctuation, and usage are separate topics. To say "grammar usage" when you're talking about punctuation is an annoying error — an annoying usage error.

"Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall..."

"... and say, 'Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately'? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news. The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics.... We recall [Martin Luther] King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did" (NYT).

"What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black..."

"... even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying 'All Lives Matter.' And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Arab-Israeli activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful..."

Writes John McWhorter, in "I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice" (NYT).

"It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and..."

"... not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "Why Claudine Gay Should Go" (NYT).

"If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?"

"It surely feels like being on the right side of social justice these days means shielding Black students even from all but nonexistent harms while essentially telling Jewish students, who are being actually assailed verbally, to just grow up. But to train young people, or any people, to think of themselves as weak is a form of abuse.... [A]nyone who has made the mistake of thinking that a healthy Jewish soul must endure ongoing calls for the extermination of Israel might at least consider that a healthy Black soul can endure a sour tweet, a talk by someone who has opposed racial preferences and even the Mandarin expression 'nèi ge.'"

Writes John McWhorter, in "Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort" (NYT).

The rock in question is that boulder the University of Wisconsin removed from Observatory Hill 2 years ago, which I blogged here. I said:

"George Floyd was saying 'I can't breathe' when he was standing up straight and just being coaxed to get into the car."

"What they were trying to do was take him somewhere to get treatment, because the drugs were severely addling his mind and he wouldn't get in the car. And he starts saying, breathing air, standing up, 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe,' when nobody is anywhere near his neck or anything else. George Floyd was extremely high on fentanyl and meth to an extent that could have killed him sitting in a chair. If you're on fentanyl in particular, you get something called 'wooden chest,' where you can't breathe if you've got that much in you. That's how high he was."

Said John McWhorter, in a discussion with with Glenn Loury, quoted at Loury's Substack, under the provocative title, "Derek Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd."

If I needed to follow John McWhorter's new rule, I would think of "they" as a nickname for the person, rather than a pronoun.

As we discussed here, yesterday, John McWhorter has proposed using the singular form of the verb with the pronoun "they" when it is used to refer to only one person. 

I'm writing a new post, not to repeat the discussion about whether that's a good idea, but because it seems as though it would be quite difficult to force yourself to use "bad" English, and I realized what I would do to make it easier. This is all assuming that I wanted or needed to use "is" and "has" and "wants" with "they." For that person — the singular "they" — I would visualize "they" as a name — a noun.

I once listened to the audio version of a novel in which one of the main characters was named Yuu — "Earthlings," blogged here and here. (Buy it here, and you'll be sending me a commission.) The narrator pronounced Yuu, "you." I got used to hearing things like: "Yuu was the same age as me.... Yuu has been my boyfriend.... Yuu always sticks close to Natsuki...." 

"Might it make the new 'they' a little easier to handle if it were used with singular tense marking?"

Proposes John McWhorter, in "Knowing When ‘They’ Means One" (NYT).

I have often been asked by people over 35 or so, “Are we supposed to say ‘they want’ or ‘they wants’?” I always answer that the proper form is “they want,” but must it be?...

Under the current dispensation, “they want to trim the cat’s claws” can refer to an individual or more than one person. Context usually makes the meaning known, but surely it would make things a little clearer if we could use “they wants to trim the cat’s claws” when referring to just one person.... 

"In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees... It was apparent to me that... Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others."

Writes John McWhorter in "On Race and Academia" (NYT).

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program....

The answer is in the official ideology of diversity, though I don't fault Professor McWhorter for failing to detect it on his own. The meaningful lesson in diversity is supposed to be that black people are individuals and not exemplars of a stereotype. By not being economically disadvantaged and by not choosing "race-related" major, these 2 grad students were teaching other students that black people are not all alike. (It's a very elementary lesson and thus scarcely the sort of "compelling" government interest needed to support race discrimination, but there it is.)

"There seems to be genuine confusion over what a well-meaning person can say without offending someone."

"According to Pew, a majority of Americans believe there isn’t any agreement on what language is considered sexist or racist of late.... You might find yourself wondering: Can I use that word? Am I not supposed to say that anymore?... [W]e enlisted the help of the polling firm Morning Consult to survey a representative sample of over 4,000 Americans...."

This is a very useful and entertaining exploration by the New York Times. Let me just highlight — uplift and highlight — a few things that stood out for us here at Meadhouse: 

First, the overview:

"By my lights, it is about as important for modern kids to learn cursive as it is for them to know their Roman numerals."

"The latter are kind of fun, and you have to know them to … well, for me they were for reading what the year was on 'Looney Tunes' opening credits, and I guess one might want to be able to know what year a building was constructed without having to ask someone. But just as those aren’t enough to impose learning Roman numerals on all schoolchildren, cursive’s time is up, now that all people will spend so much less time writing by hand."

Types John McWhorter, in "What’s the Point of Teaching Cursive?" (NYT).

"Racial preferences should now be thought of like chemotherapy, a cure that can cause side effects that should be applied judiciously."

"We’ve applied the cure long past that point, and have drifted toward an almost liturgical conception of diversity that makes less sense by the year. In a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said, 'we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences' in the university admissions context 'will no longer be necessary.' That was considered resonantly wise at the time. But now we have only about six years to go. Folks, it’s time."

Writes John McWhorter in "Stop Making Asian Americans Pay the Price for Campus Diversity" (NYT). 

McWhorter is anticipating the Supreme Court cases Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. Oral argument in those cases is scheduled for October 31st — Halloween.

Is there really much expression of "fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others" these days?

I'm reading John McWhorter, in the NYT:

In our moment, we talk a lot about the dismaying degree of partisanship in our nation. We declare fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others. Yet [Mitchell] Jackson exemplifies a sense that when it comes to [Clarence] Thomas, none of this interest in comity applies and that it qualifies as insight to discuss him as a horrid, pathetic figure. 

McWhorter is addressing an Esquire article by Mitchell Jackson, "Looking for Clarence Thomas/He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism of the past century. What happened?"

McWhorter continues: 

Once again, apparently, there is a single Black way to think, with Black conservatism valuable only as a demonstration of what Black opinion is not supposed to be. It’s worthwhile, one would think, to assume first that people’s intentions are good ones. Writing someone off as monstrous should be a matter of last resort. To go with that immediately makes for good theater, but it’s also a kind of ritualistic hostility.  

"In Middle English, male children were 'knave' girls while female children were 'gay' girls."

"Only in Modern English did 'girl' come to refer only to female children. Why this happened isn’t certain, but it’s not uncommon for words to specialize over time in that way: 'meat' originally referred to all food or sustenance, kind of like the phrase 'daily bread'; 'apple' to fruits generally; and 'queen' began as a word for 'woman' in general, and only later specialized royally. However, which words go in which directions can be quite fortuitous, and some words acquire wider, rather than narrower meanings. 'Dog' first referred to certain larger, more powerful dogs, then came to mean all dogs. 'Child' came to mean all pre-adults rather than just the littlest ones. As we moved from Middle English to Modern English, even 'child' could take on a female meaning in a certain context. A line in Shakespeare’s 'The Winter’s Tale' asks, 'A boy or a child, I wonder?' And one might suppose that this suggests that a girl is somehow less distinctive than a boy, a mere generic 'child.' But it’s possible this actually traces back to when 'child' referred specifically to female children."

Writes John McWhorter in "'Woman' and 'Female' Didn’t Start as Words About Men" (NYT).

"Making the SAT and ACT Optional Is the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations."

Writes John McWhorter (in the NYT)(adopting a term — "the soft bigotry of low expectations" — that originated with George W. Bush)

I would prefer that we address the value of the tests... after first showing that these minority students... can take standardized tests and do just as well, in the aggregate, as white and Asian American students.... To some, that take may seem backward. But I think of it as progressive, and as a demonstration, I ask the reader to consider: What happened to the idea of “tokenism”?

John McWhorter says "It’s Time to End Race-Based Affirmative Action."

 That seems very important! Let's read:

When affirmative action was put into practice around a half-century ago, with legalized segregation so recent, it was reasonable to think of being Black as a shorthand for being disadvantaged, whatever a Black person’s socioeconomic status was.... I think a mature America is now in a position to extend the moral sophistication of affirmative action to disadvantaged people of all races or ethnicities, especially since, as a whole, Black America would still benefit substantially....

Whether we're mature or not, the legal basis for upholding affirmative action in the higher education admissions process has been "diversity." And McWhorter attacks this concept. For one thing, his own children have led an upper-middle-class, privileged life.

And I will never forget a line from a guidebook that Black students at Harvard wrote two decades ago: “We are not here to provide diversity training for Kate and Timmy.”...

“Diversity” has become one of those terms (and ideas) that makes us feel cozy inside, like freshly baked blueberry muffins and “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” But how would you feel about looking a Black undergraduate in the eye and saying, “A lot of the reason we wanted you here, on our campus, is your differences from most of the other students and the life lessons they can learn from them”?

Someone says, “I want my kids to interact with Black students before they go out into the world.” I ask, “Just what was it about Black people that you were hoping your kids would learn?”

Yes, it's quite clear — if you look straight at it — that the diversity rationale for affirmative action is about the benefit to the whole student body, that is, to the mostly white students who are admitted. The black students are used as a means to an end, and the end is something quite vague and — as McWhorter demonstrates — actually embarrassing to say clearly.

He ends with this question:

How would you feel about your kids being admitted to a university because of their “diverseness” from other kids rather than, well, their selves?