Category Archives: Words

On displacement, and what it says about humans

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Some more of my notes from linguistics class. The readings last week in our Language Files textbook were in part about Charles Hockett‘s list of characteristics that distinguish a system of communication as an actual language. They are:

  1. Mode of communication
  2. Semanticity
  3. Pragmatic function
  4. Interchangeability
  5. Cuntural transmission
  6. Arbitrariness
  7. Discreteness
  8. Displacement
  9. Productivity

All communication systems possess the first three of those design features, while only human language exhibit the last two. I’d give you definitions of all of them (here’s a link), but really my own attention was drawn completely to the penultimate one, and that’s what I wrote about in my reading notes:

In both this reading and the one from ULTH, we are told that animals other than Homo sapiens do not possess or employ language, as defined by Hockett, because they lack displacement.

Of everything I read for this week, that was the point that made the greatest impression on me.

It speaks clearly to the most important quality that many humans in different times and places, employing different modes of thought and belief, have cited in asserting their belief that Homo sapiens is not an animal, but a distinct creature on a higher level.

Frequently over the millennia since modern humans developed sophisticated (from the human self-flattering perspective) language and other distinct cognitive abilities (about 70,000 years ago), sapiens have expressed this through belief systems that we refer to as religion. A well-known way of expressing this is that Man was made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Therefore we are able to think (and speak and write) about things and events and ideas that we cannot see or touch. This quality is in fact essential to the very existence of religion. We are unable to prove (to the satisfaction of an unbeliever) the existence of God or gods through empirical means.

From the perspective of my own religion, this can tempt me to embrace the sin of pride, since it suggests that unbelievers are inexplicably limiting themselves intellectually to the material, here-and-now perspective of animals (or lesser animals, or simply other animals, depending on the way you choose to frame it).

But unbelievers also perceive the ability to employ displacement in a communication system as an important, defining difference between our species and others.

In Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari stresses repeatedly that the quality that not only took Homo sapiens to the top of the food chain, but also caused our species to outlive Neanderthals and Denisovans, is the ability to perceive that which is not immediately, obviously and materially present or detectable.

The book for which Harari is best known begins in a remarkable way for students of linguistics, particularly for those who study written language. The first page is essentially an atheist’s, or at least materialist’s, take on the beginning of the book of Genesis.

He considers religion to be a myth. But he considers such myths essential to why sapiens have come to dominate the Earth, and survive while other Homo species have faded away. To him, “myths” include belief in gods and spirits, but also such abstract concepts as money, laws, liberalism, communism and many others. He asserts that none of these things exist outside shared human imagination. (If I were writing the Sapiens book, I would tend to use the term “abstraction” when Harari uses words such as “myth” and “imagination.”)

Unlike some other atheists (those tempted to their own sort of pride), he doesn’t see belief in such “imaginary” things as a weakness. In fact, it is the main quality responsible for modern humans’ success over other species, including other humans such as Neanderthals.

Such shared beliefs (and the modifier “shared” is key here) have enabled our species to cooperate in immensely larger social groups. Neanderthals just couldn’t compete with that.

Of course, to be clear. While I embrace such “imaginary” concepts as Christianity, liberalism (meaning the word in terms of the actual approach to government in most of the West until 2016, not today’s popular misunderstanding), and the rule of law, I don’t do so because it’s a nifty strategy for our species’ survival and domination. I embrace them because I believe in them.

And it’s nice to see it brought up in my new field of study…

I’m not the only one who can see this! Hallelujah!

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Yes, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, I know. I’m busier than usual, partly because I’m in my third week of classes at USC.

But my assignments include writing commentary on our assigned readings, and these tend to take a form similar to blog posts. And one that I wrote a couple of weeks back is nearly identical to one I’ve meant to write here for at least a year or two. I haven’t written it because it was one of my long, involved posts like this one or this one. I was going to call it something like, “A Hierarchy of Communications.” Too involved. Too easy (for me) to keep putting it off.

But last week, I had occasion to write a brief summary of one of the ideas that would have been included in that tome. It went sort of like this…

Here’s something that’s long been very obvious to me, possibly because I started regularly using a keyboard to send instant messages directly to other people at some point in 1980. That’s when our newspaper in Tennessee abandoned the IBM Selectric and started generating and editing copy on the screens of dumb computer terminals linked to a mainframe. The system had this wonderful little, almost entirely superfluous, feature: You could, using this same system, generate and send a brief written message directly to anyone else in the newsroom.

I could tell you some horror stories about the trouble this caused, but I’m trying to be brief. I’ll simply say that eventually I learned that that there are things you should never try to communicate using this medium. You should instead get out of your chair, walk over and say it face-to-face.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. But mainly, it’s because when someone’s looking at you and listening, you can communicate more clearly not only emotional content (and emotions fly wildly about in a newsroom near deadlines), but the person can immediately, in a matter of seconds, ask questions that wouldn’t have occurred to you as the writer of the text – usually because you didn’t realize such questions existed.

You save a lot of time this way, and maybe even avoid a fistfight under certain awkward conditions.

Today I live in a world in which most of the billions on this planet (as opposed to the 40 in that small newsroom) possess the ability to send text to anyone else whose mobile numbers they happen to possess. And they can do a lot more with those texts, which means they can cause trouble unimagined back in 1980. (This is a central problem with social media, but let’s stick to texts at the moment.)

I’m constantly begging friends, family and sometimes mere acquaintances NOT to send that important text, but to use another convenient application, the telephone feature. (After all, we do call the thing a “phone,” right?) It would save a lot of time, often a half hour or so of multiple, imperfectly typed and even less perfectly understood texts back and forth. Time and again, these matters could be handled more fully and efficiently with a 30-second conversation.

Evidently, I’ve seldom explained this well, because I don’t often succeed in convincing anyone.

So I refer you to the text in the box. The author tells us that spoken language:

  • allows confusion and ambiguity to be resolved directly by repair and confirmation procedures
  • is used in a social and temporal context, and thus brings with it a great deal of background information; draws on context to complement meaning and fill in ellipses

Absolutely. Written communications don’t offer these same valuable features.

Anyway, that’s the end of what I said — on that one subject — in my notes on the reading. It would have been just one point among many in my treatise on the full range of options in daily interpersonal communications.

Here’s the aforementioned box, from page 20 of English with an Accent, by Rosina Lippi-Green.

Old School in the real world

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Oxford and other universities awarded honorary degrees to Mark Twain. He adored the fancy duds, and went away happy…

For the next several months, I’ll have yet another excuse for not blogging very often:

I’m going back to school — tomorrow. I’ve enrolled in a course at USC designated LING 300, Introduction to Language Sciences. And yes, I’m taking advantage of the deal that offers free tuition to SC residents over the age of 65. Which makes me feel like I’m sort of throwing money down the drain if I don’t take something.

The reason I’m taking this particular course is that many times over the last 50 years (I last attended school in 1975), I’ve thought that maybe I should have studied philology. Or etymology. Or something else in that general realm. Words have been my profession, but my interest in them extends beyond using them the way a mason uses bricks. My exposure to various languages — the years I spoke Spanish as a kid in Ecuador, my two years of high school Latin, my very brief study of German, my recent dalliances with Dutch and Italian via Duolingo — has fascinated me to what most would regard a ridiculous extent. I’m interested in the relationships between various modern and ancient languages (at least, those of the Indo-European sort), as well as how human languages developed both before and after our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering.

I’m signed up as a nondegree-seeking graduate student, which apparently allows me to take undergrad courses as well. And that’s good because I’ve never taken anything in this area before, so I need to start on an introductory level.

Depending on how this course goes, I may continue this line of study. Or, since these doors are now opened, I may branch out. I might return to my second major from undergrad days, history — if I see courses that grab me. Or maybe I’ll dig into some specific language or other. I dunno. The options seem fairly unlimited.

But first I’ve got to get through this one. I opted to take this for a grade rather than simply auditiing. I figured I would slack off too much if there were no grade to work for. Here’s hoping I don’t come to regret that decision.

My plan is to do much better than I did my one previous semester as a student at this university, in Fall 1971. That should be achievable, as long as I don’t lapse into a long-lasting coma.

Perhaps I can even do well enough to put an end to those dreams. You know, the ones in which you have to go take your exam at the end of a term, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea where the class meets, because you haven’t attended it even once. You’d meant to, but somehow never got around to it.

There are variations on that dream. For instance, the Superintendent of Dreams decided at some point to use that same template, but transfer the anxiety to the more frequent (in my life, anyway) challenge of trying to get a newspaper out when everything is going wrong. But still, for old times’ sake, I occasionally experience the college version. Seems like I had one of those just a week or two ago.

Frankly, I suspect that such dreams are a lifelong affliction, so I’m not going to hold my breath in expectation of them going away. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for learning a bit about linguistics.

Oh, and before someone mentions “Old School.” Well, I love that movie. (In fact, I may have to go back to my Top Ten Comedies list and bump something off to make room for it.) But I don’t intend to emulate it. I’ve never at any time had the slightest interest in the Greek life. You can be almost certain you won’t see me at a football game, even if I continue into the fall. And streaking? Admittedly, I was an undergrad during that madness in the ’70s, but I did not partake then, and do not have plans to do so this time around. Much to everyone’s relief.

Listen up! ‘Pant’ is what a dog does. We wear ‘pants.’

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Really, my headline pretty much says what I mean to say. But of course, I’ll elaborate a bit.

The above ad was in an email I received this morning from The Boston Globe. And I’ve had it with these. I’ve been seeing such ads for a decade or two now, and I’ve reached the end of my tolerance.

First, do any of you refer to what you’re wearing between your waist and ankles “a pant?” Or has a friend asked, “Hey, what do you think of my new pant?”

No, you don’t. And no, no one has (I hope).

This is exclusively something that comes out of the clothing industry, or perhaps the advertisers who tout clothing for that trade. It’s not anything any of us out here who wear the things say, near as I can tell.

We call them “pants.” And Italians say i pantaloni. Plural. Speakers of Spanish say los pantalones. Again, plural. OK, so the Dutch for some reason use the singular form (de broek). Fortunately, when I was in Amsterdam, everyone refused to speak Dutch to me, so I was spared the pain of hearing people say such a thing in real life. Maybe they do it because of the influence the textile industry once had on the country.

As for the industry, I suppose they say it because to them, a pair of pants is a singular product more than something they wear. It’s one item, and if they used a plural term it might confuse their accountants.

But I don’t know, and I don’t care, why they do it. I just want this to stop. Now. Before somebody starts wearing “an underpant” beneath the aforementioned….

Amazon occasionally does the same…

The ominous flattening of language

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Winston’s job was obliterating facts. Another character obliterated language.

On a previous post — the one about the “thumb-up” emoji — a reader gently mocked the apparent silliness of the topic. I chose not to be offended, but to enjoy it by riffing on his point.

After all, I sort of did write that because I was looking for a quick-and-easy thing to post about, to assuage my guilt about not posting more often. And, I told myself, not everything has to be as long and complicated as the post that preceded that “silly” one (1,736 words, yikes!).

But… ultimately, I don’t consider the subject trivial. To explain…

Years ago, when Umberto Eco (the Italian semiotician and author of The Name of the Rose) was still alive, I saw something he wrote (or perhaps he was just being quoted) in a magazine. He predicted that our species was moving back toward nonverbal (or perhaps you would say post-literate) modes of communication. And this was years before emojis, in the ’90s or maybe the ’80s.

Anyway, I think of his prediction frequently these days (as I’ve mentioned before in a related rant). My question about the thumb-up emoji arises in that context.

My concern is that I see our ability to communicate flattening, becoming one-dimensional. The English language (the only one in which I am sufficiently literate to be able to perceive subtle distinctions) is amazingly versatile, flexible and able to communicate an apparent a galaxy of things with a single word, depending upon its context.

But I’ve seen a marked tendency to reduce in recent years. Sixteen year ago, I wrote about the absurdity of having my wife ask me why I was not her “friend” on Facebook. But I didn’t consider my wife absurd for wanting to include me in something she was enjoying. My problem was Facebook’s reduction of human relationships to one word. On that medium, you were either a “friend” or you were not, (which makes sense only if you haven’t advanced past the kindergarten level of social interaction). Obviously, my wife was and is much more than that to me. And yet in the years since then Facebook, in its hyperbureaucratic, ones-and-zeroes-obsessed manner, has dutifully labelled her, my parents, my children, grandchildren, cousins, acquaintances, and people I didn’t even know but approved to be polite (and no, I don’t do that any more) have all become my “friends,” without any elaboration or explanation or qualification or enhancement — without any of the things that make life rich and full.

I am reminded of the Newspeak Dictionary from Orwell’s 1984. Each edition is smaller, thinner, containing fewer words. The idea is to reduce the number of concepts a human is capable of generating or communicating, so that ideas that are troublesome to Big Brother’s state simply don’t arise or spread. As the dialectic of Oceania proceeds, language gets flatter and flatter. A thing that is in some way very, very bad is “doubleplusungood,” rather than horrible, evil, shocking, abominable, mortifying, putrid, appalling, disgusting, or … well, you get the idea, comrade.

When I first read that as a kid, being a word guy, I found the idea of such a dictionary, steadily shrinking, more terrifying than what Winston found in Room 101. Although what he encountered there was pretty doubleplusungood as well.

Combined with the communication breakdowns to which I refer, this flattening of the language — Facebook calling everyone you know your “friend,” and the apps that tell us the many-sided “thumbs-up” simply means “like,” is ominous. Creepy. Threatening.

As these modes become common, even universal, we become less intelligent. And humanity sinks into the mire. It’s one of the reasons that “Idiocracy” arrived centuries earlier than the silly film predicted…

What does this mean to you?

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Speaking of modern forms of communication…

What does this symbol mean to you?

 

I ask because when I use it to respond to a text, my phone will tell me “You liked…” whatever I was responding to.

Is that how you would translate this nonverbal communication into words? That seems to me to reflect a very limited understanding of the symbol and its vast usefulness.

Sure, it can mean “like,” in certain circumstances. But if that’s what I need it for, I can just type “I like it!” easily enough. Nevertheless, I do use it for that quite frequently, and it works in the right context. I see others doing the same.

But to my point, it is far more valuable and essential for saying something that words can’t say — or can’t say without hurting feelings. To express it briefly in words, it’s something like one or more of the following:

  • “Check!”
  • “Got it!”
  • “Received!”
  • “10-4!”
  • “Roger!”

Or, at greater length:

  • “OK, you’ve sent it and I’ve seen it, and I have nothing to say about it, and certainly no value judgments to make regarding your important missive. So, with all due respect, please go away without asking further about it, so I can try desperately to dig my way out of this mountain of actual, important work I need to do…”

Employed that way, it is enormously useful.

I learned this almost immediately after joining James Smith’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018. From the first day, I was hit by a tsunami of texts that went exponentially beyond anything I had seen or imagined before. I don’t know quite how to fully convey the quantity I mean. I could easily have done nothing but read and answer texts all day long, and still not do full justice to the task. And I had a universe of other things to do, as a more or less one-man communications department in the last months of a statewide campaign.

It was immediately as horrible as email, but more immediately demanding, since most people know it’s crazy to expect a prompt reply to an email. When you got one of those back in the ’90s, you were excited. Not anymore.

Part of this was that for the most part, James and running mate Mandy Powers Norrell communicated only by text. Sure, there was the occasional phone call while they flitted daily across the state, but no emails — which sort of drove our campaign manager nuts. He’d never encountered anything like it, and his campaign experience was much greater than mine (which is to say, he’d served in a bunch of them, and I’d been in zero).

But our two principals texting all the time would have been tolerable had that been for all the other people that constantly peppered me with information and observations that seemed to them critically valuable at that moment. I’m talking about not only fellow campaign staffers, but friends and contributors and well-wishers from across the state and beyond.

Worse, it wasn’t just individuals. There was also that cruelest invention of the 21st century — the GROUP TEXT! The kind that just keeps coming at you, with multiple responses from various recipients, all day long. The emoji was magnificently effective with these. It said, with all due politeness, “Acknowledged.” But it gave no one anything to respond to, so no one noticed when I removed myself from the group.

Finding that mode of communication was, for me at that moment, as wonderful as finding a cure for the common cold. I’ve used it that way many times since. Not to be rude or dismissive — just to get on with what I need to do, without hurting feelings.

So what does it mean to you? Or perhaps I should say, in what way is it most useful to you?…

Why do people still do this?

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Screenshot

Indeed, why?

Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone ever did it! Google’s AI function offers a reason:

In modern writing, it’s standard to use one space after a period at the end of a sentence, not two. While two spaces were common with typewriters due to their monospaced fonts, computers and proportional fonts have made a single space the preferred and recommended style.

But could that really have been the actual reason? Could people really not see that, when a period appeared — and had a space after it — and the next word was capitalized, the old sentence had ended, and a new one begun?

Of course, I realized, as soon as I typed “and the next word was capitalized,” that a huge portion of the American population (practically everyone who had not been brought up on AP style) capitalizes words at random — which is another form of insanity, to be dealt with another day.

But let’s say that was the reason. Why do people who weren’t alive back in the days of monospacing still do it?!?!?

Perhaps it’s because they’ve grown up in the utterly undisciplined online era, which has no limits whatsoever. You can type all day for the rest of your life, and never fill the available space. In fact, “space” is no longer a concept that defines the life of a writer.

But I was brought up right, and therefore have a semi-religious horror of wasting that precious resource. Or perhaps I should say I had it. Twenty years of blogging has undone me (or undun me). Now, I vomit forth words at a phenomenal rate (when I get around to posting), and feel little or no obligation to tidy up the mess. Back in the day, I spent half my “writing time” cutting what I had initially written, stream-of-consciousness-style, down to fit. Now, I just take the first step, and move on.

Not back then, though. Back then, a good journalist would embrace discipline, thinking “I must not kill any more trees than necessary!” Or more likely (and practically) thinking, “If I don’t cut this to the assigned length, some unfeeling monster on the copy desk will slash it in the middle of my very best sentence, and toss what follows it into the composing room trash bin!” (Which has happened to me.)

But you don’t have to be a journalist who remembers having to shout over the noise of the linotype machines to see that the double-space thing is wrong. Google’s AI feature didn’t exist until last year, and yet it clearly states that “In modern writing, it’s standard to use one space after a period at the end of a sentence, not two.”

Well, I could go on, and probably would, except that I want to get back to my original question:

Why do people still do this? I’d really like to know. It’s one of those human pathologies in which a take a morbid interest…

Well, now I know how to say it (I guess)…

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This kind of cracked me up.

This morning I was rereading one of my Patrick O’Brian novels over breakfast (yes, I AM reading other things, but I LIKE these), and saw a reference to HMS Indefatigable (the 1784 version, not the 1901 version that was sunk at the Battle of Jutland).

Of course, the ship’s name is a word I’ve read and understood my whole life, but have never had occasion to say out loud. So I thought I’d take a second and find out how to say it out loud.

I’ve found YouTube helpful with such things in the past, but the voice telling me how to say the English word doesn’t usually sound like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

Or maybe like this guy below on “The IT Crowd.” Anyway, now I know how to say it, if I ever want to do so while speaking on ze pheun…

A brief explanation to the reader

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In writing, ‘The main thing is to know what to leave out.’ I’m still working on that part…

I like it when writers offer explanatory notes to their readers. For instance, y’all know how obsessively fond I am of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, and he frequently offers explanations about the history of his period, or about his writing process, before the opening of the work (here’s most of one of those). All add illumination and enjoyment to the story.

But my favorite might be this pair of notices from Huck Finn, facetious as they may be in part:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

EXPLANATORY

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

Well, I’m no Twain or O’Brian, but I think it’s nice to pause and explain what I’m doing, if only to head off some of those “What the hell is going on here?” comments. I don’t want y’all developing calluses on your fingertips.

You may have noticed lately, as I’ve gotten rolling again after the holidays, that there’s been a change in what I write about — not a huge change, but noticeable.

I used to blog like a journalist (remember the Virtual Front Page?), and specifically like a journalist who’s dealt over the years with electoral politics more than any other subject. But you’re not going to see as much of that anymore.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, nobody’s paying me to keep people informed anymore. Second, I’ve realized people aren’t that interested in being informed in an era in which we have technology that enables them to be exposed only to what they want to hear. Third, journalism — and particularly political, opinion journalism — is based on the assumption that people are rational and persuadable, and therefore benefit mutually from some civil back-and-forth on the issues of the day, which makes all participants wiser, and better citizens. That is too seldom the case these days.

Then there are the personal reasons. Putting it briefly, I’m not interested in that stuff anymore. Or at least, I’m not interested in engaging with it when everyone’s consciousness is saturated in the ocean of nonsense that they get from media today. And no, I’m not just beefing again about the deleterious intellectual effects of social media. The MSM have in these rough seas lost their own ability to sort out what’s important to talk about.

I’ve told you over the last few years of my growing disgust with what is seen as “news,” and how it is presented, as the field of journalism has rapidly decayed. I am now holding myself back with both hands from offering examples of what’s wrong, because I’m trying to get back to my point (think like Twain! think like Hemingway!)

All of these harmful trends have accelerated in the past year. And for my part, I’ve gotten less patient in my eighth decade, and I prefer to spend what little time I can find to devote to this enterprise on things that interest me, and still seem worth the effort.

That includes such things as history, of course, and offshoots of history such as genealogy. And my love of popular culture (and even occasionally higher culture) has never waned. And there’s evolution, particularly of our own species, even as it seems to be collectively leaping off a developmental cliff.

And religion, of course. That one’s going to really chafe at some of you, both among the faithful and others who just don’t want to hear about it.

And if you don’t like any of this stuff, you can just go elsewhere. On some level you will be missed, but I don’t want to make you miserable, and despite recent developments, this is still a free country. At least until this coming Monday, and possibly beyond.

Note that, as that last sentence hints, current events — even political current events — will sometimes come up. (In keeping with my belief that everything, and I mean everything, is connected.) I’ll just be focusing on it from a different angle — one that interests me more, and perhaps will interest some of you.

As for the rest of you, I wish you not only a good day, but a wonderful life from here on. God bless you.

OK, I’ve got a beef with Mr. Peabody

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As we all know, the people who created “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” back in 1959 were geniuses, but none of the writers and animators were quite as brilliant, of course, as one of their creations, Mr. Peabody. I refer of course to the anthropomorpic hound who is, as Wikipedia states:

…the smartest being in existence, having graduated from Harvard when he was 3 years old. (“Wagna cum laude“).

But I’ve got a little beef with him about his Wayback Machine, which enabled him and Sherman to travel back through history at will.

More accurately, my problem is with the folks who set up the website named for Mr. Peabody’s most famous invention.

Don’t get me wrong. Those folks are wonderful. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is one of the most amazing things the internet has given us. It’s almost up there with Google Maps, which could thoroughly absorb me every minute of the rest of my life, if I let it. (Since I am the most distractable being in the universe, I can no longer read a book without pausing to look up each geographical reference to see where it is in respect to other places I know, checking the latitude and longitude, zooming down to ground level with the satellite filter and shifting to Street View to travel up and down the avenue, clicking in closer on interesting buildings… It’s ridiculous.)

The Wayback Machine may not take us back to enjoy a tête-à-tête with Cleopatra, but it does something else pretty startling. It gives us information that no longer exists (at least, not as we mere intermediate users can tell).

But here’s the thing: It’s not perfect. I don’t know if this has to do with different universes creating static and interfering with each other or what (forgive me if I’m getting too technical for you), but… well, it’s not perfect, Mr. Peabody.

Say, if you go back looking for something you wrote on a website that no longer exists, because (for instance) you don’t want to have to research and write that again, you may go back and connect to a site on a certain date, a date when you know the content you need was there, and you get to the home page, and you click on the page you want… and the content isn’t there, or is only partially there.

Which is a bit of a letdown. This probably doesn’t matter much to you, but it’s a big deal to me, because I see the internet a bit differently, as a result of my own particular history of traumatic experiences. You know how veterans of war or horrific natural disasters have trouble shaking the experience, sometimes for the rest of their lives?

Well, my form of PTSD results from all those decades of putting out newspapers under severe time pressure and space limitations. And while you may rightly regard that as less serious than those other kinds of PTSD, it produces some of the same symptoms. Such as dreams. For instance, I frequently wake up exhausted from what seems like hours of trying to crank out the paper in spite of inexplicable technical problems.

Anyway, the Web would be a magnificent thing, to me, even if it did nothing but eliminate this one former problem: As a reporter in the olden days, you’d work yourself half to death getting the needed info and writing it, and then the next day, it’s being used to wrap fish. I don’t begrudge readers using it that way, if fish wrap is what they need. But the thing is, after you publish that first story, you will then have to write multiple followups, assuming the story is ongoing, and most big, breaking stories end up in that category.

And since what you wrote before is now inaccessible to the reader, every single time there is a new development, you have to waste half of the few inches of precious space you have giving the background of what happened before this latest development. It’s ENORMOUSLY wasteful.

With the Web, there’s zero need for that. Give the reader an HTML link, and you’re done.

That is, assuming the frickin’ link works.

So… to put it in different terms, I cannot for a second understand why kids would waste time posting on, say, Snapchat. Or post on Instagram in that way that it goes away as soon as (or before) you’ve had a chance to glance at it.

If I don’t want it to be there and handy after I write it, why would I write it in the first place? (Even if it is something silly like this post.)

It’s not that I expect the Web to be eternal. Or at least, not exactly. I realize it could all disappear instantly if Dr. Evil figured out how to set off EMP devices over every population center on the planet. Suddenly, we’d be back in the Stone Age (or back in times before Google Maps, which, if you look at things from a geological perspective, is practically the same thing, being no more than 15 millennia or so off).

So, speaking of the Stone Age, I’d like stuff to last at least as long as something one of my Neanderthal ancestors once etched on a rock. I mean, that’s not an easy medium to store in a library, but at least it’s something.

All I want is for the Wayback Machine to work perfectly. Is that really too much to ask, Mr. Peabody?

Top Five Worst Cases of Using Nouns as Verbs

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If you’ll recall, the Stooges often negatively impacted each other. And when I hear these words used these ways, I feel like Curly.

One of these just smacked me in the face a moment ago when I was innocently looking for something entirely unrelated. It came from a supposed institute of higher learning — although I assume it was written by an undergraduate intern or some such in the press office. (I did a word-study job like that at Memphis State in the early ’70s, for a dollar sixty-something an hour. But I wouldn’t have done this.)

So it’s time for a list.

I had trouble deciding upon criteria for this distinction. They aren’t necessarily the worst, although some a pretty horrible. I gave a lot of weight to their being overused. Some I could perhaps wink at if I heard them once every couple of years. But our ears and eyes are constantly hammered by these. They are ubiquitous, and therefore, in a sense, among the “worst.”

Here they are:

  1. impact — Don’t cite your “authorities” that say it’s all right. Yes, this mistake has been made for centuries — like using “they” to refer (in casual, lazy conversation) to a single person, which is a separate issue, of course. But “authorities” defend it because they have friends — academics, bureaucrats, and such — who think it makes them sound official, and serious, and expert. It’s like saying “persons” instead of “people” like a normal person. And it’s insufferable.
  2. gift — This one may be the most profoundly awful — particularly since the verb that should be used, “give,” is so short and convenient. But it’s not used as frequently in news stories as “impact.” and therefore is slightly more forgiveable.
  3. parent — Just gross. You can “be a good parent.” But you cannot “parent well.”
  4. partner — I couldn’t decide which of the “p” words to list first; they’re on about the same level. Seriously, what’s wrong with “work with?” Why the hell would you say “partner with?”
  5. dialogue — This one’s bad, but not as obviously so as the ones above. I just had to come up with five. Maybe you can come up with a worse one.

On another day, I’ll lecture the garment and advertising industries on the fact that there’s no such garment as a “pant.” “Pant” is what a dog does. People wear pants, and that’s what they are called. The singular item is called a pair of pants. Got that? If so, I won’t have to return to the the subject…

It seems ‘weed’ has become sort of… iconic

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Once, this one was quite popular…

As y’all know, I’m rather word-obsessed. I’ve been meaning for some time to write a Top Five list on Overused Words. No. 1 would be “iconic.” Trouble is, I can’t think of any other words sufficiently overused to deserve a place with that one. It would take all five spots. It’s especially a problem in news headlines. About one out of 10 times it’s used appropriately. The rest of the time, not especially. But whether proper or not, it’s used way too much.

But today, I’m going to speak briefly about “weed.” It’s been quite some time since I’ve heard anyone under the age of 50 call marijuana anything else — unless they’re trying to sound prim and proper, in which case they might say, “cannabis.” (We generally stuck with that during the aforementioned campaign, as less provocative to those opposed.)

Bud made me think of this (again), when he wrote in a comment on the last post, “Waaaaaay past time to legalize pot for whatever the reason.” Poor old codger, throwing such terms around…

If I remember correctly, that one — which had been around a long time — started becoming a bit passe by the latter 1960s. I think that happened sometime before Granny told the cops she was going to “smoke some crawdads… but first I need a little pot!” That was Oct 4, 1967:

Once a prime-time network sitcom was using the term in jokes, “pot” was obviously not, well, countercultural. Cool people were more likely to be using something else from the following list:

  • Alice B. Toklas
  • Bud
  • Cabbage
  • Catnip
  • Crazy weed
  • Da kine
  • Doobie
  • Dope
  • Ganja
  • Grass
  • Herb
  • Joint
  • Loco weed
  • Magic dragon
  • Mary Jane
  • Maui-wowie
  • Oregano
  • Reefer
  • Sinsemilla
  • Smoke
  • Spliff
  • Stash
  • Tea
  • Whacky tabacky
  • Weed

There were many, many more — here’s one larger list, which I worked from — but I just thought I’d go with a few of the more familiar ones on the list. (Or, in the case of Alice B. Toklas, one that I thought was creative, but not all that commonly used.) Some, of course, weren’t used so much for the substance as the delivery system (“joint”). Some were used ironically to make fun of old-timers (“reefer”). And some were meant to apply just to specific varieties (sinsemilla). But all were used, if I recall correctly.

By the ’70s — which is when most people caught up with the ’60s — the number of terms dropped way, way down. Most of the time, people just said “dope.” Or, if they wanted to make sure it didn’t appear on a sitcom, they said “shit.” Usually in the context of “good shit.” I suspect too many people were stoned at this point to be verbally inventive.

Of course, the stuff is much stronger now than it was then, and maybe that’s why those who indulge don’t try to diversify. They don’t even come up with a new term, but stick with the tried and true, somewhat pedestrian, old “weed.” They don’t even try to shock the little old ladies with words like “dope” or “shit.” Maybe they realize the little old ladies used to call it that. I dunno…

Sure, you hear other words here and there, even from younger folks. But my observation still stands. “Weed” has become, you know… iconic…

I miss the whited sepulchers

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Of course, ol’ St, Jerome would be unhappy that we’re not using his Latin version…

You know, I appreciate the efforts of various people to make Holy Scripture accessible to modern people. I do; it’s a noble motivation.

But sometimes it just leaves me flat, and I regret the poetry that has been lost.

Here is the opening of today’s Gospel reading, in the Catholic Church’s official New American Bible:

Jesus said,
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing….

I’m not trying to make any theological point, much less a political one. In fact, as I suggested above, I suppose the correct theological point is to make the Word more accessible.

But it does bother me a little to imagine future generations missing out on the old wording. It survived to be a secular cliche because it had a certain power to it. You call somebody a “whited sepulcher,” and most people with even a modicum of cultural education will get it.

So for fun, and to gratify the esthetic part of the soul, here’s the old King James version (you know, the Protestant version):

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity…

Meanwhile, I’ll sit here and worry about the editors of the next edition of the NAB deciding to ditch “Woe to you…” because it “sounds like Yoda or something…”

I mean, they already got rid of the “unto”…

 

Good for the South Carolina DOT!

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Yeah, it’s kind of backlit, but I decided last night to stop waiting for perfect conditions to take the picture…

I am running behind on this. I should have shouted out the good news when I first saw this two or three weeks back — but I wanted a picture, and it was always raining or too dark or there was somebody behind me so I couldn’t just stop the car on the road (which lacks good places to pull over.)

Finally, I got a decent picture yesterday, and I want to praise the DOT for fixing the problem.

As for the problem, I told you about it back in March. It was a sign placed along the road where part of the massive project to fix Malfunction Junction has begun. (And before Bud jumps in to say that’s not the name of the project, here’s the name: Carolina Crossroads Project.)

The sign said… well, look back at the picture. It was along the access road on the east side of I-26, right across from the Lexington Medical Center campus.

And here was my concern, aside from being an obsessive word guy. As glad as I am that DOT decided not to destroy my neighborhood to build this thing, we will still be inconvenienced by the project for years, and we’re all aware that it costs an astronomical amount of money. So my point was, it kind of undermines our confidence in the project when day after day, we see a big dayglo-orange sign with huge black letters that tell us, over and over, that the road-construction experts managing this thing don’t know how to spell “CONSTRUCTION.”

Not a good look, you see. And it was a fairly easy thing to fix, within the context of such a huge project — DOT’s biggest ever, I believe.

And now, finally, they’ve fixed it. And I appreciate it. I don’t know who “they” are in this case (Bud, did you give them a heads-up?), but I wouldn’t flatter myself by assuming I had anything to do with it. Surely, plenty of other people saw this and said something. In any case, the folks in charge did the right thing.

No, it’s not a huge thing. But it got a little bigger, for me, every day that they didn’t fix it. So now that they have, I feel better about the whole thing, for now…

NYT needs to expand its English vocabulary a bit

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At the beginning of the Wordle craze I found it mildly irritating to see social media references to what people were encountering on the game on a given day. I was all like, “Keep your diversions to yourselves, people!”

That was before I tried the game myself, and became addicted. I’m now on a 94-day streak, but I must confess to having cheated one day back in the low 60s.

I didn’t mean to cheat — or at least, not to the extent that I did. I wasn’t actually looking for the answer. I was going to spend a turn on a throwaway word, just to try out certain letters that might be helpful in getting me toward the answer. But I couldn’t think of one. So I searched for five-letter words with this or that letter in a certain position, and it gave me a list, and my eye scanned the list, and landed on a word that was obviously the answer. And it was.

So really, I’m only on about a 30-day streak. The app just doesn’t know it.

Now I have confessed to the world, and you need not assign me any penance; I assure you I have beaten myself up thoroughly over it.

But I am here today not to speak of my own sins, but to condemn The New York Times, which owns and operates Wordle, for its trespasses. Not particularly grievous sins, but sins nonetheless.

Actually, this list I’m about to share is only partly from Wordle. I’ve also gotten hooked on the NYT’s Spelling Bee, an even greater time waster. And since you end up entering far more words playing that game, most of the words on this list are now from that.

The problem is, I keep entering perfectly good, long-established English words, and they get rejected as “Not in word list.”

Well, I don’t know where they’re getting their “word list,” but the source is obviously not the OED or any other major English dictionary. Here are words that one of these games has recently rejected:

 

  • luff — Oh, don’t ask me what it precisely means, but it’s something sailors used to do with sails. As in, “Luff and touch her!” It also has a noun form.
  • bole — A tree trunk.
  • dibble — Have you never planted a garden?
  • midden — This is a refuse heap.
  • mort — A note played on a hunting horn when a deer is killed.
  • potto — It’s a primate, and to my knowledge, it’s the only word for this species in the English language. OK, I looked it up, and some call it a “softly-softly.” I’m not making this up.
  • nappy — Means a number of things, from being fuzzy to something babies wear.
  • cavitate — Obviously, no one at the NYT has ever read The Hunt for Red October. Probably don’t know what a Crazy Ivan is, either.
  • motte — It’s the hilly part of a fortress, as in “motte and bailey.”
  • clew — To repeat myself: Don’t ask me what it precisely means, but it’s something sailors used to do with sails. As in, “Clew up, mate!” (I’m not trying to be creative here. I’m trying to sound like a foremast jack, not a poet.) It also has a noun form.
  • whinge — Surely you’ve seen this. It’s another form of the word “whine.”
  • coney — Don’t the NYT folk have any alternative ways of saying “bunny?”
  • conn — Again, go read The Hunt for Red October. Or just about any books that involve maneuvering ships on the sea.
  • trull — Don’t call a lady this, because it has a rather specific meaning, and not many would consider it a compliment.
  • wold — I’ll just quote the dictionary: “a usually upland area of open country.”
  • limey — Mind you, this one isn’t a British term. It’s a term Americans use to describe Brits.
  • telly — OK, definitely from across the pond. But we all understand it, don’t we? Just today, Spelling Bee refused it.

Note that each is linked to its dictionary definition.

OK, admittedly a lot of these words are British, and quite a few are nautical. But they are long-established words with definite meanings in English, and should never be rejected. They should be perfectly legitimate by the rules of the games. They’re not proper nouns or anything.

Yeah, I think there’s some sort of mechanism for appealing, or at least reporting, such errata (oh, and notice I haven’t included any words such as “errata,” accepting them as still pretty firmly identified as Latin — my list is purely English). But I couldn’t find it this morning, and I thought I’d just go ahead and complain here.

I left one word off my list. I had originally saved “droog,” but decided that being a Nadsat word disqualified it. But mind you, Nadsat was invented by an English writer. And I, for one, prefer it to Tolkien’s Elvish…

Coinherence

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Detail from the Book of Kells.

I have another another word to try to learn about more deeply, the way I did more than 30 years ago with “subsidiarity,” before driving my friends nuts over it.

It’s “coinherence.” I learned it today — or began learning it today — from Bishop Barron‘s reflection on the Gospel reading of 3/31/23:

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares, “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Charles Williams stated that the master idea of Christianity is “coinherence,” mutual indwelling. If you want to see this idea concretely displayed, look to the pages of the Book of Kells, that masterpiece of early Christian illumination. Lines interwoven, designs turning in and around on each other, plays of plants, animals, planets, human beings, angels, and saints. The Germans call it Ineinander (one in the other).

How do we identify ourselves? Almost exclusively through the naming of relationships: we are sons, brothers, daughters, mothers, fathers, members of organizations, members of the Church, etc. We might want to be alone, but no one and nothing is finally an island. Coinherence is indeed the name of the game, at all levels of reality.

And God—the ultimate reality—is a family of coinherent relations, each marked by the capacity for self-emptying. Though Father and Son are really distinct, they are utterly implicated in each other by a mutual act of love.

The impossibly good news is that Jesus and the Father have invited us to enter fully into their divine coinherence. The love between the Father and the Son—which is called “the Holy Spirit”—can be participated in.

I suspect that there’s a simpler way to say it, just as I keep saying the Church should go back to “one in being with the Father” in the Nicene Creed, rather than the new phrase adopted in 2011 — “consubstantial with the Father” — which, as much as I love and respect Latin-derived terms, was not a good move.

But while there may be better words for getting the concept across, there’s nothing simple about the idea itself. I really need to understand it better.

But it appeals to me greatly so far, “at all levels of reality” as the bishop says, for a wide variety of reasons, including:

  • I believe salvation (if even that is the right term, given the way so many use it), is achieved with and through others. It’s not about the I; it’s about the we. (Which is another problem with the new version of the Creed). It’s why there’s a Church. It’s why there are families. It’s why there is such a thing as love.
  • I believe in communitarianism, and most assuredly not libertarianism.
  • I love John Donne’s most famous work, to which the bishop alludes.
  • One of my favorite clichés is, “We’re all in this together.” I mean, if we must have clichés, and apparently we must.
  • It’s a big reason I’m Catholic.
  • It’s why I’ve confused so many people when they ask why I’m Catholic, and I refer them to the last sentence of Joyce’s masterpiece “The Dead.” But read the rest of it first. If it’s still not clear, and I admit it may not be, I’ll try to explain further. Maybe I’ll work in “coinherence.”
  • It’s why, back in my newsroom days, I used to talk about my dream of someday putting out a newspaper that is just one story that has everything that happened in it. Because it’s all connected, and there’s something deeply artificial about presenting the news as separate stories with different headlines. Of course, it might take a year — or at least a week — to write such a “daily” newspaper, but it would be worth it, if the laws of space and time could be suspended.

Now I realize that, except for the Donne reference, the bishop didn’t say exactly any of those things, and I may be mistaking the meaning of coinherence entirely. But it made me think of all those things, and I like thinking about those things.

And I’m just getting started with trying to understand it…

This does not inspire confidence, people!

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As y’all may have noticed that I haven’t had any bad words to say lately about SC DOT’s ginormous, biggest-ever, construction project, which they call — hang on, I’ve got to go look that up, because nobody but DOT calls it that — the Carolina Crossroads Project.

It’s what everyone else calls “the project to fix Malfunction Junction.”

To resume, I haven’t had anything bad to say about it, even as it’s finally gotten visibly under way, because they decided back in 2017 not to run it through my house. I thought that was nice of them. But mainly, I’ve lost interest, so that’s why I seem to have held back.

But I’ve got to show you the sign that I pass pretty much every day on my way to visit my mother.

This does not inspire confidence.

And if you don’t see what’s wrong, look again. It’s been there, spelled like that, for at least a month or two. Does DOT have hundreds of other signs like that, or is this one unique? I hope it’s unique, although I’m not sure how that would happen, unless they make them by hand in a shack back behind DOT HQ.

And maybe it doesn’t bother normal people. Normal people’s brains probably automatically fix the spelling as they read it, and they don’t notice, and they go on with their lives. But it certainly bothers those of us who have been editors for so many decades…

See? It’s still like that.

 

First Five Poems that Come to Mind

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I like ol’ Edgar Allan, and I don’t care who knows it!

I was going to say Top Five, but that’s not accurate. More like the first five I could think of that I actually like.

I was recently interviewing a lady who writes poetry, and to have something to ask — since I’m not a person who thinks a great deal about poetry (which you will be able to tell from this list) — I asked who her favorite poets were. She named Robert Frost and several people I’ve never heard of.

That got me to thinking, well, what would mine be? And since evaluating a writer’s entire body of work is too much effort, I changed it to fave poems. And I’m pretty sure these five had come into my mind before the phone conversation ended.

None were by Frost. I mean, he’s good and all — I guess. I only know that one that everybody knows, and it’s fine. No, I mean those two that everybody knows. OK, those three. But none of those came to mind right away.

Here are the ones that did. Since one of them isn’t technically a poem, if I think of another to make up for it, I’ll give you six:

  1. Annabel Lee — At some point in my life, I learned that some people who are snobby about poetry (you know, English majors) look down upon Poe’s verse. As a fan since I was a little kid of his Gothic horror stories, I feel I must stick up for him. But I think “The Raven” is too obvious, don’t you? Barry would sneer at me if I picked that.
  2. Ballad of the Goodly Fere — I first read this in my college days at my uncle’s house, thumbing through an anthology he had. I was drawn to it because I had run across a lot of mentions of Ezra Pound in reading about Hemingway and such, but had never read anything by him. And I loved it. Mind you, this was at the time that “Jesus Christ Superstar” came out, and the Messiah tended to be depicted as a sort of wimpy hippy, so I appreciated the contrast of depicting him as a stronger, more working-class sort. I also enjoyed the dialect. Of course, it’s still the only thing I’ve read by Pound. We don’t tend to run into — or seek out, for that matter — a lot of stuff written by writers who are infamous for their fascist leanings. Or at least I don’t — there too much else to read. It’s still a good poem.
  3. La Belle Dame Sans Merci — Just to stick in one of the Romantics. I mention it not just because I have an avid interest in the Matter of Britain, and this has to do with a knight. It’s because, well, it inspired the worst nightmare of my life. This was also in my college days, and the shocking state of mind the dream produced caused me to get up, leave my dorm room and go sit on the floor in the well-lit hall until I could shake the spell. Fortunately, I got better. I can’t tell you the content of the dream. It was more of a vague horror, related to what the knight felt when “I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.” I’ve never been a partaker of hallucinogens, but it was like Aldous Huxley on mescaline, when he looked upon an ordinary chair and saw it as the Last Judgment. It was a moment of existential horror that defies easy rational description– little to do with knights.
  4. No Man is an Island — OK, this is the one that isn’t actually a poem, although it’s frequently quoted as one, since John Donne is the only famous metaphysical poet., and you often see it presented as a poem. And that’s not the title. It’s a part of Meditation XVII, which is in turn a part of a prose work called “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” My supposed title quotes the most famous line, or second most, if you count the one Hemingway turned into a novel title as leading the list. Anyway, if we count it as a poem, it’s definitely one of my favorites. Because, you know, it’s way communitarian.
  5. The Second Coming — Since Donne’s most famous work isn’t a poem, this may be my favorite — thereby confirming your impression that my taste in poetry is stunningly unoriginal and mainstream (although I tried to throw you there with Ezra Pound). It’s a contest as to which is more often quoted or paraphrased — this or the Donne thing. Hemingway went with that, and Joan Didion went with the Yeats. Well, a lot of people fall back on the Yeats these days. Maybe because it was written 104 years ago, but nothing written since goes as directly to the heart of what’s happening now in politics and society than “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” or perhaps even better, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

Anyway, if we were ranking, and you counted the Donne piece as poetry, those last two would be my top choices. Stories about knights and ladies are all very well, but I like words to express ideas.

You’ll note they’re all pretty short poems. I love to read book-length prose works about the Matter of Britain, but don’t go expecting me to read a poem that long, Lord Tennyson. I still haven’t read The Iliad, for instance, and not just because I have no Greek. Poetry is too much work to read on and on.

Maybe I’ve been trained by pop songs. With Emily Dickinson, of course, it was hymns, and I think she was onto something.

Genealogy alert! So was my ancestor Thomas Wyatt the elder. He introduced to English a nice, short, disciplined form called the sonnet. Within a generation, William Shakespeare was making a name for himself with that form. I’m not really into sonnets (I prefer Will’s plays), but I respect the limits. Fourteen lines, baby, and that’s it. You’re done!

For that matter, I also enjoy haiku. And limericks…

Yeats, rendered by another artist I like, Sargent…

Stop dropping hammers before someone gets hurt!

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I’m still debating with myself about unsubscribing from all these fund-raising emails I’ve been getting from Democrats ever since I was in James’ campaign. That would cut my email burden about in half. But then, I wouldn’t get the chance to make fun of them.

Two things continue to strike me about them:

  1. They’re so stupid. Or rather, they assume the recipient is so stupid.
  2. They are amazingly lacking in originality. You get the same painfully hackneyed clichés over and over, sometimes multiple times in the same day.

Oh, and before you Democrats get all huffy, I’m sure the Republican fund-raisers are at least as as dumb and repetitive — probably far more so in these days of enslavement to Trumpism — but I have no way of knowing, because they don’t send me any. Which shows they have at least a smidgeon of smarts.

So I mock the ones I have.

There are several basic formulas for these things, and two types seem contradictory. There’s the poor-pitiful-us-please-send-us-money ones, which start with such headlines as “This is not the message I had hoped to send today.” Then there’s the ones that brag about how Democrats are mercilessly beating up on the opposition.

The idea with all of them is to stir emotions — any emotions, apparently — because they’ve learned that makes people give money. Or at least, the consultants say they’ve learned that. Personally, I wonder. Wouldn’t it be cool if occasionally an idea crept into these appeals? Even I might give if I got one like that.

Anyway, in recent days I saved a few of the “look how we’re beating up on them” variety, mainly because of the astounding literary monotony of them. All of these pictured in this post came in in a nine-day period — and I probably failed to save some of them.

You’ve seen the one above. Here are a couple more:

Now at this point, you might be saying, “Well, women — even that Republican one we like — just can’t handle tools, the poor things!” But hush your mouth, you sexist pig — male Democrats are apparently just as clumsy:

I’ve been known to repeat myself — everyone needs an editor, and I don’t have one here on the blog — but even if I were in a coma, I don’t think I would do something like this. I mean, think about it — that same headline is going out over and over to the same people! Does anyone actually truly think that’s a good idea?…

In EASTERN Pennsylvania, we said ‘youse’

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Maybe yinz would like to hear about the tattoos…

I got a fund-raising email from that John Fetterman guy. All I know about him is that he’s quirky. Today, in one of her periodic, wide-ranging chats with Bret Stephens, Gail Collins said “Fetterman is overly colorful for my taste, constantly showing up in shorts for public events and bragging about his tattoos.”

Based on this email I got from Fetterman, she’s right:

Omg, Brad.

Now that I’m *officially* the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, I wanted to send yinz a quick note to introduce myself + then ask you to split a $10 donation between my campaign and the Democratic National Committee. 🙏

When people first meet me, they usually notice two things: My height (I’m 6’9”!) and my tattoos. On my left arm, I have “15104”.

That’s the ZIP code for Braddock, Pennsylvania — my home and the community where I was honored to serve as Mayor for 13 years…

See that? Gail was right. It only took him 59 words to get to his tattoos. I guess he does that to try to distract people from staring at his silly chin spinach.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about his assumption that I (as a person he wrongly thinks will send him money) will understand what “yinz” means.

Wondering whether it was one of those new, invented things like “LatinX,” I looked it up. Turns out that, according to Wikipedia, “Yinz (see History and usage below for other spellings) is a second-person plural pronoun used mainly in Western Pennsylvania English, most prominently in Pittsburgh, but it is also found throughout the cultural region known as Appalachia, located within the geographical region of the Appalachians….”

Huh. Odd. In Eastern Pennsylvania, we said “youse.” Which was understandable, in the sense that the meaning could be easily inferred. When I was in the second-grade there (OK, technically I was across the river from Philly and therefore in New Jersey, but they also did this in Philly), I learned that one of the best ways to keep from getting into more than one fight a day was to say “youse” or “youse guys” whenever a normal, reasonable person would say “y’all.”

So I guess I now know how Pennsylvanians from up in the hills talk. So I’m now smarter. But I’m still not going to give him any money…