Not worth knowing

You do not have to be on Twitter or Facebook long before you come across some glaring example of pedagogical malfeasance. 

Today some poor devil mentioned a teacher who cut one letter grade from a paper each time the word that occurred, a lesson the poor devil has apparently carried into adult life.* One recalls Jane Austen: "We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing."

Let's be clear.

That as a relative pronoun introduces dependent clauses, marking the relationship with a main clause. 

It is often omitted in speech, particularly when the main clause and dependent clause are both short, as in the line from O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “We thought you was a toad.” But you do not want to make this a universal practice.

The Associated Press Stylebook, so frequently cited by people unaware of what is in it, offers useful advice. First, that must be used when an adverb of time follows the main verb. "They found out Thursday that their ship had sailed." 

Also, some verbs idiomatically require the use of that: advocate, assert, contend, declare, estimate, make clear, point out, propose, and state. 

And it must be used before subordinate clauses beginning with after, although, because, before, in addition to, until, and while. "McIntyre said that while he has made this point repeatedly over the years, no one appears to have taken notice."

AP advises, “When in doubt, include that. Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.” 

For my part, it is depressing to calculate how much time I spent over the past forty years inserting that into awkwardly phrased and unidiomatic newspaper copy.

* I do not know but suspect that the class was in journalism, since journalists as a class appear to get the fantods over that relative pronoun. 

Another futile low growl in the morning

I snarled one morning on reading that someone had refuted another party in a political dispute, deploring the erosion of the word's strict sense of "to prove wrong."  

But it has been a long time since Samuel Johnson could reply to the argument of Bishop Berkeley that the objects of our senses are not actually material objects by dashing his foot against a stone and saying."I refute him thus!" Today, I think thanks mainly to journalists, the sense "to deny the truth or accuracy of" or "to dispute" is prevalent. 

Thus when you read that one bombastic politico has "refuted" another bombastic political, you are to understand that the one merely rebutted the other, proof being in short supply among us these days. 

You may feel, as does Bryan Garner, that refute "doesn't mean merely 'to counter an argument' but 'to disprove beyond doubt; to prove a statement false,' " and that the "rebut" sense is an error. But Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that the "rebut" sense became standard in the twentieth century, and it can be found today in all the dictionaries. 

What then to do. There is always the option of taking to some online platform to whinge that people who use the "rebut" sense are uneducated cattle and that English is rotting away before our eyes. (You know the type.)

But the language goes where it will, even if I do not care for the direction. That leaves me, in practice as a writer and editor, to frame a necessary question: If I want to use refute in the older, strict sense, can I be sure that readers will understand how I mean it? 

If I can't pile up enough context to bolster the "prove wrong" sense, then I am better off abandoning the enterprise. 

It looked so nice they wrote it twice

From The New York Times as published in my morning paper: "Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monday following rare protests around the island nation against food shortages, high prices and a worrying lack of medicine amid the coronavirus crisis. [Take a breath.] Cuba's president said the demonstrations were stirred up on social media by Cuban Americans in the United States. [Take another breath. Second paragraph] "President Joe Biden on Monday called on the Cuban government to heed the demands of thousands of citizens who took to the streets Sunday to protest power outages, food shortages and a worrying lack of medicine."

Of the two opening paragraphs tacked on to this article, I much prefer the shorter one, the longer one being upholstered with "the capital of Havana" when "Havana" would have been concise and less condescending, and that hoary cliche "the island nation," assuming that I wouldn't be quite sure that Cuba is surrounded by water.

Later in the article, the reader discovers that Cuba is "a country known for quashing dissent." Noted.

This concludes the morning grumble.

Your complaints about English usage are noted and disregarded

 After forty years in the Wilderness, the Israelites arrived at Canaan, the land that had been promised to them,  to discover that there were already people living there.

Awkward. 

The Book of Judges describes, among other things, the slaughters that were required to command the Promised Land. Among them there was a battle of Joshua and the Gileadites with a people called the Ephraimites, which the Authorized Version describes:

"And the Gileadites took the passages of the Jordan before the Ephramites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over: that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Efhraimite? If he said, Nay: Then they said unto him, Say now Shibboleth; and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame how to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand." 

Shibboleth in Hebrew meant "ear of grain." The word was meaningless to the Ephraimites, but their inability to pronounce it identified their ethnicity, and thus their vulnerability. So, in time, the word in English has come to mean variously, Merriam-Webster says, "a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning," "a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group," and "a custom or usage regarded as distinguishing one group from others."

Thus a shibboleth is anything, however intrinsically trivial, that enables us to separate ourselves from people we would prefer to look down on. 

The word popped into my mind as I followed yet another sterile online discussion about the word irregardless, with predictably uninformed comments that it is "not a word"* and a mark of the "uneducated." 

It was the "uneducated" that caught my eye, because I too in my hot-blooded youth was an insufferable prig about language and what I understood to be "correct" usage. It took me a long time to understand that formal standard English is not the only English and that all the other Englishes serve perfectly well in their respective domains. 

Sneering at the "uneducated" who use some nonstandard form of English, I realize, is a pathetic form of linguistic snobbery, no more noble or praiseworthy than any other form of snobbery. It is common among people, like me, who can not claim distinction by birth, wealth, physical beauty, or social status. A defective education about how language works is all we've got, so we have to work it. 

I once thought to respond to such whingeing that no one cares about your language peeves. Now I think that there are indeed other people who care about your language peeves, but they are not worth caring about. 

*Yes it is. It has a spelling, a pronunciation, an etymology, a history, and a widely understood meaning. It has been listed, though as casual or nonstandard, in dictionaries for decades, and if you complain about that, you betray a lack of understanding of how dictionaries work and how language works. 

Independence Day

 When I was a graduate student at Syracuse University, a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral described a Memorial Day service at which a military color guard trooped down the central aisle at the opening procession, dipping its service flags at the altar. 

Memorial Day, that year, happened on the commemoration of the Feast of Pentecost, which celebrates the universal presence of the Holy Spirit in the world, regardless of national or cultural identities. It was outrageous. I wrote a sharp little note to the dean of the cathedral, suggesting that attempting to portray the Episcopal Church as a national church was misguided. I received a mealy-mouthed response from one of the canons. (When they tell you your letter was "well-written," it means they have ignored the contents. See Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room.") 

Later, at another parish, I made use of an occasion to remove items on display in advance of Holy Thursday to spirit the U.S. flag out of the chancel to conceal it in an obscure corner of the undercroft, hoping it would not be discovered. 

I am a native-born American citizen who has paid taxes without complaint for more than half a century and has voted in every election save one (a primary election when I had to be out of town) since coming of age, and I will happily dispute anyone who disputes my patriotism.

But I do not believe that the conflation of Americanism with Christianity is healthy either for the United States or Christianity. We live in what the Founders rightly established as a secular republic (though many of them did give lip service to a Deist deity). 

So mark the Fourth, and mark our hesitant efforts to live up to its ideals, but pray leave the Almighty out of it. 

Sound familiar?

"The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. Those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule."  

Hiram Wesley Evans, head of the Ku Klux Klan, eighty years ago, quoted in Robert Dallek's Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life 

Newspapers are so prissy

 A recent Washington Post article said that former Attorney General William Barr "likened Trump’s claims [of voter fraud] to excrement from a male bovine animal." You know, bullshit. A writer ought to be embarrassed over resorting to such coy circumlocutions, but this is what U.S. mainstream newspapers have led us to expect. 

For years at The Sun, house policy on bad words was to provide the initial letter followed by two em-dashes. Writers had previously used the initial letter with a hyphen for all the subsequent letters, but John S. Carroll said he didn't want reading the news to be like working the Jumble. 

Submissive to the policy, I wrote a post on this blog reviewing Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word without once using the word fuck and a similarly seemly review for The Sun of Melissa Mohr's Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. 

Such policies survive, of course, because most of the readers of daily newspapers are older people, who we think are used to more decorous language.* When The Sun allowed some profanity or vulgarity to escape into print, letters would come in chastising the editors for putting such words where impressionable young people would see them. (I challenge you: Show me a young person who reads a newspaper.)

I am of that decorous era. When I was a child, the only profanity my grandfather ever uttered was a deep, throaty Hell!, and then only on special occasions. I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as did many of my newspaper colleagues, and despite our youthful freedom of speech we remained captive to the straitlaced standards we inherited, even though our readers are hearing those very words daily. 

Oh, our weekly free newsstand effort to entrap younger readers once caused a minor stir with DOUCHEBAG as a headline on the cover, but the boldness faded. 

I have slipped The Sun's yoke in retirement, and while I do not plan to write here quite as I used to speak in the newsroom, I embrace the freedom, when something is shitty, to say that it is shitty.

*My former Sun colleague Steve Auerweck once presciently suggested changing the OBITUARIES logo to SUBSCRIBER COUNTDOWN. 

The spell of spelling

 Many Sunday afternoons when I was in the fifth and sixth grades at Elizaville Elementary were spent copying the week's spelling words, ten times each, to be submitted Monday.

English spelling is a notorious mess, a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, ecclesiastical Latin, and words that Britain and the United States lifted from indigenous peoples. The need to master spelling as a mark of literacy made Noah Webster's Blue Back Speller a bestseller in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. 

(Also in the nineteenth century, misspellings were common fodder for humor, mocking the subliterate. We have the word OK thanks to the jocular spelling oll korrect in a Boston newspaper.)

A friend has lent me a copy of Book One of The Twentieth Century Spellers, Maryland Edition, published in 1912 by Appleton, and it is a window into public education a century ago. 

Each week has a specified set of words, with spelling and syllabification, and a set of example sentences using the week's words. 

But there is more. One finds an abundance of the sententiae adults love to unload on the young: Alice Carey's verses beginning "True worth is in being, not seeming; / In doing each day that goes by / Some little good, not in dreaming. ..." 

There are occasional interpolations of random information: "The Chinese are a curious people and live a great distance from us. They are different from us in many ways. They think that one girl in a family is enough. They prefer to have boys. Their near neighbors are the Japanese." 

And, of course, patriotism: "Admiral Dewey received great honors after his triumph over the Spaniards in the harbor of Manila."

To a modern reader, the example sentences each week read like found poetry:

"The fox is covered with fur.

"Did John peddle the potatoes from house to house?

"The bird flew out of the cage.

"The class can sing the song by rote but not by note.

"The stone was a real diamond

"Did you hear that whispering?"

Did John encounter the fox on his route selling potatoes? The students' singing is faulty, but the diamond is genuine. The bird is free, but the whispering is ominous. 

The appendix of Local Words is a little window into the Maryland of the time: Annapolis, brickyard, bombardment, cotton duck mills, Cecilius Calvert, Mt. Clare Shops, slavery, tonging, Wells and McComas. 

Did you hear that whispering? It was the past. 

On the first morning of retirement ...

I picked up the Associated Press Stylebook from my desk and placed it on the shelf. 

Penguin has been bringing out Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret mysteries in new translations, and I think I'll read one out on the porch before the day grows too hot. 

In the afternoon I can join my former colleague Fred Rasmussen and the assorted barflies he has gathered about him at Zen West to sample the healing waters. (Damn, Fred's at work today and I am not. Sad.) Retirement merits a quiet ale. 

Then, I think, since it's to be a hot day, I'll chill a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc and make a Nicoise salad for dinner with Kathleen. 

Moving forward, this version of You Don't Say is the blog I set up in 2009 to continue writing when The Sun laid me off, and at least temporarily I will post here occasionally. One benefit is that people in the United Kingdom and Ireland who would like to read it should now be able to see it. 

The impulse to harangue the young has not completely faded, so if you have a class to teach in the Baltimore area this fall, I'd be open to a guest appearance to talk about grammar, usage, editing, or journalism. 

Not gone yet. 

Family continuity represented in furniture

 This swivel chair was in the general store my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, operated in Elizaville, Kentucky. He sat in it to keep his accounts and pay his bills. After he died in 1945 and my father, Raymond McIntyre, took on the operation of the store, he sat in it as he kept his accounts. After he was no longer operating the store, the chair was in the Elizaville Post Office, where my mother, Marian Early McIntyre sat in it each month to maintain her postal accounts. After she retired, the chair came to me, and it is now at my desk, where I sit to pay bills and write letters. 

Yes, that is a spittoon on the floor by the desk.