"Othering" and iTunes

Note: I've been reading The Mueller Report and have fallen behind on my blogging. Here's a "two-fer": 

 

"OTHER" AS A CONNECTING WORD

It's not just "'I' and 'the Other'" anymore; some places nowadays one can use "other" as a verb or "verbals": "to other" some group, or engage in "othering" them.

Okay, but a more old-fashioned "other" can be used to connect. My favorite since at least 1984 has been "alcohol and *other* drugs": putting ethyl alcohol back among the recreational drugs, reminding recreational drinkers of ethyl alcohol of their community with other drug users (and alcoholics of their community with other addicts), inviting The Straight People to test overly-broad assertions about "drugs" and "drug users" with their own experiences with, say, Chardonnay.

There's also "humans and *other* animals." We may be "the beauty of the world, / The paragon of animals," as asserted by Hamlet and HAIR, but we're still animals: in 20-Question terms of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral or fancier divisions of Earth's life into Archaea, Bacteria, Plants, and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea>. As animals capable of reason and even, apparently, consciousness, it's good to avoid cockiness and to keep our kin and kinships in mind.

 

 

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I-TUNES (BY-GOD: *TUNES*)

On the MacBook Pro I use as a very expensive radio, I listened this morning to a recorded episode of NPR's discussion show _The 1A_ in what may technically be podcast format. The topic was the demise of Apple's iTunes and its replacement by three apps: Video (?), Music, Podcasts. At least until the last five minutes of the show, the word "podcast" occurred only once I can recall, and that was when they named the three replacement apps. At no time did they mention audiobooks (a word Spell-Check rejects).

Interesting given that the _1A_ audience skews old and that as recently as one of the Gulf Wars DOONESBURY could have a gag on US enlisted personnel listening to music while a playlist for their older officers was precisely audiobooks.

Do fish know they're in water? Do large numbers of people walking around in bubbles of their own tunes realize that some people who appear to be in similar microcosms are actually in semi-permeable membranes of words? (And will Apple think it worth their effort to include audiobooks in their instructions for "migrating" to the new apps?)

One bit of irony: The audiobook I'm currently listening to again — on my iPhone operating as a very expensive iPod — is Benedict Anderson's IMAGINED COMMUNITIES. I suspect there are ways in which Apple vs. PC and the various music communities have more reality than, say, The United States or The United Kingdom or the other national "imagined communities" that are at the heart of Anderson's book.

 

Trump, Comey, and a Point of Grammar, a Point of Style

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, 

on three separate occasions, 

that I am not under investigation, 

I nevertheless concur with the judgment 

of the Department of Justice  that 

you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.   * * *

 I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, 

— Donald J. Trump [to James Comey, 9 May 2017]  

Note the introductory clause to a key sentence in Donald Trump's brief letter firing Mr. Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me [...] that I am not under investigation, [...]." On that clause: 

          (1) It's unnecessary. 
          (2) It's unsupported. 
          (3) It's part of a "shit-sandwich" structure of the traditional Bad News Communication, with a compliment near the beginning and an upbeat end to the letter: here reduced to "best of luck" at the very end. 
          (4) It's ungrammatical, or at least questionable for a formal document: the "you" should be "your," the possessive, giving "your informing me." Mr. Trump doesn't so much appreciate Mr. Comey as he does Mr. Comey's action in informing him that he, Donald Trump, isn't "under investigation" — if that happened, which is a question of fact, not language usage.  

           (To elaborate: The issue, in old-fashioned terms, is whether to use the possessive case ["genitive'] with an "ing-form" acting as a noun [a gerund], or the object case ["accusative"]. The venerable William Strunk and blessed E. B. White apparently suggested this test: "Do you mind me asking you a question?" or "Do you mind my asking you a question?" In the first possibility, the question would be if you'd be mildly bothered with me, in the second, it would be my action. In the Trump-letter case, it'd be «I appreciate you, because you informed me [...] that I am not under investigation» OR, what I think is the intention, «I appreciate your {act of} informing me [...], that I am not under investigation.» In informal usage, it would be perfectly correct to say, «Hey, Jimmy: I really like you letting me know the Feds aren't» — or "ain't" — «on my case.»)

Note also the final clause,  "[...] you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau." 
          Now, it's perfectly grammatical and generally okay to (unobtrusively) split an infinitive, but there's no particular reason to do so here; and keeping the infinitive together yields, "you are not able to lead the Bureau effectively." Usually, nouns outrank modifiers, but it would help drive home the point to climax the sentence with "effectively."

So let me bet a $100 monetary contribution to the ACLU that this sentence is a Trump Family writing contribution: Mr. Trump or his kinfolk or small circle of political operatives produced that one, with only minimal vetting — as in proofreading — by professionals (e.g., a word person other than Sean Spicer).    

"Everybody/Nobody Is Talking About ..." — A Note on Usage

      This is from an e-blast from the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I've encountered the line a number of places: "Here's something nobody in the media is talking about: ..." Or it's a rhetorical question, "Why is nobody talking about ...?" Or, for the flip side, the assertion, "Everybody is talking about ...."
      Uh-huh.
      First off, as the wise-ass saying reminds us, "'media' are a plural noun," less plural than it should be in terms of serious journalism, but plural up the whazoo on the web. Whatever it is, there's a good chance somebody on the web is talking about it, and fairly often on a site that most of us would accept as a politically relevant medium. So before people hit Send for posts with assertions like "Nobody/Everybody is talking about," they should do a quick Google search and test the assertion. "The exception proves" — i.e., tests — "the rule," and if even one person out there is talking about it, it ain't nobody. "Everybody" is more difficult to test empirically, but common sense can be useful: just limiting ourselves to human beings on our planet gives over seven billion "somebodies," and short of basics like breathing, it's unlikely that everybody is doing it or saying it or believing it or whatever.
      A couple or three decades back, one of my students in a College Composition class ("Freshman English") started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ...." I asked him if he dated "the beginning of time" with the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness or the first day of creation in Genesis — and whether "Man" included women and children. A few question got to the, uh, "data set" for his exposition: "Me and my buddies back in high school"; so I asked him why he didn't just write about his group in high school. He noted that I'd taught that a useful strategy for an opening paragraph was to start broad and then narrow down to a thesis statement. I said that the advice held but by "broad" I didn't mean cosmic. I also taught "Write about what you know about" — adding that sometimes that required research.)
      Similarly, there are all sorts of useful things one can say about the major media or the media one reads or some set of mediums where one could legitimately talk about "no one" or "every one" — or one can cut the absolutes like "everyone" and "no one"  (and a bit of the crap) and just announce "Here's a topic I wish more people would talk about, and here's a thing or two I wish you-all would get off your sorry asses and work on."
      We live in an era of hype, and pretentious bullshit like "From the beginning of time, Man" will get attention — it worked in a deodorant commercial — and sound impressive to people with a fair amount of schooling and insufficient education. Similarly for lines insisting that "Just everybody" is doing thus-and-so or plaintively asking "Why is nobody talking about ...."
      Such talk is excusable in a college freshperson or from your kids when they tell you how just everybody is getting tongue studs, facial brands, tattoos, and/or scarification. I pressed my student on just what the hell he was actually talking about, and if you've had any success at all raising kids you know to demand that they "Name two" with anything "just everybody" is doing.

Practical English Usage: "Friend" (22 Nov. 2012)

           Call him "Bob."

            When Bob and I and a bunch of other people were in high school, my parents went away for a weekend, and I threw a party.

            You know the set-up here, but I'll note (1) that this clichéd high school party was thrown the end of the 1950s and that at that time girls in the State of Illinois were considered women at 18 and mature enough to buy liquor legally and (2) that cheap booze in Chicago tends to be really, really cheap.

            So my guests got very, very drunk, and Bob got very drunk and, as we called it, "sick." I gave Bob Pepto-Bismol but soon found myself holding his head as he figuratively puked his guts up, and quite literally puked out his new false tooth amid the pinkish mess in my parent's toilet, a revolting mess I flushed away.

            And Bob looked up at me, and smiled — and I realized I just flushed away his new, expensive, tooth and had no, repeat no intention of recovering it — Bob looked up at me and smiled and said, very carefully, as drunken guys will, "Thank you, Rich. You are a real fren'; and there's nuthin' more importan' than frenship."

            Okay, we can argue about things as important as friendship, but I'm sure there's little more important since Bob and I are still friends these many years later, and remained friends after Bob and I found ourselves on opposing sides of the nasty American political conflict over Vietnam. (Bob volunteered to fight in the War; I opposed it.)

            So, for a point of correct, practical English usage — as a first order approximation —the word "friend" can be defined (in part) as, "someone who'll hold your head while you puke."

            A friend is also someone who'll pick you up at the airport, or drive you to the emergency room — and wait around the ER to drive you home and/or call your family. A friend will check your apartment if you're away, water your plants, take care of your pets.

            Now you may be closely acquainted with someone from whom you wouldn't expect such gestures of friendship; you may be friendly with such a person — but that person is not your friend. If you know the person just on Facebook, if the person is on the phone trying to sell you something — such a person is not your friend.

            To talk about Facebook friends or "your friends at Cyberdyne Systems" devalues an important term and contributes to another loss: our loss of ways of talking about people we deal with and know fairly well but who aren't are friends, people we don't dislike or like, but are just sort of there.

            Say, "I don't like him" or "She's no friend of mine," and you've said something pretty negative. As the cultural anthropologist Michael Moffatt noted in Coming of Age in New Jersey about the Rutgers University students he studied, "Everyone ought to be friendly," at least friendly to people they know — and friendly in the American manner.

            The idea, though, isn't limited to college students in the USA in the late 1970s and 1980s (copyright for Coming of Age: 1989).

            In William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (ca. 1599), Brutus wants to know how his slave and emissary Lucilius was received by Brutus's ally Cassius and is told Cassius received Lucilius "With courtesy and respect enough, / But not with such familiar instances" — wait for it; Shakespeare will explain the rather high-flown "familiar instances" — "Nor with such free and friendly conference / As he hath used of old." Cassius didn't show what the Rutgers students would call "friendliness," which Brutus interprets as a decline in true friendship, friendship as a variety of love. As Brutus pedantically explains, "When love begins to sicken and decay / It useth an enforcèd ceremony" (4.2.14-21).

            Indeed, which is why the Rutgers student culture included "busting," what we in North-Side Chicago in the 1950s called "cutting," and which scholars of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture call flytings. (You want some high-power wonkish cred? Do the Dozens in Old English!)

            Still, as we should be learning from the degeneration of American political discourse generally, there's a whole lot to be said for cool correctness: treating people "with courtesy and respect," even if it's "enforcèd ceremony" and no more.

            One time I mediated a dispute between a professor and a student — that was my main service for the Miami University English Department: I handled student complaints — and it turned out to be a very simple case. "You two don't like each other," I said to them. What they needed was permission, so to speak, not to like one another. "You don't have to like each other; you just have to deal with one another for the next couple months."

            The student was much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike a teacher; and the teacher was far too professional is dislike a student — my tone here is snarky — and both were Americans feeling the pressure for friendliness. I gave them permission not to like each other, even to actively dislike each other — and could type out in a couple minutes a contract about how they would behave to one another: a couple months of unenthusiastic, cool correctness.

            So I'm going to push respect, courtesy, and occasionally "enforcèd ceremony." If you want to be friendly with me, you'd better know that I go by "Rich" not "Richard" and that I assume anyone who addresses me as "Richard" doesn't know me well enough to call me by my first name and probably (hell, undoubtedly) wants something from me. If you want to be friendly, you should be open to actually becoming my friend: which means I'd expect to perform acts of friendship for you and would expect reciprocity: as in holding my head if I puked, picking me up at the airport — etc.

            Not as much as among Elizabethans or earlier, but to some extent, I expect friendship to be one of the varieties of love (usually asexual) and to exist not as a mere attitude but an evolving history of friendly deeds.

                    People who've moved away, or I've moved away from: these people can still be friends. The people I know just from Facebook or on line are potential friends for me, or for you, but aren't friends yet.


            There are a lot of people I'll treat with courtesy and respect and what we can legitimately call a friendly manner. But real friends? Expect only a few.

A Tentative Demur on a Last Bastion of Still-Acceptable Stereotyping (1 March 2014 / 20 March 2015)

In March of 2015, "migrating" my blogs from OpenSalon, now closed, I had the choice not to repost this one, which is a defense (or sorts) of fraternity men: a group most recently disgraced by some drunken Sigma Alpha Epsilon louts of Oklahoma U and the racist persuasion. Still ... I'm going to repost this since I'm convinced the fraternity issue is often a subset of youth-bashing, which is often a subset of scapegoating. In the background here is the idea that by our late teens most of us are pretty much who we are going to be for the rest of our lives, and if late teens and young adults are fairly often horrible, this is because they are a normal more-or-less adult population, but with special circumstances. And, to apply an old idea, specific "besetting sins." More specifically, the young tend toward the gross and bodily sins, while their elders get more sophisticated and intellectual in evil. The "besetting sin" of youth is Lust; the more deadly besetting sin of age is Greed. Etc. If the SAE's of OK U were obnoxious in their racist singing — and indeed they were — they were less dangerous in their evil than genteel racists who would never, ever say "nigger," not even in private, but who prevent African-Americans from getting loans or having a chance for contracts or, sometimes voting. So I will damn to humiliation the punks of the Oklahoma SAE, but would remind people to look to quieter but far more dangerous, respectable older folk of the Lost Cause Old Confederacy and new model Southern Strategies.

===================================

   

            A friend sent me a copy of an op-ed piece from The New York Times of 27 February 2014, wherein Greg Hampikian, identified as "a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University," raises the question, increasingly pressing given recent increases in the right to keep and bear and openly carry arms — sometimes including on college campuses — "When May I Shoot a Student?"

            This is a fine article, but I find myself troubled by one phrase even Professor Hampikian seems to find problematic. 

"Knee-jerk reactions from law enforcement officials and university presidents are best set aside. Ignore, for example, the lame argument that some drunken frat boys will fire their weapons in violation of best practices. This view is based on stereotypical depictions of drunken frat boys, a group whose dignity no one seems willing to defend."

             As a fraternity alumnus myself, I will not defend any obnoxious drunks but must deplore the use of the stereotyping and juvenalizing phrase "drunken frat boys." If one insists on denigration — and we writers of wise-ass punditry often so insist — I tentatively recommend the more exact, neutral, and gender-and-living-unit-inclusive formulation "obstreperous frat rats, inebriated sorority chicks, and indies."

            Partly here, I follow the example of an apartment mate I had in graduate school who wouldn’t go to a restaurant on Sunday evenings because the dormitories and independent houses on campus usually didn't serve Sunday dinner, so, "The dormies are out! The dormies are out!" He despised undergraduates of all varieties, but found those from the dorms most annoying. He was not a fraternity alum himself but a student of sociology and undoubtedly developed his views only after diligent research.

            As one might know if one has studied Elizabethan usage — and sure as hell knows if one is a Black man — "boy" is a traditional insult, but nowadays not as much as it should be.

            Given the generally suckiness of adult life for many Americans (if not 99%, still a fair number), and given how pleasant "campus life" can be if one takes care to avoid the "College is for Grownups" shit of class work, it is understandable than many young Americans use college as what one of my students called, "The Four-Year Vacation" and another called, more relevantly here, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood."

            So arrested development among young Americans is understandable, but it is not to be encouraged. And following from that principle, professors, parents, politicians, and pundits — and administrators and other nonalliterating classifications — should risk the occasional appearance of delusion and talk of "college men" and "college women," "sorority women" and "fraternity men" and, "students in the residence halls and independent houses."

            Pressing further, I would note that abuse of alcohol and other drugs is hardly limited to young people; it is just that youths tend to be loudest and most irritating about it, and certainly more apt than their elders to piss on your lawn or puke on your shoes. These problems, however, are often more a product of inexperience and some cultural/legal perversities than of youth, and America's young would do better if older members of their extended families would bloody well teach the little punks how to hold their liquor like civilized folk.

            CAUTION, however: serving liquor to even one's kids is illegal in many jurisdictions. The American rule is "Old enough to drive, be drafted, vote, and bring guns to class, but much too young to learn, even at home, how to use, not abuse, booze."

            But I digress; the topic here is language usage, about which I have some authority (we spoke English at my home). The topic here is usage and trying to talk inclusively rather than stereotyping. So avoid both overgeneralization and targeting an often-privileged minority group, but still a minority group. The problem isn't limited to "drunken frat boys," and my final advice is that one take care to slur more carefully, generally, and decorously: "obnoxious drunken assholes." 

Usage Note: "Adult Children" (14 Feb. 2015)

My first thought at hearing the phrase "adult child" is, "If you raised an adult child, you failed as a parent."

My second thought is that the first thought was at worst cruel, at best a bit unfair.

        If your child has serious developmental problems and emotionally or intellectually and/or physically  gets to her or his twenties without reaching adult development, then, obviously, you should be respected and complimented on your job of parenting. 

        In less somber contexts — on linguistic grounds, a fair-minded person might object that people speaking of an "adult child" understand "child"   as just "offspring," which makes the phrase mean the harmless "adult offspring." Okay, but come on! There's always "son" and "daughter" and "offspring" isn't that tough a word and works for most people who are biological parents as well as parenting parents.

         On more paractical grounds, the accusation of failure as a parent often overestimates the influence of parents on the outcome of their offspring. Most of us most of the time blame the parents for rotten kids — and we usually should — but not always. If a family is stuck with a 22-year old child, it may not be the fault of the parents.

         It may not be anyone's fault, but it is a problem.

         I first heard "adult child" and such in the phrase "adult children of alcoholics," and the usage seemed wrong. Adult offspring of alcoholics, God and Al Anon know, frequently have issues, but those issues didn't seem to me — at least from a distance — to be some sort of culpable immaturity. If anything, some people with a subgroup of ... what would be the proper term here? ... let's say some variety of fucked up parents take on adult responsibility at an early age and are adult well before leaving their teens, sometimes adult heartbreakingly too young.

         Folks out there using English should remember that children don't have the same rights as adults and should not have the same rights as adults. In the context of the 2014/15 round of the debate on mandated innoculations, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said, "The state doesn't own your children" and clarified that "Parents own the children." There was widespread denunciation of the idea of anyone's owning children, but it is significant that a US Senator in the libertarian tradition (no less) would think in terms of owning kids and that many of those denouncing the line were of the emphatically non-libertarian strain of the Left who were far some seeing children as autonomous, responsible beings who could usually be trusted to take care of themselves.

         Let's say play alone in a city part or take the subway.

         Children do not have the same rights as adults and do need protection, and there are powerful Americans of a wide swath of political persuasions who go way, way too far in "protecting our children." (As I said when the Powers that Were in the City of Chicago introduced a teen curfew and argued it was to protect teenagers — bullshit! it was to protect grownups afraid, sometimes with justification, of teenagers — "Just do me one favor: Don't do me no favors.")

         Eric Posner recently did a fine job of provocation, arguing that "Universities Are Right and Within Their Rights to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior" of college students because "Students today are more like children than adults and need protection." Which means, of course, that the "kids" need to be not only protected from words and topics and ideas that might upset them but also from misusing freedoms we in America recognize as birthrights for grownups.

         Children may not be owned by the State or their parents, but they do need people to control them.

         If your offspring turned out all right and can do okay on their own, thank you, they're you're adult offspring; don't insult them by calling them children or share with others that feeling deep inside that they will always be your little girl, your little boy. Such feelings fine in your heart of hearts but make for a lousy idea for public policy.

         If Posner has a point and we have wide-spread arrested development among young Americans, well, that is a serious social issue to be dealt with and not to be blandly accepted. The phrase "adult child" can have some very negative implications; it should not be used casually. 

"Trust Me! I'm a Doctor" (Titles and Respect) [30 Jan. 2015]

  My very senior, senior associate in the movie biz — senior in experience, not in age — usually gives me a movie-related gift for the Solstice holidays, my favorite in this genre being Scarface boxer shorts. This last winter, though, he gave me a T-shirt saying, "Trust Me! I'm a Doctor," with the second "O" replaced by a head-and-hat shot of The Cat in the Hat, and a "Dr. Seuss" trademark.
            There's a backstory here.
            The first time that very senior senior associate — call him Gabe —introduced me in a filmmaking context as his associate and colleague, I was very happy. He called me "Professor Erlich," though, and I later asked him not to use the "Professor."
            Like my friend "Rob," who declines to use his military rank since he retired, I feel pretty strongly that titles should mostly indicate functions, and when one ceases performing the function, one should cease using the title.
            Ditto for serious interruptions in one's profession, especially if one has latched onto a political position of some power: people should use their new titles, and that only, not the old.
            E.g., in 1970 or so, I had a bit of a run-in with the receptionist for the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois whom she referred to as "Dr. ______" and I called "The Superintendent" and "Mr. ______." When she pointedly said "Doctor," I said, "No, it's Mister. 'Superintendent ______' in third-person reference, 'Mr. Superintendent' to his face. We call senators with doctorates 'Senator,' not 'Doctor' — and that rule holds across the board."
            Still, thinking about it a bit, I told Gabe, "Well, I guess I'm still, 'Dr. Erlich'; the Ph.D. title goes with you unless you're defrocked, or whatever." (This can happen: a guy I went to grad school with had his degree revoked for fraud.)
            So, "Trust Me! I'm a Doctor" still — like the once-famous line, "I am Duchess of Malfi still," meaning she's the Duchess "even so" + "always" (4.2.101).
            But I didn't use the "Dr." when professor-ing, sometimes smiling and telling people who called me Doctor, "Recite two sonnets and call me in the morning."
            Much of that decision on declining the title was sheer snobbery.
            My first academic day on a university campus, in 1961, I saw my adviser for Specialized Chemistry, and at the end of our conversation I asked, "What do you call people around here?" Without missing a beat he replied, "'Mister.' In a department such as this" — Chemistry at the U of Illinois — "everyone has a doctorate."
            Later increases in the number of women on college faculties complicated matters, but the true-snob feeling at a Midwestern Big Ten/Big Time university like the U of IL, and later at Cornell, was that a hot-shit Ph.D. didn't need the title.
            Rules were different in the South and with Doctors of Education and some clinical psychologists, but that only reinforced the point up in "The Land of Lincoln" and in departments like Chemistry or even English.
            We don't harp on the Civil War in Union country, but we haven't forgotten it either; and "The Hierarchy of the Majors," Michael Moffatt found among undergrads at Rutgers continues up the academic food chain: Ed docs, such as the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois ca. 1970 may need the title. And — unjustly — women in some departments, at least until recently, could find the title useful and even necessary.
            Still, a major scholar of XX genotype and female gendering in my department at Miami University (Oxford, OH) could usually go by "Ms." or her first name and use that as a sign of her arrival.
            Of course, few of us were above using the "Dr." when trying to get a restaurant reservation: we might be thought an M.D., hence, relatively rich, hence, might get a decent table.
            And, maybe also "of course," in retirement I've come to miss, a little bit, telling people "Oh, 'Mr. Erlich' is fine, or call me 'Rich.'"
            As Professor Erlich I occasionally ran into contempt — and still do in on-line forums when I get dismissed as a pointy-headed intellectual — but there was more of a kind of base-line respect.
            I still won't use "Dr.," but that base-line respect I kind of miss.
            I am nobody special and with the possible exception of one semester in high school have never been. Still, Herr Professor Doktor Erlich at least had some minimal status, and Rich Erlich — outside of being a male in the US who can pass for White — film script analyst and Associate Producer Rich Erlich does not have that safety-net guarantee. (The quotes in the movie Argo include a laugh-line on associate producer status.)
            This lack of occasional trivial deference is not a big deal since I was able to put money away for retirement, and the time of any significant — as in monetary — height discrimination is behind me. Still, it's a tad diminishing to be merely me, and I really like that T-shirt "Gabe" gave me.

            "Trust me! I'm a Doctor," and, maybe, until other people show themselves contemptible, let us all offer what respect we can for people just for being human. I want some, even if the doctorate were only in Seuss.