Rich Mintz  

Reading this letter in the Times reminds me that as fast as things are changing (for the better), there are always people who want them to change faster. These Wesleyan undergraduates, bless their hearts, are annoyed at the Times for not referring to the subject of a story by his (sorry, I suppose “vis”) chosen gender-neutral pronoun of “V,” rather than the patriarchalist “he.” I don’t know Justin Vivian Bond, the subject of the letter (although I did read the book review in question), but it appears that Bond made up this pronoun himself (vimself?).

I actually agree with the impulse behind this complaint. Language choices that go under the heading of “the way it’s always been done” do often mask a bias toward the status quo, and instantiate momentum in favor of powerful institutions and groups and persons over the historically marginalized. And I do think that transgendered people, in the course of figuring out who they are and expressing that to the world, are helping more than most of us to change that.

However. How practical is it to choose your own pronoun, and then be annoyed at the rest of the world for not using it? I’m afraid that’s not a battle you’re likely to win. If I were a transgendered person, given all the daily battles in my life worth fighting, I’d probably be fighting other ones instead.

If you have a different point of view, I’d be interested in hearing it. I don’t know any transgendered people well (although I’ve met several over the years), so my perspective is something of an outsider’s — I’m primarily speaking in practical terms anyway, though.

In this incredible video clip, two women who don’t speak Hindi use Google Translate to order Indian food in Hindi over the phone, and it works:

No, I’m not talking about this ridiculous coffeemaker you can talk to… but apropos of this example of AT&T’s website giving you a gibberish (and inaccurately to boot) message about why logging in might take a while, I particularly liked the experience of signing up for the Rdio streaming music service. After you enter your email address, here’s what you see:

They tell you what they did, they tell you what to do next, and they tell you what to do first if you suspect that the thing they did didn’t work. All in plain English. Classy! Somebody is involved here who has some sense of how to make users comfortable. (I signed up for this specifically because someone I know praised the user interface of the Mac app — I’m looking for a suitable replacement for the Sirius XM Mac app, with its reliably programmed music but a user experience so aggressively awful that it makes me angry just to type a sentence about it — so I’m not entirely surprised about that.)

From today’s NYT:

Headlights in the distance from an approaching car and behind it another, and another, and another. A caravan of four luxury sedans fast approaching on a road rarely traveled at night.

Was it a large family? Bandits? Drug traffickers? Suddenly the officers faced a choice: Do we stop them and risk a shootout, or live with the mystery?

“They would have been able to shoot quicker,” Officer Lorenzo López said later, after letting the caravan pass. “By the time we would have realized it, we would have already been flying to heaven as little angels.”

It seems likely from the context that Officer López was speaking in Spanish, which was translated into English by either the reporter or the Times. And in doing so, the Times used one of my most unfavorite grammatical constructions: the modal auxiliary (“by the time we would have realized“) rather than the past perfect subjunctive (“by the time we had realized”) as the antecedent of a counterfactual conditional. By educated speakers of English this construction is either unacceptable or strongly idiomatically disfavored (warning: more detail at that link than you probably wanted), depending on your point of view, and in any case I detest it and I find it jarring to see it in the Times. In colloquial speech, yeah; in the mouths of Snooki and the Situation, sure; maybe even in informal blogging, sure. But to see it in print is a horror.

In ten or twenty years, the yobs will have won, and by then I’ll be a “get off my lawn!” old man anyway, but for now, we absolutely must fight the spread of this indignity. Who’s with me??

After receiving my eleventeenth email from an English person who said “shall” in a sentence in which I and everyone I know would instead say “will,” I have to admit that I have no effing idea what the rules are. Aside from a couple of special situations in which a poetic “shall” is conventional, which I could probably describe if a gun were held to my head, I’m completely stumped about the difference. I feel more or less the way I did about merry, marry, and Mary before I moved East — people insisted there was a difference, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

As a start, I sent this article to Instapaper to read on the train, but I suspect it will be unsatisfying and I’ll still be confused afterwards. I will (shall?) report back on anything useful I learn.

One more quick comment about my three days in Baltimore: that Maryland accent is still alive and well. And I don’t just mean in the mouths of old people and diner waitresses, although there is of course that too. Apparently, they’re still making new people, young ones, who talk like they have a mouthful of chewing gum. (I kid, I kid!) Who knew?

Every time I left the hotel — when I went out to Little Italy, for example — I encountered people half my age or younger who spoke in frank, unattenuated Baltimorese. There were one or two (I’m thinking in particular of the host at one restaurant) who I could barely comprehend — and I’m not new to this accent, I lived in DC for years!

This is a marvel to me. These kids live in the same culture I do, absorb largely the same national media, but come out talking in the local way anyway. This despite Baltimore’s being more tightly bound than ever to the vastly more generic DC metro area. For my whole life, people have been griping about the loss of local color in America, but regionalism seems very much alive to me — if anything, it may be stronger now than 15 or 20 years ago.

Dear everyone — once and for all, “reticent” does not mean “reluctant” or “unwilling,” it means “reserved” or “withdrawn.” I realize I’ve lost this one — people have been confusing “reticent” with “reluctant” for more than a generation, and the incorrect definition of “reticent” is now starting to make its way into dictionaries as a secondary meaning. Which means that, by popular acclamation, it is incrementally less incorrect than it used to be. But it still drives me crazy!

Especially when I see the word used incorrectly, in quotation marks in the New York Times, by someone (clearly a perfectly nice and thoughtful and intelligent person) who is described as working in publishing!

A visibility and safety initiative, from Mexico, on behalf of gay, transgendered, and other vulnerable people: Aguas Con Tu Ligue, which roughly translated means “watch out for your hookup,” i.e., beware of the man you just picked up. Be careful about whom you let into your house. Or, in extremis, “Tu ligue de hoy puede ser tu asesino,” i.e., “the guy you pick up today might turn out to be your murderer.” Blunt stuff, but routine assaults on gay people — sometimes physical crime, sometimes extortion, sometimes just disruption and harassment — are a bigger social issue in Mexico than here in New York. (Not that we don’t have them here too.) The case examples on the site are blunt.

I admire the courage and forthrightness behind the initiative; the philosophy behind it is that visibility helps increase safety in the short term and lead to social change in the long term, which you can hardly argue with.

As a side note, I just learned the word “aguas,” which (in Mexico only) means “look out.” Literally, it apparently originally meant “look out, I am about to throw toilet water [or, probably more literally, urine] out the window onto your head,” but nowadays it is conventional to follow it with a description of what the hearer is supposed to look out for, e.g., “¡Aguas! ¡Viene un carro!” The things you learn…

I’m familiar with the way Quakers speak in olde-tymey historical novels — typically, there are a lot of “thee”s — but now I’m reading Edward Rutherfurd’s novel New York, and a Quaker character is using “thee” as the subject of her sentences.

Now, I know enough to know (and this is one of those exceedingly rare moments in life when having studied “The Wanderer” in the original Old English in college has some practical usefulness) that “thee” is not a nominative pronoun; in (affected) modern English it can stand in for the direct or indirect object, but not the subject. Right?

But Rutherfurd is not an idiot, and (from my position about 20% into this book) it seems to me he has been at least moderately thoughtful about accuracy of all kinds. If he had meant “thou,” he surely would have said it. Which leads me to wonder, did 18th-century Philadelphia Quakers also say “thee” when they meant “thou”? And if so, why?

Well, what do you know? I’m the ignorant one: “thee” in the nominative case is perfectly normal among speakers of this dialect, through the same path by which our familiar “you” in the nominative case (for the more technically correct “ye”) has come to sound perfectly normal.

And if you’re curious about Quakers, Quaker Jane is as interesting a place to start as any; I found this page on why women opt for plain dress to be thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Uh-oh. I just learned via Nancy Friedman that “curate” (v.t.) is a trendy word at the moment. I have to confess having heard myself using it a lot lately, and not just in my work with museums (in which it takes its literal sense), but in that metaphorical sense, to mean “carefully and thoughtfully tend” a reputation, a public image, or the like. I think I just used it yesterday! Am I going to have to stop?!