It’s S/he Or It, Not They: Policing English
I’ve complained about people, usually those who have skills I don’t have and do “dirty work” like repair cars or plumbing, telling me that they didn’t like English teachers when they discovered my profession (I wouldn’t tell unless they asked). I’ve also had a few less impolite people say that they were scared of English teachers. Occasionally, even well-educated people have been apologetic about their grammar when they learned what I did for a living. When I served on a jury, the fifty-something defense lawyer humbly requested that I not hold his grammar errors against him or his client. I smirked at him because I hoped he was joking. I don’t know nor do I want to know any English teacher who would send an apparently innocent man to jail for molesting a teenage girl because of his lawyer’s sloppy grammar. In fact, I don’t know nor do I want to know English teachers who routinely correct people’s (especially strangers) grammar during conversations. As I tell the English teacher haters, most of us don’t bother to correct people, even relatives and close friends (unless the close friends are also English teachers), in casual conversations. I explained to one black man who spent the drive from the car dealer in Ontario to my house in Claremont ranting about his community college English instructor (I suspect she was also black and maybe looked like me because I clearly triggered him) that an English teacher is supposed to correct her students’ grammar, punctuation, and usage when she reads their papers, and some of us will call out a gross error during class discussions, but we don’t care how they talk in casual conversations. Many of us don’t use Standard English when we talk. I code switch between black dialect, Standard English, and something in between (“Blingish”) regularly. However, it is the English teacher’s job to explain and enforce the laws of grammar, punctuation, and style. We’re like the police, which might be why some people fear and/or hate us. Just as a police car can slow traffic on a freeway, we can slow or even end a conversation. People may speak more hesitantly or stop talking if they believe an English teacher is policing their language.
Several clever social media users who have triggered my Officer Sisney persona by calling me stupid or absurdly accusing me of using bad grammar have ended my calling out of homonym, pronoun referent, and subject-verb agreement problems in their posts by switching to Gifs and emojis. Maybe that’s how gender fluid folks like singer Sam Smith should deal with the pronoun problem that they have created. If Sam or other gender fluid people don’t want to be called “she” or “he,” maybe they can use pictures because “they” is not an option. The only single (or singular) person who can use “they” is someone who has multiple personalities like Sybil, the based-on-a-real-case character Sally Field played back in the twentieth century, or Eve, the character Joanne Woodward played even earlier in that century. English teachers have had enough problems with the pronouns used to refer to genderless nouns like “anyone,” “someone,” and “student” without the self-indulgent, gender fluid Mr. Smith adding to the confusion. As I explained in the 11/21/18 blog post, we spent the eighties training students to use “he or she” instead of “he” for genderless nouns. We did not accept “they” as an alternative (we had spent years correcting that agreement problem) then, and it’s not one now. Usually students could avoid using the clumsy “he or she” alternative by simply making the noun more specific and pluralizing it. Who is “anyone”? People? Humans? With a little thought, Sam and the other gender fluid folks can avoid messing up our already messy language with confusing pronoun usage. I understand why a human wouldn’t want to be called “it,” but how about “s/he”? Or we can avoid pronouns and use nouns. We can call the person by that person’s name or use “person” or “human.” Whatever we do, English teachers must approve the choices because we are the law. We are the ones who together can change the law as we did with “he” for genderless nouns and sexist words like “man” and “mankind,” and then we will enforce it.
I suggested a rule change last week after I saw the following sidewalk chalk sign of support for the teachers at my neighborhood elementary school: “Your the best.” I said on Facebook that I wished I believed a child had written that sign, but my years of reading freshman essays and later social media posts suggest a parent did it. My solution was to eliminate contractions. After trying to avoid contractions during a couple of posts, I activated my Gilda Radner impression, “Never mind.” But soon the apostrophe caused more trouble for me. One of my former students pointed out an error in a post that I had shared. The plural of “Trump” was written as “Trump’s.” I believed that there at one time had been a silly rule about pluralizing proper names similar to the “student/he” rule or “the Gladys Knight and the Pips is my favorite group” rule. She checked the MLA list of punctuation, grammar, and usage rules on the Internet and found no such rule. But I was certain that rule had once existed. Why else would relatively competent writers make that mistake? I had discarded all of my grammar handbooks but found on a bookshelf a recently read, humorous grammar/punctuation/usage book called HAVE YOU EATEN GRANDMA? that didn’t support my case. I thought maybe the rule related to last names that end in “s,“ but we add “es” to those names, as in “Dickenses.“ When usage kings Strunk and White didn’t have my back, and a couple of retired English teacher friends who had taught as long as I had didn’t remember the rule, I assumed I was suffering from a false rememory (a Toni Morrison word). Maybe I had corrected that mistake in the past, not taught it as a confusing rule.
Policing English is a difficult (although maybe not essential) job. There are too many rules, and some of them are confusing, illogical, and even silly. There are also too many careless users of English, people who recklessly violate the rules and resent those who try to set them straight. But as “HAVE YOU EATEN GRANDMA?” proves, sometimes even a missing comma can cause confusion. The rules matter. And at least an English teacher won’t shoot a student if s/he breaks a rule. The worst that can happen is s/he will cover the student’s paper with red ink so that it appears to be bleeding (I used purple ink), and the student will fail the class.
If you read and understood this blog, you should thank your English teachers and be careful when you use pronouns and apostrophes. You should also not try to change the rules if you’re (not “your”) not an English teacher.
Several clever social media users who have triggered my Officer Sisney persona by calling me stupid or absurdly accusing me of using bad grammar have ended my calling out of homonym, pronoun referent, and subject-verb agreement problems in their posts by switching to Gifs and emojis. Maybe that’s how gender fluid folks like singer Sam Smith should deal with the pronoun problem that they have created. If Sam or other gender fluid people don’t want to be called “she” or “he,” maybe they can use pictures because “they” is not an option. The only single (or singular) person who can use “they” is someone who has multiple personalities like Sybil, the based-on-a-real-case character Sally Field played back in the twentieth century, or Eve, the character Joanne Woodward played even earlier in that century. English teachers have had enough problems with the pronouns used to refer to genderless nouns like “anyone,” “someone,” and “student” without the self-indulgent, gender fluid Mr. Smith adding to the confusion. As I explained in the 11/21/18 blog post, we spent the eighties training students to use “he or she” instead of “he” for genderless nouns. We did not accept “they” as an alternative (we had spent years correcting that agreement problem) then, and it’s not one now. Usually students could avoid using the clumsy “he or she” alternative by simply making the noun more specific and pluralizing it. Who is “anyone”? People? Humans? With a little thought, Sam and the other gender fluid folks can avoid messing up our already messy language with confusing pronoun usage. I understand why a human wouldn’t want to be called “it,” but how about “s/he”? Or we can avoid pronouns and use nouns. We can call the person by that person’s name or use “person” or “human.” Whatever we do, English teachers must approve the choices because we are the law. We are the ones who together can change the law as we did with “he” for genderless nouns and sexist words like “man” and “mankind,” and then we will enforce it.
I suggested a rule change last week after I saw the following sidewalk chalk sign of support for the teachers at my neighborhood elementary school: “Your the best.” I said on Facebook that I wished I believed a child had written that sign, but my years of reading freshman essays and later social media posts suggest a parent did it. My solution was to eliminate contractions. After trying to avoid contractions during a couple of posts, I activated my Gilda Radner impression, “Never mind.” But soon the apostrophe caused more trouble for me. One of my former students pointed out an error in a post that I had shared. The plural of “Trump” was written as “Trump’s.” I believed that there at one time had been a silly rule about pluralizing proper names similar to the “student/he” rule or “the Gladys Knight and the Pips is my favorite group” rule. She checked the MLA list of punctuation, grammar, and usage rules on the Internet and found no such rule. But I was certain that rule had once existed. Why else would relatively competent writers make that mistake? I had discarded all of my grammar handbooks but found on a bookshelf a recently read, humorous grammar/punctuation/usage book called HAVE YOU EATEN GRANDMA? that didn’t support my case. I thought maybe the rule related to last names that end in “s,“ but we add “es” to those names, as in “Dickenses.“ When usage kings Strunk and White didn’t have my back, and a couple of retired English teacher friends who had taught as long as I had didn’t remember the rule, I assumed I was suffering from a false rememory (a Toni Morrison word). Maybe I had corrected that mistake in the past, not taught it as a confusing rule.
Policing English is a difficult (although maybe not essential) job. There are too many rules, and some of them are confusing, illogical, and even silly. There are also too many careless users of English, people who recklessly violate the rules and resent those who try to set them straight. But as “HAVE YOU EATEN GRANDMA?” proves, sometimes even a missing comma can cause confusion. The rules matter. And at least an English teacher won’t shoot a student if s/he breaks a rule. The worst that can happen is s/he will cover the student’s paper with red ink so that it appears to be bleeding (I used purple ink), and the student will fail the class.
If you read and understood this blog, you should thank your English teachers and be careful when you use pronouns and apostrophes. You should also not try to change the rules if you’re (not “your”) not an English teacher.
No comments have been added yet.
