Laying Layers and the Lays They Tell

Throw Grammar from the Train's post for May argues that the distinction between lie (as in lie down, not as in tell a lie) and lay, is being lost, because it's just too confusing.  Only a few anal compulsive grammar obsessives (like me) ever learned it anyway, and:

That's not because we're a nation of semiliterate texting addicts; lay and lie have never been easy to distinguish.  In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, the verbs were not well differentiated until the 18th-century usage juggernaut got rolling. From 1300 to 1800, “the usage was unmarked: Sir Francis Bacon used [lay for lie] in the final and most polished edition of his essays in 1625.”

This doesn't bother me, because as Jan (the blogger) indicates, the distinction between lie and lay was not a genuine feature of the language but a distinction invented and imposed by people who didn't really understand grammar.  But it does make me wonder about the other sense of lie, the sense of deliberately saying something that isn't true.  I suppose people don't confuse it because the meaning is obviously different. Though have you noticed how many people, when they found they made a mistake, will say brightly -- semi-ironically, I think -- I lied!  Even some of my Mexican friends do it, saying Miento, miento (I lie, I lie) when they realize they misspoke.  It's not a grammatical issue, it's one of semantics, but because lying and truthtelling are also moral issues, it's that as well.

So a friend shared (in the Facebook sense) this meme today.

She didn't actually endorse it.  She added a remark to the effect that she was rushed and would read it later, so presumably she shared it so she'd be able to find it when she had time to read it.  (I often do this, but by "liking" rather than sharing.)  I did some looking around on the Internet and found that the information in the image has been debunked numerous times.  I put those links into a comment to her, and after a moment's thought added another comment, linking to the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16) at a Bible site: "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor."

My friend is the daughter of a minister, and remains devoutly (though not too obnoxiously) Christian.  Unlike some other people I know, she doesn't get all pissy when I post corrections to disinformational memes she passes along.  But it still never seems to occur to her to check those memes herself.  And you'd think, wouldn't you, that people who take their religion seriously, would be concerned that what they send out into the Intertoobz would be true?  According to very old canons of truth and falsehood, it's not enough just to refrain from saying something you know to be false, hard as that standard is to meet.  You also must try to make sure that what you are saying is true.  This means, among other things, that you have to evaluate what you get from other people and want to pass along. This, evidently, is even harder.  Yet the religious believers I know, be they conservative or liberal, seem to give it little thought, and that was true long before Facebook or the Internet.

I wrote last week about the Tasteful Jesus Lady, who despite her flaunted faith also doesn't care much whether what she's saying is true or not.  But I reached a personal tipping point about this during the 2012 election season, and the worst offenders were ostensibly secular Obama supporters like my liberal law professor friend.  (To be scrupulous, the avowed conservatives were just as bad, but I expected no better from them.  My bias.)  Then there's my fictive nephew, who often shares village-atheist memes on Facebook, like this one yesterday, from something called "The Free-Thinking Society":

This meme has the dubious distinction of being false in almost every particular, from the number of translators who worked on the New Testament to the claim that the KJV was "edited" from "previous translations" rather than translated directly from the original languages, and more.  Some of the errors are insultingly trivial, such as the reference to "scrolls": all New Testament manuscripts, including the earliest, are codices, not scrolls; but whether a document was written on a scroll or a codex tells you nothing about its truthfulness or lack thereof.  (The motive, I think, is to insinuate that because scrolls are totally primitive, what was written in them needn't be taken seriously by enlightened Free Thinkers.)  Since none of these facts are that hard to track down, whoever made this meme should be regarded as, if not a liar, then at least someone who doesn't care whether he or she is telling the truth.  If "Free Thinking" means freedom to make stuff up, I could get that in a church.

Speaking of lies, my friend got the meme about charities from a page called WorldTruth.TV.  When I went to download the meme to repost it here I found this one next to it, a cartoon of a crowd of white adults (weirdly enough; not only all middle-aged adults but all male) in multicolored clothing walking through a portal labeled PUBLIC SCHOOL and emerging all in gray, with this caption:

The public school system: Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

There's a lot to criticize about the public school system, of course.  But I know of no indication that private schools are any different.  There's always been a divide between people who think schools should teach children to think and people who think schools should teach children to obey, and in general the latter group has usually gotten their way.  One of the reasons for religious schools is to make sure that the students are indoctrinated with a given cult's dogmas.  I get the impression that many people who complain that schools indoctrinate children really just want kids indoctrinated with their propaganda, not someone else's.

A friend of the friend who posted the Free Thinking meme attacked me for correcting it.  Significantly, he attacked me personally, not bothering to address the factual issues.  That's what most people think debate means, I suspect.  And then think again about the people who, realizing they said something untrue, say I lied.  Their tone of voice indicates they're joking, kind of, but I wonder.  The difference between making a mistake and deliberately telling a falsehood seems to be as difficult for many people to grasp as the difference between lie and lay, and it's a lot more important.

Copyeditor's Eye for the L33t Guy

A little while ago a Facebook friend posted this image as her status.

It led to a smug little thread that began with "ZING! Nice comeback by whoever posted the response to that dolt. [chuckles]" "'Dolt'?" I asked in a comment. "Yup," said my friend. "Nope," I said. She conceded that the questioner was at least "aspiring."

I myself am a recovering grammar neurotic, and stuff like this annoys me too. But referring a poor speller to the dictionary isn't going to do any good, and as the reactions to the post show, 1) they mainly took pleasure in the fantasy of humiliating the questioner; and 2) they assume that he or she spells badly just to piss them off. I can't be sure in every case, but I have the impression that many people who react so vitriolically to language mistakes and variation also feel superior to hate-filled fundamentalists who refuse to recognize that Christianity is about love. Yet these grammar berserkers show precious little fellow-feeling, let alone love, for people who don't meet their (often mistaken) standards for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Of course, they pretend otherwise. Here's a classic example, from comment under a post on punctuation at Dennis Baron's Web of Language:

I do think education is a class marker, in that if people want to move up economically/socially/whatever, they have to have a fair amount of education (one-offs like Bill Gates aside). And I think my job as a teacher, especially in a community college, is to help my students join the "company of educated men and women," as a university graduation speaker I once heard said. I can't change the larger social structures that govern so much of our lives--too old for Occupy Wall Street, alas. But I can try to make sure my students do not foreclose their options. That is why I also teach Shakespeare--

I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare opens up one's options in the job market. Certainly speaking or writing Elizabethan/Jacobean English is not going to help one fit in either socially or economically in today's world. I can also report from experience that the "company of educated men and women" contains a good many people whose grammar, spelling, and punctuation are less than exemplary. (Teresa Nielsen Hayden noticed that too.) To be fair to the commenter, I agree that how a person uses punctuation, spelling, and grammar -- henceforth PSG -- is a class marker, and a sympathetic teacher will try to help her students master those skills. (I think Professor Baron agrees too.) What I'm getting at is that this won't be achieved by making students feel stupid because they lack those skills. Traditional methods, like ruthless red-penciling of student writing, or shaming students who have difficulty in those areas, are counterproductive as well as inhumane. (That is, perhaps cruelty to students could be excused if it was the only way to teach them, but it isn't, and it doesn't work; so I have to suppose that it has other functions.)

The late David Foster Wallace wrote a long essay, "Authority and American Usage," in which he also claimed that requiring his students to master PSG was just for their own good, because other people will look down on them and they won't be able to get good jobs. He began the essay with an account of his and his family's PSG obsessiveness, which indicates that he was part of the problem. People look down on other people for all kinds of reasons. PSG errors (granting for the sake of argument that what enrages us PSG obsessives are errors, which is often open to dispute) are not good reasons. If people can't spell, punctuate, or negotiate the toils of standard grammar because they were inadequately taught, the decent and humane reaction is sympathy -- not condescension ("He can't help it, poor dear, he's from the slums") but sympathy because they were deprived of basic education. That so many people react with fury and contempt, feeling and expressing a desire to rub such people's noses in their deprivation, indicates that something other than concern about miseducation is involved.

Often such people claim that they "can't understand" these grubby illiterates' gibberish. Here's a mild example, from the message boards at Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, from a correspondent who "cannot help getting angry about the poor educational standards shown by some people on other bulletin boards."

Here is an example from one of the contributers after I had complained that I could not understand what he was on about ( By the way I am not a teacher ) :-

"Why would i need to improve my grammer? im in a good job earning a rather good crust, drive a 360 ferrari - this is ONLY a internet forum m8 no need to get so up tight about peoples spellings etc etc, i left school quite a while ago to start a business... Im glad i did cos people like u annoy me (teachers)

thank u please "

First, notice "contributers": there is an Internet law, known under various names, which holds that anyone who points out other people's PSG errors will make at least one of his own in doing so. Second, I can understand what the "contributer" wrote very easily. That may be partly because I'm a fluent reader, and good readers do a lot of error correction automatically, often without noticing that they're doing it. If the guy who's complaining can't understand him, he's the one who has "poor educational standards."

More virulent was one of Bill Cosby's rants against other African-Americans some years back.

It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't, where you is go, ra." I don't know who these people are. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't" ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that language.

Michael Eric Dyson quoted that, and much more, in Is Bill Cosby Right? (Basic Civitas Books, 2005, pp. 57-8), and then pointed out with great compassion that Cosby used to know better. In a 1969 interview quoted by Dyson, Cosby said:

Black people from the South have a common accent; it's almost a foreign language. I can't speak it, but I understand it, because my 85-year-old grandfather speaks it. I remember hearing him use the word "jimmin" and I had to go up to my grandmother to find out what he was saying. She told me he was saying "gentlemen." That was black; it's the way my grandfather talks, the way my Aunt Min talks, because she was down South picking cotton while I was in Philadelphia picking up white middle-class values and feeling embarrassed about hearing people talk like that and wanting to send them to school to straighten them out. I now accept this as black, the same way I accept an Italian whose father from the old country has a heavy accent [78-9].

Cosby himself speaks Black English, though with a less "heavy accent." He also "dropped out of high school after he flunked the tenth grade three times" (Dyson, 60). It would be easy to say that his grandfather and Aunt Min were poor because they were uneducated and didn't speak standard English, but in their day it didn't matter how they spoke. His grandfather must have been born in 1884 or so, when American racism was in full flower.

So, first, I don't believe my fellow PSG obsessives when they claim not to be able to understand people who speak or write nonstandard English; if they can't, it is they who suffer from some kind of impairment. Second, the hostility many PSG obsessives exhibit towards people who make PSG errors is hard to square with their frequent expressions of concern for people with "poor educational standards" who won't be able to get a good job because they're stupid.

Let me try to make myself clear: I agree that PSG mastery is a class/status marker, and not only in English, so I agree that education should involve helping students to acquire such mastery. (The reader will notice that this blog is, for the most part, written in standard English, and as a PSG obsessive, I always correct errors in old postings when I find them. Despite this, I remain low-class.) The educational critics I most admire also agree. What I'm saying is that the kind of hostility exhibited by my Facebook friend, her commenters, and so many other PSG obsessives is a moral failing. Especially creepy is the tactic of pretending that they wouldn't make a big deal out of it, but other, less enlightened people out there would.

Some years ago I was reading an exchange on marriage between Chinese and Caucasian Americans in an online forum. A couple of people argued that it was a bad idea because the kids would be picked on. (There was also some pious concern that the kids would be confused about their identity, since they'd be caught between cultures.) It occurred to me that this was a classic case of blaming the victim. "Why not pick on the bigots?" I asked. One person said that that had never occurred to her; nor, evidently, had it occurred to anyone else. People may cluck their tongues over vulgar racism and other forms of bigotry, but like the weather, they never do anything about it: like the weather, it's a force of nature or something. But bigotry is a lifestyle choice, and especially bigotry directed against children for the crime of having picked the wrong parents. People who indulge in it should be picked on, ostracized, shunned. The fact that few people are willing to do that indicates the shallowness of their disapproval of bigotry: they don't really see it as a moral failing, they see it as at worst an eccentricity, somewhat vulgar and a bit embarrassing, but not anything to get worked up over.

I disagree very strongly. Bigotry needs to be stamped on whenever it raises its head. That means racism, sexism, and antigay bigotry, but it also means people who throw a tantrum over misused apostrophes or misspellings, and who think that making fun of the offender is good dirty fun. I think that picking on bigots is good dirty fun, and more people need to take it up.

I Weep for the Future

It's good to know that our youth, and not only our youth, are concerned about things that really matter. One of my Facebook friends today latched onto this breaking news:

Oxford Comma Dropped: University of Oxford Styleguide Says No To Serial Comma

She commented: "Now my way of listing when I write is grammatically incorrect." She called the change "grammar fascism."

Well, no. A style guide is not about grammar in the first place, but about approved usage in a given environment. If I were writing for the New York Times, for example, I would follow their style guide. If I were writing a paper for a university course in the humanities, I would probably follow the MLA style guide. And so on. These guides don't set universal rules. They're meant to produce stylistic uniformity in a publication or other environment.

Even before I read the entire linked article, I noticed that the passage quoted under the headline read "The University of Oxford styleguide has decided that as 'a general rule' use of the serial comma should be avoided." Notice those three words there, "a general rule"? They mean that there will be exceptions. The article itself quoted "the official entry":

As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by ‘and’ ...

This disposes of the objection quoted by one of my friend's friends:

"~`Those released from prison today included Nelson Mandela, a murderer and a pedophile.` Oxford, Oxford, isn't this argument enough? ~"

It's not even an argument; it's merely an exception to the rule, an exception covered by the entry.

And, of course, there's no reason why people who like the Oxford comma can't go on using it, unless they attend classes at the University of Oxford. But they should be aware that, also according to the article,

The serial comma ... had been waning in popularity. For example, most journalists in Canada and the U.S. who follow the AP or CP stylebooks do not use it.

Plenty of ignorant shlubs are throwing tantrums over the change -- I didn't bother to do more than glance at the first few comments on the article at Huffington Post. When they get over this, they can have conniptions over the possibility of a pro basketball lockout in addition to the one on pro football. I mean, what are they supposed to watch -- soccer? Meanwhile, the only President we've got has committed an act of war against Somalia, bringing the wars he's juggling up to six. (The Republicans are whupping his ass at eleven-dimensional chess, but he's a wiz at juggling wars.) But how can I care about that when the Oxford comma is in peril?

The Recovering Grammar Neurotic Relapses Briefly

So, I'm reading this novel I happened on, written by an academic and published in 2003 by a university press. On the first page, in the first paragraph:

When dates ask about my field, truth requires that I answer, "Lesbian planets." Although this response never peaks male ardor ...

Argh. "Piques," not "peaks," thought I. Well, maybe she did it deliberately, to suggest that she wants his ardor to make a peak in his trousers. More likely it was just a typo, but on the first freaking page?

I soldiered on. All was well until seven pages later. The narrator is on a plane to Germany, with her cat in her backpack because he'd broken out of his cardboard cat carrier.

"What do you have in there?" asked the woman seated next to me. Norris peaked out ...

Argh. "Peeked", damn it! "Peeked!" The book isn't searchable on Amazon, so I don't know if she does it again. (It is searchable on Google Books, and it doesn't appear that she found it necessary to write "peak" again. Maybe the narrator will climb a mountain peek for a pique across the border?) Thank Cthulhu I didn't buy it; I just checked it out of the library. Once in a while a reader just has to vent.

All Animals Are Equal

(Click on the image for its source and more information)

Homo Superior points to a piece on George Orwell's Animal Farm by Christopher Hitchens at/in the Guardian -- but mainly, it seems, to complain about "all these passive-verb sentences". (Maybe he's alluding to Orwell's admonition "Never use the passive voice where you can use the active"?) I'd be grateful for the link simply for a related story sending Hitchens up for using "lesbian" as some kind of insult, with a link to a wonderful (or maybe terrifying) site that I'm going to add to my blogroll. And I'm taking it as an opportunity to post here a piece I wrote on Animal Farm in the 90s for the local student newspaper.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

If I had to point to one decisive influence that swung my politics to the left, it would be easy: George Orwell's Animal Farm, which I discovered in the fifth or sixth grade. I read it on my own, not in school, which is probably why it wasn't until years later that I encountered the prevailing interpretation of the book.

Both Right and Left agree that Animal Farm is a Cold War tract, an attack on Stalin's USSR and a vindication of Churchill and Truman's national security states. When they're feeling charitable, my fellow leftists dismiss it as a product of tubercular delirium in Orwell's last years. Right-wingers see Animal Farm as a sign that Orwell was abandoning socialism in favor of a mature anti-Communism, like that of Joe McCarthy or Francisco Franco. Both sides assume that anti-communism equals fawning pro-capitalism, but that's not how I understood Animal Farm, so this summer I went to the library and reread it.

The introduction to the Time-Life edition I read declares that when Animal Farm was published in 1946, "already it was becoming brutally clear that wartime hopes of peacetime cooperation between the West and Russia had been dangerously naive." If that was Orwell's message, he didn't manage to get it into Animal Farm, which states clearly that the rulers of capitalist society will find peaceful cooperation with totalitarian states brutally easy.

It's true that the rebellious animals of the Manor Farm are betrayed by the pigs, who represent the Communist elites who ruled the Soviet Union. But if Animal Farm is a defense of Western democracy and free enterprise, where are the benevolent democratic leaders of the West? They can only be represented by the vicious, drunken farmers, who have no redeeming qualities at all. By Cold War values, the ending of Animal Farm is a happy one. The pigs have seen the error of their ways and become just like their farmer counterparts, who in turn see at Animal Farm "a discipline and an orderliness which should be an example to all farmers everywhere.... [T]he lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county." I can imagine Winston Churchill expressing such views, or the architects of NAFTA.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." This hardly depicts a radical difference between England and the USSR, Churchill and Stalin: it says that they are indistinguishable. East and West can meet, if not altogether amicably: "Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress.... The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously." Cheaters both. For me this scene calls up images of Nixon meeting Chairman Mao, or Reagan dining with Deng Xiaoping.

"But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally." Is this Stalinism -- or is it Reaganism, the Era of Diminishing Expectations? Grandiose dreams of increased comfort and leisure were bruited about when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s; now we hear that the postwar boom was an economic aberration, and we had better adjust to the idea that things are going to get worse, not better.

No, Animal Farm is a subversive book. If the adults who allowed it into my school's library had really read it, they'd have made sure I never did. The right-wing censors who want to purge the curriculum of any real political incorrectness don't realize that their hero, George Orwell, is laughing at them from his grave.

Hitchens's column does include some interesting information about Animal Farm's publishing history and its reception worldwide, for which I thank him. He crows over having noticed "one very salient omission":

There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

He's right, though I think I recall having noticed the omission myself. Never wrote about it, though, and while it's interesting if you demand that your allegories walk on all four feet, I'm not sure it means anything. (Hitchens has nothing to say about its significance either.) I think what I pointed out is more meaningful, especially with regard to Animal Farm's reception by the anti-Communist West. Someone must have noticed it before, but I don't recall ever reading anyone who did. People like Malcolm Muggeridge (who wrote the introduction to the Time-Life edition that I quoted in my column) didn't realize that the leaders of the US and Britain during the Cold War were Orwell's farmers, every bit as vicious and corrupt as the Soviet Union's pigs.