“A society is generally as lax as its language,” or Vocabula to phonelesscord: Ohhh Snap!

To supplement my paltry salary at my (rewarding!  remember, it’s rewarding!) nonprofit job, I edit college and grad school admissions essays for an online company.  As part of this service, I rewrite essays, reorganizing them and revising them for style/concision, etc.  For the most part, this is fun work.  It is fun to go in with an objective eye and organize an essay so the client’s undergraduate research as Such And Such Biochem lab, or that eye-opening volunteer project she undertook the summer after sophomore year, or whatever, sounds really important.    And it’s fun to correct for style, and make things more concise, because, well, because I am a nerd and I like it.

 The part of this job that makes me cranky and sometimes resentful of the education system and of the lazy students who would rather pay a couple hundred dollars to a website than carefully proofread their own essay, is correcting for grammar.  I don’t mean the trickier stuff - structuring long sentences with lots of subordinate clauses, using semicolons - that’s fun.  I’m talking about misusing “its” and “it’s.”  I mean using the word “literally” for emphasis.   (Did he “literally explode with rage”?  I doubt it.  I literally doubt it.)  I correct these things, and avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented, intellectually curious, capable, motivated, and all-around snazzy as they insist throughout the essay, did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.

This leaves me feeling very much like a crotchety old lady who should just chill out and watch a sit-com.

 So I was overjoyed to read an article in the Wall Street Journal last week about a man who is even more of a crotchety old grammar-and-usage nerd than myself.  And he has a website!  The slogan of this nit-picking and very fun site?  The stern, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”  I like this.  This makes me feel like my prowling through essays for subject-verb agreement is part of some larger, more significant societal crusade.

Vocabula Review, which is both a website and paper publication, includes regular columns with great titles like Bethumped with Words, Grumbling About Grammar, and Top Twenty Dimwitticisms.  Is anyone else getting excited about this?

And then the website promptly burst my self-important bubble, when the first article I read was about a grammatical crime of which I am guilty.  Damn!  Just when I thought I was a good-guy.  The article begins,

“ When someone says we need an epicene pronoun, what do they mean?

Since when has they been third-person singular? That’s what he or she means. The epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral device for referring in the third person to the generic human being, without falling back on the discredited universal masculine or stumbling forward over the incipient singular they. “

Insert sheepish face here.  Yes, only moments ago I wrote, “… avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented …. blahblahablah … did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.”

In other words, the article opened with a massive oooooooh snap! that seemed to be directed right at me.

Obviously there is a lesson here about being judgmental, self-righteous, and cantankerous, but this post isn’t about life lessons, it’s about grammar and usage!  So, onward.

The article goes on to suggest that, instead of the awkward “s/he” or the incorrect “they,” we just invent a third person, singular, gender-neutral (epicene, if you will) pronoun.  He suggests :

For he/she: esh, hesh, heesh, shehe

For him/her: rim, mer, hmer, hrim

For his/her: ris, ser, hris, hser

Yup, they sound funny.  But witty Vocabulist Michael Berger has this to say in these new pronouns’ defense:

“Granted, a person might find the proposed candidates a bit odd and unfamiliar, but esh would get used to them, and ris vocabulary would be fully up to date with ris attitudes and social practices. A bit of an awkward start and a learning curve is a small price to pay to enable rim to refer to people individually as human beings per se.”