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12/10/2024

This is an interesting perspective on using "you guys": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/opinion/you-guys-everyone.html #

John McWhorter, "Who Are You Calling ‘You Guys’? Everyone, Actually." _The New York Times_, December 5, 2024. Some excerpts:
Audrey Bilger, the president of Reed College, might have put this debate on the map in 2002, with an influential call to stop using “you guys” as a term of address for women, writing that “calling women ‘guys’ makes femaleness invisible.” That idea found some traction in the tech industry, among other places; one start-up invited employees to put a dollar in a glass jar each time they used the phrase in this manner. The novelist Alice Walker said the use of the term to refer to women reflected a “fear of being feminine.”
Some of those critics advise us to substitute “you all,” “all,” “folks” or “people.” Some have even suggested “y’all,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.
From my observation of the speech patterns of girls and young women — including my daughters and students — I think “you guys” is a horse too far out of the barn to be roped back in. For one thing, as some of the critics note, many of the people who use “you guys” to refer to women are themselves women. (Same goes for “dude” and even “bruh,” as in “brother.”) Trying to stop them or anyone else from speaking this way would be like trying to stop people from saying, “And I was like ….” . . . .
Psychological experiments have since proved otherwise, confirming that a masculine pronoun primes people to think primarily of men.
But “you guys” does something different, having traveled a well-worn pathway from a word with a specific, fixed meaning into something more — an element of grammar. . . .
The word has come to mark “you” as plural (note that we don’t say “you guy”), a very handy grammatical function that many other languages address with a single pronoun. “Guys” can still mean “a collection of men,” but it also means something quite different. It’s not the only example of a word that has evolved in completely divergent ways. Another is the N-word, which occurs in two versions: one a vicious slur, the other a term of affection. The kinder version emerged from the other, but it is not the same word at all.
But why “guys”? We wouldn’t address a room full of men as “you girls.” One reason is that English lacks a warm, relatable word for women. “Ladies” is dainty. “Sisters,” beyond Black English, sounds like nuns. “Gals” is a touch comic and perhaps a tad vintage — a little hair spray and Jell-O molds, to my ear.
Another reason is that English is, in general, somewhat pronoun-starved. Other languages almost always have a richer array. . . .
When women call one another “you guys,” “dude” or “bruh,” I don’t hear a fear of being women. They have sapped the gender from a masculine word in order to use it for their own purposes. I hear it as progress.

The story of how a gendered word became a universal pronoun says a lot about how language evolves.

03/09/2024

Adjective order: So, there's supposedly a rule for what order native English speakers typically put cumulative adjectives in. But I'm finding conflicts in different places on what that order is. Is it size, shape, condition, age (Allyn & Bacon Handbook)? Or size, shape, age (https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/)? Or size, age, shape (https://proedit.com/unwritten-adjective-rule/)? I've struggled with strings like "divorced Korean Christian men," so somewhere along the line I found that religion goes between material and qualifier, which puts it after origin. The article below suggests some times when exceptions to the "rule" may be made, which might be helpful to non-native English speakers.

The unwritten adjective rule prescribes the order in which adjectives should be listed by attribute category. Everyone seems to use it, but no one knows it.

02/21/2023

Here's an article that gives a different perspective on people-first language:

What person-first language fails to recognize is that disability is an essential part of identity for many disabled people.

09/03/2022

I can't help but think that changing a person's pronoun mid-sentence or mid-paragraph or mid-conversation is just going to make it more confusing to know who is being talked about. It took me a long time to get used to my friend calling her child "they" without having to think, "oh, she's referring to her child." Can we just popularize the pronouns ze/zem/zir or one of the other options? It would make copyediting and teaching English to non-native English speakers more straightforward.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/05/people-use-pronouns/ https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/gender-neutral-pronouns

Confused about how to use gender-neutral pronouns? Here’s a brief explainer on pronouns used by people who aren't binary-identified, as well as why they're important...

06/01/2022

How to use the word "diverse" correctly.

Are you using “diverse” radically or oppressively? Here’s a handy flowchart to help you out.

07/01/2021

I was trying to decide whether I could legitimately use "Rev." in front of my name, so I did an internet search. Since it's not really a title (grammatically speaking), I think I'll stick with just using "Dr." Anyhow, I found this, which helped clarify things for me:

"Should I call you 'Reverend'?" someone asked me recently. I paused for a moment, thinking a million thoughts at once. I'm not much of a fan of the "reverend" title, in part because of its problematic grammar but mostly because I don't want to be revered. "Reverend" isn't actually a title at all; it...

03/10/2021

I thought about deleting this page because I haven't kept up with it, but it's a good place to share things like this (so I can easily find it for future use): "12 Separate Words Everyone Combines into One—But Shouldn’t"

You don't put or omit a space when speaking these words, so, when it comes time to write them, it's hard to remember whether you need one.

12/30/2019

Does anyone need any editing work done or know someone who does? I don't get another paycheck from Mid Michigan College until January 24.

07/23/2019

As we start getting ready to head back to school, here are some student paper-formatting tip sheets for those using Chicago Style: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/turabian/Student-Tip-Sheets.html

07/08/2019

This article talks about "paraphrase plagiarism" and how to avoid plagiarism in academic writings. I recommend it for all academic writers.

Many of us would benefit from frank conversations with other scholars about improper borrowing, otherwise known as plagiarism, but the topic is so hot that most professors avoid discussing it, except in warnings to their undergraduates.

07/01/2019

Here is another one of those misleading "rules" I was taught in high school: When "too" is used in the sense of "also," it should be set off by commas. Actually, according to The Chicago Manual of Style Online, commas are unnecessary with the adverb "too" in most cases. They are necessary for clarification and for emphasizing an abrupt change of thought. For example, "I like carrots and potatoes too" is unclear. To clarify, one would write either "I, too, like carrots and potatoes," or "I like not only carrots but potatoes too." As an example of commas used with "too" to designate an abrupt change of thought, Chicago offers the following humorous sentence: "He didn’t know at first what hit him, but then, too, he hadn’t ever walked in a field strewn with garden rakes" (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0004.html).

01/01/2019

How to spell and capitalize words related to the Christmas season

In appreciation of this thankless task, ACES has put together an editorial style sheet full of jolly jargon and tinselly terms. So break out the wassail (hot mulled cider) and bûche de noël (an “edible yule log”) and start celebrating.