Feisty Men

I was doing research on Saturday and stumbled across this article: 11 Words We Need to Stop Using to Describe Women

I skipped past it in the results because it wasn't what I was looking for, but then scrolled back and clicked as curiosity got the better of me. While I definitely agree with many of these words being eliminated from descriptions of women (and I could add at least one more), one of them stopped me short. Feisty.

The article says: "When was the last time you heard someone describe a "feisty" man?"

That would be last week. Yes, I call the guys I work with feisty ALL THE TIME! Seriously. All. The. Time. Just because the author of this article has never heard it, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Join me in calling men feisty, people! It's an awesome word.

The word she should have put on this list and didn't is bitch.

I don't care if another woman is using the word, it is not friendly and it is not something we're taking back, which is what I've heard others claim. All women are doing by using this word in relation to other women is giving men more license to use it. And believe me, men use it enough without our encouraging it.

When I use the word--and I do--it is 100% insult.

There's a image I saw online of a woman holding a sign that says: "Not your bitch." Exactly.

Re-Learning

From 9th grade through my freshman year in college, I took German classes. I was actually dreaming in German about the same time I quit, which IIRC someone mentioned is a precursor to fluency. Of course, I didn't know that at the time and 19 year olds shouldn't be allowed to make life decisions. :-) Or at least me at 19 shouldn't have been making these types of decisions. By the time I realized my mistake, the university wanted me to take the placement test again (I'd already taken it before my freshman year because of my 4 years of high school German) and the cost of this test was expensive for a full-time student.

Since then I've entertained the idea of taking German again because it can't be as hard to learn a second time as it was the first, right? But while I did buy a computer-based German language program, one lesson showed me that it was going to be a challenge to relearn. This was at the same time that I was dealing with a house in Minnesota while I was living in Atlanta, aging parents who were still living in Minneapolis, and later, moving, my mom's death, moving my dad in with me, writing, etc. It went on the back burner.

In June, I received an email that I could get two audio programs for one credit, and of course, I went to check it out. There at the bottom of the page was a language learning system. I perked up. One credit would get me lessons 1-5 and 6-10 in German. I decided it was worth a shot.

At the time, I figured since it was audio learning only, I could listen to it in my car while I commuted. But I tried out the first lesson at home one evening and decided it required too much focus and I needed to keep my attention on the road. I decided to keep it to the evenings.

I'm through lesson 2 now and this method seems to be working for me better than the computer-based program did. Words started coming back to me and I was able to understand the rudimentary conversations on the audio. I'm not getting too excited yet. Lesson 2 is pretty darn early in the learning process and things will only get more difficult going forward, but I'm heartened that I am managing to re-learn.

Hey, You Guys!

A while back I came across an article that listed five things (I think it was five) that you should never say at work. Curious, I decided to check it out. IIRC, I'd never heard four of the five spoken at work. I'm saying IIRC because I read this article a couple of weeks ago and moved on, thinking I'd never want to reread it. The problem was that one of those items has been bugging me and now I'm blogging about it. :-)

Anyway, one of the five is what has been gnawing at me. The article said never say "You guys" because it makes your female colleagues feel as if you don't value them or BS like that.

Seriously? Dudes, I'm from Minnesota. Almost everyone uses "you guys" as a plural form of you. There is no sexism involved. In this context, guys has no gender identification. It's no different than saying "youse" or "y'all." It is a plural.

I've heard linguistics talk about this on podcasts. English lost the second person plural and we've been trying to recreate it ever since. Where you live determines which choice you make. For example, Minnesota uses "You Guys." I promise you there is nothing sexist about it. It's not exclusionary in the least, it's just our dialect. (PS: Lots of other areas of the country say you guys too!)

This is the first time I've ever seen someone misunderstand what you guys means in such a blatant manner. I'm a female. If someone addresses a group I'm in as you guys, I don't feel less valued. Hell, I don't even think about it because this is such a natural way of speaking.

Maybe other areas of the country who use a different plural you don't know this? But I think that's wrong. I've moved to the south and the favorite is y'all. Still, no one here seems to misunderstand what I mean when I say you guys. This kind of leaves me thinking that the writer him or herself doesn't like guys as a second person plural and took the opportunity to try and quash it. The problem is this is a dialect. Good luck beating that out of people who learned this from the cradle.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Language is an interesting thing. How it changes, how we use it, the regional differences, and of course, the differences between English spoken in the US versus English spoken in the UK. I admit to being a total geek when it comes to linguistics/usage.

Recently, I had a chance to think about yes, yep, and yeah because of a self-realization. I almost never use the word yes. In fact, I'm the most likely to use it as an expression of excitement, like when my baseball team scores the winning run in a game, I'll holler yessssss! But in conversation? It's almost always yeah.

I know that yeah is considered lazy and colloquial, something that shouldn't be used professionally or in formal circumstances, but it's really difficult to change.

Some research shows that changing yes to yeah or yep is natural for English speakers because it takes less breath to say yeah and yep is even easier. This is per an answer on Quora about why three different ways to say the same thing emerged.

The title I used for this post makes me think of the Beatles, but my language pattern was in place long before I ever heard of them. Heck, it was in place long before I ever heard any rock music. As I blogged at the beginning of November, my parents didn't listen to music very often. Their radio station of choice had news, weather, recipes, etc.

It makes me wonder if yeah is a Minnesota/Minneapolis thing. Minnesota had a lot of settlement from Norway, Sweden, and Germany and the word for yes in all three languages is ja.

This answer makes the most sense to me, so I'm going with it unless something better comes along.

The Invisible Said

To paraphrase Mark Twain, The reports of Said's death have been greatly exaggerated.

There are writers--newer writers--going through contortions to not use the word said in their stories. "Said is Dead" proclaims the graphic I see pinned on Pinterest over and over and over again. It also includes a list of words to use instead. But said is not dead, said isn't even ill.

The beauty of said is that it's an invisible word. Readers register it, of course, but they don't stop reading because of it. I humbly suggest that this is not the case with many of the contortion words.

"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too," the witch cackled.

Writers aren't normal, I know that, but the word cackle stops me. Cackled? I try to picture someone cackling while talking. It's like reading a sentence that says, "That's funny," he laughed. I mean, I guess you could laugh and talk at the same time, but this isn't a smooth dialogue tag. This is a conspicuous flashing red tag.

His laugh started low and rumbled up his chest before escaping. "That's funny," Jack said.

See how said kind of disappears? See how the focus is on the character and his words, not on the writer's choice of dialogue tag?

The job of a writer is to get out of the way. The reader shouldn't be thinking about you, about your choice of words, about how you put a sentence together. If you're so hugely worried about using said too many times, write your story so that you don't need a dialogue tag every time someone talks.

Jack's laugh started low and rumbled up his chest before escaping. He gave his kid brother a light punch on the biceps before his expression sobered. "That's funny, but Mom and Dad won't feel that way. If I were you, I'd keep that information quiet."

We know it's Jack speaking because of the action in front of the dialogue. No tag necessary.

The next time you read a book, try to remain semi-aware of the dialogue tags. Did any of them make you hesitate even for a split second as you read? Were any of those the word said? I'm willing to bet it wasn't. I'm willing to bet that the reading stumble happened on she cackled, he laughed, she hissed, he shouted rather than on he said.

Plus, seriously, some of the dialogue tag substitutes for said are lazy writing. He shouted. Okay, so instead of showing me he was mad, you're telling me he's mad with that tag.

That's not to say that said is the only choice. It's not, of course. There are times you'll want to use something different and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with choosing to use he shouted if that's the best way to tell the story. It's not fine if you're thinking, well, I used said ten pages ago, I better not use it again, so let's see, what can I use instead?

There's a lot of pluses to the invisible said. Don't go through contortions to avoid using it.

Language Geek

As a word geek, I've always had an interest in language and linguistics. I even took a linguistics class as a freshman in college. I've listened to several History of English books and podcasts, but recently I found a college-level linguistics class taught by a professor on Audible. There's actually a whole series of different lectures in different disciplines.

One of the lectures was about how languages change through semantic drift and vowels/consonants soften over time. A T becomes a D sound for example. What was really interesting to me, though, was when he discussed Shakespeare.

The professor said (and apologies because I don't remember his name and I'm too lazy to look it up) that if he goes to see a Shakespeare play at the theater without pre-reading it, he doesn't enjoy it and it's difficult to understand what's going on. He talked about seeing the faces of people in the theater at intermission and how so many of them didn't appear to be enjoying the experience. He said it's because the English language has had so much semantic drift from when Shakespeare wrote his plays to now.

As a Shakespeare geek, I'll confess this is true. I always pre-read his plays before I go to the theater because the professor is exactly right--the meaning of words has changed a lot.

The example he gave was Romeo and Juliet. That scene when Juliet stands on the balcony, Romeo on the ground below, and says: "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" He said that we take this as where are you, Romeo and we think it odd because he's right there.

But that isn't what she's saying. According to the professor, in Shakespeare's time, wherefore meant why. What she is saying is: Why are you Romeo? Which makes a lot more sense with the lines that came next about "deny thy father and refuse thy name." She's lamenting that he's a Montague and she's a Capulet, that their families are enemies, that they can't be a normal couple.

I ran into something similar in my Shakespeare class. In Hamlet, he tells Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery."

Of course, I took nunnery to mean convent and that made a kind of sense in context. Then I learned that nunnery was slang in Shakespeare's time for a whorehouse. That totally changed the meaning of that scene.

Even today, we see words change their definition. To my great dismay on some things, on others, I think it's a good thing. Like the word decimate. To me it means destroy, more than destroy. It means to all but wipe out the enemy or whatever. And I was corrected by someone who said decimate means to reduce by 10%.

Okay, maybe it meant that once, but look at dictionary.com now. That's a secondary definition, a signal of how the meaning of that word has shifted over time.

This kind of thing fascinates me--like I said, word geek--and I love regionalisms like pop vs. soda vs. Coke, etc. As you can imagine, I'm totally geeking out listening to this audio university lecture series and I have hours more to go. Yea!

Guten Tag

Right before Christmas, I received an email offering a huge discount on computer language programs. This is the same company I bought the Spanish program from and I was impressed with their program, but I'd done the one thing I was afraid I'd do. I stopped doing my Spanish lessons.

But oh, look, German 1-5 is available for way cheaper than I've ever seen it and I want to relearn the German I learned in school.

No, I told myself. Look what happened with Spanish. You really wanted to learn Spanish, too, and you got squeezed for time and never picked it up again. You sure as heck aren't spending all that money on another language until you learn the first one.

Um, yes, I talk to myself. Anyway, I strongly resisted the desire to buy the German language program. Besides, if I really wanted to relearn German, there are podcasts and I still have my old textbooks. (At least I think I do. I did purge a lot of books before moving to Atlanta.)

Days go by, maybe even a full week and I'd think of that offer on and off, but I would repeat the reasons why I couldn't buy it.

And then the company sent out a reminder email and that the offer was only good through Dec 23rd. The added enticement of free overnight shipping was tossed in. You know what happened next.

Guten tag. Ich bin Patti und Sie? Wie geht es Ihnen?

It's Alive!

I was reading an article about 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes and found myself nodding my head at some of them. Lie/Lay/Lain/Laid/Etc. Yeah. I get so confused with that. I try my best, but I count on editing to catch when I slip.

My other huge, huge issue is Affect and Effect. Gah! No matter how many times I read over the rule and study examples, it doesn't sink in. I've actually rewritten sentences to avoid using either word or I substitute something like impact which I'm sure makes all grammarians everywhere grimace with disgust, but hey, at least I don't have to chose between affect and effect and that's always a win.

But there was one entry, that made me go, uh, no. That was the definition of the word moot. The article says:

Contrary to common misuse, "moot" doesn’t imply something is superfluous. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion.

I hang around with writers online. A lot of them. I went to school with some really smart people, both high school and college. There are lots of smart people that I work with and have worked with over the years. I have never, ever in all this time heard anyone use the word moot in this way.

English is a living language, that means it changes over time. I submit that the definition of the word moot has made the shift and it's time for the dictionary to be updated. I'm sure I've made the hardcore English gurus gasp in horror, but tough. If you want a language that is unchanging, become a Latin guru. It's a dead language, it will stay the same forever.

As far as English speakers (at least in the US) are concerned, moot means there's no point in arguing over something because it doesn't matter.

Words shift all the time. Look at decimate. I had a judge in a writing contest a long time ago correct my use of it. I used it to mean destroy, she insisted that it means take a tenth of or destroy a tenth of. Look it up on Dictionary.com. The meaning the judge told me was the correct one? It's marked obsolete!

The people have spoken...and as we've spoken, we've redefined words. Just try and read Shakespeare now without the little footnotes at the bottom of the page explaining what a word meant back in his day. I'm a huge Shakespeare fan and I can mostly understand what he's saying from the context, but the meaning of words has definitely changed.

They're still changing. I'd argue some more, but why bother? It's a moot point. ;-)

Language Pet Peeves

Every now and then on writers' loops, discussion arises about language pet peeves. There are things that bother others that don't bother me at all--like when someone answers "No problem" when someone else says, "Thank you." I confess that I'm guilty of No Problem, which is maybe why it doesn't bug me.

I have issues with other things.

I could care less. Um, no. It's I couldn't care less. If you say I could care less, it's denoting the opposite of what you're trying to convey. This makes me grind my teeth every time I hear it.

It's a mute point. The word is moot. There's no such thing as a mute point, thank you very much.

Strange apostrophe usage. As in putting apostrophes where no apostrophe belongs, or not putting apostrophes where one does belong. Prime example is its/it's. The car lost its hubcap. No apostrophe because I'm not saying: The car lost it is hubcap.

Irregardless. There is no such word. Regardless is the proper word. Go with it.

a lot is two words. all right is two words. It's not alright.

To be fair, English is a living language and it changes as people use it. In fact, I love how vibrant the language is. It's very possible that some day alot will be one word and alright will be in the dictionary. That's okay. I think the biggest change is going to come in computer tech words.

Copyeditors have continually changed my internet (lower case i) to Internet (capitalized). I don't think capitalizing internet is going to last much longer. They hyphenate my email to make it e-mail. I believe the AP Stylebook has already changed this to no hyphen. I don't hyphenate any of the "e" terms, not ebook, not epublisher, nothing. I can't wait for this change in language to happen. Right now I have auto correct setup to make these into "proper" usage when I write them the way I think they should be. :-)

One of my favorite things is when they report the new words that have made the cut for the dictionary for the year. I know, I'm a geek, but it's cool to watch words be born.