Fool's Errand

Okay, I need to spend some time on here someday to fix up what needs fixin' on this page...but that might be a few months, and in the meantime, you're welcome to the journal...I'm hoping to keep it daily, or as close as a father/husband/tutor/childcare worker/editor/performance poet/journalist can manage...multiple projects coming up over the next 4 months, and I'm hoping to document some of them here. Next week: two face-to-face interviews, one with a jazz musician, one with a head of business with a group that 'culturally integrates' expats here in Munich...and the usual stuff, English with Sophia (5) and Moritz (10) and 6 hours with the pre-school bunch just watching and playing. Plus work on Trip.

Anyway, time's pressing, I need to get off the computer so my daughter can play on National Geographic Kids...but, the promised passage from Pinker. The book again is 'The Language Instinct,' and it's worth it for the linguistic gems peppered throughout alone...among which is Pinker's debunking of the '14-400 words for snow' among Eskimos. It's also pretty accessible for what it is...there's not too much grammar to wade through, but there's enough to stretch most people's grasp. As a sample of the content AND the writing style, I offer the below:

'Sometimes an alleged grammatical "error" is logical not only in the sense of "rational" but in the sense of respecting distinctions made by the formal logician. Consider this alleged barbarism, brought up by nearly every language maven:

Everyone returned to their seats.
Anyone who thinks a Yonex raquet has improved their game, raise your hand.
If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone.
Someone dropped by but they didn't say what they wanted.
No one should have to sell their home to pay for medical care.
He's one of those guys who's always patting themself on the back. (an actual quote from Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye")

They explain: "everyone" means "every one," a singular subject, which may not serve as the antecedent of a plural pronoun like "them" later in the sentence. "Everyone returned to his seat," they insist. "If anyone calls, tell him I can't come to the phone."

If you were the target of these lessons, at this point you might be getting a bit uncomfortable. "Everyone returned to his seat" makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission to be in the audience, and everone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph. If there is a good chance that a caller may be female, it is odd to ask one's roommate to tell him anything (even if you are not among the people who are concerned about "sexist language"). Such feelings of disquiet--a red flag to any serious linguist--are well founded in this case. The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:

Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.

Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible "improvement," Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively graps is that "everyone" and "they" are not an "antecedent" and a "pronoun" referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a "quantifier" and a "bound variable," a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means "For all X, X returned to X's seat." The "X" does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across defferent relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The "their" there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The same goes for the hypothetical caller: there may be one, there may be none, or the phone might ring off the hook with would-be suitors; all that matters is that every time there is a caller, if there is a caller, that caller, and not someone else, should be put off.

On logical grounds, then, variables are not the same thing as the more familiar "referential" pronouns that trigger number agreement ("he" meaning some particular guy, "they" meaning some particular bunch of guys). Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy; a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable. Since these are not real referential pronouns but only homonyms of them, there is no reason that the vernacular decision to borrow "they," "their," "them" for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists' recommendation of "he," "him," "his." Indeed, "they" has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.'




----A bit arcane, unless you like language issues, I know. But if you do, the book is a very valuable resource--about 430 pages in paperback incarnation, and much more amusing than any linguistic thesis probably has any right to be.

Next up on the reading list: "The Terrorism Reader," edited by David J. Whittaker. &...this weekend is mum's day, so, might be Monday before I come back...or, might not.