20151205.0720

Work continues. I intend to spend much of the day today at work with grading. When I manage to get the grading cleared, I will tend to the next freelance project that faces me--which ought to be fun, actually. The new project is one of the back-fill type I get every so often, looking at older materials that have been brought to new prominence. Working on such projects allows me to catch up on some of the reading I have long thought I ought to do but have not done due to the press of other reading that work demands I do. So that much is to the good.

I finally broke down and went to a clinic about the cough and cold I have been fighting for a long while now. The Mrs. persuaded me into it--not that it took much argument on her part, and not that I was actively resistant to doing so. (That I had not done so earlier is a measure more of my being lazy, tired, or otherwise taken up more than anything else.) I came away from the clinic with a couple of prescriptions--both filled--and a strong suggestion for an over-the-counter drug, and I have begun the course of treatment laid out for me. How much it will help is not yet clear to me, although I have to think that it will. I am tired of being sick. (I am also tired of being tired, but with exams coming next week, a little bit of rest is in view--after which I will be working again.)

One of the things I do in support of my teaching is maintain membership in the National Council of Teachers of English. As part of that membership, I receive a daily digest of online discussions among the membership. Recently, news has broken about the Washington Post allowing the use of singular they (here*), something about which I have commented on occasion (examples are here and here). With that news has come another onslaught of expressed vexation about the purported degradation of language from those who see themselves as bastions of good taste, "logic," and "linguistic principles." Never mind that the linguists I know--and I know a fair number--look at language as an evolving thing, not a static one; for them, change is change is change. Never mind that even in languages that track grammatical gender more rigorously than modern English there is not a necessary association of physical gender and grammatical gender. (I have noted before a case in German, here.) Never mind that taste--even good taste--changes, as should be evident from simply observing the world.

That there is so much resistance to such changes among those who teach in the liberal arts--even at the university level, I might note--and that the changes are coming from the private sector and from the expressed will of the people--that theoretical thing that is supposed to determine how the affairs of any just society are to be conducted, at least in the lip-service paid by many--seems to me to be at odds with much of the bilge pumped out from the mouths and keyboards of pundits I have heard and read and seen. But that will, of course, not matter; facts too seldom do.

*The piece also comments about the use by the New York Times of the gender-neutral courtesy title "Mx." I like this one, actually; it is simple, and it is accordant enough with existing forms that it does not strike the eye as too strange to use. I can see that it might produce confusion in such situations as my discussions of my family--while "the Mx." and "Mx. 8" might be fine, trying to differentiate among references to the many people in the family who would be "Mx. Name" would be a challenge. (Since I have a doctorate, I stand aside from the problem--I do not generally respond to "Mr. Name" anymore. I worked hard to be "Dr. Name" and am lucky to be able to claim "Prof. Name" at present.) Even "Mr. Name" while I lived with my parents and there were three people at the same address who could and should answer to that phrase was...interesting. So I suppose that the potential confusion is not enough of a reason not to move in such a way.