By Michael Lewis
Monday, November 01, 2021
Language, the soul and tool of politics, is only rarely
the subject of politics. But in the past few years, and with baffling speed,
language has moved to the center of public life. The political conversation
today churns with terms unfamiliar a few years ago: Latinx and BIPOC,
cisgender and heteronormative, deadnaming and preferred
pronouns. Some of these neologisms were made necessary by changing social
realities. Others were created precisely to change those realities. For
example, there was no need for Harvard School of Medicine to coin the phrase
“birthing people” as a substitute for “mothers,” other than to topple the
notion that only women can give birth.
Such terms emerge from the world of identity politics,
the militant branch of the contemporary American left. And it is only natural
that a movement that thinks in terms of racial and sexual identity would fixate
on the words that define identity, to seek to control it. There are words that
you may never say and there are words that you must always say, and a single
misstep can bring serious, even career-ending consequences.
A term like birthing people may be good
for a laugh, but not for those on the front lines of the identity movement. A
California law, Senate Bill 219, would have punished nursing-home employees
with up to a year in prison for repeated use of the wrong pronouns, a practice
known as “misgendering.” That law was overturned by a California court of
appeals in June. In this and other court cases, the First Amendment has
acted as a shield against compelled speech. But if freedom of speech has
long been regarded in this country as something sacred, so too is the freedom
from discrimination. Canada’s Bill C-16, which in 2017 amended the
Canadian Human Rights Act to include “gender identity or expression,” makes the
use of the wrong pronoun punishable by two years in prison. Canada does
not have a First Amendment—and it is now possible to imagine a scenario in
which ours is made to give way to an expanded understanding of civil rights.
How did this come about? How did the linguistic ground
beneath our feet, the bedrock of Shakespeare and Orwell, turn to quicksand and
so swiftly? The rise of identity politics—itself a neologism of the
1980s—offers only a partial explanation. We must look in another quarter
entirely to understand what has transformed our relationship to the words we
use.
* * *
Every language is a work in progress, in perpetual
flux. By the time one is 20, one knows this from personal experience,
having observed new words come and go, some of them sticking. One can see this
in graphic form with the Google Ngram Viewer, which shows the frequency with
which any given word or phrase appears in printed texts. One can plug in a word
and watch its rise and fall over the decades. (My students are usually
surprised that no one said pasta before about 1980, for
example, or that relatable in the sense of “personally
relevant” dates to only about 2010.)
But if the law of language is change, it is not formless
change. To have a written language, and not a merely spoken one, is to be in
constant contact with its past. So long as a work of literature is still
read, its phraseology and vocabulary persist as a substrate; they are the
anchor, as it were, that counterbalances the sails of random change.
English has had two great anchors: the King James Bible
and the works of Shakespeare. They came into being at about the same time,
that moment around 1600 when modern English can be said to have emerged in its
definitive form. Here Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French fused in a way that preserved
the character of each, giving the speaker of English a linguistic keyboard with
a remarkably expressive range, letting one glide in an instant from tangible,
pungent concreteness at the lower end to lofty Latinate abstractions at the
upper. No other European language has anything like English’s battery of
synonyms, which permit us to make the finest of social distinctions. There is a
reason why drama is the essential contribution of English to world culture.
Because of their cultural prestige, Shakespeare and the
King James Bible influenced every succeeding generation of writers. And so,
four centuries later, they remain largely accessible to us (although you might
have to refresh yourself on the meaning of quietus or bare
bodkin). The same language spoken at the Elizabethan court was still
serviceable to the world of the Industrial Revolution and into the Cold
War. But the social revolutions of the 1960s put strains on English that
went beyond mere words to confront the structure of the language itself.
The civil-rights movement, momentous though it was, put
no great emphasis on language. It did effect one significant reform, although
from an unlikely direction. In the summer of 1968, the singer James Brown
recorded a top-selling soul single with a euphoric call-and-response plea to
“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” The phrase had a galvanizing effect on
both blacks and whites. Black was a word that in sound and dignity was
equivalent to white; even better, it was a word proposed from within the
community and not assigned from outside. It was adopted virtually overnight.
Terms such as Negro and colored, which had previously been the
polite alternatives, came to sound out of touch, if not outright offensive.
It was not so easy for the women’s movement to achieve a
similar linguistic parity. Traditional sex roles had embedded themselves not
only in the words of the language but in its structure and grammar. English
itself was a “sexist language,” a phrase that first appeared in an essay of
1971 by Ethel Strainchamps. While the words man and woman were
ostensibly equal counterparts, they were not used equally. Women were as likely
to be called girls, females, or ladies—the
connotation of the latter word particularly amused Strainchamps. (Why was it,
she wondered, that one referred to “Republican ladies” but never to “Communist
ladies” or “Black Panther ladies”?)
The principal bone of contention was that women were
addressed in a way that declared their marital status, as Mrs. or Miss, and
expressed their social identity in terms of their relationship to a
man. The solution to this was the neologism Ms., which was to
be the pendant to Mr. It had been proposed as early as 1901,
but now it was reborn as the title of Ms. magazine, which
debuted in December 1971 as a supplement to New York. Like James
Brown’s song, that title both identified a problem and offered a
solution. It was a curious fiction of a term, as it was an abbreviation
with no word behind it. It prevailed, but not without a struggle. One
of the last holdouts, oddly enough, was the New York Times, which
did not adopt the term until 1986.
That first issue of Ms. featured a
furiously ambitious article called “Desexing the Language,” by the feminist
writers Casey Miller and Kate Swift. To repair the problems diagnosed by
Strainchamps, their solution was radical surgery. Any word or structure
suggestive of traditional sex roles was inherently degrading to women, and the
language should be remorselessly purged of them. All sex-specific job titles
were to be made androgynous; out went fireman and stewardess,
in came firefighter and flight attendant. Also to
be purged were any conventional words or phrases that included the word man,
of which there are an endless variety, e.g., mankind, manpower, manhandle, freshman, one-man
show, man the lifeboats, etc. Substitutes were eventually found
for each of these, with varying degrees of success.
As successful as Miller and Swift were with these causes,
other aspects of their program left the public cold. The authors made much
of the iniquity of using the masculine pronoun he as the
generic pronoun corresponding to anyone (as in “if anyone
comes late, he won’t be admitted”). They were not satisfied with the customary
alternatives of he and she or the time-honored they,
which was grammatically incorrect but good enough for Shakespeare and Jane
Austen. Instead, they introduced a gender-neutral pronoun of their own
devising, which they designated the “human pronoun,” complete with a table
showing the declension of tey, ter, and tem (as
in “if anyone comes late, tey won’t be admitted; oh, alright, let tem in”).
Here the public drew a line. The fact is that the
American public has always had a fine ear for linguistic absurdities. That
ear provides the limiting principle that restrains the impulse to reform
everything.1 When the publisher Robert McCormick introduced
“sane spelling” in his Chicago Tribune, the public laughed at
follies such as fantom, doctrin, or jaz. And yet
at the same time, it saw the elegant logic of simplified spellings such
as catalog and thru.
It is one thing to adopt new words, quite another to
learn a new set of grammatical rules—just as it is one thing to remove the
suffix man from chairman and quite another to remove it
from woman. When students at Antioch College proudly formed
the Antioch Womyn’s Center in 1978, it was generally taken as a gag. And
so, by the end of the decade, the linguistic map had been redrawn, some but not
all of the feminist demands met. Flight attendant? Yes. Tey and ter?
No.
But how is it that the same culture that could mock these
pronouns a generation or so ago is now diligently declaring its own pronouns?
The answer: It is not the same culture.
* * *
In the summer of 2013, an Army private and intelligence
analyst was court-martialed for espionage and sentenced to 35 years (and
subsequently pardoned by President Obama). One day after receiving that
sentence, Bradley Manning publicly became Chelsea Manning and asserted the
right to be referred to by female pronouns. Sexual-reassignment surgery
was no longer a novelty by 2013, but this was a particularly sensational case
in which some of the most contentious issues of the day converged: the passing
of government secrets to Wikileaks, the rightness of the Iraq War, and the
transgender experience. For the first time, the general public became
aware that there was such a thing as a “preferred pronoun” and that it was a
matter of common courtesy to use it.
The media complied with Manning’s request, and with a
comprehensiveness not possible a generation earlier. There had been
earlier transgender celebrities—the writer Jan Morris, the musician Wendy
Carlos—and they had been treated respectfully, without any collective
soul-searching about one’s own pronouns. In a digital age, when Wikipedia was
coming to possess an authority exceeding that of the Oxford English
Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica combined,
the application of preferred pronouns could be instantaneous and even made
retroactive. Earlier references to Bradley Manning as “he” could be
digitally scrubbed. Manning did not become a woman but
had always been a woman, which would turn to be more than a
semantic difference. To continue to refer to Chelsea as Bradley was to
“deadname” her and affront her human dignity. It would not take long for what
would have been considered a faux pas to become a demeaning, possibly criminal
act.
It is impossible to imagine any of this could have
happened without the digital revolution. Miller and Swift’s call for a
human pronoun had fallen on deaf ears. It would have taken innumerable
editors and publishers to sign on to their crusade and (barring a catchy new
James Brown song to make the case), it still would have faltered. But Miller
and Swift did not have Facebook at their disposal.
In 2014, the online platform gave its 1 billion-plus
users the option of choosing from among 56 genders (including pangender, neutrois,
and two-spirit). So began the second great campaign to reform the
language. If feminism had been the prime mover of the first, the second would
be dominated by the movement for transgender rights.
Black Lives Matter, for all its ubiquity in public life
today, has had no great quarrel with the English language, not like that of the
transgender movement. The transgender critique does not so much build on the
earlier feminist one, which paved its way, as invert it. The feminist critic
would say that there were two sexes, and not to treat them equally was
oppressive and discriminatory; the transgender critic would say that it was
oppressive and discriminatory to point out that there were two sexes. Such an
attitude is scorned as “gender normativity,” which is to be swept from the
language by removing sex or gender from all terms for kinship. Not brothers
and sisters but siblings; not husband and wife but spouses;
not man and woman, but person. A 2017 article in an
academic publication with the instructive name of the Journal of Language
and Discrimination gives practical suggestions on how to make language
trans-inclusive. For example, the sentence “Women often grow up being taught to
accommodate others’ needs” can be rewritten as “People assigned female at birth
(often) grow up being taught to accommodate others’ needs.” By this logic, a
term such as birthing people becomes not only comprehensible but more or
less obligatory.
Languages change, as we have seen, but not at random. The
tendency is almost always toward concision and clarity, giving rise to that
great time-saver, the contraction. “People assigned female at birth,”
however, is the very opposite of a contraction; it is not a word but a short
story. And a speech or essay peppered with such circumlocutions will be a
dreary slog indeed. It grates like fingernails on the chalkboard to anyone who
has read Macbeth or knows Psalm 23. But who does
nowadays?
The tolerance of the public toward ever more cumbersome
circumlocutions is a great paradox. Is it out of a general sense of anxiety and
the fear that one will be ostracized for dissenting and be cancelled
(another characteristic word of the day)? Or is it that a nonreading public
does not have a sufficiently developed ear to recognize verbal horror when it
hears it? A half century of determined attempts to reform the English
language—none of which paid the slightest heed to its aural and rhythmic qualities—has
done a good deal of collateral damage. It has certainly done the ear no good.
One can follow the declension in subsequent renditions of Matthew 4:4, “Man
does not live on bread alone,” from “Human Beings cannot live on bread alone” (Good
News Bible, 1976) to “No one can live only on food” (Contemporary
English Version, 1995).
It is not only that the insertion of sex-neutral language
has drained the aphorism of its cadence, but that it has made literal what was
metaphorical. The gorgeous alignment of idea, imagery, and sound that gave
us Matthew’s poetic aphorism has given way to a bald platitude whose individual
elements seem to have been pried apart, translated piecemeal by Google
translator, and clicked back into place. (The editor of that last edition
noted that he based his language, at least in part, on how it was used in
television.)
* * *
Whatever else our ongoing process of linguistic
revisionism has achieved, it has not made the language more beautiful or
richer. It has certainly taught writers to be cautious. It is not that
they are fearful of taboos, which are great aids to a writer. All
languages have taboos, those fixed and stable rules that a child learns
naturally. They constitute the boundaries within which the game of
language is played, and the testing of those boundaries, even stepping slightly
out of bounds with a slightly indelicate aside, constitutes one of the
principal delights of language. But when the taboos are unseen and
constantly shifting, like buried land mines in the field rather than bright
lines on its edges, one must step as though through a minefield, and language
becomes flat and banal. The fear of giving offense to even a single reader
is fatal to vibrant prose (although that single reader, we all know by now, can
do a great deal of damage with a single tweet).
A language purged of all figurative and allusive imagery,
relentlessly literal and radically present-oriented, is a pitiful (and
pitiless) instrument of communication. Any piece of prose that rises above
the level of an assembly manual operates at multiple levels, from the factual
to the imaginative, and requires good will on the part of the listener to grasp
a speaker’s idea. After all, an idea is an intangible thing and must be brought
into being by figural language.
But that is precisely what our identity-conscious
linguistic revisionism has virtually ruled out by teaching people to read
literally, rather than imaginatively; to look for certain words and
formulations; and to judge prose by their presence or absence. And when those
readers, shielded by the digitally enforced information silos in which they are
confined, come across unfamiliar words or old-fashioned formulations, they are
startled and liable to take the jolt of surprise as something
unpleasant. It is the debilitating susceptibility that comes from
isolation from outside irritants, much like the recent rise of allergies in
children not exposed to certain foods. For the contemporary reader, much
of English literature can induce a kind of moral peanut allergy.
All this occurred with little protest from those who were
the traditional guardians of the language, the teachers and professors of
English and linguistics. But these guardians had long since become
“descriptivists,” detached watchers of how language is used rather than enforcers
of its rules (who are now known benightedly as “prescriptivists”).
For the descriptivist, mistakes of grammar were
themselves authentic speech; all dialects were equally valid, and there was no
such thing as a standard language. “A language,” so ran the sneer, “is simply a
dialect with an army.” But as Jacques Barzun liked to point out, a
standard language is the most democratic thing of all; it makes the dweller of
a village, able to communicate with a few hundred people at most, a citizen of
a country.
In the end, this is the worst, if unintended, consequence
of our half century of linguistic revisionism. It estranges us from our
own language, pushes our language away from us as if it were an anthropological
artifact so as to view it from a distance, not only critically but
suspiciously, and as an instrument of oppression. But to try to cleanse a
language of all the bad things that can be done with its words is to
confuse ends and means. It is an endless and hopeless task. And to be alienated
from your own language is to be alienated from yourself. No wonder people
are so angry. And who’s to say that a term such as birthing people won’t
soon be supplanted by another on the grounds that it, too, is a criminal
violation of fairness, given that it is, shall we say, species-normative?
1 One sometimes reads that Americans were
so consumed by anti-German hysteria during World War I that they replaced
words such as sauerkraut and German Measles with liberty
cabbage and liberty measles. In fact, these were
ironic suggestions, briefly commented on with amusement at the time, and never
really taken seriously.
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