Pleasures of Being Home, Part 1: More Reading Time

I do not want to seem insensitive about the COVID-19 pandemic, which is in its third year and has killed far more than 6 million people worldwide. I knew a good family man who died from the coronavirus during its initial outbreak. Some of my favorite jazz musicians also succumbed to the virus, including pianist Barry Harris, saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist Ellis Marsalis, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, and trumpeter Wallace Roney, as well as the legendary playwright Terrence McNally. Many terrific small businesses, including restaurants and jazz clubs, have gone under due to the economic strains of COVID. I also feel fortunate that all I have lost is money, which, as the saying goes, isn't everything. 

In fact, my health has improved since early 2020. Before then, I would get laryngitis twice a year, sometimes more, sometimes leading to bronchitis. These ailments have disappeared from my system. I attribute this reversal of fortune to fewer rides on buses and trains in proximity to germ-carrying commuters and fewer handshakes with people attending my live classes. And health, as the saying goes, is everything.

I can think of other big benefits of quarantining at home. Since March 2020, I probably have read more than I had in the previous decade. I have been collecting books for years that I promised myself I would eventually read. As my writing consulting business grew increasingly successful, I began to think the only hope for reading those books would be retirement, incapacitation, or incarceration, but I was not planning on any of those circumstances. The pandemic offered me found time. I read scores of novels, short story collections, philosophical treatises, biographies, histories, poetry volumes, and plays. I enjoyed the time-consuming process of being transfixed by chilling chapters, rereading powerful paragraphs and scintillating sentences to examine the writers' rhetorical strategy, and delighting in their wonderful word choices. 

I am convinced that these exhilarating experiences have made me a better reader, a more powerful writer, a more informed writing teacher, and a more sensitive writing critic. By the way, my business has coming roaring back this year. Patience born from using idle time productively has paid off. The point is of this post is that you can use waiting time, from standing in line at the bank to getting through a pandemic, by entertaining and educating yourself through reading. When your turn comes, you will wonder where the time went. 

Why I Read Poetry

I read poetry nearly every day. How could I not? When Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" begins with "Who made the world?" and Rita Dove's "Canary" ends with "If you can't be free, be a mystery." When Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness" begins with "The name of the author is the first to go" and Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" ends with "we were never meant to survive." 

I read poetry because of the focus it brings to my daily activities, the pleasure it brings to my professional responsibilities, the surprise it brings to my ill-advised assumptions, the inspiration it brings to my human interactions, and the serenity it brings to my loneliest moments. I suggest you get started reading poetry at the Poetry Foundation, which offers a seemingly endless supply of great poems.

Defaulting to "I Can"

I offer a simple yet transformative piece of advice: Default to I can.

Too often at work, we read people write about what they cannot do, even if they are our vendors:

Question 1: Will you help me on Monday?

Answer 1: I can't.

Question 2: Do you wax floors?

Answer 2: We can't.

Question 3: Would you provide a discount for my $2,000 order?

Answer 3: XYZ, Inc. can't.

I continually suggest to never put these words anywhere near each other: I (or we, or My company) and can't. We are all in the can, not can't, business. Use the more positive can, even when you can't. Here are easy fixes to the three can't-do sentences.

Question 1: Will you help me on Monday?

Answer 1: I can help you on Tuesday.

Question 2: Do you wax floors?

Answer 2: We can wax floors at an additional cost, or, We can mop floors more frequently to avoid their need of an expensive waxing. 

Question 3: Would you provide a discount for my $2,000 order?

Answer 3: XYZ, Inc. provides discounts for orders over $10,000.

That's not too much effort, is it? Of course, sometimes people will insist that you do something you just can't. In these cases, you'll have to clearly say, "I can't." But at least you tried the better approach the first time around.

The benefits of defaulting to I can will be legion. People will see you as cooperative, helpful, and positive.

Pronoun Preference: TBD

In the 1970s, we tried to solve the sexist usage of deferring to male pronouns in mixed or ambiguous situations calling for a singular application. Before then, this sentence was standard usage:

An employee must understand a job requires that he ask his manager about problems unfamiliar to him.

In 1978, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) decided that since such usage excluded females, some workarounds were preferable. Thus, the following three sentences became standard, with the second and third ones being preferable to the wordy and awkward first:

1. An employee must understand the job requires that he or she ask his or her manager about problems unfamiliar to him or her.
2. Employees must understand the job requires that they ask their manager about problems unfamiliar to them.
3. An employee must understand that the job requires asking a manager about unfamiliar problems.

Good enough. Fast forward nearly a half-century to gender-identification issues and preferred pronouns. Now we encourage employees to proclaim their preferred pronoun in the name of inclusion. The intention behind this usage addition is honorable, no doubt. But announcing preferred pronouns creates more problems than it solves. Imagine a project team of six employees:

• Allie, agender, prefers they/them/their
• Billie, female, prefers he/him/his
• Carlie, male, prefers it/its
• Dannie, female, prefers she/her/hers
• Eddie, male, prefers he/him/his
• Frankie, nonbinary, prefers no pronoun

In such a situation, you can see the confusion that will arise from referring to these team members in a business document. The NCTE has tried addressing this language bind through recommendations in a revised 2018 position statement, which falls short of solving the problem. 

So this is what I say. The pronouns he/him/his and she/her/hers will not disappear from the language anytime soon. Regardless of the next step in our discovery of respectful usage, show patience. Respect those who "misuse" the new standards at the same level that you are trying to respect those you want to bring into the language fold. Things will evolve, but only with more patience and less finger-pointing.

Resolving a Usage Meltdown

Damon Young lost composure and commonsense, if not his linguistic flair, in writing "A Letter to That Man Who Emailed Me to Correct My Grammar" for The Washington Post. As a fan of the ain't, I have no problem with Young using the word, but I cannot understand why he walked into the trap of engaging in a foolish intellectual assault on the person who wrote him about stumbling over two misuses of standard English: it ain't for it isn't and these for those. Maybe the writer's closing order made Young's blood boil: "You do good work; don't try to sound like you are still in the street." 

I will not defend the writer's arrogant intolerance of Young's usage, but seeing a Washington Post columnist open an essay with "I'm better at this than you are at everything you do" seems so radically puerile. How does he know who his critic is? Maybe she's a Nobel Prize-laureate in physics. Perhaps he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Or a MacArthur genius lawyer who fights for equal access to the law. Or a great chef, or clothing designer, or government employee or minister or police officer or mother. Reread Young's opening sentence. What was he thinking when he wrote everything?   

In his article, Young reasonably explains that "rules of grammar are mostly suggestions." But notice how closely he adheres to standard English rules, beginning with the article title. He uses who instead of the more common nonstandard that. He uses man, although I doubt he asked the writer their sex (we can't tell by names only these days) or sexual identification (you know what I mean), which would be more in line with fashionable usage. Incidentally, I have been referring to Young as he/him/his because he does so on his website.

Young then refers to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison as ghosts, simply because they are deceased. I will not doubt that Young has the potential to reach Baldwin's and Morrison's legendary accomplishments and artistic mastery, but he has a long way to go. And if he does attain that pinnacle of literary achievement, it will be in large part because he learned a lot from those writers. I won't criticize Young's favorites, Raven Leilani, Cole Arthur Riley, Doreen St. Félix, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; therefore, Young should not dismiss Baldwin and Morrison as irrelevant. He likely wishes he could be such a ghost.

I prefer ain't for practical, not aesthetic, purposes. English has "standard" contractions of all types (e.g., are not = aren't, is not = isn't, was not = wasn't, were not = weren't), except for am not. The pure contraction amn't has been out of favor for centuries, so why not use ain't?  As for them white boys instead of those white boys, Young is relying on a vernacular. Man people from my neck of the streets, the Bronx, has more than once said something like "I know them guys." Young should have the liberty to write as he pleases. 

Young errs gravely in other parts of the article. He writes "sentences are music." Wrong. A sentence is a  collections of words to transfer meaning; music is a combination of sounds to make harmony. Writers can only try to make their words seem musical. But they are not. He also says of his own writing, "I'm not even that good." Even though he says so merely to further belittle the person who wrote him, he actually is that good. Good enough to have a Washington Post column. Good enough to usually write with authority and credibility. Good enough not to lower himself by attacking his readers so acerbically and brazenly. In addition, he writes that as a 10-year-old, he needed to see ice hockey Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux handle a puck on the ice for only 15 seconds to know he was great, "Because talent always speaks the same language" even though he claims, "I don't know jack about hockey." Wrong and wrong. It takes a deep understanding of a team sport to understand why some athletes rise above their peers. For Michael Phelps and Allyson Felix, we maybe can count their medals to determine their greatness; for Ernie Banks, Charles Barkley, and Tony Gonzalez, we need to look deeper, and not just at their statistics, not with the experience of a 10-year-old. And talent surely does not speak the same language, not even metaphorically. Most middle schoolers know that such a claim is false. How can we compare the talent of landing a disabled passenger plane on the Hudson River or of saving a family from a building inferno while wearing 45 pounds of equipment restricting one's movement to fashioning an exquisite sentence?  from Finally, Young fragilely considers correction of his usage "anti-Blackness." As a writing teacher, I have heard countless Black people tell me that their mothers corrected them for using ain't. And White folks use ain't as much as Blacks do.

Dare I advise Damon Young after reading his tirade? Here it is, something I tell all my students: It's all right to  draft when you're emotional, but allow a cooling-off period before pressing send. Just write, Damon Young, and appreciate your readers—or you shall lose them.