Language don't get no respect
jacobs
A. J. Jacobs, author of
The
Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in
the World (Simon & Schuster, 2004), might have worked his
way through the entire
Encyclopaedia
Britannica (and lived to tell us about it in this book), but the
very few things he remembers about his college classes aren't entirely
accurate. Language don't get no respect.
Jacobs writes engagingly, and his first name is Arnold, which is a plus
in my book, but already on page 2 I gave a little cry of dismay, on
reading the following:
Like many in my generation, I've
watched my expensive college education [at Brown University] recede
into a haze... Off the top of my head, I recall exactly three
things from my classes:
1. When my comp lit professor outed Walt Whitman.
2. When the radical feminist in my Spanish class infuriated the
teacher by refusing to use masculine pronouns. "La pollo." "No, el pollo." "La pollo." "No, no, no, el pollo." Et cetera.
3. When the guy in my Nietzsche seminar raised his hand and said,
"If I listen to one more minute of this, I'm going to go crazy," then
promptly stood up, walked to the back of the class, and jumped out the
window. It was a ground-floor window. But still. It
was memorable.
(I left item 3 in there because I was impressed that Jacobs spelled
Nietzsche's name right.)
No, no, I moaned, not
pronouns.
Articles, man,
articles. Did you learn
nothing in Spanish?
No doubt the radical feminist also insisted on using feminine pronouns,
but in these examples it's the (definite) articles that she's
wielding. Granted, in Spanish the definite articles and the
third-person definite pronouns are closely related (sometimes,
homophonous), but still they are grammatically distinct, and it's
useful to have different labels for them. Too bad that Mr.
Know-It-All didn't remember that from his Spanish class at Brown.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 18, 2005 04:39 PM