Vale, Vocative

Texting has introduced a revolution in communication, and for some of us that is not always a good thing.  An article I read recently, for instance, demonstrated in detail the damage, if not quite full death, that the apostrophe has suffered as a result of the inconvenience to use the key combinations necessary on phones and tablets to punctuate possessives and other grammatical instances appropriately.  I have long lamented the eclipse of the apostrophe on road and street signs.  Look around.  You may not have noticed but now you will -- except if you are going to Martha's Vineyard, one of the few places that has received an exception by the bureaucratic authorities who make such subtle but momentous decisions.

As troubling as the loss of apostrophes is to me, there is another loss even more disconcerting personally.  It is the near total annihilation of the vocative.

A vocative construction, as its name implies, is used when invoking, calling, hailing, or addressing someone. (Ironically, for present purposes, the literary device of addressing someone not present is called an apostrophe, and it is to my mind no coincidence that both are on life support or have been dispatched to a new grammatical gulag system.)  For example, you might say, "John, where is my hat?"  In that interrogative, the vocative is the address to John, and it is marked off with a comma.  The same sort of construction occurs when we greet people, "Hello, John."  It is just a common affair. It happens every day.

But that is just the thing that is so troubling:  the loss of the vocative now also happens every day and everywhere.  I sampled the other week four people in the same context, and not one of them had heard of a vocative construction, much less knew that it is proper to mark vocative uses with a comma.  They just took for granted that what they did multiple times a day with their friends on their phones was the formally and grammatically proper way to write, if they happened to think about grammar as a system at all.

For someone such as I am who finds grammar for the most part an anchor in a seismically changing world, this development, including the grammatical ignorance, is unsettling. I see this everywhere, and it irks me.  It is not just in professional e-mails that begin "Hi Polytropos" -- without a comma.  It is not just that I find my cortisol levels rising whenever I log into Google, the splash page for which greets me "Hi Polytropos" without a comma.  I see it occasionally at more festive times, for instance, when a group of people want to celebrate someone's birthday, and they order a cake with a message inscribed in the icing.  This happens more than you might think, at least in my social experience.  Without exception, the last 7 cakes (that's all I can remember; I'm sure the streak is longer) have all used a vocative incorrectly in wishing someone happy birthday by name, the equivalent to "Happy Birthday Polytropos!" -- without a comma.

Now, I realize that you might think, "Heavens!  This Polytropos is a grammatical grouch." I dispute that, and you can read some of my other prior posts about grammar for explanations of why I think it is important (e.g., here and here and here and here).  But grammar has real life and death consequences. 

Consider, if you will, this tag line in an e-mail that I received not long ago from a favorite restaurant, which also happened to be the e-mail's subject:  "Let's eat everyone!"

Think about that for a moment.   "Let's eat everyone!"

Good.  Kind of revolting, huh?  This exhortation was meant to be an encouragement to fine dining.  The clause was, after all, that used by the talented chef who said that to his patrons after surveying their culinary preferences and the wine that they brought before he embarked on a seven-course tasting menu.  The e-mail that was meant to invite one to dinner out caused me to lose my appetite, and all because of a vocative -- without a comma.

When the restaurateur failed to mark off the vocative properly, what should have been the hortatory subjunctive, "Let's eat, everyone!" became an invitation to cannibalism.  Grammar has real life and death consequences.

You might say to yourself, "Well, I can sort of understand the need to mark off the addressee(s) in the case when preceded by a verb of a certain action, but surely it is negotiable in other instances, like greetings." But then you have created a rule, and you have re-written a grammatical rule, and you seem to invoke the following of that rule.  So, I might rejoin, why not just follow the rules that already exist for good reason rather than do gymnastics to create your own rules?

The grammatical descriptivist is the person who, generally, says that grammar is what people do with it.  But if the innate descriptivist becomes to some extent a prescriptivist (grammar is what convention has for good reason laid down ought to be done), then the principle of rules in grammar is conceded, and the burden of proof for deviating from proper practice is on the one who has inherited a grammatical deviation largely by technological change, social practice, and poor primary education.

The loss of certain punctuation and the erosion of both grammar and clear writing are, I think, largely the effects of the prevalence of texting.  It is also more than that.  It is a function of different discourse, one that is implicitly imperialistic.  It is also a function of not merely what people write but also what people read (or do not read).  It is, moreover, a function of lack of basic instruction about what is becoming and why.  When I explained to those four people mentioned above what a vocative is, why it is used, and why it is punctuated the way that it is, with examples, at least three of the four said, "Oh, well, I've never heard of that, but it makes perfect sense.  I see it now."

Maybe that is all it takes, small steps in our own circles, to resist the grammatically insidious domination of Google's login page, e-mail greetings, and cake decorators in our daily life. This is, indeed, a Resistance movement.  You can join.  It really does depend on you.  Otherwise, an invitation to punctuate might be corrupted further, not only in form but also in diction:  "Let's puncture everyone." One mistake might lead to more, and that's how grammar can be a matter of life or death.  We will then be saying "Vale!" to a lot more than the vocative.

Campus Rage Culture

I am reproducing below an interview-article with Jonathan Haidt about the genealogy and anatomy of campus rage culture. That is my term to refer to the now common system of expected and policed beliefs and practices on college campuses in the United States that characteristically seeks to exclude certain opinions in the supposed service of inclusion and to homogenize ideological perspectives for the purported purpose of diversifying viewpoints. It will, for instance, marginalize some authors in order to de-marginalize others, all because in this new political-civil religion marginalization is bad. (See, e.g., the new policy of the English department at Harvard.) It must be rooted out by Inquisition, alleged heretics must be proscribed, and all of their writings -- no matter their content or actual arguments -- must be condemned.

I have decided to reproduce in full the interview with Professor Haidt for several reasons. One is that he is a well-respected social psychologist, and his observations therefore carry a weight and garner a hearing that others might not receive. He has waded in previously on the danger of the proliferation of required "trigger warnings" and the protections that universities seem endlessly to supply undergraduates (e.g., his "The Coddling of the American Mind" in The Atlantic, Sept. 2015).

Another reason is that this is a timely topic of utmost importance not only for university campuses but also for the nation. It is important for the nation because what is occurring on campuses in opposition to some persons and viewpoints is often, as was the case at Villanova University last week, eerily similar to the Southern lynchings of persons like Emmett Till on the basis of hate fomented by slander, false accusations, and misimpressions, typically based on hearsay. The campus rage culture is a contemporary form of lynching others based on prejudice. 

For instance, Villanova University students and faculty who protested the speaking engagement of Charles Murray reported their reason to be his "white supremacist" writings in The Bell Curve; however, it remains unclear whether the protesters had read all of the book in question, including the clarifying sections designed specifically to prevent readers from drawing unwarranted inferences. As two Cornell University professors note in this recent New York Times column, “…only a small fraction of the people who have opinions about that book have actually read it. (Indeed, some people protesting Mr. Murray openly acknowledged not having read any of his work.)” It is not uncommon at such speaking events for protesters to be asked why they are publicly denouncing Mr. Murray or some other controversial figure, calling him a “bigot” and “white supremacist,” if they admit that they are not sure that he in fact was one. What matters to them is not the truth to guide their beliefs, actions, and emotions but a social practice of protest, marginalization, and essentialist name-calling. (Would that they had read this prior post.)

Another student at Villanova who actually attended the lecture is reported to have started crying after it because she understood Mr. Murray to have said that her specific undergraduate degree was worthless. Other students also report that a concerned faculty member approached the student to check on her and learned that this was the reason for her tears. When, in an effort to reverse the student’s lachrymose lament by encouraging an accurate, charitable understanding of Murray's words, the professor said, “I don’t think that is what he said,” the student replied, “I'm not ready to hear that right now.” Other faculty members are said to have embraced the student and joined her, as a form of comfort, in lambasting the speaker. What mattered was not the truth to guide her beliefs, actions, and emotions but a social practice of emotive affirmation to demonstrate tribalistic loyalties. And this, mind you, occurred at a university whose explicit mission promotes veritas (truth), unitas (unity), and caritas (charity).

Those three virtues -- truth, unity, and charity -- are what hang in the balance for larger society nationally according to what emerges from our universities locally.

Du Bois, Double-Consciousness, and a Lingering Problem

W. E. B. Du Bois gave eloquent expression to a personal and socio-cultural tension at the beginning of the twentieth century that is simultaneously a reality that many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps even constantly.  When Du Bois described the central problem of the new century for black Americans as being that of the color-line, he also articulated the challenge of negotiating different worlds, allegiances, and identities as that of double-consciousness:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 5)

Du Bois has in mind a particular historical struggle.  For Du Bois, this double-consciousness was the distinct self-perception, or group perception, of being on the one hand black and on the other hand Americans.  If we can frame the tension that he identifies more generally, we might describe it as the unsettling difficulty of standing at the same time in more than one tradition.