Thank You for Your Frankness

The term Lingua Franca, as many readers know, stems from a 16^th-century Mediterranean reference to the language used between speakers of different tongues as “the language of the Francs,” the Francs being all Western Europeans – that is, all non-Greeks. Since then, the Francs has come to mean the inhabitants of France – though most would agree that English, not French, is the lingua franca of our era throughout much of the world.

The gist of the title of this blog, which we are laying to rest at the end of this week, has been, in my view, that whatever we as writers are examining in terms of language crosses frontiers – frontiers between pedagogy and common usage, politics and rhetoric, rule-makers and rule-breakers. Because we are a blog that encourages commentary, we also reach through the distance that otherwise separates authors from reader. And our readers, in their responses, have been remarkably frank. That is, like the Franks in Frankish Gaul, they are free, without hindrance (except by way of Chronicle guidelines) in how they respond. They are not, to reference another aspect of “frankness,” always sincere, and occasionally they have been ungenerous. But for the most part, I have deeply appreciated the contribution made by you, our readers, to the discourse in Lingua Franca. Your contributions, criticisms, encouragement, and even tangential argument have kept us inspired and on our toes for more than seven years.

Here are some of my favorite responses. I’ve gone through all my posts, but for the sake of brevity have limited the selections below to posts that garnered more than 40 responses, since, as the commenter “dank48″ once noted, “Sometimes the effect of an article can be measured, in a sense, by the comments it provokes.”

My most commented-on post, on “manspreading,” got a whopping 159 responses, including the following:

• In the past, if you wanted to nag a man, you had to marry him first.
• There’s a big difference between the comfortable “hang” of standing versus the “scrunch” of sitting, & it’s very much more pronounced with age & weight (I won’t go into the details).

The runner-up, on professors’ pet spelling peeves, received 82 responses, among them –

• If I see “loose” one more time, I’ll loose my marbles. Then everybody will suffer.
• “Wierd,” without doubt. It’s just weirdly spelt.

By and large, the posts that drew the most attention referenced gender, politics, or tics. My confession that I’d started responding “I’m good” to eager servers at restaurants drew 65 comments with a mix of opprobrium and humor:

• To those who use “I’m good,” I say “Be of good cheer. I’d be happy to put in a good word for you. People can complain on spurious grounds but it won’t do any good. Although I thought this argument was as good as over there will, no doubt, be some good for nothing pedant determined to criticise.”
• When offered a second helping of milk and honey, God said, “I’m good.” And no one was bothered.

Likewise my confession that I’d stopped marking certain irregularities in students papers (75 comments):

• Their inattention to proper usage is just one side of the coin: They also cannot figure out what the heck a clearly defined assignment is actually asking.
• Malpractice. What English teachers do in the name of gatekeeping should be actionable in a court of law. What happens at the grammar gate is worse than Homeland Security at the airport.

I’ve been on the alert, these seven years, for efforts to render stubbornly gendered expressions gender-neutral, and my reports have drawn feisty and funny responses, like the post on Mx.  — 42 responses, among them:

• Ambrose Bierce approached things from the other direction. He proposed that Mr. be used by and for married men and that unmarried men be designated with Mh., pronounced “Mush.”
• The author wants to make “MX.” available to all human beings. Why so speciesist? Aren’t my dog (Mx. Fido) and my breakfast bacon (Mx. Piggy) equally deserving?

When I referenced Chelsea Manning to jumpstart a post about addressing people by their preferred monikers, a fierce argument about Manning erupted, with 52 comments including:

• If Mr. Bradley Manning legally changes his name to “Chelsea,” then I’ll refer to him (to the extent I refer to him at all) as Mr. Chelsea Manning.
• Manning isn’t asking us to call her “God” or “bff” and thereby suggest a false relationship to her (like Ferris’s mother-in-law). She also isn’t asking permission, as someone who identifies as female, to say sexist things seemingly allowable depending on how we “see” her gender or sex (like Ferris’s troubled colleague). She’s just asking that we say “she” instead of “he,” something that should affect none of us in any way.

Another post along the same lines, about the prolific use of girl in titles referring to grown women, brought 42 responses from both sides, of which I particularly appreciated this:

• This seems so right as to be fairly obvious. However, just because a thing is obvious in its fairness, doesn’t mean it will be widely adopted. It seems that what the author is asking for, and indeed what much of identity politics, with which this kind of appeal is often confused, is asking for is a kind of consciousness, and a robust sense of fair play.

A similar note of sanity was sounded by a reader following my discussion of the term gun control:

• I suppose since this blog focuses on the negative vs. proactive language we use to frame our arguments for and against the issue of gun legislation, terms like “gun nuts” and “crazy people” are not helpful either because they immediately place NRA sympathizers on the defensive rather than warming them to alternative solutions/suggestions/ideas. Something to think about if a compromise is to be made.

I’ll end with my favorite negative and positive comments. The first was to a post that began — quite cleverly, I thought — with “While most of us were at the beach last summer, a kerfuffle erupted over the Oxford comma.” I was called to task with this:

• The beginning of an otherwise beguiling article was marred by the casual elitism of “while most of us were at the beach.”  Who’s most of us, scotty?  Most americans are hammered by unemployment and the attendant miseries, and even teachers don’t spend summers at the beach, unless they want an early case of skin cancer from the sun which has lost its ozone layer.

The positive comment came after an earlier post about commenting, which closed with “What strikes me as marvelous about the dialogue thus far in this series is how, both in its complaint and in its enthusiasm, it calls attention to this thing the Greeks called logos. . . . If one thing distinguishes us as both writers and responders, it is that we stop for a moment, in the chaos of our days, to consider the word itself, the thing that makes us, if not divine, certainly human.” A cheerleading comment ensued:

• I, for one, adore this blog. . . . Just know that there’s a silent army that applauds you. :)

I, likewise, applaud you, our readers. Keep it coming, and keep it frank.