The Writer and Their Only Gender Neutral Option

A contemporary trend in composition textbooks is the view that academic writers should be on guard against the accidentally sexist use of pronouns. By this I am referring to sentences such as, "the writer should pay attention to the pronouns he chooses to use." The use of the pronoun, while not necessarily sexist, is certainly sexually exclusive. This presents a problem in modern English, a language that must now accommodate a more egalitarian concept of readerly/writerly identity. While English is fortunate not to have gender specific adjectives like those of the Latinate languages, English, like so many languages that derived their system of logic from Latin, has no gender neutral pronouns. While I am not concerned with political correctness, actual correctness should be something for which we strive, should it not? And if we are to be factually correct in our use of language, we must address the gendered pronoun issue. Of course, the long accepted solution has been to use the phrase, "he or she" but any reader will tell you, this device becomes very monotonous, very quickly. The style problem caused by this phrase is compounded by the fact that there is also no gender neutral possessive. Thus he or she must own his or her whatever he or she owns. Clearly an alternate solution is needed. Here are my solutions. They're actually solutions arrived at by writers struggling with the issue who have un-dogmatically invented solutions as needed. I am simply setting them forth in attempt to codify them.

1) Assign gender based on the writer's identity. It seems to me that when a writer is referring to an unspecific subject, the writer is generally and unconsciously being autobiographical. That is to say that when the writer of a composition textbook says, "the writer should never assume that his audience will naturalize his assumptions," the ambiguous "he" to which the writer refers is the writer himself. This is true because what the writer is giving you as a lesson in how to write is a rule that has worked for him. He is therefore thinking of himself as the writer and bidding the reader to do what he does. Therefore, I propose that the writer use his or her own sex, as I have done here.

2) Accept "They" and "their" as gender neutral pronouns. "They" and its possessive "their" are English's only gender neutral pronouns. The problem is, of course, that they are plural. It is therefore technically incorrect to say, "the writer [singular] must sharpen their [plural] pencil." The use of they and their as singular pronoun is already in common practice, yet if any student uses the word in this way, he or she is likely to have it graded as "wrong." There is, on one hand, a fallacy in grading here. Since language is based on common use, the fact that using "their" as a gender neutral pronoun has been in common use for some time makes it correct, whether English departments want to accept it or not. Plus, with the absense of better gender neutral words, these are our language's only single word alternatives. I have already committed to myself not to judge these pronouns as incorrect in my own students' papers, though I will need to remind them that others will.

My personal preference is for the first choice. I like it better for stylistic reasons; "they" and "their" still sound incorrect. I also like the ethos that is added by the linguistic reminder that the writer is present. If the reader knew that the writer would be sexing his argument based on his own identity, every time the reader came across a gendered word, it would remind the reader that the writer is indeed real. In this way, the writer is constantly reasserting his humanity; the speaker is a person, not a system of scribbles on a page.

Champs!

I know I never write on here anymore but school keeps me so busy. I'm on here now just to celebrate the Red Sox first division championship in 12 years after nine years of Yankee dominance in the AL East. The tyrant is deposed!!!

Beat Picture of the Week

A vandalized car with a punched column...but not reported stolen.

Our Final Baseball Trip (for the year)

When we went to Texas for the Sox series, the first game was delayed one hour for rain. For our inconvenience, we were given two free tickets for upper-deck seats. On game three, we were given four vouchers for seats of @25 or less as part of a giveaway. We redeemed all these tickets over the past weekend in what turned out to be a trip of ups and downs.

We left on Thursday and hit Fort Worth just in time for rush hour traffic. It took us two and a half hours to get from OKC to Forth Worth then one hour to get from Fort Worth to our motel in Arlington.

We had a room in the Days Inn on Collins in Arlington. I knew we were in for a treat when we pulled in to the lot and found that the motel shares a lot with the Afrika Food Mart and a loud Mexican bar. Butting up to the lot was what we cops commonly refer to as a "turd complex" which is an apartment complex that accepts Section 8. The employees of the hotel were unfriendly and the room was lousy. The coffee maker sit in the bathroom (it can't be moved because it's tied to the wall). The bed was extremely small and low to the ground and the bed spread looked faded with age. To top it all off, the entire place was full of teenagers. We usually pamper ourselves on this trip by staying in the Wyndam hotel, which we planned on staying at Sunday and Monday nights. While traveling to the park from the motel, we learned that out hotel had been sold to Sheraton. We kept our reservations but lost all our free stuff that we get there for being part of Wyndam's rewards program. But more on that later.

Game one was against the Indians, a great ball club, who had C.C. Sabathia on the hill. It was a great game but we were surrounded by weird people. Don't ever eat the pizza in Rangers Ballpark. It's just frozen pizza like you can get at Walmart.

After the first game, we drove down to Rockdale to stay with Charissa's parents. It's a great community and a cute little town but it's far away and really boring and I'm glad they're moving to the Tulsa area so we don't have to drive to Rockdale anymore. While in Rockdale, we drove to Round Rock to catch a minor league game between the Express and our own Oklahoma Redhawks. The Redhawks lost but we did get to see Freddy Guzman (my favorite minor leaguer) steal home on Round Rock's pitcher.

Sunday night we went back to Dallas, this time with Bill and Saphronia, and stayed in the newly renamed Sheraton, where we learned that the Seattle Mariners were also staying. We had rooms on the fourteenth (thirteenth) floor overlooking the ballpark. I LOVE this hotel and was so glad to be back in it after staying at the crappy Days Inn and the comfortable but boring spare bedroom of my in-laws house. We had a great omelet man who Bill has become friends with.

On game day II, we took a tour of the ballpark and ate in the restaurant attached to the park. At the game, we got to see a Sammy Sosa home run in an explosive fifth inning which saw five runs on five hits (two were home runs: Sosa and Wilkerson). The Rangers took an 8-7 victory and have taken the first three in their four game series against the strong Mariners lineup.

The final down came when we arrived home and learned that our friend who we had left to watch our animals had forgotten completely and our dog and cat had been five days without food or water. Both of them were okay but Cooper (the dog) had an abrasion on his nose where it looks like he kept trying to get the door of his house open. Chloe (the cat) had found a box of dog biscuits and was keeping herself fed on those. We took the dog to the vet just to be sure and he was given a clean bill of health. I felt horrible all day over it.

Thus rounds up our final baseball trip of the summer.

Go Sox!

Caroline's Lucky Night

Oklahoma is a state of thieves. We steal. It's what we do. The Sooners were a group of criminals that sneaked over the lines early before the land-runs, essentially stealing lands. The Myriad Gardens, designed in the 60's but not built until 1988 (just in time for the land-run centennial), was copied from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark. When the city wanted to revitalize Bricktown, they copied San Antonio's river walk, creating a river flowing through Bricktown. We tried to steal the Hornets from New Orleans and will very likely steal the Supersonics from Seattle.

But now we've gone too far. This season, OKC's triple-A baseball team, the Redhawks, has been stealing the dubious Red Sox tradition of playing (and singing supposedly) Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." This Thursday, the organization will make the theft complete when they hold "Neil Diamond Night" at the park, during which any person named "Caroline" will get in for free.

Perhaps this wouldn't seem so ridiculous if the song, or Neil Diamond, had anything to do with baseball. What makes it silly is the fact that the Red Sox tradition of singing the song (which they do before the 8th inning) is something of a fluke. The park started playing the song, the fans started singing along, the tradition stuck. No one really seems to know how it happened or why New England even tolerates Neil Diamond being played in their most holy sanctuary of Fenway Park (in fact, many die-hard fans simply refuse to sing along...But I kinda like it). The tradition belongs exclusively to Boston and no other Major League city. But that won't stop OKC from stealing it, just like they stole the Fenway Dog (which isn't even very good).

Oklahoma, when will we get our own traditions? When will we, a city larger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City MO, Oakland, and Miami become a major league city in our own right?

Attention Hackers!

Please do something about these guys.

Reflecting on "Falling Man"

I'm reading the novel "Falling Man," which is the new novel by Don DeLillo, who is one of my favorite authors. The book follows the life of a 9/11 survivor and his family just after the attacks. I read a scene this evening which I found particularly poignant. In this scene, Keith, the main character is watching the news with his wife as they play the World Trade Center videos.

He said, "It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this
distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking
it's an accident."Because it has to be.""It has to be," he said."The way the
camera sort of shows surprise.""But only the first one.""Only the first," she
said."The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're
all a little older and wiser." (135)

This scene is so profound because it is so ubiquitous. This is exactly everybody's experience. Perhaps you remember and it felt the same for you. You were sitting in a student center on a college campus and the first tower was burning and you thought, it's an accident. It's happened before. A B-17 hit the Empire State building. This is the same type of thing. And you wondered how, with our modern technology, an accident like this could happen. But it's an accident of course. It has to be. But then you see the second plane, and it happens so fast but you are thinking fast too, so before you even see the planes you think, Oh God, it's not an accident. And as you see the flames you know that every thing has changed forever. And isn't it fitting that in the twenty-first century we should die in real time on cable news.

Isn't this your experience too? Isn't this the cultural work of great literature, to put into words our collective experience. This book isn't as well done as some of DeLillo's others but this is where it is successful. You read the book and you feel...consoled somehow, because you're glad to know that you're not the only one.

The Writing on the Wall

Because I am unrealistically optimistic about the state of education in our universities, I am always amazed and saddened by the fact that adult men in a university setting scratch crap in bathroom stalls. But since they do, I might as well read and criticize them. I went into a stall today and did some leisurely reading and now I ma going to give both my readers my favorite messages from today. Remember, these were written on the walls of a bathroom stall in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma...the ivory halls of academia.

"Collage is for the week"
-It's true, only pansies would cut pictures and glue them together to create art.

"Today's poop is brought to you by the leter H."

"Writing on the walls is for dumb ass's"
-Speaking of...

What Time Is It?

Not 4:30 (Spin Doctors Fans) but...

Dice-K, Make My Day, or How Sweep it Is

So Charissa has been going to the wall on the third base side for the last three days trying to get autographs. We got Kyle Snyder on Friday but no luck yesterday. Today we get there at noon and go in as soon as the gates open. Charissa goes down to the wall in one of the aisles and she is a little back in line. The pitchers are playing catch along the third base line in shallow outfield. They finish up and I realize that Daisuke Matsuzaka is walking towards Charissa's line. He begins signing and she is getting closer and closer. I think that she had looked pretty close to the front but now she seems miles away from Dice-K as people push and shove to get to the front. Then he takes Charissa's ball. He signs it (or as she says it, "his $103 million hand touched me) and she says thank you. He bows to her and she bows back; then she turns to walk away. as she goes up the aisle past the people who are still in line and I'm thinking, 'stop talking to people. Look disappointed,' because I can just see someone snatching the ball out of her hands and running. I come towards her and I can see that her hands are trembling. She hands me the ball and there it is, a big "D' with some scribbly crap after it and the number 18.

Tavarez and Loe are the Sox and Rangers number five pitchers, respectively. Both of them had fairly good outings. Tavarez: 5.2 IP, 4R 4ER, 6H, 1BB, 1HB, 6k. Loe 6IP, 3R, 3ER, 7H, 1BB, 0HB, 2K.

Varitek hit a three run home run in the fourth in support of Tavarez but Tavarez got no decision after giving up a three run upper-decker to Teixeira and an RBI single to Ian Kinsler. Piniero got the win for the Sox after Otsuka blew the save for the Rangers, allowing two runs on three hits in the eighth and Gagne gave up a lead off homer to Pedroia.

Okajima came in to save the game for Piniero and had to make it close for us. He gave up one run on an RBI single by Teixeira (who wouldn't go away) allowing the Rangers to come withing one. Then, Sammy Sosa came up to bat. He hit a long two-strike fly ball which Crisp caught, ending the game and securing the sweep.