I swear, perhaps too often. My default frustration lines are typically "for fuck's sake" or "are you fucking serious?" And yet my first reaction to obvious bad behavior on the part of Garbage McWoof was to open my mouth and let one of my mother's favorite phrases come flying out. Apparently, it's a fairly common phenomenon. According to the Daily Mail, "eight out of ten of today's mothers admit they use the very same cliches to discipline their children that they had to endure from their own parents." Granted, I have a dog, not a child, but the phenomenon still applied. When it came to laying down the law, I went with one of Mom's old standbys, followed by another one of Mom's old standbys: "You're skatin' on thin ice, Mister!"

Kathryn Crawford of TheBabyWebsite.com tells the Daily Mail that mothers often revert to cliched sayings because we've seen them work before: "The funny thing is that many mums will insist they are nothing like their own mothers," she says, "But the reality is that we can't help but teach our children as our parents taught us, and that means using old sayings and routines which worked for our parents." Naturally, there are learned behaviors, and instantaneous reactions that one picks up during one's own childhood. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (After writing that sentence, my mother's voice popped into my head again to say, "Isn't. The word is Isn't. Don't say ain't. You weren't raised in a barn.")

According to Crawford's site, the Top 20 sayings passed on from parents to children include "Wait and see," "Because I said so," "I've told you a thousand times," and "That's for me to know and you to find out." "Cripes Almighty," isn't on the list, though it certainly makes my Top 20 Momisms. Feel free to add your own parental hand-me-downs in the comments.

Are We Turning Into Our Parents? [The Baby Website]
Because I Said So: Eight Out Of Ten Mothers Admit To Repeating The Old Adages Their Parents Used On Them [DailyMail]

Judson speculates that saying "eeee" makes you "start to smile" (that's apparently why we say "cheese" in photographs), and the act of smiling can make us happy, saying words with "e" sounds might make us happy as well. And other sounds can produce different feelings. Judson describes a study that found "that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl - the German vowel sound ü, for example - you're likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o."

So do languages with more a than ü for happier speakers? Certainly Italians, with all their -a and -o endings, are said to be garrulous and fun-loving, Germans more dour. But these are just stereotypes, and as someone whose second language is, um, Latin, I'm not qualified to judge the happy-making potential of any spoken tongue besides English. Perhaps bilingual commenters can help me out with this — do you find that you're jollier in one language than another? Relatedly, are some words funnier or sadder than others, irrespective of their meaning? I know a lot of people who find "oi" sounds gross, as in "moist" and "ointment." And I'm in agreement with Judson that "e" sounds are kind of funny — try saying "beekeeper" a bunch of times. But I'm not sure I can think of any words that evoke sorrow, except, with its low moan of an ending, "sorrow" itself.

A Language Of Smiles [NYT]

She did this with every word we tended to overuse in our creative writing projects: very, good, awesome, bad; all of these words were buried with great gusto as she pushed us to try to write without them. As a word made its way to the gloomy graves that stood amidst a mess of shoebox dioramas and various dogeared books, she'd remind us that the words weren't gone forever, just gone until we left fourth grade. "By then," she'd say, "you'll realize you didn't need them after all."

I often think of the word graveyard: after yesterday's Angela Chase Syndrome post, I found myself picturing my teacher burying the words "like" and "you know." But there are other words that need to go. Most notably, the word "app." App must be buried forever and ever, amen. Just say "application," people! Enjoy the extra syllables! They're lovely!

So what words would you bury in the Word Graveyard? Awesome? LOLSpeak? Fake words like "irregardless?" Words used incorrectly, like "literally" to describe something figurative? Feel free to list your Word Graveyard nominees in the comments below.

The problem was, I liked writing. I also liked cursing. Instead of one serving as a deterrent to the other, I just continued doing both — as I do to this day. Luckily, former technology exec Christopher Lochhead is on my side. In his essay for CBS News, "In Praise of Cussing," he writes,

Ah, swearing. We love to do it. Understanding why it's so popular is less self-evident. But after four decades of first-hand trial and error, I think I'm on solid ground by saying that for most Americans, swearing is an eminently satisfying, if not authentic, mode of self-expression. With one strong cuss you can probably express every human emotion from love to hate precisely because swearing offers such a powerful release.

He goes on to say that lots of successful people (like Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel) curse, that cursing can encourage teamwork, and that, "in times of joy, cussing positively lifts hearts." However, he also warns that "there are times in business when swearing can backfire by making you appear weak as if you were trying to compensate for some deficiency."

There are times in social life when cursing can backfire too. I'm not just talking about saying fuck in front of your grandma — there can also be something pretentious about swearing. At one point in college a friend of mine pointed out that we had started cursing a lot when we were having intellectual conversations, as though trying to prove we were still cool. Talking about, say, "motherfucking post-structuralists" began to seem annoying, a facile combination of high and low that now seems like it belongs on Stuff White People Like. So as not to be assholes, we were forced to cut it out.

While I've never bought the schoolmarmy maxim that cursing is an un-creative form of verbal expression, I agree with Lochhead that "there's a time and a place for swearing." Or rather, a variety of times and places. These include, but are not limited to: driving, fighting, watching a sporting event, drinking, drinking while watching a sporting event and/or fighting, watching your candidate win an election, watching the opposing candidate win an election, watching Sarah Palin do anything, eating hot sauce, stubbing your toe, crying, finding a big bug somewhere unexpected, and anything having to do with Bill O'Reilly. And, of course, writing.

In Praise Of Cussing [CBS]

It's a lesson we, as a species, learn and unlearn seemingly daily. We eschew traditional interrogation techniques in lieu of physical torture, believing the latter more effective, even as we run PR campaigns and write ad copy to convince our own people of the justification for war and of their supposed desire to enlist in the military to fight it. We mock and condemn the notion that Islamic jihadists believe there is a special reward awaiting them in the afterlife (how many virgins can a man really need?) for their supposed martyrdom as we eulogize our own service members and victims of terrorist attacks with talk of their special places in heaven. We learn about propaganda and yellow journalism and bitch about media bias as we increasingly consume media that agrees with and reinforces opinions we think we had before we began gorging ourselves. Entire professions and industries spring up dedicated to the cause of using language to convince millions (if not billions) of people to do things they wouldn't already do — but this product! vote for this candidate! believe in this cause! — and yet we all continue to believe our thoughts and actions are unique, unpolluted snowflakes.

Language is powerful because it is how we order our thoughts. Who among us really thinks in abstract concepts? But it is also a complex game of Telephone, in which messages are relayed, misinterpreted, misapplied, misrepresented and misunderstood. The use of language is fundamentally imperfect because one's listeners are always hearing it through individual filters.

Scott Roeder, who is being charged in the brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller, is obviously a deeply flawed person, but he is not alone in either his apparent beliefs or his willingness to break one of the most fundamental taboos of human society — killing other humans — in service to a political cause. For instance:

As news of Roeder's arrest traveled, Kansas City activist Regina Dinwiddie remembered the day a dozen years ago when Roeder hugged her in glee after trying to frighten an abortion provider by staring him down inside a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"He grabbed me and said, 'I've read the Defensive Action Statement and I love what you're doing,' " Dinwiddie said in a telephone interview. She was a signer of the 1990s statement, which declares that the use of force is justified.

"I said, 'You need to get out of here. You can get in a lot of trouble,' " Dinwiddie recalled.

Dinwiddie said she does not consider death of Tiller, the nation's most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, to be a homicide.

"I don't think he was murdered. I believe he was absolutely stopped in his tracks and it was long overdue," Dinwiddie said. She declined to say when she last spoke with Roeder.

But Dinwiddie isn't the only associate of Roeder's who reinforced his apparent position on violence against abortion providers.

Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.

"I met him once, and he wrote to me a few times," Leach said. "I remember that he was sympathetic to our cause, but I don't remember any details."

Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller.

Or there's this quote, from Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry:

George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God.

Even in rhetorically condemning Tiller's murder, some supposedly mainstream anti-abortion groups can't stop themselves when it comes to their own rhetoric (or self-interest).

The Kansas Coalition for Life Unequivocally Condemns the Shooting of Abortionist George Tiller.

Although at the time of this writing, it is not known who killed Abortionist Tiller, we do know for certain that this crime was NOT the work of any true proLife person. A true proLife person respects human life as a gift from God, and leaves all life and death decisions to God Himself.

This killing — if it is in any way connected to a genuine proLife group, has the potential to set back the proLife movement by 20 years or more.

One can even look to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly for examples of rhetoric calling Tiller a murderer himself, which are too numerous to list.

Calling abortion the murder of unborn children or referring to people who perform abortions or who are politically pro-choice as infanticide-perpetrators is a time-worn tactic of the movement to make abortion illegal in this country. It was a deliberate choice on the part of the anti-abortion movement, stemming from a growing public relations problem with referring to women that way.

These illegal tactics — denounced by many peaceful antiabortion activists — multiplied in the 1980s, as the broader movement shifted away from pressuring the women who were having abortions to the medical personnel providing them, according to Carole Joffe, a sociology professor at UC Davis.

The shift in emphasis was a smart public relations move for those who oppose abortion, casting women as victims while exploiting public uneasiness over doctors who performed the procedure. Those public sentiments stemmed, in part, from the existence of ethically sketchy, "back-alley" abortion providers in the era before the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, Roe vs. Wade.

It's a deliberate use of language to demonize a group of people that, for some, will inevitably translate to the demonization and dehumanization of individuals like George Tiller.

For many years, George Tiller was made the face of the small population of abortion-providers by the anti-abortion movement in part because he was openly willing to provide second- and third-trimester abortions to women who needed them, and because he wasn't willing to back down (or leave Kansas, where he was born and raised). His clinic was bombed in 1986; blockaded for a month in 1991; and he was shot twice by another anti-abortion (but not "pro-life") zealot in 1993. More recently, he was subject to judicial harassment by the state of Kansas, being hauled before 2 citizen-convened grad juries, charged with misdemeanors and finally acquitted. But not six weeks after his acquittal, his clinic was vandalized yet again, as if the anti-abortion movement was saying, "If we can't win in court, we intend to win regardless." Few, if any, of the right-wing groups now rightfully decrying his murder spoke out against the vandalism, and the clinic asked the FBI to take a more active role in the investigation, rightly fearing more violence to come.

And now it's come, from a fellow Kansan named Scott Roeder, whose ex-wife says he sought martyrdom. A former colleague in the anti-government militia movement says — who was arrested with and convicted of having bomb-making materials but whose conviction was overturned on appeal — Roeder was more obsessed with abortion than anything else. He reportedly posted on Operation Rescue's site about tracking down Tiller at his church two years ago — a kind of (legal, First Amendment-protected) harassment Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups regularly condoned as part of their campaigns to intimidate medical providers out of the mission of providing reproductive health services.

Dr. Warren Hern, who is one of an even smaller group of doctors providing second- and third-trimester abortions to women that need them, says that the harassment is deliberate and pervasive — and that physical violence is the obvious end result of all the violent rhetoric aimed at providers.

"Every doctor that does abortions has been under an assassination threat for decades," Hern said. "The anti-abortion movement message is, ‘Do what we tell you to do or we will kill you,' and they do. This is a fascist movement."

Hern laid blame for Tiller's death at the feet of the anti-abortion movement's encouragement of violence against abortion providers and the Republican Party's "exploitation" of the extremist rhetoric.

"Dr. Tiller is dead by an anti-abortion assassin, and this is the absolutely inevitable consequence of 35 years of anti-abortion fanatic rhetoric and intimidation and assassination violence and exploitation by the Republican Party of this movement," Hern told the Independent.

Hern isn't one to mince words any more than the people who — on a daily basis — threaten him with assassination.

Words matter, and actions matter. Scott Roeder was reportedly inspired by people who think homicide in the pursuit of political goals is justified. In this, they feel backed up not just by Biblical writings, or Hammurabi's Code but by the actions of our government. Our government regularly executes people who it deems have committed crimes too heinous for society to endure — which is the rhetoric anti-abortion groups regularly use to oppose abortion. Our government executes wars with countries to unseat dictators for the supposed greater good and at no small cost to individuals' lives.
Every day, we're bombarded not by "Thou shalt not kill," but by the message, "Thou shalt not kill unless" — and there's no firm consensus on what "unless" entails. In the absence of that consensus, in the midst of that grey area in which societal justification meets individual circumstance meets human frailty and the easily-led, what we too easily find is the darkness of the human mind and what inhumanity humans are capable of when exhorted not by the barrel of a gun but by the power of words.

To hearken back to the Bible, it was words that led Abraham to the point of killing Isaac; that ordered the slaughter of Jewish boys in Moses' Egypt and then again in Herod's Israel; that exhorted the crowd against Jesus (and in favor of Barabbas) in Pilate's Jerusalem. Words have ever exhorted people to war — some considered more justified than others — and rarely stopped anyone from starting one. The Rwandan genocide was touched off by a radio broadcast; the rise of Nazism in Germany began like any other political campaign — with speeches and soaring rhetoric — and ended in the Holocaust euphemistically entitled "The Final Solution," to make its evil more palatable. The same hysterical, overwrought, violence-filled and justification-laden rhetoric that fires up a crowd outside a clinic to pray and scream and harass in order to supposedly effect judicial and legislative changes will cause - and has caused - some individuals to think that their violence is justified in achieving the ends (no more abortion) promised by a political movement that has, to them, frustratingly failed to deliver.

Suspect Held in Kansas Abortion Doctor's Slaying [Washington Post]
Far-Right Subtly Celebrates Tiller Murder [Talking Points Memo]
Suspect in Tiller's Death Supported Killing Abortion Providers, Friends Say [McClatchy]
Statements on George Tiller's Death [Witchita Eagle]
O'Reilly's Campaign Against Murdered Doctor [Salon]
A History of Violence on the Antiabortion Fringe [LA Times]
Slain Abortion Doctor George Tiller's Work Made Him a Target for Years [NY Daily News]
Ex-Wife: Murder Suspect An Aspiring Martyr [CBS News]
Suspect Jailed in Kansas Abortion Doctor's Killing [Associated Press]
The Anti-Abortion Campaign Against Dr. George Tiller [Rolling Stone]
Late-Term Abortion Doctor Decries Tiller Killing: ‘This Is a Fascist Movement' [Colorado Independent]

Related: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword [Wikipedia]
Abortion Provider Must Turn Over Files [LA Times]
George Tiller, Kansas Doctor, Acquitted In Late-Term Abortion Case [Huffington Post]
Tiller's Wichita Clinic Vandalized [Feminist Majority Foundation]
Wichita Clinic Vandalized [Feminist Majority Foundation]
Right-Wing Reactions to Tiller Murder [Time]
Scott Roeder on Operation Rescue's Site [Democratic Underground]
Pray in May to Stop Abortion, Wichita, KS, May 17-20, 2007 [Operation Rescue (cached)]

Earlier: Obama The Baby Killer?

"While NBC bleeped out the words, it was abundantly clear what was being said," writes AdAge's Brian Steinberg, "But the very fact that the network felt the need to put a semigloss on harsh language — even though it appeared in a gritty drama that initially aired at 10 p.m. on a Thursday — epitomizes the confused TV world in which we live." Indeed: why would NBC even bother to allow those lines to be shot if they knew they'd just get bleeped out anyway? It's a stupid tactic to appear edgy that actually makes the show look ridiculous and fearful of the censors.

While it's understandable that you probably shouldn't be allowed to say "go fuck yourself" on an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, why are we still, in 2009, acting as if people don't swear on a regular basis? Paid cable shows have the luxury of adding realistic dialogue to their programming, as swears are allowed. Can you imagine Tony Soprano or Kenny Powers using "friggin'" and "bullcorn?" No. So why do we get up in arms when an actor playing a NYC cop uses the word "tits?"

Perhaps the ever blending cable, network, DVR, and paid cable landscapes are to blame for the seemingly strange decisions over what is and is not okay to say on television: "whether you agree there's no place on TV for cursing or accept that it's part of the language as it exists today," Steinberg writes, "it is impossible to miss that the rules today seem to be mostly arbitrary and based in a time when there was a much larger distinction between broadcast and cable, and when a TV time slot was a fixed appointment to view."

I will admit, however, that there is one bonus of swear removal: the amazingly bad re-dubs of 80's films, wherein you can see the character mouthing "fuck off, shithead," but hear some ridiculous replacement like "fuzz off, shipmate." That's the stuff that profanity-free dreams are made of.

Does Bleeping Profanity On TV Make Any F—king Sense? [AdAge]

Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, has found that the language we speak may fundamentally change the way we see objects. If your first language is one with masculine and feminine nouns, then you very well may ascribe certain gender characteristics to inanimate things. Spanish speakers, for whom bridge is a masculine noun, are more likely to deem bridges "strong," "powerful," or "towering," while German speakers tend to call bridges "elegant," "slender," or even "fragile."

Boroditsky observed the same phenomenon with the work "key," which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers were more likely to call the key "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated" and "useful." Spanish speakers came up with the adjectives "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny" and "tiny."

To test whether or not this would work on speakers of gender-neutral English, Boroditsky created her own language, called "Gumbuzi." She assigned various nouns with the prefix "oos" (masculine) or "soos" (feminine). Boroditsky taught a group of students — who spoke only English — her language for a single day. At the end of the day, she found that the students had already begun to internalize the grammar of her fake language. They started to attribute stereotypically feminine traits to the feminine nouns, and masculine attributes to the masculine things.

And this all happens without our knowing it. "You have no idea this is happening to you. You just think you are learning a way of talking, but really you are learning a whole way of seeing the world," Boroditsky said.

Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong [NPR]

According to Matthew Hutson of Psychology Today, "Psychologists at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. asked students to imagine a romantic encounter with an attractive member of the opposite sex or a casual conversation with someone older. Then the students wrote an essay on an unrelated topic. The romance-primed men unknowingly used more unusual words in their essays. Female subjects didn't show the same effect, but a previous study found that women do show creativity spikes when primed with thoughts of attracting a long-term partner."

The scientists believe that intelligence indicates superior genetics, and that men may be showing off their vocabulary in an attempt to impress potential mates. This would appear to be the opposite of that dude at the bar who strolls in wearing his free spring break beer t-shirt and talks about his dick for 20 minutes and what a stud he is before beginning to cry during a singalong of "Piano Man" and passing out in his basket of wings.

However, men should steer clear of becoming Thesaurus Boy, that pretentious paramour who attempts to insert unnecessary words into regular conversation as a means to impress the ladies; women may be able to detect deception and will be turned off. And your chances of scoring with the ladies, as Mike Tyson would say, will "fade into Bolivian."

Language: Bed Bards [Psychology Today]

[Image via Toothpaste For Dinner]

It's unclear why the term is used so frequently in the People article, especially since Michelle is never quoted using the word herself. The article says (emphasis added):

Just one month on the job, the First Lady takes a break to talk to PEOPLE about loving her family's new life in the White House, her juggling act as mom-in-chief and helpmate to leader of the free world-and, yes, when we'll get to meet the First Puppy.

She is, all at once, so many different things to so many different people: the first African-American First Lady; mom to two very young girls; Ivy League-educated lawyer on hiatus from her own career; fashion icon; traditional hostess and wifely helpmate.

She recognizes that "helpmate" has taken on a whole new meaning as she watches her husband getting grayer by the month.

For now, she's just focused on the job at hand, saying she wants to live up to being the helpmate and role model Americans are looking for in a First Lady.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the word means simply, "A helper and companion, especially a spouse" and comes from a translation of the Bible that refers to God promising Adam "a help meet suitable for him." Obviously, the word could be interpreted to mean that a wife is nothing more than a helper to her husband, but does the term always have a negative connotation? Melissa McEwan writes:

The most obvious word to use would be partner, which I'm guessing was not used for the very reason I like the word-its implicit suggestion of equality.

However, it's actually not the first time Michelle Obama has been described as Barack's "helpmate" rather than his "partner." In a Reader's Digest article on Michelle last year, author Melinda Henneberger wrote:

If Barack is elected, Michelle insists, she has no interest in a role beyond that of helpmate and mother.

And in a December USA Today article, Obama family friend Barbara Engel used the term, saying of Michelle:

She's a down-to-earth woman with consummate self-confidence and excellent judgment, complete integrity, and capable of keeping her kids grounded while being a helpmate and adviser to her husband ... I think Michelle is going to make history as first lady. ... She will keep it real.

In the same article, Ann Stock, White House social secretary under President Clinton says, "The first lady has always been a helpmate and sounding board for the president, his most trusted adviser, and that's always a given." It's likely the use of the word has more to do with Hillary Clinton than Michelle Obama. While it's true that "partner" seems like a more modern term for your spouse, Michelle sanctioning the frequent use of "helpmate" probably has less to do with her not being considered her husband's equal, and more to do with reassuring the American people that Barack's "partner" isn't going to be overhauling the health care system anytime soon.

Lovely Lady Helpmate [Shakesville]
Helpmate [Dictionary.com]
Michelle Obama Interview: Her Father's Daughter [Reader's Digest]
What Kind Of First Lady Will Michelle Obama Be? [USA Today]

Hatch, 15, tired of the abundance of swear words he heard on a daily basis, decided to fight back, politely, with the No Cussing Club, an organization that meets at his California high school on Wednesdays. The club prides itself on clean language, something Hatch wanted to spread to the rest of his county.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to take up Hatch's cause, and declared the first week of March to be No Cussing Week, to which much of Los Angeles County replied, "Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?"

Hatch says his No Cussing movement isn't about censorship as much as being more aware of what comes out of one's mouth: "It's not about forcing anyone to stop, just to bring awareness," Hatch says, "If you can do a week without cussing, maybe you can do two weeks. And then maybe a month." There are reportedly over 20,000 members across the country, spreading the same message. McKay's group even has a website, which states: "Ya wanna hang with us? Don't cuss!"

I will admit that I went through a serious potty mouth period in college. I was in a sketch comedy troupe with a bunch of 19-year-old boys, and our typical way of greeting each other, affectionately, mind you, was "Hello, Fuckface." I swore so often that it just became a part of my speech patterns: things sounded better, or funnier, with a big ol' f-bomb attached to them.

However, after I graduated, I found myself slightly embarrassed with the amount of swearing I was doing. And there were times when I nearly let a string of expletives into the air in professional settings, which is generally frowned upon, especially if you, like me, work in a library. Whoops! I have since cut down on my swearing, thanks to the help of a Swear Jar (that amassed about 40 bucks in quarters in approximately 3 days) and a conscious effort to tone down the sailor-speak.

But the idea of a No Cussing Week seems bit crazy to me; yes, "curse words" are slightly vulgar and crass, but that's the bloody point of them! Sometimes, you just need to swear, and "h-e-double hockey sticks" ain't gonna cut it. A ban on cussing is a bit like emotional censorship. One should never feel obligated to swap out "shit" for "shoot." I mean, come on. For fuck's sake!

However, I applaud McKay Hatch's efforts. It can't be easy to hold a No Cussing Club in high school without making yourself the target of some pretty choice swears. As for No Cussing Week, those who can't help but swear don't have to worry about being punished, according to Tony Bell, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County supervisor, who says the week-long swear ban is just "a good reminder for all of us, not just young people but everybody, to be respectful to one another and watch the words we use."

To which we say: we'll do our motherfucking flippin' best, Mr. Bell. Team No Cussing, Fuck Fudge Yeah!

Oh, and for the best thing you've seen all day, check out McKay Hatch's No Cussing Club Rap. It is beyond awesome. Not even swears can describe the hotness of this jam:



[No Cussing Club]
LA County Tries For No-Cussing Week [AP]

The woman quoted above is, MSNBC tells us, at the vanguard of a new movement: recession grammar police. Some people have always been good spellers and had excellent grammar. Loads of folks are bothered by errors. A few have always been kind enough to correct their friends and loved ones. But apparently the economic downturn and the corresponding lack of control people feel over their lives has driven language vigilantes to new heights of activism. The results are sometimes funny, frequently annoying, and occasionally illegal.

To hear MSNBC tell it,

The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in books, broadcasts and puckish blogs that poke fun at common gaffes and proffer usage tips for those not in the know. Language love is celebrated via T-shirts, Facebook pages and shiny new holidays such as National Grammar Day. Even Oprah’s gotten in on the style and usage scene by asking Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty to clear up confusion about compound possessives.

But for every "'Blog' of 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks" (yes, that's what it's called) there's an irritated co-worker chafing at constant criticism; for every copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves sold there's a nursed grudge; for every article on famous authors' spelling errors, there's apparently an obsessive dad who carries color-coded pens and corrects strangers' bumper stickers. As for the illegality, that came about when a couple of folks corrected a historic hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

Those who bridle at a misplaced pronoun probably feel themselves on some level to be guardians of the language, a bastion of order in an increasingly anarchic universe. (The fact that Jane Austen, doyenne of order, apparently couldn't spell may or may not reassure them.) Perhaps this is why people are sometimes more than merely annoyed by such criticism: it suggests a fundamental failure. Then too, there is the issue of implicit educational superiority, a naturally touchy subject. The fact that the critic is always right — that there is, in fact, an objective validity to such criticism — can only serve to increase the recipient's sullen truculence. Then too, there is something to be said for appreciating a touch of anarchy: most of us get a kick out of the occasional Tonight Show-style malaprop, and the woman who refuses to eat anywhere with a misspelled name (she counts "Krispy Kreme" and, yes, is the same one whose quote opened this post) is probably an anomaly even amongst high sticklers. Whatever the stakes — and one can certainly make a good argument that proper usage is far more than a mere nicety — anyone who worries about the fraying of society's fabric must acknowledge that civility is at least as crucial.

Fastidious Spelling Snobs Pushed Over The Edge [MSNBC]
6 Wordsmiths Who Couldn't Spell [Mental Floss]

Councilman Eric Crafton certainly can't think of any. "I happened to see a state legislature meeting in California where several of the state representatives had interpreters at their desk because they couldn’t speak English,” Mr. Crafton tells the New York Times, “That’s not the vision I have for Nashville.”

Crafton has reportedly wasted $350,000 worth of taxpayer money on his quest to ensure an English-only government, money he believes is well spent: “We’ll make English the official language here,” he claims, “After that happens, we’re going to go city to city, show them how we’ve done it here, and let the dominos fall.”

Yet other city officials don't agree: Mayor Karl Dean, local civil rights leaders, and business owners have all come out against the proposal. “Economics is global, and to be competitive you cannot drive away immigrants and the businesses that rely on them,” says Ralph J. Schulz, President of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, “Businesses from outside Nashville have been calling and saying, ‘Is Nashville a xenophobic place?’ ”

Xenophobic attitudes often spring up in tough economic times, as citizens look for a scapegoat on which to place the blame. The threat of anti-immigrant attitudes is only amplified by such measures, which are exclusionary and give momentum to the idea of "the other"'; the fact that Crafton is pushing for "English-Only" rules is just a means for him to push the idea that English speakers are somehow more worthy of holding local offices. As David Morales, a Mexican immigrant, notes: “It’s part of a larger problem of people not understanding immigrants: their habits, their languages, their barbecues in the front yard. It’s more than just fear about jobs. It’s fear about a whole way of life.”

In Nashville, A Ballot Measure That May Quiet All But English [NYTimes]