First, I realize to what extent I’m opening myself to criticism, but then, when did I ever call myself an intellectual, other than ironically? So have at me, for whatever sins against the language you can find on this blog. I know they are many; one thing I had to do in resolving to maintain a blog to begin with was accept the fact that I would have to write and publish more quickly than I could do so without error. So go for it.
On to my subject: I don’t know whether you clicked through this post on Foreign Policy‘s "Public Intellectuals" reader-participation feature. If you did, you might have found the accompanying article by Christopher Hitchens, "The Plight of the Public Intellectual." Do so now, if it’s not too much trouble. It won’t take long. I’m just asking you to take a quick glance at the first paragraph, which goes (for those of you too lazy to click) like this:
Has anyone ever described themselves as an “intellectual,” or given it as the answer to the frequently asked question, “And what do you do?” The very term “public intellectual” sometimes affects me rather like the expression “organic food.” After all, there can’t be any inorganic nourishment, and it’s difficult to conceive of an intellectual, at least since Immanuel Kant, whose specialization was privacy. However, we probably do need a term that expresses a difference between true intellectuals and the rival callings of “opinion maker” or “pundit,” especially as the last two are intimately bound up with the world of television. (I recently rewatched the historic 40-year-old ABC News confrontation between Gore Vidal and the late William F. Buckley at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The astonishing thing was that the network gave these two intellects a full 22 minutes to discuss matters after the news. How far we have fallen from that standard of commentary.)
Actually, you only have to read the first five words:
Has anyone ever described themselves…
… to which I respond, No, I don’t believe anyone ever has.
Do you not find this painfully jarring? You don’t see it? It’s the number disagreement, dammit! It jumps right out and smacks me in the face. I could not make a mistake like that. There are all sorts of mistakes I can make, and not bat an eye or any other part of my anatomy, or yours either. But this one is a mistake that I find it hard to imagine myself making.
Of course, Mr. Hitchens being an intellectual and all, I find myself doubting that it’s a mistake. There is a school of thought out there — one of the more twisted branches of feminism — that hold that it’s better to refer to a person of nonspecific gender as plural rather than commit the unpardonable sin of using the traditional English standard of the inclusive "he" — or rather, in this case, "himself."
So it seems that one of three things seem likely:
- It was an honest slip, on Mr. Hitchens’ part as well as at least one (and probably more) editors’. (The fact is that even if one agrees that we should no longer assume the masculine form is inclusive, one can write around the problem without committing the sin of number disagreement.)
- It was a positive assertion of a sociopolitical point, and one that I would have thought far too trite for Mr. Hitchens, who — while I may disagree with him on the existence-of-God thing, is a man of discerning and courageous intellect, one who doesn’t tiptoe around words to avoid offending. Doubt me? Read this piece about Iraq, "A War To Be Proud Of."
- This disturbing usage has become so ubiquitous that even top intellectuals — and their editors — think nothing of employing it.
Whichever explanation applies, I was surprised to see such an article begin that way.
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Or,
4. It is a schizophrenic/MPD-friendly usage.
😉
Hitchens’ grammar is perfectly acceptable and correct. According to Random House Unabridged Dictionary, definition #3 of “themselves” is as follows:
3. (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine himself or the definite feminine herself): “No one who ignores the law can call themselves a good citizen.”
Here’s the link.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out which, the language changes to incorporate frequently made mistakes or, in this case, to make a word fit a situation that waxes awkward without it.
I didn’t notice the “themselves” mistake that wasn’t actually a mistake until Mr. Warthen stuck his foot into his mouth by pointing it out.
I’m inured to verbal abuse, or abuse of verbiage, I suppose.
But Mr. Warthen and Mr. Hitchens are right about one thing. A working class hero is something to be, but an intellectual is something no one ever calls themselves.
The citation Phillip links to is certainly an example of how political correctness leads to illogical results, in this case changing the number to avoid offending fringe feminists and violating perfectly logical rules of grammar in the process, as Brad points out. That’s just what the English language needs, more exceptions. While minor, it’s still a degradation of the language.
As for intellectuals, I highly recommend Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, a 2007 update to the 1990 version in my library. The author, Paul Johnson, captures the contradictions between what these intellectuals say and their actions.
Writers are by definition intellectuals, except for a few notable exceptions. Mein Kamp wasn’t written by an intellectual for instance. Mao wasn’t an intellectual.
You’re got some company there not being an intellectual. Good night and good luck!
Mike, I haven’t looked into other references on this question, but is this really a modern usage? Or does it actually predate modern feminism? In any case, Hitchens is not someone I would ever accuse of being politically correct!
Then again, no one ever calls themselves politically correct.
Apologies for being a comment hog with my third in a row, but Mike: I’m not familiar with that book but the title and your comment certainly implies that intellectualism is synonymous with left-wing politics. One could make a strong argument that the reason we are in this sticky Iraq situation is because of the theorizing of a cabal of neocon intellectuals from academia, who were very good at laying out their vision of how everything was going to work out, but managed to leave out some important real-world factors from their theories.
Some of the 9/11 report reveals that Bush was originally skeptical of trying to push an Iraq link to the attacks: his “average-guy” instincts in this case were right. But Bush, not the brightest bulb in the universe, was wowed by the intellectuals in the think tanks who had been pushing their grand schemes for years.
I have to laugh at G.W. Bush being constantly smeared as “dumb”, by the same people who worship Al Gore, Bill Clinton, an the like. There are no dumb fighter pilots. There are no dumb graduates of Harvard Business School. GW is both a fighter pilot and an MBA.
Bill Clinton flunked out of Oxford.
Al Gore barely was graduated by Harvard.
Al Gore was expelled from divinity school for drug and alcohol abuse.
Al Gore flunked out of law school.
Bill Bradley didn’t make 900 on the SAT.
Ted Kennedy cheated his way through college, paying students to take his tests.
John F. Kennedy was not bright and surrounded himself with a bunch of wannabe intellectuals from Harvard, like McNamara, Eckstein, Galbraith and Califano, who made a mess of the Vietnam War.
Look at the advisors Clinton had:
His National Security Advisor had to resign because he couldn’t get any level of clearance.
His economic advisor wrote her dissertation on the wonders of the communist Romanian economy.
If a dictionary endorses such an abhorrent abuse of the language, then I suspect the dictionary entry of having been rewritten by someone on the Newberry College faculty, which voted UNANIMOUSLY (or so we are told anonymously — talk about your academic courage) to ditch the “Indians” nickname…
Just to show that it’s not just the Random House dictionary that okays Hitchens’ use of “themselves,”, here is the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition #3 of the word:
themselves
3) used instead of ‘himself’ or ‘herself’ to refer to a person of unspecified sex.
In another section of Oxford Dictionary’s website, they go into greater detail about the history of such usage, with examples that would indicate…hi Mike…that somehow Thackeray and Shakespeare, er, traveled through time?… to allow feminism to pollute their use of the language.
From Oxford:
“The English language unfortunately lacks a simple singular pronoun which does not specify gender. Various people have suggested new words to fill this gap, but none of them has caught on, or (frankly) is ever likely to: it is not practical to try to change such a basic element of the language by sheer will.
However, children and adults alike naturally find the obvious solution to this conundrum: rather than using the formal and awkward formula ‘he or she’, they simply use they, especially after words such as anyone and no one which are strictly singular but often imply a reference to more than one person.
This is not a new problem, or a new solution. ‘A person can’t help their birth’, wrote Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), and even Shakespeare produced the line ‘Every one to rest themselves betake’ (in Lucrece), which pedants would reject as logically ungrammatical….”
Oh yes, it’s a VERY old usage in common speech — but, I would venture to say, a relatively recent one in self-consciously “intellectual” writing, which is where we came into this…
The problem with intellectuals is intellectualism becomes their drug and they are hopelessly addicted to it. They not only cannot smell the roses, they don’t even see the roses.
I have listened to Mr. Hitchens pitiful attempts to be a modern day Buckley. I don’t know for sure but I sense Mr. Hitchens is underneath a very lonely and insecure man having forsaken his maker.
It may be a little cute to define “Intellectuals” as folks who form and foment ideology, but I think it’s apt. A favorable review of Johnson’s book has this:
I don’t think that intellectualism is necessarily synonymous with left-wing politics, but do take issue with the view that a “cabal of neocon intellectuals from academia” may be responsible for the Iraq invasion / war.
That quote is from a review of the next book on my “must read” list,War and Decision. Before you recoil in horror at the thought of touching anything authored by Doug Feith, head of DoD’s policy organization at the time and much vilified by everyone but his dog, you should take a look at the book’s website, not just the reviews linked there, but the supporting documents available there. (And here’s that White House memo from October 2002.)
Feith probably had no alternative but to compile a massive archive of contemporaneous documents. His reputation has been ruined, but he’s chosen to respond in a clever and honorable way by producing a second draft of history after the first of hysteria.
Aldous Huxley said it best:
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
Nah. An intellectual is someone who TELLS himself (note the classic use of the inclusive masculine there) that he has discovered something more interesting than sex, probably because he has trouble getting any of the latter.
“If a dictionary endorses such an abhorrent abuse of the language, then I suspect the dictionary entry of having been rewritten by someone on the Newberry College faculty, which voted UNANIMOUSLY (or so we are told anonymously — talk about your academic courage) to ditch the “Indians” nickname…”
“Oh yes, it’s a VERY old usage in common speech — but, I would venture to say, a relatively recent one in self-consciously “intellectual” writing, which is where we came into this…”
Gosh, Mr. Warthen, when someone proves you’re just plain wrong, why can’t you yourself just admit it?
Me myself, I’m thinking Oxford seems consciously intellectual to me.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
Phillip is correct, but Brad is too. A language’s usage can be categorized qualitatively as ranging from the vulgar, or common usage, to the literary; in between there may be a standard used for formal communications.
There’s a quantitative aspect too in terms of vocabulary and word frequency in the different types. We in the US do not really face the issue of dialects — generally a form of the vulgar / spoken variant — or of extreme differences in pronunciation: same words and alphabet, but different sounds, as in using “h” (or “kh”) instead of “g”, giving a new meaning to Fleetwood Mac’s lament at the difficulty of finding really good Greek food in song “Gyros are hard to find.”
Folks who speak more that one language — too bad Herb’s abandoned this forum because he could comment on what he’s experience with German — have to deal with the differences in grammar among the languages they are fluent in. Native English-speakers generally end up learning more about English grammar and syntax in the process of mastering another Indo-European language. They become sensitive to the need of maintaining the correspondence in number between a pronoun and its antecedent because doing otherwise marks one as illiterate in another language.
So why should we care here in Vespucciland, land of the free and home of the brave?
We need not unless we are communicating with folks who care about — may be affected by — imprecise usage. Formal communications demand rigid adherence to conventional usage, thus legal documents, contracts, commercial terms and conditions, safety warnings, advisories of all sorts, operating instructions, and so forth have to be unambiguous on many levels to be effective; failure may be consequential.
Of lesser importance today is the notion of correct usage for its own sake. I attribute that to the gradual degradation of standards of all sorts, but that’s my problem.
Some of an earlier response to Mike got accidentally deleted I think, but if a piece of it shows up again here, please forgive the redundancy. Here’s a short version:
The White House memo Mike cites does not at all refute the assertion that US military action to overthrow Saddam and occupy Iraq was a pet project of neocons in academia and think tanks throughout the 90’s and early 00’s. The motivations of the intellectuals and theorists were numerous…In any case the list of goals are bullet points in the memo, not necessarily in order, but even if you do take those to be in order of priority, the proclamation of even laudable goals (an Iraq that “does not threaten its neighbors”) does not mitigate the neocons’ failure to predict (or choice to ignore) certain outcomes which later came to pass.
Indeed, the very first goal stated in the memo is a great example! You’d have to agree, Mike, that at the top of the list among those neighbors who saw a major threat removed would be Iran. Oops.
And folks, you should read on into the section of the memo entitled “U.S. Objectives” for a good chuckle. There were objectives to do this project in a way that did not “promote regional instability.” And in a way that would have Iraq no longer be “a safe haven for terrorists.” Oops. And oops again. (And Feith includes this document to DEFEND his reputation??? Maybe given the fact that the media is covering Iraq a bit less these days, he should just leave well enough alone before he digs himself deeper.)
No sir, when this is said and done, even Feith’s dog may turn on him. Of course he’s amassing documents to make his role look as good as possible. Watch in the next administration as many of the cast of characters does the same, each one trying to deflect the responsibility onto others.
I’m not in favor of vindictive, punitive measures, only the truth emerging. And rest assured, there WILL be hearings. Much more of the real story will emerge in the next administration. We owe it to those who have given their lives.
“Phillip is correct, but Brad is too.”
No, Mike, the language simply changes. It evolves. There is no absolute, formal form of English that has remained constant over the long haul while common usage geed and hawed.
The capitalization scheme in the Declaration of Independence would earn lots of red marks if used in a modern term paper.
When I was in high school, “judgement” was simply wrong, and only “judgment” was acceptable, but now either may be used.
Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and text messaging, the changes occur more rapidly than ever.
It’s just verbal future shock. Pretty soon, vowels might be considered as archaic as Middle English does today.
Actually, that should be “as Middle English is today.” 🙂
penultimo mcfarland –
Sure, language does change, but at any given instant there exist formal variants enforced by producing organizations through style manuals, as well as informal variants that enjoy common usage. The trick is not to confuse the formal with the informal in communicating with the intended audience.
I happen to work with a variety of formal variants. I negotiate and interpret contracts, precision is paramount and many commonly used words and phrases have special meaning in a legal context or can come back to haunt the parties when disputes arixe. My employer produces a wide range of technical documentation and research reports that require precision in expression. But this is a level of formality that surprises nobody.
We certainly use informal forms of language in our daily communications as you point out. Folks should be aware of the need to employ formal variants in many circumstances, little things like applying for a high-paying job, addressing the League of Women Voters, or requesting a reduced sentence. I just hope that folks avoid hurting their chances or embarrassing themselves by using an inappropriate style in communicating with others.
Phillip –
From what I’ve read about the book so far, Feith wrote it not to defend his reputation, the typical motivation for a Washington memoir, but to establish facts regarding the decision to invade Iraq. Here’s Feith’s own wordscourtesy of the WaPo — note that the unbiased journalist added this in the video’s description: “Some say this book points fingers at everyone but himself but the blunders in Iraq.” Who are the some?
I’ve not yet read the book, but Michael Barone has and is not one of the WaPo some. He writes that Feith admits he made mistakes and misjudgments. I’ll add my evaluation when I’ve finished the book.
I note that in promoting your conspiracy you don’t mention the fact that regime change was a matter of US law and policy, that folks like Clinton and Gore had spoken forcefully about the need to remove Saddam, and so forth.
I’m just glad Saddam is history, and I’m sure you are too.
Well, sure, Mike, anyone should be able to figure most of that out themselves. 🙂
I read a lot of technical information from the web regarding computers and programming and I spot many grammatical errors posted on technical articles and weblogs. I can excuse misuse of English grammar by H1-B Visa holders because English is not their native language; however I cannot excuse those that know English from making grammatical errors. Yes, the web is anonymous and due to outsourcing of computer support, you could be talking to a “Bob” or a “Suzy” about a problem with your computer, but their accent doesn’t sound quite right.
My mother was an English teacher that taught the proper use of grammar and not the language; she also taught French, but that was to us English speaking Americans. From her, I realize the value of proper grammar in business and technical communications.
For Lee, Mom taught most of her career in public schools. She went to teach at a segregation academy, hated the experience, and resumed teaching in public schools. The TERI program did not exist when Mom retired from teaching.
The resolution to remove Saddam Hussein from power was sponsored by Democrats in 1998, reversing the restrictions they had placed on President G.H.W. Bush in 1990. They voted overwhelmingly to authorize President Clinton use, “any means possible”, to “remove the threat of Iraq’s WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION”.
President G.W. Bush was operating under that authorization when he geared up to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, because they had been harboring and supporting Al Qaeda. The Democrats insisted on a new vote so they could go on record supporting the war. Hillary Clinton voted for war, along with John Kerry and all the others who now claim it was Bush’s private war.
I’m just glad Saddam is history, and I’m sure you are too.
-Mike
Not especially. With Saddam in power the middle east was relatively stable. Oil prices were running under $50/barrel. Few Iraqis (mostly opponents of the Saddam regime) were dying (compared to hundreds every month now). Iraq served as a counter weight to the religious nuts in Iran. Now Iran is a growing threat. We now know that Iraq was of no military threat to anyone outside a few hundred anti-Saddam “extremists” in Iraq itself.
Sure we had problems in that area of the world but they were relatively well contained. The world is vastly worse off for our misguided attempt at imposing our brand of democracy on a people that don’t want it. No amount of evidence showing how terrible Saddam Hussein was will change that fact.
So you were fine with
* Saddam running two training camps for hijackers,
* harboring Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders ( see Salman Pak),
* providing cash to the 9/11 hijackers (we captured his records and photos of the transactions)
* paying $20,000 to families of kamikazee bombers
* still having 650,000 tons of biological and chemical WMD on hand which the UN had missed but U.S. soldiers captured in 2002
“I’m just glad Saddam is history, and I’m sure you are too.”–Mike
Yeah, sure, but then I would also be glad to see Robert Mugabe, the Myanmar regime, the Sudanese leaders, the North Korean regime, Hugo Chavez, Palestinian suicide bombers, Israeli pro-settlement hawks, and possibly Vladimir Putin be “history,” too. If these are the criteria by which we commit ourselves to military action, then we should be at war now in about ten places around the world simultaneously.
Of course what most of us really wanted after 9/11 was (silly us…) Al-Qaeda to be history.
How’s that going, again?
Look at the list I posted of all the top Al Qaeda leaders killed and captured since 2002. Another was added last week.
They have been too busy dying to attack America for the last 7 years.
That’s a lot better than when Clinton’s lack of pursuit was a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, according to Bin Laden. The Islamofascists don’t respect weakness and cowardice, like Bill Clinton and Obama exhibit. That’s why Radical Islam openly supports Obama.
Mr. Hightower,
I have nothing against school teachers. I just know that private enterprise will select the best ones and reward them appropriately, whereas government teachers are paid based on tenure and political gambits.
The only thing I have against their retirement system is having to rob my retirement and by children’s retirement to prop up unfunded government retirement promises made to buy votes. Teachers and everyone who actually does productive work would be better off is their entire retirement was owned and funded by themselves.