My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Browsing Category The Way I See It

Doggonit! That Confusing Gender Binary Language

by on ·General, Language, Opinion, The Way I See It

According to Heraclitus, “Change is the only constant in life. As I understand it, the Greek philosopher’s statement means that everything we are used to will undergo some transformation sooner or later.

I suspect that many of my boomer subscribers, and the sprinkling of millennial readers, feel as intimidated as I do about how things keep changing. What the flux? As soon as we get used to something, it alters, transforms, it changes before you can say abracadabra!

Let’s talk about language. Grammar rules and word meanings constantly change, proving that language, too, is inconsistent. Remember when a mouse meant a rodent you might see skittering across the floor, not a device sitting on your desktop near your computer? And how long did it take some of us to learn that ghosting meant more than a shadowy image on an old television screen? It seems that as soon as we learn the meaning of certain words or the context used, a language adjustment sprouts like gray hair on an AARP member’s head.

It has become trendy now to use pronouns in non-standard ways. Wait a minute. Did I say trendy? Strike that. As sure as it rains on just-washed cars, some sensitive folks will freak out over my using the word trendy in this situation. So, bear with me while I replace trendy with, oh, let’s say, practical. As I was saying, non-standard pronouns are also described as non-binary or gender-neutral pronouns. Some folks may have been educated about those latter pronouns for a while. But, I, on the other hand, only recently, and unexpectedly, learned the lesson.

Imagine you are cruising along, completely absorbed in a book you are reading, when suddenly you get side-swiped by what you think is an improper pronoun. Such an “accident” is more noticeable when you see the word on a printed page than when you listen to a narrator. In an audiobook, you wonder if you heard what you thought you heard, but when you see a word on a page being used in an unfamiliar manner, it looms in front of you like a bright red STOP sign at an intersection.

Recently, I was listening to an audiobook. After the initial introduction of the male and female characters, whenever the author referenced one of them, if she did not use their name, she referred to the character as they instead of her or him. The first time I heard “they,” when I was expecting to hear “her,” I chalked it up to a typo. Then I heard “they” intended for him, and I wondered facetiously, can the narrator read? As the story progressed, and the same perceived mistake kept recurring, sometimes with different characters, I realized something was off-kilter.

(Note: I use read interchangeably, referring to a printed book or an audio one. In this case, it was an audiobook that caused my angst.)

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the pronoun swap got distracting to the point that it wrecked an otherwise intriguing plot and flowing storyline. So much so that, at one point, I considered ditching the book unfinished. Only curiosity about how the story would end kept me reading.

The most common option for gender-neutral pronouns is the singular usage of the pronouns they/them. Instead of using “he” or “she” in a sentence, you would use the word “they.”

If any of you readers are scratching your head trying to figure this all out, the following is an example of sentences with binary and non-binary pronouns.

Ordinarily, I would write this: “Our teacher called in sick this morning, so Principal Moore taught our class today, and she did well. Kudos to her.” I would not write this (non-binary): “Our teacher called in sick this morning, so Principal Moore taught our class today, and they did well. Kudos to them.”

Still scratching? Perhaps this explanation from Google will help: “The non-binary pronouns are “they,” “them,” and “their.” When talking about someone who identifies as non-binary, use “they/them” (not “he/him” or “she/her”), and use “their” (not “his/her”).”

Got it? You think? Well, imagine reading an entire novel containing non-binary language.

When I began reading the book, I thought that perhaps the author failed to have a copy editor proofread it before it was published. But, of course, she did. Finally, after stressing out over what I thought were numerous proofreading flubs, I figured it out.

I understand that gender-inclusive language is a way to embrace persons whose gender is unknown or undeterminable or a non-binary person who chooses to use “they” as their identifying pronoun. By George, I get it! That makes it no less confusing, especially for uninitiated writers and others.

Call me nonprogressive or old-fashioned, whatever. I think using non-binary pronouns is freaking awkward!

I found a Study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill somewhat conciliatory after reading the following: “We speculate that relative unfamiliarity with non-binary they and non-binary gender may…lead writers to avoid using a form that may not be familiar to their [audience].” I hope everyone who writes for a general audience will take that seriously.

In the meantime, traditions keep changing like the seasons. No disrespect intended, but what’s next? Will Christmas novels that have Santa saying, “Ho, Ho, Ho” be banned because some people will consider it offensive, instead forcing Santa’s laugh to be “Ha, Ha, Ha” or “He, He, He.” Wait a minute. Strike that. Replace “He, He, He” with “They, They, They.”

And you, he, she, they, their, them – y’all have a very Merry Christmas!

 

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GI Jane Joke was no Knee-Slapper

by on ·Entertainment, Opinion, The Way I See It

Wow! Not since I saw the butt-naked streaker run across the stage during the 1974 Oscars have I seen anything so mouth-dropping as when Will Smith slapped the GI Jane joke out of Chris Rock’s mouth. And as if the smack heard around the world wasn’t enough, Smith went back to his seat and shouted obscenities. “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth.”

Since everyone else with two lips and a pulse is opining about the Smith-Rock show, I’m adding my two cents.

Rock’s joke may have been in poor taste, but when is using physical violence against someone who says something you dislike okay? Is it all right for a student to strike a school teacher because he or she was asked to stop cutting up? Heck no. Is it okay for a parent to hit (and God forbid spank) their misbehaving child when a time-out is a waste of time? Well, that depends on who you ask.

The same premise can be applied to the infamous slap. Two wrongs don’t make a right. As I see it, the problem with many of today’s rebellious youths is that they have out-of-control parents as role models. Case in point – Smith’s son Jaden reportedly tweeted, “And that’s how we do it.” Would his response have been the same if Smith had pulled out a gun and shot Rock dead?

Smith lost points with me when he displayed a hair-trigger adverse reaction to what was said in jest. And I wonder, did it occur to him – for a split second – to wait to talk to Rock man-to-man off-stage and tell him that he didn’t appreciate his bad joke? Or was the actor hell-bent on displaying another Oscar-worthy performance?

Judging by what I’ve seen and heard, the public is divided on their feelings about the incident. If ordinary people expect celebrities to be role models, then Smith needs to check his demeanor because his inappropriate behavior took him to a new low. On the other hand, Rock showed restraint and class; he also refused to press charges for the assault.

According to ET the Oscars is broadcast in over 200 countries. Being the recipient of the bitch-slap heard around the world is the ultimate humiliation. I don’t even want to think about the outcry that would have resulted if Rock had socked him back and the two wound up grappling on the stage. That surely would have gotten more gasps than the naked man streaking across the stage over forty years ago.

I’ve heard some folks say that they wonder if Smith was under the influence of too much alcohol or some other judgment clouding, courage-boasting substance or if he was having a breakdown. Many folks are also saying that they believe there is something deeper eating at Smith than Rock’s GI Jane joke.

Since we were not privileged to hear the conversation between Denzel, Tyler Perry, and others who appeared to be trying to comfort Smith backstage, we don’t know what they were saying to him. I’d like to think that instead of saying, “Way to go, man!” at least one, if not all, of them, told him that what he did was out of line. It has also been reported that Smith said Denzel told him, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.'” Take heed Will Smith. Take heed.

This morning on The View, Smith’s mom expressed her surprise about her son’s actions. She said that she had never seen him behave that way.

And while many people are empathizing with “Poor Will” I agree with today’s guest host also on The View. She expressed her thoughts concerning the possible reasons for Smith’s behavior and whether the Academy should discipline him. She said, “Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean that you should excuse it…We cannot have selected consequences to decide who gets punished and who doesn’t.”

Will Smith may one day receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but it’s likely already being tarnished by the legacy of his recent Oscar-winning night behavior.

That’s my two cents, and I’m taking it to the bank.

 

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Entertaining Deep Thoughts

by on ·Food for Thought, Opinion, The Way I See It

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.” Stephen Hawking.

I read somewhere that the typical Pisces is extremely introspective. Don’t I know it. My brain seems to always be on hyperdrive, even when I’m sleeping in dreamland.

I contemplate everything. It baffles me that people spend hundreds of dollars on cut-out jeans simply because they are fashionable. And I wonder why birthdays are counted in years instead of days; especially since a day can sometimes seem like a lifetime. I humorously consider that someone who turns 50 on their birthday would be 18250 days old. Then, I imagine trying to fit those figures on a line on a form with only enough space for three digits.

Often my philosophy wavers between believing in predestination and the idea that we are all autonomous beings fueled by self-determination.

Some people ascribe to the doctrine that a Higher Power foreordains everything and that the script of our life is assigned when we are born. As we age, we think that we can control our destiny when we may not. What if we only believe that we have free will because part of the master plan is to let us think that we do?

Consider the epigraph The Appointment in Samarra. Are we always where we are supposed to be at any given time?

Another example. Say that a man is running late for an appointment. He rushes out of the building and anxiously tries to flag a taxi. A cab stops a couple of feet away from him. As he begins walking toward it, another man who had just approached the scene rudely rushes past the first man and hurries into the cab. The driver pulls off and proceeds on the green light into the intersection and is broadsided by a box truck that has run the light. Both the cab driver and passenger are badly injured. Was it predestination that the man from who the cab was stolen avoided the accident?

If someone commits suicide, was it predestined that the person would die that way, or was their free will, their intent to take control, the determining factor in when and how death would occur? Relevant to death, was euthanasia proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian, an assigned architect of good or a force of evil? Everything is relative, isn’t it?

Do things unfurl in life the way they are supposed to, or is everything happenstance? Are our hopes, dreams, and plans already inbred or assigned to us before we are born, and do we merely follow the script once we are here?

I frequently consider how our thoughts, words, and actions, good or bad, sometimes have extensive reach. The things we say or do can benefit or harm others, often without our knowledge, subsequently a domino effect.

In these contemporary times, it seems that everything and everyone is interrelated far and wide. For example, random hookups that result in childbirths, artificial inseminations, and surrogacies make blood ties far-reaching. Consequently, brothers and sisters, cousins, and other blood relatives can unknowingly develop a physical or sexual love connection without knowing that they are related.

Occasionally, I entertain the idea that we, all of humankind, are on a universal chessboard. Depending on our social and economic status in life, we are the kings, queens, bishops, rooks, and pawns that provide entertainment for the omnipotent powers that be.

Sometimes I am inclined to agree with Shakespeare. Were he alive to paraphrase a line that he gave to Hamlet, he might say of my perpetual curiosity, “The lady doth overthink too much, methinks.”

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A Time to Laugh

by on ·Religion, The Way I See It

People joke about God having a sense of humor. I’ve done it, too. But, something happened to convince me that not only does God have a sense of humor, He sometimes uses humor to shake us up.

This morning – I am saying my a.m. prayers and have progressed to “hallowed be Thy name” when my mind begins to wander. Should I have Hazelnut or Arabica Dark Roast coffee with breakfast? Unfortunately, it is not unusual for my thoughts to stray when I’m saying my prayers. The Lord knows that I sometimes have the attention span of a two-year-old with ADD. I force myself to refocus and get back to the business at hand. I apologize to the Lord and start over as I always do whenever my prayer is interrupted.

“Our Father…” I get as far as “Thy will be done,” seconds before my cell phone pings on the nightstand beside the bed, indicating that I have a text message. I ignore the phone and apologize again for the interruption before restarting the prayer.

As I ask God to “Give us this day,” a loud, horn-honking car alarm goes off outside my bedroom window. Son of a biscuit eater, I think, then add Sorry, Lord.

I begin again and manage to finish praying without any more interruptions. And then the strangest thing happens. I turn on the TV to watch the news while making my bed. The set is tuned to the channel it was on when I turned it off last night. Grey’s Anatomy is on. Then comes the kicker.

Dr. Miranda Bailey (one of Grey’s key characters) stands before an altar holding glowing candles in the chapel. She stretches her arms to her sides, raises her head toward heaven, and begins to pray. She says, “Lord,” but before she can utter another word, a coworker arrives by her side and begins chattering. Although the intrusion is brief, Dr. Bailey’s frustration is evident. When the coworker leaves, Bailey turns back toward the altar and is about to resume her prayer.

“Lord,” she says again. Then she is interrupted by the phone inside the pocket of her smock. She pulls out the phone, glares at it, and sighs in frustration as the show goes to a commercial.

I am a little bit rattled by the parallel between what I just saw and my earlier experience while trying to finish my prayer. I pick up the remote control and change the channel while thinking how strange it was that the TV happened to be on that station and showing that particular scene. I don’t believe in coincidences. Surely, God was jesting, about my apologizing for the interruptions. In addition to wrath, mercy, and love, He does have a sense of humor.

Religion – like politics – is a touchy subject. Many people refrain from discussing those two topics because the conversation can turn from an interesting discussion to a nasty argument before you can say Hail Mary.

I am not a religious person, nor am I an atheist. I am spiritual. People who don’t understand my philosophy would likely label me a Christian atheist, but I reject that label.

Sometimes, when discussing the subject, I use the words religious and spiritual interchangeably because it’s easier and less time-consuming than explaining my viewpoint. As I see it, religion is a detailed tradition of organized beliefs and regulated practices shared by a like-minded community and often led and controlled by a person or person(s) who consider themselves called or appointed by God.

Being spiritual is having a one-on-one relationship with God or whatever one chooses to call the Supreme Being. Therefore, I do not feel compelled to have an intermediary or middle person – another imperfect mortal –interpret, explain, or orchestrate their understanding of the Higher Power to attempt to drive me to think their way.

People who claim to be spiritual instead of religious are not necessarily agnostic or atheist. On the contrary, many of us are God-fearing Christians. We just don’t want to be affiliated with religious institutions and groupthink that impacts people’s free will and common sense—shades of Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate. And we do believe in prayer.

As author Stan Toler says, “You don’t necessarily need a great sense of humor to get God’s punch lines. You just need a great sense of faith.”

Amen.

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Creeping Normalcy

by on ·Food for Thought, Opinion, The Way I See It

Is there such a thing as normal anymore?  Or is normalcy, like beauty – in the eye of the beholder? I often wonder about that.

It was easier to comprehend things when I was much younger (darn near a hundred years ago). It didn’t require a rocket scientist mentality or a Ph.D. in political correctness to determine what was normal and what wasn’t. Back then, we learned in school that two plus two equals four. Nowadays, even that is arguable. Ask a scientist or mathematician, and that person might tell you that two plus two doesn’t necessarily equal four. Then, they’ll go on to explain that significant figures and rounding could produce a different answer. For gosh sake, I am not delving any further into that. Anyone who wants additional information about the quandary of two plus two had best start doing their research.

The conversion from normalcy to the existing status quo sometimes annoys me. Things that once fit neatly into boxes now bulge and punch holes through the container. I like the way a friend of mine described the situation when we were discussing it recently. He said, “Society is on the downstroke. The best days are behind us.”

My favorite television show is The View. The women on the program are intelligent, courageous, and outspoken. They don’t give a flying squirrel whether the public agrees with what they say, nor do they hold back on voicing their opinion. Even when they have a co-host or guest on the show whose ideas I strongly disagree with, who I feel is teetering on the border of idiocy, I still respect that person’s right to voice their opinion.

Like The View’s co-hosts, I am not bothered by people’s judgment of my viewpoint. However, I am astute enough to know that there are times when it is prudent to be diplomatic instead of shooting from the hip. I feel sorry for people who are so afraid of expressing what they honestly think because they fear that being candid will make them look bad, biased, or bonkers in the eyes of their relatives or friends. So, they suppress their true feelings and deny what they are really thinking. Then, later they silently fume about what they wish they had said. Been there. Done that. Years ago. Ain’t doing it no mo’. (Okay, I got a bit carried away there. But isn’t that the freedom of journaling?)

Getting back to the topic. I miss the days when if I received an unexpected wedding invitation from an acquaintance who I didn’t know very well, I didn’t have to wonder if it would be a heterosexual or same-sex marriage. Of course, the gender of the partners will not determine whether or not I attend the wedding. I don’t care who weds who. But, the fact that I don’t care about the gender of the couple doesn’t stop me from wondering. With the growing trend of parents giving their children unisex names, guessing the gender of someone’s S.O. isn’t as easy as it used to be. For example, if a wedding invitation reads, “… joyfully invite you to the wedding of Blair and Blake” or “the honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Casey and Hunter,” there may be cause for pause. Suppose I want to buy the couple a set of engraved coffee mugs or embroidered gift towels; in order not to commit a faux pas, I need to know whether to buy “His and Hers, His and His or Hers and Hers.”

And look at families. As I see it, there is no such thing anymore as a normal family. Okay, I suddenly sense that using the word normal will be like pouring rubbing alcohol on a bleeding, open wound in some folks. So let’s strike it. Perhaps, in this instance, traditional is a more acceptable word to use. Traditional families like I used to see on TV programs during my generation’s younger days. Families like Father Knows Best, The Partridge Family, Good Times, and even The Jeffersons are what I mean by traditional families. They used to be referred to as nuclear families. I wonder, is the term “nuclear family” taboo now, too?

Traditional or contemporary families are more on par with This is Us and  Modern Family.

When I was a child, I had friends who may have had one or two step-siblings living in their home. Aside from the step-siblings, the children in the house all had the same last name. (Sometimes the step-kids did, too.) According to a study by Cassandra Dorius, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, “One in five of all American moms have kids who have different birth fathers.” So, there could be as many as five or more children in today’s household, each carrying a different surname connected with their numerous baby daddies. I suspect that this is now considered normal; oops, I mean traditional.

Well, those are some of my thoughts about normalcy.

Dare I publish this? People might consider me unreasonable, narrow-minded, or biased; whatever adjective suits their fancy doesn’t faze me. But in judging me, I hope that they will acknowledge that I am sincere in expressing my beliefs and opinions. I refuse to cowardly straddle the line and pretend to be impartial when I have concrete feelings about something.

I’m sure that even my critics would agree that Charles Addams was on point when he wrote, “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” With that – I do agree.

 

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