by Anne Fadiman
Mr. Shawn didn’t blink. He gave no indication that I had said anything untoward. In fact, he calmly proceeded to discuss the new feminist magazine—its history, its merits, its demerits, the opportunities it might offer a young writer like me—for four or five minutes without ever mentioning its name.
Since that time, whenever I have heard anyone talk about civility, I have thought of Mr. Shawn, a man so civil that, in order to spare me embarrassment, he succeeded in crossing an entire minefield of potential Ms.’s without detonating a single one. I consider his feat comparable to that of Georges Perec, the experimental French writer who composed a 311-page novel without using the letter e. After I left the building, I called a friend. (“How do you say that new little word? … Oh my God, no!”) That was a terrible moment, but as Mr. Shawn had surmised, wanting to die in a telephone booth was greatly preferable to wanting to die in his office.
In twenty-three years—an eyeblink in our linguistic history—the new little word has evolved from a cryptic buzz to an automatism. From the beginning, I saw its logic and fairness. Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for Ms. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable saying it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, my ear retuned. Now, although it’s probably a moot point—everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne—I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can’t be Miss Fadiman because I’m married. I can’t be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can’t be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom Ms. was invented.
On the sanguinary fields of gender politics, Ms. has scored a clear victory. I wish I could say the same of, say, the United Church of Christ’s new “inclusive” hymnal, in which “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” has been replaced by “Dear God, Embracing Humankind.” The end is estimable; it’s the means that chafe. I’m not sure I want to be embraced by an Almighty with so little feeling for poetry. Yet, having heard the new version, I can’t say I feel entirely happy with the old one either. As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary. Most people who have written about questions of gender bias in language have belonged to one camp or the other. Either they want to change everything, or they don’t see what all the fuss is about. Am I the only one who feels torn?
Verbally speaking, as in other areas, my feminist self was born of a simple desire for parity. The use of gender-neutral terms like flight attendant, firefighter, and police officer seems to me an unambiguous step forward, part of the same process that has euthanized such terminal patients as authoress and sculptress—good riddance!—and is even now working on the gaggingly adorable -ette words: usherettes are being promoted to ushers, suffragette to suffragists . (I have been particularly sensitive to words that make women sound little and cute ever since the day my college roommates and I sat around discussing which animals we all resembled. I’d hoped for something majestic—an eland, perhaps, or a great horned owl—but was unanimously declared a gopher. Given that history, it’s a wonder no one has ever called me an authorette.)
My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear. To understand how I feel about grammar, you need to remember that I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never “the hoi polloi,” because hoi meant “the,” and two “the’s” were redundant—indeed something only hoi polloi would say. (Why any ten-year-old would say hoi polloi in the first place is another, more pathological matter, but we won’t go into that here.)
I call the “to each his own” quandary the His‘er Problem, after a solution originally proposed by Chicago school superintendent Ella Young in 1912: “To each his’er own.” I’m sorry. I just can’t. My reactionary self has aesthetic as well as grammatical standards, and his’er is hideous. Unlike Ms., his’er could never become reflexive. (I might interject here that when I posed the His’er Problem to my brother, who was raised in the same grammatical hothouse as I, he surprised me by saying, “I won’t say his’er. That would be a capitulation to barbarism. But I would be willing to consider a more rhythmically acceptable neologism such as hyr or hes, which would be preferable to having to avoid his by plotting each sentence in advance like a military campaign.” My brother clearly doesn’t warm to the same challenges as Messrs. Shawn and Perec.)
What about “to each his or her own”? I do resort to that construction occasionally, but I find the double pronoun an ungainly burden. More frequently I recast the entire sentence in the plural, although “to all their own” is slightly off pitch. Even a phrase that is not stylistically disfigured —for example, “all writers worth their salt,” which is only marginally more lumpish than “every writer worth his salt”—loses its specificity, that fleeting moment in which the reader conjures up an individual writer (Isaiah Berlin in one mind’s eye, Robert James Waller in another) instead of a faceless throng.
But I can’t go back. I said “to each his own” until about five years ago, believing what my sixth-grade grammar textbook, Easy English Exercises, had told me: that “or her” was “understood,” just as womankind was understood to be lurking somewhere within “mankind.” I no longer understand. The other day I came across the following sentence by my beloved role model, E. B. White: “There is one thing the essayist cannot do—he cannot indulge himself in deceit or concealment, for he will be found out in no time.” I felt the door slamming in my face so fast I could feel the wind against my cheek. “But he meant to include you!” some of you may be murmuring. “It was understood!”
I don’t think so. Long ago, my father wrote something similar: “The best essays [do not] develop original themes. They develop original men, their composers.” Since my father, unlike E. B. White, is still around to testify, I called him up last night and said, “Be honest. What was really in your mind when you wrote those sentences?” He replied, “Males. I was thinking about males. I viewed the world of literature—indeed, the entire world of artistic creation—as a world of males, and so did most writers. Any writer of fifty years ago who denies that is lying. Any male writer, I mean.”
I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn’t really see women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot. Our invisibility was brought home to me fifteen years ago, after Thunder Out of China, a 1946 best-seller about China’s role in the Second World War, was reissued in paperback. Its co-authors were Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, my mother. In his foreword to the new edition, Harrison Salisbury mentioned White nineteen times and my mother once. His first sentence was “There is, in the end, no substitute for the right man in the right place at the right moment.” I wrote to Salisbury, suggesting that sometimes —for example, in half of Thunder Out of China—there is no substitute for the right woman in the right place at the right moment. To his credit, he responded with the following mea culpa: “Oh, oh, oh! You are totally right. I am entirely guilty. You are the second person who has pointed that out to me. What can I say? It is just one of those totally dumb things which I do sometimes.” I believe that Salisbury was motivated by neither malice nor premeditated sexism; my mother, by being a woman, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.
For as long as anyone can remember, my father has called every woman who is more than ten years his junior a girl. Since he is now ninety-one, that covers a lot of women. He would never call a man over the age of eighteen a boy. I have tried to persuade him to mend his ways, but the word is ingrained, and he means it gallantly. He truly believes that inside every stout, white-haired woman of eighty there is the glimmer of that fresh and lissome thing, a girl.
If my fat
her were still writing essays, every full-grown “girl” would probably be transformed by an editor’s pencil into a “woman.” The same thing would happen to E. B. White. In an essay called “The Sea and the Wind That Blows,” White described a small sailing craft as “shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl.” I don’t think he meant a ten-year-old girl. I think he meant a girl old enough to be called a woman. But if he had compared that boat to a woman, his slim little craft, as well as his sentence, would have been forever slowed.
What I am saying here is very simple: Changing our language to make men and women equal has a cost. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. High prices are attached to many things that are on the whole worth doing. It does mean that the loss of our heedless grace should be mourned, and then accepted with all the civility we can muster, by every writer worth his’er salt.
INSERT A CARROT
During a recent visit to the Florida island where our parents live, my brother and I had dinner with them at a fancy restaurant. As we bent our heads over our menus—all of us, that is, except my father, who can’t see—I realized that our identically rapt expressions had nothing to do with deciding what we wanted to eat.
“They’ve transposed the e and the i in Madeira sauce,” commented my brother.
“They’ve made Bel Paese into one word,” I said, “and it’s lowercase.”
“At least they spell better than the place where we had dinner last Tuesday,” said my mother. “They serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck.”
We stared at one another. You’d think that after all these decades, we Fadimans would have mapped every corner of our deviant tribal identity, but apparently there was one pan-familial gene we had never before diagnosed: we were all compulsive proofreaders.
Our confessions tumbled onto the tablecloth like so much spilled Madeira sauce. My brother revealed that in a 364-page computer-software manual he had consulted the previous month, he had found several hundred errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax. His favorite was the oftrepeated command to “insert a carrot.” He had written the company, offering to trade a complete list of corrections for an upgraded version of the software, but had not received a reply. “They want to be wrong,” he sighed. I knew that by “they” he meant not just the software company but everyone who was not a Fadiman.
Our mother confided that for several years she had been filling a large envelope with mistakes she had clipped from her local paper, the Fort Myers News-Press, with the intention of mailing them to the editor when they achieved a critical mass.
My father, who at age twenty-four had been a proof-reader—indeed, the entire proofreading department—at Simon & Schuster, admitted that in the full flush of his youthful vanity he had routinely corrected menus at posh Manhattan restaurants and handed them to the maître d’s on his way out. He had even corrected library books, embellishing their margins with ¶s and lc’s and s, which he viewed not as defacements but as “improvements.” After he lost his sight three years ago, he had spent an insomniac night trying to figure out what kind of work he might still be capable of doing, and had hatched the following plan: He would spend twelve hours a day in front of the television set, prooflistening for mistakes in grammar and pronunciation. He figured that if he charged five dollars a mistake, he would become a rich man. His plan evaporated in the harsh light of morning, however, when he decided that, like the software company, the networks were not Fadimans and would therefore not wish to be improved.
I myself owned up to a dark chapter from my own hubristic youth. When I was twenty-three, I had discovered fifteen misprints in the Pyramid paperback edition of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. (Samples: page 25, paragraph 2, line 13: “thundercould” for “thundercloud”; page 99, paragraph 1, line 28: “acytelene” for “acetylene”; page 147, paragraph 1, line 27, “rocco” for “rococo.”) Nabokov had always struck me as a bit of a fusspot—had he not once observed, “In reading, one should notice and fondle details”? —so I wrote him a letter listing the errors I had noticed and fondled, on the pretext that he could incorporate the corrections in the next edition. I deserved a kick in the pants for my meddlesomeness, but lo and behold, three weeks later a fragile blue aerogramme with a Swiss postmark arrived from the Montreux-Palace Hotel. In it, Véra Evseevna Nabokov—she who had detonated, on page 219 of the book in question, Nabokov’s “slow-motion, silent explosion of love”—thanked me on her husband’s behalf for my “thoughtfulness.” Her typing was faint but 100 percent error-free.
I know what you may be thinking: What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies! It is true—and I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. I knew my family would not be distracted by the silver dragées or the pink sugar rose; had I not narrowly averted the punctuational catastrophe, they would all have cried, in chorus, “There’s a superfluous apostrophe!”
Of course, if you are a compulsive proofreader yourself —and if you are, you know it, since for the afflicted it is a reflex no more avoidable than a sneeze—you are thinking something quite different: What a fine, public-spirited family are the Fadimans! How generous, in these slipshod times, to share their perspicacity with the unenlightened! If you had been alive in 1631, it would have made your day to come across the seventh commandment in the edition of the Bible specially printed for King Charles I, which read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” In 1976, if you read Beverly Sills’s autobiography before it was cleaned up in the second printing, its very first sentence did make your day: “When I was only three and still named Belle Miriam Silverman, I sang my first aria in pubic.” Your favorite part of The New Yorker is the column fillers. No McPhee profile, no Updike story could satisfy you as completely as the extract from the Richmond Times-Dispatch that read:
Meanwhile, Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s exhusband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles’ marrying Diana while she remained his power mower.
My own power mower, George, does not understand the thrill of such discoveries. He does not think me a lovable helpmeet when I wander past his computer screen and find my fingers, as if animated by an inner gremlin, inserting a second r in embarass. I am certain, however, that the gene has passed to our six-year-old daughter. She can’t yet spell well enough to correct words, but she has definitely inherited the proofreading temperament. When she was two and a half, George said to her, pointing at our birdfeeder, “Look, Susannah, a rufous towhee!” Susannah said, witheringly, “No, Daddy, a rufous-sided towhee.” It is only a matter of time before she starts adding those missing r’s herself.
After our family dinner, I asked my mother if I could borrow her envelope of clippings from the Fort Myers News-Press. I spread them out on a table at home. There were 394. (What kind of person would count them? The daughter of the kind of person who would clip them, of course.) The offenses included fifty-six disagreements between subject and verb, eight dangling participles, three improper subjunctives, three double negatives, twelve uses of “it‘s” for “its,” three uses of “its” for “it’s,” three uses of “there” for “their,” three uses of “they’re” for “their,” and one use of “their” for “they’re.” Hunters shot dear; lovers exchanged martial vows; mental patients escaped from straight jackets; pianos tinkered; and Charles celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as the Prince of Whales. “There’s a huge demographic out there,” commented the News-Press film critic, “who appreciate good film and shouldn’t be taken for granite.” Even before I bumped into the large boulder at the end of that sentence, I had the feeling that I was reading a language other than English. I vowed I would never again take an intact declarative sentence for granite.
Swallowing 394 errors at a sitting gave me indigestion. One is e
nough. One is delicious. One is irresistible. My former editor John Bethell, who admits to sharing my compulsion, says that when a typo swims into his field of vision, he can’t not notice it. He remembers his first act of proofreading—at age seven, he saw a sign in a shop window that read DIABETEC FRUIT—and recently restrained himself from correcting VINAGER on a grocery-store sign only because he feared that passersby might think he was a graffiti vandal. The Bethell family, like the Fadiman family, presents irrefutable proof that the trait is genetic. John’s father, an architect, was, in effect, a proofreader of visual details. If a guest moved an ashtray a quarter of an inch, he descried the repositioning and rectified it instantly. John’s daughter, Sara, manifested the gene at an early age by stopping at dammed-up streams during family hikes and removing all the dead leaves. Sara grew up to be a copy editor, a profession she compares to walking behind an elephant in a parade and scooping up what it has left on the road. Her prize find, to date, was a sentence in a manuscript for a San Francisco publisher: “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the development of the Big Band Theory.” In her mind’s ear, she still occasionally hears the strains of the cosmic orchestra.
The proofreading temperament is part of a larger syndrome with several interrelated symptoms, one of which is the spotting mania. When my friend Brian Miller, also a copy editor, was a boy, he used to sit in the woods for long stretches, watching for subtle animal movements in the distance. The young John Bethell was a whiz at figuring out What’s Wrong with This Picture? Proofreaders tend to be good at distinguishing the anomalous figure—the rare butterfly, the precious seashell—from the ordinary ground, but, unlike collectors, we wish to discard rather than hoard. Although not all of us are tidy, we savor certain cleaning tasks: removing the lint from the clothes dryer, skimming the drowned bee from the pool. My father’s most treasured possession is an enormous brass wastebasket. He is happiest when his desktop is empty and the basket is full. One of my brother’s first sentences, a psychologically brilliant piece of advice offered from his high chair one morning when my father came downstairs in a grouchy mood, was “Throw everything out, Daddy!”