Charles Harrington Elster

November 08, 2018 6:36 AM EST

Okay, so just a little big question about good old-fashioned English usage. Hard-on I get: it's hard, and it's on. But then why isn't the opposite called a hard-off? I don't get it. So this one's got me a bit stumped (no pun intended--oh, I confess, maybe just a little). P.S. Good Sir, if I had the scurrilous epithet emblazoned on my t-shirt that said, "The judge is a hard-on or Cops are hard-ons, etc." do you believe that would be an arrestable offense or rather wholeheartedly constitutionally protected free speech like, say, "Fuck the Draft." Just asking? Be well ole sausage!

- Pip pip for now, Eton.

November 08, 2018 1:13 PM EST

Thanks for the hilarious question. The short answer is you're suffering from a case of over-literality. "Hard-on" doesn't need an opposite, partly because the opposite condition is the normal state of affairs most of the time (except for those afflicted with priapism), and largely because we collectively (and thankfully) haven't felt the need for an everyday word or idiom that characterizes the flaccid male member. (Remember, that's FLAK-sid, not FLAS-id.) That's why we don't speak of people who are "softasses," workers who wear "softhats," or about being "between a pillow and a soft place." And on the other note, I'm soft on the first amendment, and I'm also a former New Yorker, so I would never consider it an offense to use "hard-on" for anything you deem worthy of the epithet.

- — Charles Harrington Elster

February 15, 2018 1:34 PM EST

This is a topic which I've been wondering about for quite a while since I see writers use the indefinite pronouns everyone, anyone, nobody,(I'll have another question about Oxford commas at another time) and somebody followed by a plural such as "their".
Grammatically, that never made sense to me and being bilingual has only added to the depths of wonder. In Spanish and all of its relatives (so far as I know) when there is a group of people or items if the group is mixed, both men and women, masculine and feminine gendered words, it is always masculine.
Once again, though, the ruling you made makes sense and is cogent.
Thank you for shedding light on this to everyone who has been racking their brains on this.
I still want to say "his".

- John Stack IV

October 26, 2018 1:11 PM EDT

Richard Stallman, a leader in the free, open-source software movement and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, just published his treatise on this subject (2018-10-22). Gender issues have been a hot topic in IT for a few years now. An excerpt follows. Your thoughts, Charles? From https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html We need not choose among the bad solutions. Thanks to Marge Piercy's book Woman on the Edge of Time we have a clean, clear and natural solution. * Use the elegant gender-neutral pronouns "person", "per" and "pers". They fit into English smoothly. They are easy to remember, since they come from "person", and the last two resemble "her" and "hers". They are natural to use, since they work just like "she", "her" and "hers". "Pers" ends in a voiced consonant, just like "hers". This solution is superior, since it does the job while avoiding all the drawbacks of the other solutions. I now use these pronouns some of the time in writing and speech, as illustrated in the rest of this article. In using them, I've found that I wished that "person" were quicker to say, so I have coined the shorter alternative "perse", made from "person" by omitting the last syllable. It sounds like "purse", and represents the pronoun "person" but not the noun "person". "Perse" and "person" as pronouns are equivalent and interchangeable. "Perse" and "purse" are not confused in speech because the singular noun "purse" requires a preceding determiner while a pronoun cannot have one. For example, "The purse is here" refers to an object, whereas "Perse is here" refers to a person. ... "Person" etc. are just as gender-neutral as "they" etc., but since they are singular they fit a singular antecedent. Gender neutrality need not imply a sacrifice in English grammatical clarity; it is still possible to have both.

- Eric J.

November 02, 2018 7:00 PM EDT

Sorry to take so long to reply here. Thank you, John Stack IV, for your thoughtful comment and for ending it with "everyone who has been racking their brains on this." Despite our lingering reservations over embracing the resurgence of the plural pronoun, that says it all. And thank you, Eric J., for sharing that quotation and proposal from Richard Stallman and Marge Piercy. It is, perhaps, an elegant solution, and in some ways better than similar solutions I have seen proposed. But the crux of the problem is that, while language can be standardized, it can't be engineered, and all attempts to do so have failed. Instead, language is organic and fluid, and over time it changes based on whims and trends and misconceptions far more than it changes or holds fast because of proposals and prescriptions, no matter how elegant or logical. In short, what we decide to do with language is both a common and a messy process, and, as William Safire once wrote, "When enough of us are wrong, we're right." Or, as Mark Twain once wrote, "You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting." So, as much as we may wish for an elegantly engineered solution to this problem, I have no doubt that the outcome will be decided by general acclamation and resignation. It's hard to give up what you were taught, but it's even harder to teach something others don't want to learn.

- — Charles Harrington Elster