Hashtag FFWgr

Ninety-nine percent of you won't know what that title means--which is sort of the epitome of bad communication. Nonetheless, I'm starting there, because I ended there--at #FFWgr. 

#FFWgr, the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a biannual conference of writers and readers of faith: about finding faith, leaving faith, and returning to faith; about the connection between faith and writing. I make my pilgrimage there to find inspiration and motivation. I'm completely positive (in the ironic sense of those words) that I will eventually be one of the speakers there, talking to the little people about getting up at four a.m. and sitting down in front of the computer and waiting for God to show up.

Actually--that was James McBride's line. My perspective will be more of a p.m. perspective, because mornings give me hives; and my topic will be Why I Keep Writing Even Though I've Never Been Published; And As A Matter of Fact, Why Would You Even Listen To Me?

I'm going to give you two kinds of #FFWgr candy: motivational and/or interesting quotes from some of the talks I went to; and a reading list. I kept notes as I listened, and wrote down the names of books and authors that the speakers mentioned. I may have missed a few, but I've still got a pretty good list.

So first, the quotes, in order of their appearance:

Daniel Taylor:

"Everyone should write their own apologetics--how do you tell this story of faith to yourself?" This is a riff, he said, on Milton's idea that everyone should write his own theology. I tried to confirm that Milton actually said or wrote something like this, but could not. Internet, could you do me a solid and let me know a) did Milton ever say/write anything like that and b) what's the source?

The topic of Taylor's talk was The Use of Story in Apologetics. He said, "stories defend faith by making it desirable, powerful, winsome. Stories don't just tell truth. Truth can be a sledgehammer. Stories can make faith not just reasonable and believable, but also attractive."

"Stories are convincing; they require us to change, and tell us how to do it."

"Stories don't prove anything, but stories prove everything that's important."

"Don't just tell anecdotes, tell stories. Anecdotes are reduced; they lack personal experience and emotion." I'd like to learn more about this distinction.

"Look for evidence of the divine in the mundane and even in the profane." 

John Suk talked about something called "perspective by incongruity," an idea of Kenneth Burke's which I didn't quite get but will add to my growing list of Things I Want to Know More About.

(Sigh. #FFWgr always leaves me with the existential exhaustion of realizing ever more clearly how much I don't know.)

From James McBride: 

"Most of what I do fails. Learn to fail. Fail--then forget it." I'm not sure I believe this. Maybe it's hyperbole? I would like to know, operationally, what that looks like.

"I wake up at 4 a.m. and just sit there waiting for God to come into the room." Many speakers at the conference mentioned the productivity of the early morning hours, which discourages me a tiny bit.

"Skepticism is good, but cynicism is a killer of dreams." Ooooh, this was good. (And by the way, how do you spell "ooo" that rhymes with "mood" rather than ooooh that rhymes with "road"? Because I was aiming for the oo in mood sound there, but it just didn't look right without the h.)

Shannon Huffman Polson: 

"Grief and loss are lonely, but they connect you to humanity." I think this is why suffering is such a useful tool for an artist, writer, musician. Dammit.

"I wanted to suffer, wanted the pain of grief--because it would keep me closer to those I had lost." This certainly resonated with me, even though I remember when I said it to a friend, she looked at me strangely. I saw other heads nodding--and I was glad to see that this counter-intuitive feeling of wanting to hold on to the pain of grief was not merely a glitch in my otherwise well-adjusted persona, but that it had universal resonance.

"If the grief ebbed, did it mean that the love and connection were not that great? There is a lot of guilt in grief." This, too; both the question and the statement.

Andrew Krivak:

"Take small acts--actions outside of the interior life of grief and loss--and write them into your story." This is actually a paraphrase, but I like the notion that small acts have great value. I think he was making a reference to the book Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World. 

Peter Marty

Peter Marty (whose appearance reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer):

"If you want to be a better writer, become a deeper person." I wish he had offered Seven Steps to Becoming a Deeper Person.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We keep on outsourcing our brains--we know and remember less. We externalize our knowledge, our taste, our experience, and our faith. We reference and rely on the faith and experience of others. In Genesis, by chapter three they stop talking with God and start talking about God."

"Is it possible for some people to miss their lives in the way that they miss a plane?"

"Tell me what you love, and I can tell you what you believe." Oof.

"We identify our center through suffering." More on this, please.

Anne Lamott:

"Life and writing are very, very hard. I don't think we're here to figure things out."

"There is perfect healing, but people die anyway. Frankly, if I were God, I would have a completely different system."

"I think if there is a God, he probably looks a lot like Isaac Stern. Or Bette Midler."

"We were taught to stay one step ahead of the abyss. If the abyss opens up at your feet, go to Ikea. Get an area rug."

"It's OK to admit that you're crazy and damaged. All the better people are."

Hugh Cook offered practical advice about writing fiction:

"Your character must desperately want something; but something thwarts her. She must make specific, decisive actions."

"Use dialogue not for narration or description, but to show your characters."

"Reveal your character's age early on."

Brett Lott:

Start a story with what you know, and head into "what if"--what if this happened, or that?"

Suzanne Woods Fisher:

"Answer the call to write; keep the calling at the forefront of your vision all the time."

"Living for the opinions of others is seductive; don't do it. Remember who you are."

I have no quotes from James Vanden Bosch, but his presentation on corpus linguistics was one of my top three sessions. Who knew. I might even sign up for the eight-week MOOC in September.

Miroslav Volf:

"Atheists point to ways that religion and Christians have failed and malfunctioned."

"We must listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from around the world to penetrate our own self-deception. We must listen to the wisdom of saints and critics."

"We are restless for God; we reach for the transcendent. The orientation of our selves to the Divine is the primary function of faith."

This next quote is from an audience member who might have been quoting someone else, but it struck me as worthy of inclusion: "Christianity has become so sentimental and shallow that we can't even produce good atheists anymore!" This was connected to the part of the interview in which Volf said something to the effect that he'd take Nietzsche over Dawkins any day.

"I don't bemoan the marginalization of the Christian faith. There are strengths in the margins. When Christians were in the center of power we were used, and the faith was abused. Like the band of twelve followers on the outskirts of Jerusalem, we can testify to the beauty of Jesus Christ from the margins."

Rachel Held Evans:

"Every challenge--the challenge of writer's block, distraction, discouragement, fear, lack of ideas--is solved by getting back to work. In writing, that work is paying attention, naming things, telling stories." 

"Remember that God is generous, and grace is scandalous. God has called us to this work. There is no scarcity principle at work in writing--there's plenty of work to do, plenty of stories to tell."

Now, I bet you can't wait until #FFWgr2016! I know I can't.

Stay tuned for Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: Reading List.

RUOK?

Texting with Aidan was always fun. He spurned text shorthand, and tried to write everything grammatically. Here's one of the last exchanges we had; I was at work, and he was traveling to his home school co-op:
 
Aidan: Can you look up how long you need to wait before your bladder explodes?

Me: Why?

A: I really have to go to the bathroom and Im on the train.

A: Im starting to feel like Im going to faint.

Me: Put ur head down between ur knees.

Me: Ru ok? I tried to call u.

A: Im not sure.

Me: Answer your phone.

Me: How now?

A: Im on the train. I dont want to be rude.

A: How now?

A: How do you mean, brown cow?

Me: Its not rude when ur mom is worried that ur going to faint.

A: Im feeling less of that now, but can you answer my question about bladder eruption?

Me: No I can't right now. Sorry. It is not going to explode.

A: Just you wait...

and later...

A: I need my levothyroxine, my heart beats are super uneven.

Me: Levo does not affect ur heart. It's for your thyroid.

Me: R u worried?

A: Not really.

Me: Ok. I will try to pick up ur levo on way home tonight.

A: The only thing Im worried about is your text talk.

Me: Heh. 

Eleven

M. Peevie here. I'll be eleven in two days, and it's time for an update.

So. Last week we were driving to school, and there was a Mercedes in front of us. The only reason I know it was a Mercedes was that my mom said, Hey, I like that Mercedes in front of us. Then A. Peevie said, well, it's not that cool because it's boxy like a mini-van. But I pointed out that the Mercedes was not totally boxy: "It has hips!" I said, noticing that it sort of curved out below the windows.

My mom, the writer, liked this observation. "M. Peevie," she said, "Nice use of anthropomorphism."

"Well, I don't know what 'anthropo-whatever' is," I said, "but I thought it was personification." Then we totally got into a conversation about the difference between personification and anthropomorphism, and IRONICALLY my mom could not even tell us the difference. Sigh. What good are parents if they can't even define their terms?

In school I asked my teacher, Mrs.Kind if she knew the difference between personification and anthropomorphism. She did not. She told me to go down the hall to Mr. Language Man's room and ask him. Mr. Language Man said something that I do not remember. Later when I told my mom about it, she said she thinks they are basically the same. I'm going with that for now.

In other news, for my birthday I want World Peace. I want world peace because I do not like to think about our soldiers and people in other countries getting hurt and killed, and I do not even understand why they can't just sit down and work it out. This is what my mom tells me and my brother A. Peevie all the time. "Sit down and work it out," she says, "I am tired of being a referee." 

And usually we do work it out, but sometimes A. Peevie is completely unreasonable, or my other brother C. Peevie is mean, and I have to tell my mom that he is hurting my feelings. Even though he is the big brother, sometimes he is immature, and sometimes he is a bully. Sometimes he is fun, though, and he wrestles with me. This usually happens late at night, like 9 or 10 o'clock, in my parents' bedroom, and they get extremely annoyed at us for being loud and obnoxious and for being in their bedroom when they are ready to Be Done With Kids.

I have a couple of goals now that I am getting older. One goal I have is to understand what I hear at church. Some days this is easier than other days. Some days the pastor talks about stuff I don't really want to hear about, like S-E-X. (Today my pastor said that we should not be more prudish about s-e-x than God is!--but I'm not sure what he meant. All I know is, I do not want to talk about it or think about it.) 

Another goal I have is to go to DePaul University on a softball scholarship. Because my dad works there I can go there and have free tuition, but I would still have to pay for roomanbord. I'm not really sure what roomandbord is, but if I go there on a softball scholarship, I would get that for free, too. I am working on my softball skills, and I think I am getting better. Sometimes we play traveling teams, though, and their pitchers scare me.

There is one thing I really really want for my birthday. It is a little cooler from Pottery Barn Teen that sits on your desk and hold like four cans of Coke. I think if I get this for my birthday, my happiness will be complete.

Talk to you next year, Internet. Peace out.

M. Peevie

Three LittleThings That Bug Me

I don't want to sound like a giant crankopotamus here, but certain things bug me.  I'm going to get them off my ample chest here and now, and then I'm going to Choose to be Cheerful again.  K?

1.  I hate getting emails with a subject line that reads "Re:".  Just "Re:".  Re: what?  People:  are you really SO BUSY that you can't take the time to write even ONE WORD to identify the content of the email?  ONE STINKING WORD?

An email without a subject line is like a canned good without a label--open at your own risk. It's also a missed marketing and communications opportunity.  Q:  Are you listening?

2. "Lol" tacked onto the end of texts, FB comments, and emails to show that you have just made a joke.  If we can't tell it's a joke without you including a virtual laugh-track, then it's certainly not laugh-out-loud funny.  So knock it off.

3. OK, I can only think of two things that bug me at the moment.  That's a good thing, right?

I will NOT be there for you, nor do I want you to be there for me.

I swear.  There is one trite, annoying, meaningless, banal, cliche, hackneyed phrase that English speakers and writers rely upon to express the concept of emotional support that I believe has lost all meaning, if it ever had any to begin with.  It is "is there for [personal pronoun]," as in "he is always there for me," or "my mother was never there for me," or "What the hell do you want from me? I just want you to be there for me."

Maybe the long-lasting sit-com Friends started it 16 years ago, giving U.S. popularity to the catchy but lyrically lame song by The Rembrandts, "I'll Be There for You."

I'll be there for you
When the rain starts to pour
I'll be there for you
Like I've been there before
I'll be there for you
'Cuz you're there for me too...

But it's not just a sitcom theme song.  It's all over pop music:

Wyclef Jean, in Class Reunion:  

Baby girl, the world is yours, just look through
That open door, I'll be there for you
If you ever feeling blue (oh), it's a beautiful world

And Prince, in Adore:

Until the end of time
I'll be there for you.
You own my heart and mind
I truly adore you.

Bon Jovi succumbed to the allure of the cliche, with "I'll Be There for You"

I'll be there for you
These five words I swear to you
When you breathe I want to be the air for you
I'll be there for you
I'd live and I'd die for you
Steal the sun from the sky for you
Words can't say what a love can do
I'll be there for you

It's all over TV and movie dialogue, all over eavesdropped conversations on the El. It has become the catchphrase of a generation, and it makes me want to puke.  (Although I do kind of like the Bon Jovi song, in spite of the hated phrase.)

When I was teaching freshman composition, I gave my students the assignment of writing an essay on a person they admired.  The phrase "she was always there for me," or some variation, showed up more times than the word maverick in a Sarah Palin speech.  I made my students rewrite their essays without using that phrase even once--and they complained like I asked them to make their own ink out of mangos and Elmer's Glue.  But when those essays came back, the students instead discovered creative and thoughtful language, images and illustrations to convey the love and support they received from their admired one.

"She stayed up listening to me until 2 a.m. the night my boyfriend broke up with me," one girl wrote about her mother.  Another wrote about her best friend, "She's a great listener, and she lets me borrow her clothes, even after I got a stain on her sweater."  See what I mean?  Specific, meaningful illustrations that put a clear picture in your head of what the speakers/writers appreciate in their friends.

Here's my challenge to you, my readers, who are clearly smarter and more talented than all the rest:  Count how many times you hear or read this phrase in a week--on TV, in music, from your friends and colleagues.  I heard it six times the other day on TV and in the grocery store.  In one day! 

Each time you hear it, ask yourself if the phrase gives you a clear sense of what the person means when he uses it, or if he could use more specific and descriptive language to communicate more effectively.  And then take the pledge to rid the English-speaking world of this phrase which is the zucchini of language--it's all over the place, and virtually tasteless.

What do Shakespeare and Obama Have in Common?

You'll be excited to learn, as I was, that next week we'll be celebrating National Grammar Day. In honor of this august holiday, I'd like to share a grammar story with you.

"A. Peevie," I said, "don't eat any more of this bacon. The rest is for me and M. Peevie."

"M. Peevie and I," said A. Peevie, wearing his Captain Grammar cape. I gave him a Look.

"What?" he said, with a sly grin. "I'm teaching you English."

The keenly observant among you will immediately note that technically, in terms of standard English grammar, my original construction was correct and A. Peevie's correction was wrong. The phrase "me and M. Peevie" constituted the object of the preposition "for." You wouldn't say "the rest is for I."

But more important, where is he getting the idea that clear, understandable spoken language requires correction? Not from me, I assure you. In fact, he gets quite the opposite from me. We take non-standard grammar and syntax examples and fondly turn them into family slogans, like "What did you said?"

I suspect the nefarious influence of a prescriptive English teacher at school has inculcated the noxious notion that correcting someone's grammar is acceptable and appropriate. I love excellent and precise written and spoken language as much or more as the next guy--but I'm not on board with untrained and unrestrained grammar policing.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) is the primary sponsor of National Grammar Day. The society's blog (yes, the SPOGG Blog) comments on celebrity grammar goofs, with recent bi-partisan criticism for both President Bush and Senator Obama; and the blog even nags celebs to use "proper English" in text messages and blogs.

Obama got nailed for using a "they" with a singular antecedent--the same construction that Shakespeare used more than once ("There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/As if I were their well-acquainted friend," in A Comedy of Errors). If it's good enough for Shakespeare, and if it occurs "in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries" according to Language Log's Geoffrey Pullum, then why isn't it good enough for Grumpy Martha (SPOGG's prescriptive host) and the rest of the grouchy prescriptivists?

My favorite linguists over at Language Log Plaza mildly ridiculed National Grammar Day as potentially mean-spirited--but they did not resort to name-calling, as Grumpy Martha said they did in her reply. I'm in the linguist's camp on this one. I don't think we need more finger-pointing about language, especially when the operational definitions of "correct" and "proper" grammar are dynamic.

And we definitely don't need more correcting and finger-pointing from 10-year-old ill-informed language tyrants.

Freshman Composition 101: Redux

Hi. My name is E. Peevie, and I'm a (recovering) prescriptivist. I come from a long line of unapologetic linguistic prescriptivists. Just a few weeks ago my mom commented on the incorrect usage by a television personality of who versus whom. I suggested that according to common usage by native speakers, the distinction was no longer valid.

"So," said my tiny, white-haired momma with a tinge of hostility and possibly even a mote of self-righteous indignation, "Just because everybody does it, that makes it right?"

"Well, um, yes," I said, "in language it does."

"Hmph," said momma.

I know what she was thinking, and what she would have said if the conversation had continued. She would have asserted that of course common usage doesn't change the rules. She might have even compared it to moral relativism: Just because everybody now thinks __________(fill in the blank) is OK doesn't make it right.

I wonder what she'd think of this post in Language Log about the use of the "singular they" to refer to the next president of the United States. Geoffrey Pullum points out that this usage has occurred for the first time because this is "the first moment in history when there is a genuinely non-trivial amount of doubt about whether the next president will be male or female."

Actually, I know what she'd say. She'd be horrified, and insist that the correct pronoun would be the gender-neutral "he," or she'd grudgingly suggest that even the more politically correct "he or she" would be a more correct choice.

When I was an English major back in the dark ages, my grumpy department head, Dr. William Pixton, was a standard-bearer for standard English. His very own "Some Conventions of Standard Written English" was the required text for the composition classes I taught as a graduate teaching assistant. I made freshmen cry with my red pen bleeding all over their lame essays, filled with p-antes and p-agrees and s/v/a's. I drilled it into their thick Okie skulls that pronouns must have clear antecedents, and the antecedents must agree in number with the pronouns.

(I even edited my little brother's papers with the same hard-line approach, and to this day that high-achieving yet tender-hearted big-shot trembles at the mere mention of a p-ante. This post is dedicated to him.)

But I've switched teams. I believe, like GKP, that the singular "they" is here to stay. And I'm starting not to mind so much.

More importantly, isn't it brilliant how relevant and interesting grammar and linguistics are? I'll bet you had no idea.

Rumor and Innuendo

Some of my favorite blogs are linguistics and language related. I just happened onto another great one, called Mr. Verb.

One thing that Mr. Verb said in a recent post was that our society suffers from a "profound anti-intellectualism." I could not agree more. Things that regularly pass as science and fact are actually rumor, innuendo, superstition, and tradition. My most frequent personal anecdotes illustrating this point involve Diet Coke and linguistics.

Well-meaning friends (you know who you are!) frequently advise me not to drink so much DC because it's carcinogenic. I say, cite your source--but they prefer to stick to the hard science of I-just-know-it-ology.

Well, one of my favorite bloggers, minor celebrity cartoonist Scott Adams (a fellow Diet Coke guzzler) recently posted a link to a study that indicated that there is, in fact, no link between one DC ingredient--aspartame--and cancer. (I tried to find the link, but he's such a prolific blogger that I gave up after a short, feckless search through his archives.)

Mr. Peevie also sent me a link to the National Cancer Institute that supports the same conclusion.

And as far as the English is concerned, some of my family and friends assume that because I love words and language, I also enjoin the alleged rules of English grammar and usage, in particular those which are really only myths and/or wishful thinking. The problem is that many amateur word lovers (the operative word here being "amateur") are language bullies: they want language to be pristine and unchanging so that they can prescribe rules and contemn people who break them. It's a self-esteem thing.

But, as Mr. Verb's descriptive catchphrase indicates, "Language changes. Deal with it. Revel in it."

I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV. (There's a pitch for the networks: Chicago Five-Oh: A buttoned-down linguistics professor solves crimes during office hours with her red pen and a penchant for descriptive phonetics! Dun dun dun!) I try not to snark too much about pronunciations, usages, spellings, and syntaxes that fall outside of the E. Peevie Style Guide.

(That being said, there are certainly usages making their way into standard English that do tend to grate like a rake on pavement. But that's a blog post for another time.)

Here are some other language and linguistics-related blogs that I enjoy:

The Language Log
Language Hat
Tenser, said the Tensor

[Update: This post has been edited to incorporate the truly thrilling word-as-link techno-frizzle. (I don't get out much. And I don't even know how to talk about whatever it is that you call this stuff, being techno-impaired. But you know what I mean. And I am indebted to Roger and Mr. Peevie. Thanks, guys.]