“[A]ll languages have little dings in them where there really is no quick way to express something that you could express in most other languages. My favorite example is in French, where you can't say that something sticks out. For example, if you have a rental car and you park it in the lot, all the cars are parked in a straight line and you don't park yours all the way in, so the back is kind of sticking out—you can say you parked wrong, there are all sorts of things you can say, but you couldn't go to the office and say, mine is the car that's sticking out back there. There's no verb for that. Or, in Danish, there's not a word that you would specifically use to mean to get liquid off of something. You can't wipe, you can only erase. Everybody does fine, but all languages have those sorts of dings.”
— John McWhorter, Discussion with Yascha Mounk on Substack, April 9, 2025.
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While I'm on the topic of language and people's psychological struggles with it, I've been meaning to describe an illustrative case or two from my own life, which are not to do with gendered words.
My mom is a boomer who has tried to keep a pretty open mind about how our culture is changing with regard to gender identity, to the extent that she's able when her exposure to these cultural changes is pretty limited (which I think is the case for a lot of people as old as she is, who primarily socialize with people above 50), there's a lot she doesn't understand, and there's a lot she admits she doesn't understand and clearly genuinely doesn't make much sense to her. I think she (along with many, including young Tumblr-ish progressives) has a pretty firm feeling that the trans movement is somewhat of an echo of the gay rights movement, and she was always ahead of her time on gay rights so it feels consistent to her to at least be open-minded on trans / gender identity issues as well. She often doesn't manage to get trans people's pronouns correct, but to be fair, she doesn't get much practice, and she does make at least some sincere effort. (My dad is a somewhat grimmer story on all of this, but tonight's post isn't about him or even about trans issues really.)
But apart from the pronoun issue (and perhaps apart from the introduction of "Ms." that feminists popularized in her youth), my mom is actually really, really hostile to any kind of innovation in language.
Any perceived change from the prior default in any grammatical construction, or a variation in pronunciation within her dialect of English from the way she's spoken all her life, really viscerally and relentlessly gets under her skin. There are several examples that she brings up every visit or two I have with her (sometimes because she catches me or another family member using them, sometimes just because). I'll just mention one, which happens to come up particularly often at this time of year: it's common nowadays to say "graduated [name of school]" without a preposition, when, according to my mom, nobody used to do this, this is objectively Not Correct, you're supposed to say "graduated from [name of school]". (I suppose it's true that people rarely if ever spoke the newer, "incorrect" way while she was growing up, although I'm pretty sure I've spotted instances of "graduated" without "from" coming from a good few decades ago, so it can't be a super recent innovation even if it's only recently become the default.) Every single time she hears "graduated" without the "from", it really really irritates her.
Again, there are several other similar trends that she opposes with a similar vehemence that I won't list here.
I find this staunch and purist prescriptivist stance completely irrational, but it seems like a hopeless endeavor ever to argue with my mom about it. The dialog doesn't go exactly like as follows, but this is the gist of what appears to be her attitude on it: "Why do you say it's Objectively Bad to say such-and-such?" "Because it's Objectively Incorrect, and it's bad to use words incorrectly!" "But what makes it Objectively Incorrect?" "Because it's not the way the words used to be used!" Any point about how language is always changing decade by decade, century by century, and how with the changes in how people actually speak come changes in what is Correct and Incorrect, seems to be lost on her. In the case of "graduated [from?]", one can illustrate this especially well: I actually pointed out to her that her way of using "graduate" -- that is, saying "I graduated from [name of school]" -- was once an innovation! Early in the 20th century, as far as I understand, the "correct" way to use that verb was to make its subject the school (or the people working at the school), and to make the graduate the object of the verb, as in "[name of school] graduated me", or else one could use a passive construction: "I was graduated from [name of school]". Eventually people started making the graduate the subject of a non-passive use of the verb -- in other words, they removed the "was". (This was actually first brought to my attention in an SSC comment some years ago.) When I brought this up to her, she waved it aside by saying that she never knew of a time when the only correct construction was "[school] graduated me" or "I was graduated from [school]", and if her parents started out using only those constructions, well, they never corrected her or objected to her saying "I graduated from [school]", so it couldn't have been a significant departure from what was normal.
In other words, the only logical conclusion I can reach from my mom's convictions is that the Eternally Objectively Correct use of standard-dialect American English is whatever was the norm among what was exposed to those happened to be growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, and anything else will always and forever be wrong.
My sibling has tried arguing with her by championing descriptivism as an alternative, but I can't say I entirely agree with that either. My stance is that we should notice innovations in current use of our language and go along with it if and only if we feel they're good or neutral innovations, so resist and push back on them if we judge them to be degrading our language in some way. To my thinking, while leaving out "from" after "graduate" seems like a slightly sloppy shortcut at first blush, there's nothing objectively detrimental to the structure and flavor of English if we let this one verb take direct objects (again) instead of requiring a prepositional phrase to be attached to it when specifying the school. On the other hand, I hate the fact that our verbal tense system is being eroded by frequent popular replacement of our past unreal subjunctive tense by a past conditional (e.g. "I wish I wouldn't have done such-and-such" instead of "I wish I hadn't done such-and-such"), so I resist and (at least in principle, in my mind) push back against it.
My mom also really hates anything that goes against the grammar books when the usage listed as correct is clearly supported by logic, a good example being using "me" after "and" when it's part of the subject of a sentence: if you wouldn't use "me" without the conjunction, then you shouldn't use it with the conjunction. This is despite the fact that, as far as I know, Modern English speakers over the centuries never actually consistently spoke in this "correct" way, so she's not doing a particularly good job of prescriptivism here. On a basic level, I'm with my mom on this, but I acknowledge that John McWhorter does have some very sophisticated arguments in defense of "[subject] and me" that my mom absolutely will not hear. (My dad is where I inherit most of my rationalist traits, but my carefulness with verbal and written precision in a non-mathematical context, together with my preoccupation over logical underpinnings for linguistic conventions, absolutely comes from my mom and not my dad.)
To myself (and probably occasionally in Tumblr posts), I use the term "linguistic sensitivity" to refer to a bundle of aversions involving language which include these absolutely vexing, intense, insistent, under-the-skin negative psychological sensations from certain uses of grammar and certain pronunciations that my mom has. (There's probably a better succinct phrase referring to this psychological quirk; I'm terrible at coming up with good terminology.) This is of importance to me especially because I think I'm the same way. That is, I've either inherited or had inculcated in me a variant of this "linguistic sensitivity".
To give an example of my sensitivity, my College Ex seemingly decided fairly abruptly, a couple of years into college (during the time we were in a relationship), to start pronouncing the name of the high school we had gone to together in what I'm like 1000% sure is an incorrect fashion that absolutely nobody else I'd ever encountered out of the many hundreds involved in some way with the school had ever used. (I don't want to describe what it is because I'm shy about revealing certain autobiographical things like the name of my high school, but she insisted on pronouncing one consonant in way that is contrary not only to the obvious national origin of the surname used for the high school but contrary to just about every Roman alphabet -using language on the face of the earth except for a single non-obscure one where that consonant would never appear in that phonetic position.) I don't think she pronounced it that way back when we were still going to the school or had just left it; I think her switch was fairly abrupt, but she absolutely insisted that that was how it had been pronounced all along, only ever claiming as evidence something she'd heard on a non-professionally-made audio recording that was played to her in band class. I was pretty timid about bringing it up to her, at least relative to how deeply it annoyed me. It really didn't help that her way of responding was extremely derisive. I think she even used the R word* to me about it? Like it was so obvious that our high school was pronounced this way, if only I'd just listened back when I was there!
*I'm sure today she'd be ashamed of her frequent use of the R word to deride things she thought dumb. I mustn't be too self-righteous: it hadn't yet been collectively decided among sensitive liberal people that the word was generally offensive back in the mid-'00's, and although I remember it bothering me whenever I heard it in any context of "this is dumb", this was one of only very few linguistic points of social progress that I was actually ahead of my time on.
My then-gf got several other completely illogically backed mispronunciations of names lodged into her head during the time we were together and absolutely refused to hear corrections to those as well. (E.g., this didn't bother me at quite the level of mispronouncing the name of our high school, but there was a professor, Russian and well-known in the community, whose last name was Irchai which she insistently and emphatically began pronouncing as "EER-shuh" -- the schwa in the second syllable not just when she was swallowing it while speaking quickly, but when putting some weight on the whole name. Only French and Portuguese soften <ch> and of course their words aren't Romanized from a different alphabet; not a single language in the whole world pronounces <ai> as a schwa in any word; and as far as I could tell nobody else called him that -- my gf's mother knew him and pronounced his name correctly with the last syllable as in the drink chai. I think you can tell by how much I go on about this stuff that it still grinds my gears to look back on!) And part of my point in describing my ex's extremely dismissive, almost defensive, reaction to my timidly calling her pronunciations into question is to suggest that she had some form of "linguistic sensitivity" of her own! Somehow some wires had gotten crossed in her brain regarding pronunciations of certain names, and she became really hostile to any attempt by someone else to correct them, and her way of reacting was to make out that the correcting person was just being really dumb and unobservant.
Anyway, I cannot overstate just how much this habit of my College Ex's deeply, intensely, irrepressibly irritated me. As in, if I had to answer the cliche question of "What little habit of your partner annoys you the most?", it would clearly have to be this (although when she actually asked me the question, the answer I chose to give was "leaving your chewed gum on the rim of my drinking glass"). I didn't make an Actual Thing of it because I knew how irrational I was being. Seriously, just mispronouncing the name of a school we no longer attended, or a professor I had maybe met only once, got to me that much? I knew it was my own problem to get over. But try as I might, I didn't know how to avoid experiencing an almost physical barely-contained-micro-rage clenched-up response every single time she mentioned our high school around me (which was probably on nearly a daily basis).
Anyway, I guess you could say this cluster of aversions is an idiosyncrasy that probably many of us have in one way or another. And it may not entirely be based in rationality, it's arguably pretty irrational altogether, but it is a kind of important thing to acknowledge when we discuss the level of difficulty that we might collectively have with abruptly overhauling deeply-ingrained basic aspects of our language because of social changes, and why the kind of complete dismissal of that difficulty that I somewhat frequently hear is going to be alienating to many.
While I was reading through White Fragility @limeadeislife recommended I might check out John McWhorter's book, or maybe more of an extended pamphlet, Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America especially because I was looking at White Fragility through the lens of how it resembles what I understand about certain right-wing Christian cultures.
I'm not entirely sure how to approach McWhorter's book.
On the one hand, unlike Robin DiAngelo, McWhorter can put together a cogent argument in the format of "A leads to B, which suggests C" which DiAngelo never bothers to do, which means the book is both a breath of fresh air after White Fragility but also that I found myself wanting to argue with some of his tangential political views about, say, education, just because they were coherent enough to argue against.
But in terms of the central thesis, the book is, openly, aimed at left-wing centrist types who find people like DiAngelo utterly inexplicable, and less directly at members of DiAngelo's ideology who are starting to question the dogma.
In fact, I did enjoy this roasting of White Fragility
"Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, for example, reads in the present tense like a bizarre exercise in mind control created by someone bent on manipulation and getting paid. That's a misinterpretation: It is a work-book based on principles foundational in seminars of critical race theory, which its author sincerely believes in, promoting it out of a sense of benevolent mission."
I both feel that I should, for consistancy's sake explain why this invocation of Critical Race Theory doesn't bother me too much while at the same time feeling that this would be a boring tangent of interest only to a handful of people who are constantly annoyed with me.
But this leads to my big issue with the book, which is that it is very "101". This book is aimed at me eight years ago; by 2020 I had already deprogrammed myself and if you are reading this tumblr you already think this stuff is obnoxious nonsense as well, and you'll be very familiar with most of McWhorter's arguments (Including his trade school advocacy and belief in ending the war on drugs). You already read about and were outraged by the egregious examples he cites.
There's room for a deeper book about all this stuff, which delves more deeply into both the history of ideas and the culture of the religion that McWhorter sees.
The Ideology With No Name
McWhorter doesn't actually use the word "Woke" in the book. He says he finds it dismissive, and the phenomenon is serious, but I also do get the feeling that he knows that a bunch of the people shrieking about "wokeness" are as mendacious and dishonest as DiAngelo and her ilk.
There's a silly bit in White Fragility where DiAngelo writes:
"[Charles W.] Mills describes white supremacy as 'the unnamed politcal system that has made the world what is is today.'"
Which... Like. You named it in that sentence.
In fact, one of the major propaganda victories of DiAngelo et al has been to assert that they do not have an ideology, that they are merely anti-racist, and that any anti-racist movement or person obviously agrees with them, and anybody who disagrees is disagreeing with anti-racism as such.
So there just isn't an agreed upon name for the particular thread DiAngelo is part of.
McWhorter calls the ideology "Third Wave Anti-racism" and the people who follow the ideology, "The Elect" after an essayist named Joseph Bottum who I have not yet read.
Basically, McWhorter sees third wave anti-racism as a religious movement rather than a political movement, and I also agree that it has a lot in common with Right Wing American Protestantism in particular. I thought I might just go over some of the parallels, some of these are things McWhorter goes over in his book, some are my own thoughts or expansions of my own thoughts based on things he says.
Anti-Racism is the Gospel, by which I mean "The Good News". There is a strain in American missionary work that professes to be baffled that anybody rejects the Gospels. The Gospels are obviously true, and obviously good. The fact that Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead is as obviously true as the fact that the sky is blue. And so anybody rejecting the Gospel is pathologized the same way that you would pathologize someone who insisted that nobody has ever seen a blue sky. You can't admit that maybe the Gospels could be false, or that the evidence for them is anything less then overwhelming, so you invent psychological reasons for why non-believers insist on saying things that are obviously false. DiAngelo specifically is like this, she constantly acts baffled that anybody would respond to her wisdom with anything other then sheer gratitude. White Fragility asks the question, "Given that everything I, Robin DiAngelo, say about race is true and helpful, why do people get so angry when I say it?" It sounds like I am exaggerating but I promise she says this in almost the same words in the introduction to the book, which I'd quote if I hadn't already returned it to the library.
Racism is Original Sin, This is so obvious that basically everybody who is opposed to third-wave antiracism has picked up on it. It's held that every white person is inherently racist, and we can't ever stop being racist, we can only acknowledge our racism and attempt to minimize the damage. But something that I think has been talked about less is that this can be used to enforce hierarchies. Something that happens often in Christian circles is that when a leader of the community is found doing something corrupt or bad, the response is, "Of course, it just goes to show you that every one of us can sin, but the leader has repented his sin and been forgiven by Jesus Christ, so if you don't forgive him as well it shows how unchristian you are." Meanwhile, if you are found to be sinning, well, doesn't it say something very bad about you that you let yourself do this despite the community looking our for you? A similar thing happens with this "We're all a little bit racist" two-step. DiAngelo's racism is the unfortunate problem with being raised in a racist society; your racism is evidence that you haven't done the work.
Your everyday life is the battleground between God and Satan One of the reasons Christianity appeals to people is that it elevates the everyday struggles into amazing battles for the universe. Your decision about whether to masturbate while thinking of that hot barista is actually a demon from another plane of existence locked in a deadly battle for your soul with the creator of the entire universe. As much as third-wave Antiracists talk about systemic racism, in practice they are really heavily focused on inter-personal racism. DiAngelo specifically professes that once enough white people have healed our internal racism, systemic racism will sort of... disappear in an act of pure white person will. Whether you talk over Monique from HR is elevated from petty office drama to a very battle for the soul of America and the fate of her minorities.
Have you heard the good news? One of the silliest tropes in American Christian media is when our Christian heroes run into people who have never thought about Christianity and don't know anything about the bible. Of course, that idea is absurd; Christianity is one of the major political forces in America, it's basically impossible to be ignorant of it, but because it doesn't have a hegemony, it's adherents often pretend that it has no power at all and only a tiny elect even know about it. Third-Wave Anti-racism constantly does the same thing, asserting that Whites just don't think about race or racism even as millions of them rush out to buy White Fragility. Because Third-Wave Antiracism does not have a hegemony in the US, this is taken as evidence that it is utterly powerless and nobody has even heard of it, even though that is patently absurd.
I've Done Everything The Bible Says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! McWhorter points out that often, third-wave anti-racists will applaud both of two entirely contradictory opinions: e.g. if whites move out of minority neighborhoods, that's white flight and evidence of white racism. If whites move into minority neighborhoods, that's gentrification and evidence of white racism. From outside, this looks like, and frankly is, pure hypocrisy. But what it does in practice, and I say this from inside experience, is build out a social hierarchy. On the lowest rungs (The ones I used to occupy) are the people who actually believe this. We are surrounded both by obvious contradictions and by friends, coworkers, and celebrities telling us that actually all this makes perfect sense, and we assume everybody else just has access to a secret knowledge that allows them to resolve these apparent contradictions. What I very slowly learned, which lead to my conversion from the culture, was that this is not the case. You don't actually figure out some crazy third way out of that dilemma, you just move to the all-white suburb because you just had a kid and you're worried about crime, and then you occasionally publicly confess how guilty you are that you did it, and that it just shows how far we have to go. The people on the highest rung are, from what I can see, people who are so utterly lacking in self-awareness and so incapable of putting together a logical argument that they simply don't understand the contradictions in their own world-view, and just confidently do whatever.
Man, I've tried to write this a couple of times and it feels like it gets away from me.
One last trope in Christian media is the unbeliever who doesn't know anything about Christianity, but he reads the bible and then comes away with the exact political beliefs of a 21st century right-wing Evangelical. Which is of course absurd; the idea that you could reconstruct Evangelical beliefs on gun control or border security by reading the Bible is patently insane, but there is a cultural bonding ritual that comes from explaining how actually all of modern day Republican politics actually comes from the bible. People who don't get it are the outgroup, people who do are the in group.
I thought about this a lot while reading White Fragility. The ideas in it are not complex; rather, they are contradictory (Or at the very least, in extreme tension with each other) and explained incredibly badly.
This allows us to identify the in-group and out-group; our in-group are the people who are already so familiar with her ideas that they can take her rambling nonsense and explain that actually it's a bunch of simple, correct ideas (I can absolutely do this, by the way), while being confused or hostile marks you as a member of the out-group.
I may just make a different post about the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is how this stuff is different for black and white people.
McWhorter and a couple of other people I talked to reminded me that there were foot washing ceremonies during some of the George Floyd protests, and I just want to remind you all that any white person who washes the feet of a black protestor is symbolically casting themselves as Jesus Christ.
"The Trumpian attitude toward Harris's Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign world and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.
This willfully blasé attitude towards the word's pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable -- and therefore not who we are. It's a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump's false rumor that Barack Obama wasn't American."
Here's a gift link behind the paywall to noted linguist Dr. John McWhorter's excellent (and fascinating!) article in the New York Times about why Donald Trump and his allies intentionally mispronounce Vice President Kamala Harris's name.
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The takeaway is that in 1528, one euphemized the damned but not the fuckin’, whereas today we would expect it to be the other way around, as it indeed would likely have been in a document like this a century or so later. To wit, profanity first involved the holy, and only later the holes.
—from Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter Now, Then, and Forever by John H. McWhorter (chapter 2, pgs. 48-49)
A Columbia University professor lamented in his NYT newsletter that he was unable to teach John Cage's 4'33" to his humanities class last week because of the noise of the protestors outside.
The rest of his newsletter was about how the noise disproved the pro-Palestinian students' claim of holding a "peaceful" protest, and thus calling in NYPD and the draconian punishments of the university itself were justified.
