Dreadfully puzzling

"If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him,” according to the Mad Hatter.



A problem is seeping into writing like the coal ashes from a Tennessee power plant into the Emory River, almost imperceptibly, yet perniciously. The problem is called unclear reference, the ambiguous use of pronouns.
Pronouns are stand-ins for nouns. We use them (the pronoun them, for instance, here stands in for the word pronoun) in order to avoid excessive repetition of the same word or name. However, it gets tricky when a pronoun could theoretically refer to more than one antecedent, the word it replaces.
To curb the environmental hazards of the 2009 Tennessee accident, the ashes are removed from the Emory River. “Sediment can be seen in the Emory River as machines pump it into holding ponds.” Even though we can logically infer that the river’s water is pumped into ponds where it then can be cleaned, the sentence itself is ambiguous. The antecedent of the “it” the machines are pumping could be the noun “sediment” or the name “Emory River.” Neither really makes sense because one cannot pump sediment or an entire river into holding ponds. The only substance that can be pumped is the water of the Emory River; yet the writer does not mention the word “water." It is up to the reader to read it into the sentence, to see it between the lines, and to clean up the muddy mess-age.
One citizen, who directly is affected by this disaster, says that he wants “to plant a garden. I’m concerned about it getting in the soil.” “It” can here only refer to the antecedent “garden,” yet that’s clearly not what the aspiring gardener implies, who is concerned about the spillage polluting the ground ("In Aftermath of A Spill, A New Round of Challenges" NYT 3/7).
Newspapers are full of such disasters. (Pun intended.) The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are just the most recent ones, and since time immemorial, disasters are accompanied by looting. For example, “In 1911, Sicilians dodged lava flowing out of Mount Etna to loot homes abandoned in its path.” Whose paths? Although the closest antecedent would be Mount Etna, the reader correctly assumes that the pronoun refers to “lava” ("The Rough Morality of Up-For-Grabs" NYT 3/7). Again, the reader must do the writer’s job and clarify the connection.
Dodging blow-ups and spills is probably routine for a president’s political advisor. “David Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision” ("The White House Message Maven" NYT 3/7). While “He sits in… meetings” clearly refers to Axelrod, “the last person he talks to before making a decision” must be the president. Again, the reader simply uses his (or her) common sense to get a message whose rendering is incorrect and fuzzy.


A pronoun should refer clearly to one, definite noun.
This noun, coming before the pronoun, is called the pronoun’s antecedent.
Take the car out of the garage and clean it. What needs to be cleaned? The garage? Most likely, if the sentence was spoken in California. The car? Just as seemly a guess.
When the party finally reached an agreement, it was in tatters. Was the party in tatters or the agreement?

A pronoun should not refer to an implied idea.
When the antecedent is implied instead of explicitly stated, the reader has to guess the sentence's meaning:
Pearl S. Buck received much critical praise and earned over $7 million, but she was very modest about it. She was probably modest about her success.

The antecedent should not be remote.
In Euripides’ Medea, he describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband. It is much clearer to say that "In Medea, Euripides describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband."

Me First!

"For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within"
(Alfred Lord Tennyson).



A new field of psychology, called ecopsychology, addresses anxiety and other mental maladies that are directly related to the rather common loss of our innate ecological instincts and consequently to our dysfunctional relationship with nature. Because humans for so long have believed in the dualism of mind and body, which presumably allows us to destroy nature without harming our mind, we live according to the premise "what interests me is me" and proportionally have disconnected ourselves from others and the world around us.

“You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

This basic error indeed propagates itself and grows like weed in our daily lives and in our language. As Jean Twenge in her book Generation Me points out, books and TV shows that revolve around the self have been blanketing the nation for many years. As a consequence, self-reference words (I, me, mine, myself) have proliferated, however at the cost of collective words (humanity, country, community etc). Twenge quotes Britney Spears saying in 2004 that her priorities are “Myself, my husband, and starting a family.” Not only does none of the three listed items in any way refer to anything outside Spears’ own individual life, she also begins her list with herself before she remembers her partner and her hypothetical future children. Until not too long ago, it was considered very impolite to mention oneself first. It was proper to say that “Michael and I are going out tonight.” Today, it is more likely to hear that “I and Michael are going out.” As Twenge reminds us, such manifestation of a change in mores should not come as a surprise after years of schools concentrating on students’ self-esteem and their self-esteem only. After all, there is no need to improve when one has “worthy and good inner essence… [that deserves] recognition and attention from others;” and there is no need to heed others when the “individual needs should be considered first and foremost” (65).
"A single word often betrays a great design," Jean Baptiste Racine believed. Thus, language is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of the way we think. Putting ourselves first and ignoring our ecological and social instincts ad perpetuum will destroy the planet because it will have destroyed our mind. Many already may feel solastalgia, a pain over the realization that what we call home (and this includes environment and language) is seriously endangered. Will we understand that without changing our attitude towards the outside (and the way we express this attitude) we will not feel much better inside?

I or me, oh my!

My Cat, My Pie, and I

Just watch my¹ cat and me² when we debate
whose pie it is there on my plate.

I may believe it’s mine³. Alas,
she knows what’s mine is hers.

My husband stares at us, my cat and me⁴,
and wants me⁵ to resist her piteous plea.

Of course, it all depends on me⁶,
because it's I⁷ who should have sway.

But we, my cat and I⁸, know whom I will obey
and do agree that she is mightier than I⁹.

And I do know myself¹⁰ and know the rule:
It will be she who wins and I who is the fool.¹¹

But she and I¹², we shroud all this in secrecy,
a private matter - between just her and me¹³.

Nobody else but she and I¹⁴ will grasp
who ate the cream with quite some zest:

Not I but she¹⁵ – who won’t confess.
So, hush! It wasn’t I¹⁶ who told you this.




1) My is the possessive form of I when it is followed by a noun.
2) Me is the object form of I. Somebody (subject) shall watch my cat and me (object).
3) Mine is the possessive form of I when it is NOT followed by a noun.
4) The cat and I are the object at which the husband stares. Moreover, a preposition (at) always requires the object form me.
5) Between a verb (want) and an infinitive (to resist), the object form me is needed.
6) After a preposition (here on) follows the object form me .
7) After linking verbs (be, seem, appear, become), the subject form I is required. Linking verbs link the subject (here it) to its modifier (here I) that describes the subject.
8) "my cat and I" is an appositive phrase explaining the subject (we) and must therefore also be in subject form.
9) She is mightier than I am.
10) Myself is the reflexive form of I. A sentence like "I cut myself" means that the subject (I) is affected by its action (to cut). When "I cut the meat," the cutting does not affect myself.
11) Another example of the personal pronoun after a linking verb: Subject (it), linking verb (will be), modifiers (she who wins/I who is the fool).
12) Appositive phrase preceding the subject (we)
13) Object form after preposition (between)
14) "She and I" are the subjects who will grasp what's going on.
15) Not I ate the cream but she did.
16) Another example of the subject form after a linking verb

The infamous “you”

The “red scare” of the seventeenth century were – the Quakers because they insisted on addressing everybody equally as thou and refused to use the then more respectful you for individuals of higher rank. Relics of this old respectful you are even today common in very formal salutations such as “Your Majesty,” “Your Highness” or “Your Grace.” While for example the French, despite their revolution against the aristocracy and for liberté, egalité, and fraternité, still make this clear distinction between formal and informal greeting, modern English speakers have all turned Quaker. We use you for everybody, from our family members to the president. Malcolm Gladwell considers this a unique benefit of the English language since it diminishes power-distance. He illustrates this with the story of the jinxed Korean Airline. The American consultant in charge of restructuring this ailing airline required those who “wanted to remain a pilot at the company … to be fluent in” English because “in English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy.” According to Gladwell, the story of KA “is an extraordinarily liberating example” of “making successes out of the unsuccessful” by taking “them out of their culture and re-norm them” (Outliers 219-220).

One may question whether “re-norming” is liberating or conforming. One may at the same time contest that the French are more polite simply because they have a formal way of addressing a stranger or an authority. Yet, even in English you is appropriate in formal writing only when giving directions or advice. Beyond that, writers should avoid this pronoun because it may pique the reader. A writer, for example, may explain subprime loans and the advantage of their lower initial interest rate. However, she then declares that your initial advantage only lured you into a dangerously risky financial situation because the inevitable annual adjustments will cost you in the end much more than a traditional loan. Using you, the writer forces the reader to identify with the subprime borrower, something not everybody may appreciate.

I am not you

The author of the NYT times article “Floating In the Digital Experience” (1/3/10) Manohla Dargis explains how “Avatar” has brought back the social experience of watching a movie together “after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop.” The reader rightfully may refuse to be depicted as one who watches movies cloistered in her bedroom. It is also an assumption that “Avatar” “forces you to remain attentively in your seat … and locks you in tightly.” What if it didn’t? What if the reader is just this one person who left the theater in the middle of the movie?

Using you in writing implies assumptions about the reader. However, when it is haphazardly mixed with we and I, the writer either lacks grammatical awareness or overindulges in poetic license for effect, however now clearly forces the reader to identify not only with the imaginary “you” but also with the author herself. “We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store).” WE agree to pay more than YOU might at Blockbusters? Watching “The Dark Knight,” Manohla Dargis felt “that I was at the very edge of the screen. ‘Avatar’ … blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more.” I/Manohla was on the edge of the screen, but 3D technology sucks YOU/the reader into it? “Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route.” Yes, a movie director’s goal clearly is to capture the viewer and lead her along a path she herself might not have chosen, but a movie critic should refrain from directing. Even though movie aficionados certainly have a lot in common, they also have their individual preferences. Not everyone who is a movie enthusiast must necessarily be enthused by “Avatar.” Which brings us back to the initial discussion of respect. In spoken English, you may have a democratizing capacity, but in writing it blurs the line between the writer's and the reader's opinion.
Anyway, whoever yearns for a solitary affair with his or her laptop might want to check out this documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/