The most offensive word in the English language, part 2

I was at an internet discussion board the other day when I noticed that somebody had an attitude problem.  He seemed determined to argue, and I realized that he was overusing one particular word, and that was what made his posts so offensive.  In fact, about one out of six words was the word in question.  I'll bet you think you know what this word is, but you're probably wrong.  In fact, it's a word I used three times in the last sentence, and I may have already offended you by using it.  It was in that sentence, too.  Did you find it?  There. I did it again.

Any competent marriage counselor or expert on How To Be A More Effective Parent or teacher will tell you (I've got to stop doing that!) that one can avoid conflict and increase cooperation by making "I statements" and not "YOU statements" in sensitive conversations.  See http://www.fabermazlish.com/.  When people throw you around too much, especially at the beginning of a sentence, as in "You always..." and "You never..." and "You think..." and "You just want to..." and "You're trying to..." instead of speaking about what they know, others will see themselves as being accused or attacked, and they'll get defensive or angry at you.  

Since we as parents set an example for our children and model the habits they'll learn as they grow up,  it's not a bad idea to break the "YOU! YOU! YOU!" habit, if we have it, as soon as possible.  Not only can it keep our children out of unpleasant confrontations with strangers, but it can help them learn to communicate in personal situations with friends and family in a mature and constructive manner, especially in handling sensitive issues.  A useful template for a talking about a problem, instead of provoking other people's anger, is 

"I feel [name of emotion] when [describe situation] and I would like [specify the change you'd like to see]."    

Children who learn such communication skills from their parents are more likely to use them with other people, including their parents, and avoid offending those people, especially their parents.

The most offensive word in the English language

There's an English word so offensive that people stopped using it hundreds of years ago, and the last time people tried saying it to the wrong people, they were burned at the stake for it.  Or  if they got a more merciful judge, they simply got thrown in jail or had their tongues cut out.  It's so offensive and so strictly taboo that many people don't even know what the word really means.  It's so offensive that it's best to avoid using even the polite substitute or a foreign translation.  Or a foreign translation of the polite substitute.  In other words, it's not the word itself that's the problem, but the idea behind the word, in any language.

First let's consider the English word itself, and next we'll consider polite substitutes and why even those are best avoided.  Are you ready for the word yet?  

That's the word.  

Now somebody reading this is probably thinking, "Is she crazy?  What's rude about that word? It's in the Bible, for #$%&'s sake!"  As if everything in the Bible were morally pure and G-rated.  Some of us in one of my on-line English majors and literature lovers groups had a discussion about this issue a few years back, and somebody even said she was once criticized in church for praying with the word "you" instead of "thou" because, according to the criticizer's opinion, "thou" is more respectful than "you."  
Whatever my friend's critic's knowledge of the Bible may be, his understanding of English grammar has some weaknesses.  Why the King James Bible and some prayerbooks use the singular form is a question for another day.  

Once upon a time, every language, including English, had two classes of pronouns for the second person.  Spanish even has three.  Now English is the only language that uses only one set of second person pronouns  Thou was a singular pronoun, the old English equivalent of the French, Italian, Latin, Romanian, or Spanish tu, the German, Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian du, the Icelandic þú, the Polish, Czech, and Slovak ty, the Russian ты, the Bulgarian and Macedonian ти, the Greek σύ, the Hebrew אתה, and the Arabic أنت, which people in all those other languages use to address a close acquaintance or social equal.  You is actually a plural form, the English equivalent of vous, vosotros, vos, vobis, voi, Sie, wy, вы, אתם, etc., which, in every language but English, people use for more than one person or for strangers or people to whom they need to show respect.  People who still want a separate plural pronoun have settled on you-all or youse.  

 If anyone still needs convincing, just consider that other famous English writer active around the time the change happened, William Shakespeare.  Consider how many people Juliet was addressing  when she said:

Just one Romeo.  Actually, it wasn't even that many people, because technically, she was thinking aloud to herself, and she didn't realize he was there under her balcony listening to her.  Now consider how many people Mark Antony was addressing when he said:

 A whole forum full of Romans.

The value of hard work

We all have a responsibility as parents to teach our young children the value of hard work.  Of course we all want them to succeed in their goals and become self-reliant, so they can fulfill their dreams and so we can be proud of them, or if for no other reason, so they don’t mooch off us in our old age.

In the past weeks, some politician or other has claimed that 47% of the American public pay no taxes and have no appreciation for the value of hard work.  He didn’t use the phrase “shiftless and lazy” explicitly, but many of us heard those unspoken words.  Oddly enough, that 47% figure corresponds almost exactly to the proportion of Americans who have told pollsters they’re voting for the other candidate.  Of course both candidates have supporters who pay high taxes and supporters who pay none.  In truth, we should probably attribute only a small fraction (closer to 4% or 7%) of the non-payment of taxes to the laziness and faulty character of the poor; some is due to old age, low incomes, illness, disability, or even to the greed or faulty character of rich who exploit loopholes and off-shore tax havens to avoid paying the taxes they owe.

Without getting into a political discussion, I think we should consider this question of why some people might not know the value of hard work.   The truth is that many of us, including middle class people, never learn the value of hard work until late in life, if ever.  Why is that?

Consider the young person who devotes hours to perfecting jump shots, back flips, double Axels, or guitar solos, only to receive no recognition, or to be excluded from the team or the band.  Consider the student who puts hours of effort into every school project and extra credit report and still doesn’t get grades as high as classmates to whom straight As come naturally.

Consider the workers who have two or three minimum wage jobs and see little of any rewards for their efforts.  Suppose your mother gets  up to catch a 6:00 bus every morning so she can ride across town to spend all day scrubbing floors, yet she still doesn’t bring home enough money to pay the rent on a decent apartment, plus utilities and health insurance without using food stamps, and she can’t afford to buy a functioning car or even good shoes for you and your siblings.    Suppose that what she does bring home is an aching back, chapped hands and knees, and stories about these other women she works for who can spend all day driving around in their SUVs shopping, who have closets full of shoes, and who can’t be bothered to scrub their own floors.  

Consider the family with a two hundred year legacy of working  involuntarily without pay for a paternalistic master who kept all the wealth they created and never recognized them as adult human beings or allowed them to pursue dreams of their own.

Consider the child with parents who have never encouraged him to work hard nor acknowledged his efforts.  Consider the child who never has the opportunity to get his or her own way, even at winning a game or choosing a favorite dessert.

One need not be economically disadvantaged to lack drive.  Indeed, some of the most diligent among us are people trying to overcome hardships.  Often children who grow up with all the advantages are the laziest among us. 

I have recently come to the realization that my own parents didn’t particularly help  me understand the importance of working hard.  My mother (who worked very hard at a low-paying dead-end job) frequently told me I was uncommonly clever, which only taught me to believe I was somehow more entitled to rewards than people who were merely average, by virtue of who I was and who my relatives were.   Yet studies show that in countries where children test higher in math than American children do, they learn to value hard work (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning, http://www.tdl.com/~schafer/Asian.htm).  Children were given impossible problems to solve, and instead of giving up right away and saying “I quit.  It’s too difficult for me” they saw it as a challenge and kept working on it for a long time and trying to figure it out. 

Perhaps we need  to remember that what matters most in life is not who we are, which is something we cannot control, but what we do with our lives, which is something we can control.   Better yet, perhaps we can impress that on our children by valuing their efforts and their achievements.

 

Do you read to your children?

Do you read to your child? I wrote in this blog last year that parents should read to their children, and that post has been my most popular one so far.  Perhaps you followed my advice, and perhaps now your child is a reader. YES!

Congratulations!  So  you may be thinking “Since my child can now read, it’s time to stop reading aloud, right?  NO! 

Elementary school children love being read to in class by a teacher, classmate, visiting parent, or local celebrity.  My high school students loved having me read to them.  Book group members and public radio listeners love listening to authors read from their work. Parents enjoy spending quality time with their children over a favorite book, and children enjoy it, too.  So by all means, keep up the regular nightly bedtime story ritual for as long as you can.  It will

• help develop comprehension skills so your child can get good grades and be a success in school and life 
• help strengthen your relationship with your child 
• give your child an opportunity to ask questions about matters you don’t ordinarily discuss during the day 
• give your child an opportunity to hear unfamiliar words pronounced aloud, and
• expose your children to your own childhood favorites, the old classics, or those “forgotten” books that they probably won’t discover on their own or through a recent library school graduate.

Reading is about much more than decoding the symbols on a page.  It is about nothing less than thinking itself.  Even a child who has "cracked the code" can grow intellectually by discovering new ideas and new vocabulary, by learning how to recognize plot patterns or style, make predictions, detect bias or irony, and develop cultural literacy and critical thinking.  I could read Charlotte's Web in second grade, but I could not have tackled Sherlock Holmes on my own even in fourth or fifth grade.

There are plenty of books your child might be able to read on his or her own.  Yet there are even more books that might still be too much of a challenge.  Informed teachers could tell you each child has two different reading levels, the independent level and the instructional level.  A normal fourth grader might be able to pick up and read second or third grade level books for pleasure without help, something that will not hurt a child and that can provide useful practice, even if that child’s test scores demonstrate that fourth or fifth grade level materials are most appropriate in a formal reading class at school, with a teacher who knows how to teach.

With a parent, grandparent, older sibling, or other person reading aloud, a child can experience books and stories beyond his or her instructional level.   Books written for seventh or eighth graders might frustrate even a bright fourth grader, and if parents wait for children to read these books in seventh or eighth grade, homework, sports, video games, The Mall, or even more popular newer books might prove too much of a distraction and prevent that from ever happening.  

So what books are good to read?  I would leave children alone to discover books like Twilight and Uglies for themselves, and since series books are so popular, it makes sense to let children read volume 2 or 3 or 40 independently after introducing the first one.  Books written in the 1800's or even mid 1900's might be trickier or more tiresome for modern children to tackle on their own, and they often deal with more innocent subjects than more recent books, which should make children feel more comfortable reading them with parents.  The classics, like mythology, folklore, Robin Hood, and fairy tales were written for inter-generational sharing.  As I mentioned before, anything that you yourself loved as a child would be good to share with children.  Detective books can also be good.  Of course any good children's librarian would be happy to suggest books that might work well for your family, and I will post a list if people express an interest in one.

I would like to thank Jen Robinson, for the picture above.