Read Online Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman - Free Book Online Page B

heard anyone talk about civility, I have thought of Mr. Shawn, a man so civil that, in order to spare me embarrassment, he succeeded in crossing an entire minefield of potential
M
s.’s without detonating a single one. I consider his feat comparable to that of Georges Perec, the experimental French writer who composed a 311 -page novel without using the letter
e
. After I left the building, I called a friend. (“How do you say that new little word? … Oh my God, no!”) That was a terrible moment, but as Mr. Shawn had surmised, wanting to die in a telephone booth was greatly preferable to wanting to die in his office.
    In twenty-three years—an eyeblink in our linguistic history—the new little word has evolved from a cryptic buzz to an automatism. From the beginning, I saw its logic and fairness. Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for
Ms
. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable
saying
it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, my ear retuned. Now, although it’s probably a moot point—everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne—I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can’t be Miss Fadiman because I’m married. I can’t be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can’t be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom
Ms
. was invented.
    On the sanguinary fields of gender politics,
Ms
. has scored a clear victory. I wish I could say the same of, say, the United Church of Christ’s new “inclusive” hymnal, in which “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” has been replaced by “Dear God, Embracing Humankind.” The end is estimable; it’s the means that chafe. I’m not sure I want to be embraced by an Almighty with so little feeling for poetry. Yet, having heard the new version, I can’t say I feel entirely happy with the old one either. As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary. Most people who have written about questions of gender bias in language have belonged to one camp or the other. Either they want to change everything, or they don’t see what all the fuss is about. Am I the only one who feels torn?
    Verbally speaking, as in other areas, my feminist self was born of a simple desire for parity. The use of gender-neutral terms like
flight attendant, firefighter
, and
police officer
seems to me an unambiguous step forward, part of the same process that has euthanized such terminal patients as
authoress
and
sculptress
—good riddance!—and is even now working on the gaggingly adorable
-ette
words: usherettes are being promoted to
ushers, suffragettes
to
suffragists
. (I have been particularly sensitive to words that make women sound little and cute ever since the day my college roommates and I sat around discussing which animals we all resembled. I’d hoped for something majestic—an eland, perhaps, or a great horned owl—but was unanimously declared a gopher. Given that history, it’s a wonder no one has ever called me an authorette.)
    My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear. To understand how I feel about grammar, you need to remember that I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say
hoi polloi
, never “the
hoi polloi
,” because
hoi
meant “the,” and two “the’s” were redundant—indeed something only hoi polloi would say. (Why any ten-year-old would say
hoi polloi
in the first place is another, more pathological matter, but we won’t go into that here.)
    I call the “to each his own” quandary the His’er Problem, after a solution originally proposed by Chicago school