POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Bias-Free Word Finder: A Dictionary of Nondiscriminatory Language Rosalie Maggio Beacon, $15 Okay, so I've committed a few false generics in my time. I'll even admit...
...That gives a lay reader an exasperating sense of wading through a crate of cotton...
...But neither gay rights nor Karen Finley's performance art helps bridge the gap to mainstream voters...
...The beat demands little historical or theoretical knowledge...
...Gelman shows how news judgments are often shaped by insecurities...
...To be sure, liberals generally do embrace the individualist ethos in such realms as sexual preference and artistic expression...
...Still, I always thought I could get along quite well without a dictionary of nondiscriminatory language...
...Anderson has certainly struck a fertile theme...
...They just traded pot for royalty checks...
...Europe had centuries of tradition and culture to serve as ballast against the new commercial juggernaut...
...The path from Civil Disobedience doesn't have to lead to Reagan...
...Otherwise, you're bound to miss the numerous mini-essays that appear throughout, offering insights on such issues as body image, aggression, and homophobia...
...This continued, in divergent ways, in such writers as Walt Whitman and John Dewey, on up through the Beats and the counterculture of the sixties...
...These reporters, often the paper's youngest and most naive, will stay out latest, and work cheapest...
...For all of you who've taken to replacing -man with -person, be advised that this "weak, awkward, and annoying suffix...
...Hunk for men is verboten...
...In Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson and Thoreau both lived, Thoreau buffs recently organized to defeat a proposed office park development near Walden Pond...
...Traditional press histories like Richard Kluger's The Paper and David Halberstam's The Powers That Be mention police reporting only in passing...
...Chuck Achilles' heel for "where the shoe pinches...
...Gandhi was a great admirer, as was Martin Luther King...
...The New York police beat ought to provide some of the best sociological material in the country, but he offers little about collisions of race, politics, and economics...
...They affected him the way the New Left affected his more political contemporaries such as Irving Kristol, though Anderson's grudge is less personal and vindictive...
...Anderson starts out with a premise that is promising enough, if not especially original...
...Fair enough...
...As opposed to what other kind of "others," he doesn't say...
...She believes we must rid the language of all words and phrases that are gender- or racespecific, no matter how inoffensive and regardless of the spirit in which they are uttered...
...But in Jacksonian America, there was little to restrain the market and the kind of man it created...
...The dirty little secret about ethics in journalism is that at times like this, there are none," he writes...
...And, yes, I've dabbled in sexual asymmetry, though I never developed a taste for exonyming...
...Under "Amazon/amazon": "Use the term only if you understand its history and multiple connotations...
...The Industrial Revolution came at a time when America was socially still a blank slate...
...During the sit-in movement in Nashville, at the peak of the civil rights movement, a mimeographed memo circulated among the demonstrators that ended with the sentence, "Remember the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King...
...Gunn and his Inspector Clouseau hat tumbled down the staircase...
...auto mechanics are women...
...Just pages later, however, he lustily returns to taste-be-damned: Two shots echoed in the hallway...
...But regrettably, his frame of reference is almost entirely literary, and his book falls into a genteel literary version of the trap that has bedeviled the liberal mind for decades...
...and an "insider/outsider" rule (derogatory words should be used only by groups to describe themselves...
...The paradox has a pointed relevance for Democrats, as Bill Clinton takes office with an opportunity to change the party's gestalt for a generation...
...He lived (more or less) in a hut, and wrote with dismay about the commercial culture that, a century later, Reagan shilled for as TV spokesman for G.E...
...Having now carefully examined some 5,000 words, phrases, or expressions that reportedly oppress, exclude, or offend, as well as 15,000 alternatives, I've never felt more semantically challenged...
...But Anderson is foggy and academic where he needs to be current and specific...
...The alternatives for a word like ditz don't seem all that friendly: "missing some marbles," "mind like a sieve," "not all there...
...She would replace raise Cain with "lecture," "make mischief," or simply "carry on...
...Although the book is intended as a dictionary, you have to read it through first to get your money's worth...
...I'll even admit to linguistic perjoration...
...Those who aren't up on Bartleby the Scrivener and the work of Henry James may find themselves lost...
...In these situations the reporter's mantra may once have been "I'm just doing my job...
...Although it's well written, this is a limited and frustrating book—but its shortcomings reveal much about the news business...
...Richardson [the alleged gunman] escaped in his pajamas, climbing through a hatch in the roof...
...But that's not all there is, and liberals in particular often need to be reminded of this...
...By replacing fuzzy, overgeneralized, clich?-ridden words with explicit, active words and by giving concrete examples and anecdotes instead of one-word-fits-all descriptions you can express yourself more dynamically, convincingly, and memorably...
...writers using biased words like right-hand man "leave their readers as uninspired as they are...
...Particularly in the days when many reporters hadn't gone to college, the police beat offered papers a controlled and demanding area to teach the newest hires...
...Mitch Gelman joined Newsday in 1986 as a researcher and politicked his way onto the metro staff a year later...
...There has been a "waning of the intellectual's faith in the possibilities of discourse," he laments...
...Anderson's heart is clearly in the right place, though, and it's not his fault the publisher tried to pitch the book to a wider audience than it actually addresses...
...The memoir that followed, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, became an inspiration for countless reporters who felt themselves stagnating on the same beats...
...Apparently I've been committing a whole host of socially unattractive sins, including adultism and—this one really hurts—orgasm-as-norm thinking...
...is not generally recommended...
...Gelman uses some of his best —a doctor at Kings County Hospital, a fed-up transit policeman, the wife of a wounded officer—to show that the crime reporter must know the right people in order to bridge the gap between the department line and the truth...
...This is why Thoreau and Reagan could meet at the point on the circle at which they were furthest apart...
...Both for those absorbed in the pursuit of money and for those with visionary claims for the self, the term 'future' refers to acquisition— more profit or broader visionary claims...
...Thoreau the individualist, who strived to lead a life of principle, has provided a great continuing impetus for social justice as well...
...people first (a person with a disability, not a disabled person...
...The author, a retired Columbia professor, does touch upon these themes...
...He describes how, trying to convince the mother of a 10-yearold rape victim to allow him to interview the child, he stopped worrying about doing what is right, and wanted only to get a story the other papers didn't have...
...Having myself just finished three years of covering similar cop beats at several newspapers, I found the book a believable introduction to the police reporter's world...
...Ralph Nader could capture the imagination of mainstream America with a radically anti-corporate message because he was the plucky individual who took on General Motors...
...Can you imagine having dinner with this woman...
...Anderson's annoyance with the Beats seems to be the animus of Making Americans...
...Instead of offering a real alternative to commercial man, these writers lapsed into "an individualism that apes the impersonality of what it opposes and attenuates our ties to human others...
...Thoreau was writing in protest of the Mexican War, the kind of imperial skirmish that Reagan would have gloried in...
...And some of what she proposes is perfectly reasonable: parallel treatment for the sexes (husband and wife, for example, not man and wife...
...The O'Rourkes who supported him didn't switch their ideology...
...I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed . . . to life itself," Thoreau wrote, "than this incessant business...
...One blasted off half of Gunn's head, the other hit him in the stomach...
...And then there's the condescending tone that turns up throughout the book: "Readers may choose words at their own levels of understanding and commitment...
...Recoiling from the individualism of the corporate capitalist, liberals tend to lose contact with a larger part of the American psyche: the urge toward individual enterprise, the dislike of regulation and bureaucracy, and the spiritual/religious drama of redemption and reform, all of which provide much of the subtext of America's political discourse...
...Consider, for instance, Buchanan's lead to a story of a man who was shot during an argument he started at a fast-food restaurant: "Gary Robinson died hungry...
...She sees this as not only making the world a better place, but as making writers better at their craft...
...They began, Anderson argues, a literary retreat into the private precincts of self-discovery and self-expression...
...no-nos will do little to create a more egalitarian society or raise anyone's self-esteem—though it's a perfect way to avoid focusing on underlying causes and serious solutions...
...That thought could start a major drumroll...
...Gelman hasn't decided what tradition he believes in—the formalism of Halberstam or Buchanan's flashbulb postmodernism...
...Social reformers like Martin Luther King and environmental prophets like John Muir drew from the great individualist tradition that Thoreau helped define...
...Machismo and favors count...
...In other words, because he was so American...
...use "centerfold" instead...
...From the constant battles with police officials to the rivalry between and within staffs for space and attention, Gelman's book is valuably honest...
...So, beginning with Emerson and Thoreau, they harkened instead to themselves...
...Individualism isn't something liberals need to fear...
...That leaves off the story with the controversy over a reading by Beat poets at Columbia in the fifties...
...Maggio considers words like nubile, petite, brazen, curmudgeon, and bruiser as "sexist...
...For instance, we are allowed to retain sexist names for nonhumans, such as alewife, timothy grass, daddy longlegs, sweet william, and myrtle...
...Maggio would like to castrate (sorry: "draw the teeth of," "spike the guns of') the language, to make it into a prosaic eunuch ("pushover," "doormat...
...You also miss lots of factoids of questionable significance...
...Reagan meanwhile turned these into poetry, even though his policies often promoted corporate rather than individual endeavor, and even though he often exempted the very rich from the rigors of the market...
...Yet when I go to the newsstand I see an awful lot of discourse...
...This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way," Thoreau wrote in his famous essay Civil Disobedience...
...There is no disputing, moreover, a solipsistic side to the American individualist tradition...
...But actually, they've stayed pretty much where they were...
...Made of money" is deemed a perfect substitute for rich as Croesus...
...Bombshell has to go because it's also "militaristic and violent," as do Renaissance man, dirty old man ("conveys very little real information"), Big Brother, Caesar's wife, and deus ex machina (deus is in the masculine gender...
...Social import is found not just in texts, after all, but also in what people make of them...
...But neither Emerson nor Thoreau actually lived that way, and I doubt that many of their contemporary devotees live that way, either...
...But the problem is that Maggio goes well beyond banishing words that offend or exclude people...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Bias-Free Word Finder: A Dictionary of Nondiscriminatory Language Rosalie Maggio Beacon, $15 Okay, so I've committed a few false generics in my time...
...Yet for all this, the two could sound so much the same...
...Melville was writing for people "disengaged (like Ishmael) from engrossing social ties," he says, and it was not until the post-war diaspora that this rootless quality became a common experience in American life...
...The result, he suggests, is much as when a child, rebelling against a parent, turns out just like that parent...
...He files this book having spent three and a half years learning journalism by jamming out 1,100 stories on the endless crime that plagues and defines much of New York...
...Jonathan Rowe...
...At last, we are going to get past the wearisome invocations of the "Greed Decade" and start to place this epoch —which Reagan hosted rather than invented—within the deeper currents of American thought and life...
...Because Anderson doesn't deal with that, I don't know what he means...
...But Rosalie Maggio, author of The Bias-Free Word Finder, has shown me the prejudice of my ways (not to mention expanded my use of academic jargon...
...He pines for the days when the Partisan Review crowd—Lionel Trilling, Arthur Schlesinger, etc.— wrought out a literary "middle ground" between the individual and society...
...It was Reagan, not Carter or Mondale, who brought the blissed-out romanticism of the sixties—the lobotomized Thoreau—into presidential discourse...
...Anderson doesn't dwell on such subjects...
...In Gelman's world, there is no ethical dilemma in this gory overdramatization, in insisting on interviews with families of gunshot and rape victims, or in bringing a cake to bribe his way into a wounded officer's family home...
...Somebody seems to have faith in it...
...Like Gelman, many of today's newspaper and television reporters have covered cops, but it is only recently that the police beat has acquired cachet...
...Reagan, by contrast, thought the market— business—was synonymous with life itself...
...This is hardly a hermetic or Reaganesque lineage, nor the worst we could seek to revive in America today...
...Certainly that strand exists...
...As America's folkways gave way to the factory, the railroad, and the surging forces of acquisition, protest writers had little to harken to by way of alternative tradition...
...But a dictionary of this type makes no such distinctions, in the same way that books decrying women's use of make-up or plastic surgery condemn the product or service rather than the questionable motivating factors...
...Things changed six years ago when The Miami Herald's Edna Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for her wonderfully reported but overwritten police coverage...
...At one point, for example, he discusses why Moby Dick didn't get the recognition it deserved until after World War II...
...Sixtiestypesturned-Reaganites such as P. J. O'Rourke make a big deal about crossing over from their former ways...
...His patron saint is Hawthorne, who recoiled from the transcendentalists and sought identity and destiny in the firmer earth of family and community ties...
...Preaching a literature of social engagement, Anderson disengages from the life and controversies that his readers actually experience...
...Instead of milquetoast, Maggio suggests "someone with cold feet...
...This left a large realm of emotive discourse to be dominated by the Reagans in the name of financial gain, to the exclusion of the other directions in which it can be channeled...
...That's the sad part...
...Gelman sounds almost old-school as he writes of the guilt he feels as he breaks the bounds of privacy in pursuing a story...
...It could just as easily have been Reagan...
...Like many p.c...
...Some of the very writers Anderson disparages can be instructive in this regard...
...Certainly it's hard to argue with her basic contention that language influences culture as much as culture influences language...
...I thought this book would help...
...But many of Maggio's linguistic tinkerings seem random...
...But soon Anderson is back to his syllabus of texts...
...He writes with a muted elegance, a reluctance to join battle with—or even explore— anything on the current scene...
...Money increasingly defined both who you were and the way you related to others...
...In Gelman's world it is "I deserve this information, let me in!,, —Ross Kerber Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money Quentin Anderson Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $21.95 How did it happen that, of all recent presidents, it was Ronald Reagan who sounded at times like Henry David Thoreau...
...It could also explain how the sixties and the eighties were mainly different sides of the same coin, rather than different coins...
...Yet they were utterly opposite in almost every way...
...Beach bunny and bosom buddy are not heavily discouraged...
...You don't need a lexicologist to tell you that the attitude behind the usage of many words is more important than the words themselves...
...Reagan's economics were the doyourown-thing hedonism of the drug culture transferred to the financial realm...
...It could help explain, for example, a peculiar feature of leftwing publications like the Village Voice—the way their self-absorbed politics of libido embrace the raw Id of the commercial culture they purport to oppose...
...reformers, Maggio has erred on the side of self-parody...
...National Democrats foundered during the seventies and eighties in part because they lost touch with the language of American individualism— aspiration, enterprise and responsibility for one's lot...
...Gelman concentrates on the tension between reporters seeking drama and police departments seeking order...
...Now Clinton has begun to claim the language back, and it behooves Democrats to re-examine the roots of the individualist tradition, both to inform their policies and prepare themselves for the assaults that Republicans are already preparing for 1996...
...that there should be a connection between individual effort and reward, and that social betterment begins with individual virtue and concern rather than brainy proposals from the policy schools...
...Continuing to expand a list of un-p.c...
...It comes with a tantalizing subtitle, "An Essay on Individualism and Money," and a list of literary subjects that cranks anticipation into high gear...
...Unfortunately, Gelman quits as soon as he's explained the task of the reporter, leaving the book essentially a diary...
...Anderson presents Emerson and Thoreau, for example, as apostles of self-absorbed hermitry, seeking a "solitary, total, and guiltless possession of the world...
...And my favorite: "If you must think in halves...
...Defending herself against presumably numerous critics who have mocked her zealotry, Maggio writes: "But then ridicule, it is said, is the first and last argument of fools...
...These are "traditional values" that Democrats can recapture, as Clinton has begun to do...
...The result is ironic...
...A book published in 1992 that purports to explore "individualism and money" in American life that barely mentions such names as Milken, Reagan, Gilder, or Kemp...
...Well, call me a fool, I guess, because I found this word finder a lot more silly than useful...
...The conviction lies deep in the American soul that individuals are responsible in some degree for their lot, and are not just creatures or victims of social forces...
...Karen Lehrman Crime Scene: On the Streets with a Rookie Police Reporter Mitch Gelman Times, $21 As lawyers trudge their way through law school and clerkships and as doctors are hardened in their residencies, newspaper reporters cut their teeth covering the police beat...
...For instance: 36 percent of embezzlers and less than 1 percent of U.S...
...Occasionally, Anderson generates a little literary steam in such directions...
...Police bureaucracies are instinctively protective about everything they know, but reporters are expected to develop sources...
Vol. 24 • December 1992 • No. 12
