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☆ Opinion | The Prevalence of Standing Ovations
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-30 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

),” by John McWhorter (Opinion, April 16):The currency of the standing ovation is indeed seriously debased. The impulse to stand up during the ovation following a performance may in some cases represent a kind of unconscious one-upmanship. I confess that although I invariably applaud performances, I usually “sit out” the competitive appreciation derby, and haul myself to my feet only if I feel particularly inspired. To the Editor:I admit that I’m often among the first to give a standing ovation. I always wondered why the holdouts would deny something so simple to these hardworking actors.

Persons: Wahoo, John McWhorter, “, I’ve, David English Acton Locations: Mass

☆ Opinion | I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-23 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time. I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Persons: John Cage, ”, Israel’s, Jewish Organizations: Columbia University Locations: Gaza

☆ Opinion | What if O.J.’s Trial Happened Now?
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-18 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Those contrasting perspectives have gone down as demonstrating a gulf of understanding between the races. That gulf persists, but it narrows apace, and if the verdict came down today, it would be a lot less perplexing to many white people than it was back then. We might even see some of them applauding along with Black people. It isn’t that these people would celebrate Simpson himself, any more than the jurors did back in 1995. The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team.

Persons: Simpson, “ I’m, ” I’m

☆ Opinion | Bravo! Hurray! Wahoo! (Meh.)
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-11 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In the old days of American theater, the 1950s and before, even megastars like Ethel Merman did not regularly get standing ovations. Standing ovations meant a performance was truly extraordinary. Some have attributed the trend to the tourists who fill many of the seats at Broadway shows; they may be less familiar with theater and therefore especially enthusiastic. But standing ovations are the default even at shows and plays that attract few tourists, and besides, tourists have been flocking to New York since long before the 1990s. I think that made theater, by contrast, feel more special — “live performance,” as we now refer to it.

Persons: you’ve, Clinton, I’ll, Ethel Merman, Ethan Mordden, ovations Organizations: Broadway Locations: New York

☆ Opinion | ‘Little Women’ and the Art of Breaking Grammatical Rules
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-04 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A few weeks ago I wrote on the grand old rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, which is, quite simply, a long-lived hoax we’d best relegate to history. In that light, I’d like to dismantle the powerful but hopeless idea that language is something to be judged rather than observed. It can be hard to process, within the bounds of our lifetimes, the randomness of our take on what “proper” language is. I’m thinking of this now as I finally read “Little Women,” which everybody but me seems to have read and which seems to generate another movie version every 10 minutes. Meg to Laurie at a ball says, “Take care my skirt don’t trip you up.”

Persons: Jo, Amy, prim, “, Meg, Laurie, ” Locations: England

☆ Opinion | On Broadway, ‘Centering’ Antiracism Is Delightful
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-28 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My 12-year-old daughter practically had to drag me into the musical “Six,” currently raging on Broadway, in which Henry VIII’s six wives all have their say about what happened to them. In this, the whole show is a kind of lesson in antiracism, regardless of whether a viewer is consciously aware of it. In that way, it is a quintessentially modern work of musical theater. Beyond the lessons “Six” teaches, the performers manage some of the deftest work on Broadway I’ve ever seen. So, “Six” can change your lens in an antiracist (and antisexist) way — while also turning you on to art, wonder, curiosity and excitement.

Persons: ”, Henry VIII’s, Kimberly Akimbo, ” I’m, Anne of Cleves Organizations: Broadway

☆ Why the SAT Isn’t Racist - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-14 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

That’s three down: Last week, Brown University reinstated standardized testing as a part of its admissions requirements, following Yale and Dartmouth, which did the same earlier this year. For all that we have heard about how standardized tests propagate injustice, the decisions at these Ivy League schools are antiracism in action, and should serve as models for similar decisions across academia. Of course, for years, the leading idea has been precisely the opposite: that the proper antiracist approach is to stop using standardized tests in admissions. Many schools first suspended using them a few years back because their administration was too difficult during the peak of the Covid pandemic. All the way back in 2001, the University of California president Richard Atkinson was warmly and widely celebrated for eliminating the SAT from the schools’ admissions process.

Persons: Richard Atkinson, Sian Beilock Organizations: Brown University, Yale, Dartmouth, Ivy League, University of California

☆ 2 phrases to use to be a more successful employee or manager—and 2 to avoid, according to leadership coaches, psychologists
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Aditi Shrikant | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Here's what to say, and what not to say, to be a more successful employee or manager, according to speech experts, leadership coaches, and psychologists. To be a better manager or employee, there are some phrases you should use more at work, and some you shouldn't say at all. Workplace relationships can be tricky to build — you want to look competent, form connections, and also not overstep boundaries. Say: "Thank you." "And I parsed it and I thought, 'What a gorgeously chilly way of saying: Your problems don't matter to me.'"

Persons: Jim Edwards, Edwards, John McWhorter, Bill Gates, McWhorter, Cortney Warren, it's, Warren Organizations: Columbia University, CNBC

☆ Opinion | Black English Doesn’t Have to Be Just for Black People
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-29 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

He’s 28, he’s white and he can be hard to listen to. And that’s because he’s always dipping into Black English. In a routine about friction with his stepfather, for instance: “You gon’ keep me in dis room wit’ dis movie? All summer, baby — ah’m good!”Then, following a few sentences in mainstream English: “I finally had leverage for wuhnce. I was like, ‘You kin either beat me, or — you ain’t gon do both, OK?’,” adding an expletive.

Persons: Matt, “, Dave Chappelle Organizations: wuhnce Locations: North Lewisburg , Ohio, North Lewisburg

☆ Opinion | Where Did Our Strange Use of ‘Like’ Come From?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-15 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

They are ordinary, seemingly educated, white Northeasterners ranging from their late 20s to late middle age speaking casually. And what stands out today, 60 years later, is how often they pause briefly when they talk. Their speech sounds almost herky-jerky to the modern ear. Casual speech, always and everywhere in any language, is all about short sentences, often unfinished, often with occasional hesitations. For one thing, a single song doesn’t change the way people talk every day.

Persons: ” It’s, Frank Zappa’s

☆ Opinion | No, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ Is Not ‘the Worst’
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-08 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Gershwin intended the rhapsody to fuse the respective powers of classical music and jazz. In the article I cited above, “The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100,” Iverson offers an intriguing take: that “Rhapsody in Blue,” while having its charms, is just too square to merit being played as often as it is. He believes the rhapsody isn’t truly jazzy enough, and specifically that it only lightly dwells in African-based rhythm. But to Gershwin, the rhapsody was precisely what it needed to be. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow.” So while the rhapsody certainly has its foot-tapping sections, it also sails, rests, jolts and soars.

Persons: George Gershwin’s, tony, Paul Whiteman, Gershwin, Ethan Iverson, ” Iverson Organizations: Times, Aeolian Locations: Manhattan

☆ Opinion | When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-30 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

For one, the word can be taken as a reality check against a prominent idea concerning language. Psychologists have since shown repeatedly that differences in how languages’ vocabularies label experience do condition very small differences in thought patterns. In Russian, for instance, there is not one word for blue, but two: one for darker blue and one for lighter blue. No experiment has demonstrated that differences in language affect our minds so profoundly as to result in significantly different world views. It is culture — i.e., reality — that does that, not the specifics of how narrowly or broadly a word happens to apply.

Persons: ”, Sapir, Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf

☆ Opinion | We Need a New Word for ‘Plagiarism’
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-23 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

They are boilerplate statements in books or academic papers whose reuse is only uncovered through the use of high-tech language searches. I, for one, would be quite OK with someone else lifting boilerplate statements from my work. In an alternative universe in which we had two words for “plagiarism,” that entire discussion could have been clearer and more efficient. There is no reason the new term has to be a formal one derived from Latin like “plagiarism” — or “duplicative language” for that matter. Perhaps we already have the term: “cutting and pasting” — as distinct from, rather than a form of, plagiarism.

Persons: Gay, Oxman, It’s, plagiarize, —

☆ Opinion | Knowing When ‘They’ Means One
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-28 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I have a proposal about our new usage of “they” to refer to individual people, as in, “Irene? Oh, they left an hour ago” or “Bernard cut themselves by accident.”Because it is so hard to change language by fiat, I know that my proposal here must qualify as modest. But propose it I must: Might it make the new “they” a little easier to handle if it were used with singular tense marking? Context usually makes the meaning known, but surely it would make things a little clearer if we could use “they wants to trim the cat’s claws” when referring to just one person. Poor little “they” has had it rough over the years.

Persons: “ Irene, Bernard, ”, “, Chaucer, Thackeray’s

☆ Opinion | Early College Is the Equalizer We Need
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-21 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In New York City, for example, the Bard Early College branches in Manhattan and Queens are sterling examples. For example, the Bard Early College programs focus on giving this opportunity to underprivileged kids by encouraging them to apply. Eighty-six percent of Bard Early College students go on to get B.A.s within six years, as opposed to a national average of 63 percent of college students who graduate. However, early college programs should play a larger role in those conversations, given the high rates at which their students graduate from college. Also, early college students have to pay for only two years of college.

Persons: Bard Organizations: Bard Early, Bard Early College Locations: New York City, Manhattan, Queens, Newark , Cleveland , New, Hudson Valley , New Orleans, Baltimore, Washington

☆ The Music in Black American English - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-09 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Broadway, as always, is giving us lessons on language and its connection to music. The stellar new production of “Purlie Victorious,” not seen on Broadway since 1961, is Exhibit A. If the production discomfited me in any way it was that every 15 minutes I was waiting for someone to start singing. To impersonate the cousin, Purlie enlists an awkward young woman, Lutiebelle, who in the process falls in love with him. The play was written by Ossie Davis, who played the lead in the original production alongside his wife, Ruby Dee, as Lutiebelle.

Persons: “, ”, —, who’s miring, Purlie, Lutiebelle, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Leslie Odom Jr, Aaron Burr, “ Hamilton Organizations: Broadway Locations: Spain, Georgia, American

☆ Opinion | The Trap of the Overprotected Childhood
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-02 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Not long ago, I visited the quiet, treesy neighborhood I spent much of my 1970s childhood in. Fifty years ago, there would have been lots of kids roaming and biking around in the streets; I was one of them. It isn’t that the neighborhood, West Mt. Which makes it so curious that on that afternoon, it looked like a movie set of my childhood cleared off for the day. I’ve asked around and been told there are plenty, and the very day I was there I watched the local school letting out lots and lots of kids.

Persons: I’ve, — Locations: West Mt, Airy, Philadelphia . West Mt, America

☆ Ivy League linguistics expert shares the No. 1 common phrase to never use: It really means 'Your problems don't matter to me'
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-07 | by ( Ashton Jackson | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

If you're speaking with John McWhorter, never use this common phrase: "It is what it is." "The first time someone said that to me was when something unpleasant had happened to me, and he didn't care. "And I parsed it and I thought, 'What a gorgeously chilly way of saying: Your problems don't matter to me.'" But it can come across as so passive that using it can erode other people's trust in you, as McWhorter noted. It's not entirely bad news for McWhorter's least-favorite phrase: Using it can be a sign of emotional resilience, because it shows your ability to accept your circumstances, psychologist Cortney Warren told Make It last month.

Persons: John McWhorter, Bill Gates, McWhorter, You've, they're, Yasmene Mumby, Cortney Warren, Warren, it's, Kathy, Ross Petras, Warren Buffett Organizations: Columbia University, Genome, Associated Press, NORC, for Public Affairs Research, Trust, CNBC

☆ Opinion | Two Languages Walk Into a Bar
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-29 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I encountered another variation on this theme during my annual stay at a Jewish summer bungalow colony. The colony’s social director introduced himself with a song, set to a klezmer-like tune, in one stanza of which he sang about how his parents and older relatives hated that he had decided to become a social director. A social director! A social director! Don’t tell us our boy is a social director!

Persons: It’s, Maisel, ” someone’s, “ We’re, Lenore’s, ”, “, Ikh, bey zeyde Organizations: Miami Locations: Rosmarins, ”

☆ Opinion | How Hip-Hop Became America’s Poetry
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-22 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

As a kid in the 1970s, even one attending private schools, I was directed to drive by poetry slowly now and then, but rarely to actually stop and take it in deeply. Today, while vanishingly few people are up for reciting poems such as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” or Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” vast numbers can eagerly and effortlessly recite hip-hop lyrics. But true verse of the kind featured in hip-hop — poetry that does not rely on melody or harmony — centers the word alone. In contrast to the synergy of song and word, verse is an especially heightened form of language alone. Rap is verse poetry, in all of its verbal richness and rhythmic variety, a deft stylization of speech into art.

Persons: ’, doughty, W.E.B, Du Bois, Louis Untermeyer’s, Gioia, Pushkin, “ Oppenheimer, Barbie, Joyce Kilmer’s Organizations: ., America, Light Brigade

☆ Opinion | One Sentence Does Not Define a Curriculum
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Too often the idea of the slippery slope is presented as a given, rather than as an assertion requiring evidence. But I do perceive that America has become infinitely more informed about slavery than it was 50 years ago. To propose such an idea is, in its way, to dismiss the work so many have done to change minds. There are, to be sure, other things in the curriculum that also need fixing. The group was given only a few months to compile the curriculum, and errors like that happen in haste.

Persons: I’m, ”, …, Ron DeSantis Organizations: D.C, Tulsa Locations: America, “ Amistad, Florida, Washington, Rosewood

☆ Opinion | Will Translation Apps Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete?
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-25 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

To polyglots, foreign languages are Mount Everests daring us to climb them — a metaphor used by Hofstadter in his article. After all, despite the sincere and admirable efforts of foreign language teachers nationwide, fewer than one in 100 American students become proficient in a language they learned in school. Immersion programs, if begun early, can actually imprint a foreign language into a child’s brain. I know: A foreign language is a window into a new way of processing the world. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did.

Persons: Hofstadter, John McWhorter, ”, “ Organizations: Columbia University Locations: Rome

☆ Opinion | Complicated Stories of Affirmative Action
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-22 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To the Editor:Re “On Race and Academia,” by John McWhorter (newsletter, July 4):Professor McWhorter’s account of being placed in positions for which he was less than qualified as a result of a series of institutions’ attempts at affirmative action is undoubtedly based on both his experience and analysis. Unfortunately, it reinforces the prevailing narrative that affirmative action gives less qualified people of color opportunities denied to more qualified people who are white. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us in her TED Talk “The Danger of the Single Story” that we need a balance of stories. Joy Reid recently shared her affirmative action story on MSNBC. Andrea Haynes JohnsonLas VegasThe writer is an adviser for Courageous Conversation, which provides consulting services on racial equity.

Persons: ”, John McWhorter, Chimamanda Ngozi, Joy Reid, Reid, Let’s, Andrea Haynes Johnson Las Organizations: TED, MSNBC, Harvard Locations: Andrea Haynes Johnson Las Vegas

☆ Opinion | Is ‘Yo’ the Gender-Neutral Pronoun You’ve Been Looking For?
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-19 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

My focus this time out is on standard English rather than nonstandard English, since one of my recent books was about Black English. Although they are often presumed to be simpler — in a word, dumber — than standard English, the opposite is often true. One example I am thinking of is a relatively new and unheralded gender-neutral pronoun that has emerged in, of all places, Baltimore. Gender-neutral pronouns are a thorny topic in English. But in English, a truly accepted gender-neutral pronoun has been a holy grail for generations.

Persons: A.A . Milne, ”, “ Ariella Locations: Baltimore

☆ Opinion | What Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Meant When She Said ‘Blink’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

To a linguist, there is so much to appreciate in just about every word. And over the past couple of weeks, I have been delighting in none other than the word “blink.”This delight was inspired by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. In fact, in different ways, the word “blink” points us both backward and forward in time. Justice Jackson’s usage of the term was apparently the result of the expression “blinks reality,” which is relatively common in legal writings. “Blink” had come to mean “neglect” by the 18th century, and the usage was ordinary up through the Gilded Age.

Persons: Ketanji Brown Jackson, ”, George Eliot’s “ Adam Bede ”, Henry James’s, Blink ”, “ Organizations: Supreme

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