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Yesterday, my granddaughter (college senior, English/Political Science majors) texted me a reference to a podcast she thought would interest me.  The parenthetical information in sentence one is important – my granddaughter’s age, her political/social sensibilities and her language awareness.  The podcast:  Call Your Girlfriend (June 28, 2019); the subject: Pronouns.  My granddaughter and I have twenty-one years of Word Nerdiness between us. I listened to two hosts interview a woman whose mission is to teach the use of “they” as a singular pronoun as an alternative to the binary dominance of “he” and “she.” I have two years into this linguistic issue since I first met a person who asked for the pronoun “they.”  Recently an Op Ed in The New York Times, authored by a writer who introduces himself as a “cisgender Dad,” argued that gendered pronouns put people in categories they would not choose for themselves.  The writer argues that, Grammarians aside, social inclusivity demands that we un-gender our language regardless of confusion between singular and plural.

I am one of those Grammarians whom he would dismiss.  I imagine the red rivers of ink I traced connecting pronouns and antecedents on thousands of student essays.  Granted, I may lose this one, as I have bowed gracefully to defeat with “between you and I.”  Should I expect the world to know that “between” is a preposition and demands an objective pronoun (me)?  Like a knife in my heart, I will hear “they” call up a single person. The Op Ed writer does not champion the non-gendered pronoun, “one.” I can understand it is the stuff that makes one crazy to identify with one gender and endure a life where you are referred to (via pronouns) as a gender you are not   An ungendered pronoun or elimination of all pronouns seems fair.

“Practice,” my granddaughter and the podcast urged.  “Start with referring to your cat as ‘they,’ and the use will come naturally.”   Couldn’t be more true. Language changes faster than sunrise sets to dusk.  Practice makes perfect.  Besides, I am on board with the ways gender stereotypes control our thinking.  More than fifteen years have passed since my church replaced old hymnals with new ones that removed gendered pronouns, yet that change doesn’t take easily with all.  My voice raised in song, I often miss complete stanzas to an old hymn I thought I knew. All around me, I hear parishioners of my age stumble as they pray, “Our Father, our Mother . . .”  Yet gradually God has changed from the great white man I envisioned in Sunday School, until God is now a spiritual wholeness with the feminine in me.  Takes practice.

As it was, the podcast’s topic itself didn’t shock this aging English teacher.  But ah, the medium is the message, and the interviewee on the podcast, a woman likely in her 20’s and a purported pronoun expert who is writing curricula to change pronoun education, spoke every line of her talk with a lilt at the end of the sentence, as if she were asking a question rather than making a statement.  I have heard many young women do this, but I cannot recall young men doing it too.  To my aging ears, it sounds as if the speaker is begging for approval, unsure of her message, and so makes a declarative sentence into a question she can withdraw like a fishing line cast into a blackened stream. I think the tone infantilizes the speaker.  Similarly, the speaker peppered her commentary with “like” when there was no comparison intended that would call for “like.”  Both the upspeak and “like” come from Valley Girl Talk, a dialect that connotes, for me, bikini clad California girls mostly interested in what they will wear to the next beach party.  My granddaughter argues that “like” is the filler of her generation that allows the listener pause time to catch up; whereas in her grandparents’ generation is was “um.” Hmm.

I shared the podcast with a neighbor of my generation.  Like me, she wants to to catch up on what younger folks are thinking. The upspeak that annoyed me, annoyed her.   She added that she has been asked at the start of professional meetings to “introduce [herself] with preferred pronouns and feels like it is a ‘tell’ beyond [her] comfort zone.” An introduction with her name should be adequate. Now that is something I had not considered.  I connect it to an experience related by an African American friend who recently moved into an assisted living residence.  At her first visit to the dining hall, another resident asked her “What do you prefer to be called?”  My friend knew the woman was fishing for Black, Colored or Negro.  My friend replied, “I prefer Theresa.” As my friend righty assumed, no one asked the other resident whether she preferred White, Anglo or Caucasian. By announcing our pronoun, do we feel we are putting ourselves in a category; whereas, we might like to keep our gender preference to ourselves?  For whom are we declaring our pronouns?

My granddaughter continues to coach me.  Well along on writing this blog, she refers me to a Fresh Air Podcast (NPR) in which Terry Gross interviews linguists about upspeak and a related linguistic practice called vocal fry. https://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices  I learned that both tics are more common to speakers under forty, but are equally employed by men and women.  However, in audio media, women’s voices are much more often criticized than are men’s.  The greater range of pitch of a female voice also exaggerates tonal difference. Most surprising is the information that younger listeners do not hear the uniqueness of upspeak as do older listeners.  No doubt those under forty do not hear the preponderance of like.  Do we make value judgements here? Is the English language going to Hell in an I-Phone? The evolution of language is more than accepting new vocabulary.  It is also accepting new tones and inflections.  If we are lucky enough to converse with our grandchildren we can ride along.

By the end of dinner, our granddaughter and we agreed that language changes with our social sensitivities.  Another friend, a gay man in his 50’s, told me the Gay community used “they” back as far as the 70’s when it wasn’t safe to declare your sexual orientation.  Social sensitivity expands.   This morning, I sat comfortably with this conclusion as I rode my bike to the village store to get the Sunday paper.  The mid-twenties man behind the counter greeted me, “Hi, nice morning.”

“Yes,” I answered, and asked, “How are you today?”

“I’m well, thank-you,” he answered.  I almost dropped my six dollars for The Times.   He didn’t say, “I’m good.” He knows the question of “how” demands an adverb.  Maybe he even knows what an adverb is! Or maybe language does not change as a rapid-running creek into a stagnant pond, but rather a long, slow river, winding around like an ox-bow to the sea.

After dessert at a dinner for University of Washington supporters, our host asked each to say what we love about the UW.  “I appreciate the Access Program,” I said.  “With the permission of the instructor, senior citizens can audit any class for only five dollars.”

“Are you taking a class this next quarter?” she asked.

“Yes, The Philosophy of Feminism.”

“Isn’t there a course in Masculinism?” quipped the man next to me.

“Sure,” I said, “It’s called The History of the Last 2,000 Years.”

            Everyone laughed.

So began my thinking about the Philosophy of Feminism a week before I walked into a lecture hall with 140 undergraduates.  I was prepared for Female vs Male.  I was prepared for Slam the White Patriarchy.  All of this without giving time to define Feminine or Masculine.

The professor, an exceptionally thoughtful woman, began the class asking each of us to write down our name, what pronoun we preferred for addressing us, and any needs that might affect our equal access to the class.

Ah, the pronoun thing.  I was ready for that, even though my English teacher identity cringes when a single person selects they.  Needs?  Well, vision and hearing.  What if the students felt they had no needs worth noting?  “Everyone has needs,” the professor explained, “so if you are inclined to say you have none, please say, ‘I anticipate my needs will be met.’”

Got it.  If I say I have no needs, while the student next to me announces her deafness, she is cast as “other,” or “outside the norm.”  This class practices inclusion, and so it did, all the way to the final exam.

When I told my friend Bindy I was taking The Philosophy of Feminism, she asked how Feminism can be a philosophy.  I looked up philosophy, and among many definitions is “the way one looks at the world.”  Then if we can have Marxism, named after a man, and Socialism, named after an economic structure, both recognized as philosophies, a Feminist lens can be a philosophy as well.

As the class progressed, I noted the elasticity of gender.  We read essays by noted Feminists and women who struck out for equal rights to vote and work, but we also studied other marginalized groups, many ethnicities and all genders. Starting with oppression, the professor invited volunteers to tell about occasions when they have felt oppressed. A young black woman raised her hand.  “It is mostly older white people who say this,” she explained, “but I feel oppressed when people think they are flattering me by commenting on how articulate I am.”  What she heard in that compliment, was “You are a black woman and so I am surprised that you speak so well.”    The black man sitting next to her added he was tired of representing to others the conditions of a black man in America.  “Just read the front page of your newspaper, if you want to know what it is like to be a black man in America.  It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.”  Although that quotation came from one of our readings, hearing it from him, I heard it as Truth.

I was learning from these young, progressive students to view a world that I had not experienced in similar ways.  I reflect on the fewer opportunities for women when I was a coed in in the early ‘60’s.  Yes, I was marginalized as a woman, and now may be marginalized as a senior citizen.  When a student saw a solution to many of our country’s issues in eliminating congressional representatives over 60 years of age, I raised my hand — Ageism, the one marginalized group not yet addressed in the class.  After class, he apologized to me, the one over-sixty student among them.  I accepted his apology and thanked him for all the words his generation gave me that were not available when I was nineteen: sexual harassment, date rape, non-binary, intersectionality micro aggression.

 Our language stretches every year to better accommodate events, debates, and feelings.  If I had thought Feminism simply concerned advocating for women, by the end of the class, that definition was too narrow. I grew to see that Feminism represents advocacy for a world where every person has an equal access to well-being and to power.  It is personal and it is political. It is a philosophy ready for the embrace of all people who see the world as a community with differences, but ones that do not elevate a group at the expense of another. Anyone can be a Feminist.

This summer the UW does offer a class in Masculinism.  Yes, a class to discuss what it means to be a man. I wish I could attend that class too, but it IS summer, so I am at our cottage on Quilcene Bay, not in a campus classroom  My student desk is replaced by an L.L. Bean rocking chair on our deck where I can read and reflect on my connection to others – even the violet green swallows flitting over nesting boxes and swooping up bugs for their babies.

In a college linguistics class, my professor explained that idioms make American English a challenge to learn.  “For example,” he illustrated, “how can a person who understands the separate meaning of put, up, and with, infer put up with means to endure?”  Likewise, understanding pay and attention, why would someone combine them for pay attention, as in to notice, or to focus on something?  Pay suggests debt and remuneration.  Could it be that paying attention is a choice to purchase, or a willingness to invest something of yourself?

Yesterday morning, driving my grandson to school, I was attentive to his lively accounting of his weekend’s crew regatta.  Showering me with details of the course, wind and water, he suddenly excused himself to change the subject.  Then he began, in acute detail, to describe the sunrise over a semi-cloudy horizon above the Cascades.  The scene called for his attention as we drove at 55 mph over the Ship Canal bridge.  I remained attentive to cars ahead.  Max described a ribbon of light between mountains and clouds, a “urine yellow beneath a black cape.”  Mid-range, between Lake Union and the Cascades, he noted marshmallow clouds hovering at vacillating heights opening to reveal snow-spotted peaks.  “ It seems even more dramatic,” he said, “because we are driving past.”

“Like performance art,“ I offered.

“Yah,” he agreed, then returned to telling about the regatta and medals won by his team.

“My medal for Max,” I thought, with a grandmother’s pride “how he notices the world.  He pays attention.  His is an investment in creative consciousness.”

Surely spring seduces our attention, a welcome price to pay for warm sunrises, the embryonic unfurling of ferns in early May. We notice each new flowering dogwood tree or rose, pausing because we know the blossom will not last for weeks.

Yet every season, I cannot think of paying attention without recalling the evocative plea of Linda Loman referring to the decline of her husband, Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

“Attention must be paid,” she demands in a prophetic voice that mourns the waste of a human being by the crushing jaws of capitalism.

My generation sometimes boasts that it is The Greatest Generation and romanticizes cruising Route 66 in gas guzzling cars.  Our generation paved miles of farmland for highways to take us to strip malls cemented over where valley farms once stood.  Were we so inattentive to the environment we took for granted?  Now we foresee a great debt called in for our children and grandchildren to pay.

Two afternoons a week, I audit The Philosophy of Feminism at the University of Washington.  Surrounded by a hundred students between the ages of 18 and 22, I am hearing where they are attentive.   Yes, cords connect their smart devices to their ears, so folks from my generation assume young adults are inattentive to all but their own music or messages.  However, in class discussion of generational differences, these students are paying attention to my generation’s arrival at journey’s end, with remaining years of dependence on social security that these students’ salaries will fund until Social Security is depleted, likely before today’s youth reach retirement age. Especially in Seattle, they are aware that student housing costs as much as their tuition, in a city where the two richest men in the world live in mansions.  Unlike our generation, these young adults do not expect to surpass the prosperity of their parents.  As Max focused on the beauty of a sunrise, they are paying attention to climate change and the very air they breathe.

This morning, the sun spills through Volunteer Park Café where I sit attentive to long shadows cast by the fully leafed-out sweet gum tree outside the café window.  I remember that we are exhorted to “live in the moment,” inviting me to drink in the loveliness of the leaves.  At the same time, human consciousness sweeps my attentiveness to years spent and years to come.  When I was teaching high school, if my students tumbled into pleasurable distractions, I would say, “Listen up,” another curious idiom.  At the end of this day, I want to recall how I cashed in my hours paying attention.