Here at Adept, we use Ms. for all references to women unless her marital status is germane to the topic, i.e., Mrs. Colin handed me the DNR documentation for her husband. If the preferred gender of the subject is unknown, we recommend M.
When addressing strangers, authority figures, and in formal situations, it is considered polite to use an honorific, or title, to address them. The most frequently used honorifics are gendered male or female, which may not always be appropriate. In this article, we are going to review the most common honorifics, the alternative Mx., and how and when to use these titles.
The most commonly used gender-neutral honorific is Mx., pronounced [ miks ] or [ muhks ]. The first recorded use of Mx. was in 1977, where it was suggested as a less-sexist alternative to the traditional Mr., Mrs., and Miss. These forms are not only highly gendered, but they also link a woman’s status to whether she is married or not.
The honorific Mr., from master, is used for men regardless of marital status. The titles Mrs. and Miss, from mistress, are used for married and unmarried women, respectively. To reduce the emphasis on marriage, the alternative Ms. was coined in the 1950s for women regardless of marital status.
Just as Ms. solved the sexist problem that a woman was described based on her relationship to men, the form Mx. addressed the gendered nature of titles more generally. Although it was coined in the 1970s, it didn’t gain traction until the 2000s as there came to be greater mainstream acceptance of nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people (see A Language Of Pride: Understand The Terms Around LGBTQ Identity).
Mx. is now used as a preferred title for many who identify as neither man nor woman. This is not its only use, however. Like other gender-neutral forms of address, Mx. can also be useful when addressing an audience whose gender is unknown. A good example of this is on forms that use a title (think: Mx. _____).
While Mx. is the most common gender-neutral title, it isn’t the only one. Another alternative for nonbinary or gender-noncomforming people is Misc., short for miscellaneous, from the Latin for “mixed.” Similarly, the alternative title M. does away with all the gendered information that comes after the M in the other titles and is a simple way to express a variety of genders or lack of gender. Another option is Ind., short for individual. As with all titles, pronouns, names, and so forth, one should be mindful to use the language that a person uses for themselves.
Along those lines, professional titles are gender-neutral and may be preferred by people of any gender. The most common of these is Dr., short for doctor, which is used for Ph.D. holders and medical doctors. Captain and coach are also common titles that can be held in a variety of settings. People in the military can be referred to by their ranks, as in General or Sergeant. Members of the clergy in many faiths are also typically referred to by specific honorifics, such as Reverend or Rabbi.
What does Mx. stand for?
Mx. is a riff on the classic gendered titles Mr. and Ms. It keeps the M and swaps the gendered element of these terms for the gender-neutral X. The letter X has historically been used as a symbol for the unknown or indescribable. In this way, it is perfect for a gender-neutral honorific. Mx. shows respect while leaving the gender unknown or unarticulated. Other examples of words that use the letter X as an indication of gender-nonconformity that you may have come across are folx and womxn.
The purpose of using these titles, whether it’s Mr., Ms., Mx., or anything else, is to convey respect. (They are called “honorifics,” not “ruderifics,” after all.) Because that’s the goal, whatever title someone chooses for themselves is the one you should use for them. And whether you are nonbinary, gender nonconforming, or simply just not interested in being called a gendered title, if Mx. or any of these alternatives don’t feel fitting to you, you can always coin your own!
So excited to be working on oral histories of the Lumbee. This article from the Smithsonian provides some background about the Lumbee
Thousands of Lumbee Indians, members of the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, once lived in the neighborhoods of Upper Fells Point and Washington Hill
With the support of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a new archive is being established to collect the history of the Lumbee community (above from left are members of the intertribal Baltimore American Indian Center: Louis Campbell, Lumbee; Celest Swann, Powhatan; E. Keith Colston, Lumbee / Tuscarora). Edwin Remsberg, Maryland Traditions, VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
One chilly March afternoon in 2018, Ashley Minner, a community artist, folklorist, professor and enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, gathered the elders together for a luncheon at Vinny’s, an Italian eatery on the outskirts of Baltimore. The group crowded around a family-style table, eager to chat with friends after a long winter. Over a dessert of cannoli and Minner’s homemade banana pudding, she got down to business to show the group what she had found—a 1969 federally commissioned map of the Lumbee Indian community in Baltimore as it stood in its heyday.
Her discovery was met with bewildered expressions.
“The elders said, ‘This is wrong. This is all wrong.’ They couldn’t even fix it,” Minner recalls from her seat at a large oak desk in Hornbake Library’s Special Collections room. When she speaks, she embodies a down-to-earth, solid presence, with an air of humility that her University of Maryland students will tell you is how she conducts her classes. That day, she wore no jewelry or makeup, just a T-shirt, jeans and a bright purple windbreaker.
Lumbee elders discuss Peck’s 1969 map on March 22, 2018. Far row left to right: Earl Strickland, Minnie S. Maynor, Gerald Butler, Sarah Arnold, Adam Smith (non-Lumbee), Lizzie Locklear. Near row: Heyman “Jonesy” Jones, Jeanette W. Jones, Mattie “Ty” Fields, Howard Redell Hunt, Jeanette Hunt. Photo courtesy of Sean Scheidt
At the luncheon, plates were cleared but questions remained. The elders drafted a rough sketch of the neighborhood based on their recollections. Now it was Minner’s turn to be perplexed. Though she has lived all her life in the Baltimore area, nothing looked remotely familiar.
“It wasn’t until my Aunt Jeanette took me to Baltimore Street, and pointed and said, ‘This is where I used to live,’ that I realized the reason I wasn’t getting it was because it’s a park now. The whole landscape has been transformed.”
Baltimore may be famous for John Waters, Edgar Allan Poe, and steamed crabs, but very few people are aware that there was once a sizeable population of American Indians, the Lumbee tribe, who lived in the neighborhoods of Upper Fells Point and Washington Hill. By the 1960s, there were so many Native Americans living in the area that many Lumbee affectionately referred to it as “The Reservation.” In the early 1970s, this part of Baltimore underwent a massive urban renewal development project and many Lumbee residences were destroyed, including most of the 1700 block of East Baltimore Street. “Almost every Lumbee-occupied space was turned into a vacant lot or a green space,” Minner says. The population of “The Reservation” continued to decrease between 1970 and 1980, when thousands of Baltimoreans moved out of the city to Baltimore County, including many Lumbee.
Now, Minner, age 37, is embarking on a mission to share their stories with the world. In conjunction with her Ph.D. research and with the support of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, she is creating an archive devoted to her community, including a more accurate map of how the neighborhood used to be, so that their contributions to the city’s cultural legacy will be rendered visible to history.
“We run the gamut of skin colors, eye colors and hair textures,” Minner says. “When the Lumbee came to Baltimore, Westerns were all the rage. But we didn’t look like the Indians on TV.” Jill Fannon for Bmore Art
The Lumbee are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and the ninth largest in the country. They derive their name from the Lumbee River that flows through tribal territory in Robeson, Cumberland, Hoke and Scotland counties of North Carolina. They descend from Iroquoian, Siouan and Algonquian speaking people, who settled in the area and formed a cohesive community, seeking refuge from disease, colonial warfare and enslavement. Some intermarried with non-Indigenous peoples, including whites and blacks. After World War II, thousands of Lumbee moved north to cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit, seeking work and eager to escape Jim Crow segregation. They traded the back-breaking labor of sharecropping for jobs in factories, construction and the service industry. Many also became small business owners.
The Lumbee have fought unsuccessfully for full federal recognition from the U.S. government since 1888. Congress passed the Lumbee Act in 1956, which recognized the tribe as Native American. However, it did not give them full federal recognition, which grants access to federal funds and other rights. A bi-partisan bill called the Lumbee Recognition Act is now pending before Congress.
The historically mixed-race heritage of the Lumbee has played a role in the government’s denial of recognition, and marginalization at the federal level has a trickle-down effect. Many Lumbee in Baltimore, like members of other tribes living in urban areas across the country, suffer from cases of “mistaken identity.”
“I’ve been called Asian, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian—everything but what I am,” Minner says. “Then you tell people that you’re Indian, and they say, ‘No, you’re not.’ It does something to you psychologically to have people not accept you for who you are day in and day out.” Minner is Lumbee on her mother’s side and Anglo-American on her father’s side. Her husband, Thomas, is Lumbee and African American.
When the elders said their goodbyes at the restaurant, they promised to meet again to help Minner with her research. Over the weeks and months that followed, Minner and some of the elders revisited the streets of Upper Fells Point. As with Proust’s madeleine, sometimes all it took was sitting on a particular porch or standing on a familiar street corner for the floodgates of memory to open.
“It’s phenomenological. You re-embody the space and you re-remember,” Minner explains.
They pointed out the phantoms of once-upon-a-time buildings. Sid’s Ranch House, a famous Lumbee hangout, is now a vacant lot. A former Lumbee carryout restaurant has been replaced by Tacos Jalisco. South Broadway Baptist Church at 211 S. Broadway still stands and serves as one of the last anchor points for the Lumbee, who remain in the city.
Minner reviews images from the Baltimore News American collection at the University of Maryland, College Park. In hand is a photo of Lumbee women displaying a quilt at the Baltimore American Indian Center. Xueying Chang, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Minner’s deep dive into Lumbee history started with her own family. While still in high school, she recorded her grandfather’s memories of Baltimore and North Carolina. “I guess it’s that fear of loss and knowing that people aren’t around forever,” Minner said, reflecting on what prompted her to document his stories. Elaine Eff, a former Maryland state folklorist and one of Minner’s mentors, said that Minner is in a unique position to document the Lumbee. “An outsider just wouldn’t understand the nuances of the culture,” she said. “Ashley straddles both worlds.”
By collaborating with the elders, Minner is offering them the opportunity to decide how their personal and collective history will be presented.
“I began working on this project [thinking] there were no records,” Minner says, surrounded by boxes of old photographs and stacks of phone directories. Preeminent Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery, who sat on Minner’s dissertation committee, reassured Minner that she could find proof of the Lumbee’s extensive presence in Baltimore. After all, they had home addresses and telephone numbers like every other Baltimorean. Lowery advised Minner to look through census records, newspaper articles and city directories in local archives.
After examining multiple articles and the census records, Minner discovered that pinpointing the exact number of Lumbee in Baltimore during the 1950s and 60s when the community was at its peak was more complex than she had anticipated. According to the researcher who produced the 1969 map, John Gregory Peck, the census records at that time only distinguished between “whites” and “non-whites.” The Lumbee were classified as white; for outsiders, Lumbee have continually defied racial categorization.
“We run the gamut of skin colors, eye colors and hair textures,” Minner says. “When the Lumbee came to Baltimore, Westerns were all the rage. But we didn’t look like the Indians on TV.” Despite many success stories, the Lumbee community in Baltimore has struggled with illiteracy, poverty and criminal incidents. Minner acknowledges that historical accounts tend to highlight the problems the Lumbee have faced but also emphasize the darker aspects of their story. “The older articles are often really negative. It’s always about a knife fight or a gun fight,” Minner says, referring to news clippings she has compiled, some of which feature crimes allegedly perpetrated by Lumbee.
In addition to materials sourced from city and state archives, Minner’s new Lumbee archive will include oral histories and contributions from elders’ personal collections. She is quick to point out that acting as both a tribal member and scholar can make determining “how much to sanitize the ugly things” a challenge.
The Lumbee archive will be housed at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Minner’s compilation created with Lumbee elders will form the backbone of the collection. She believes the collection could take as long as five years to assemble. A digital version of the Lumbee archive will be accessible through the Baltimore American Indian Center in addition to UMBC, so that community members can conduct their own research. Elaine Eff also stressed the importance of the archive being widely known and accessible. “The fact that the archive is going to UMBC in Special Collections is significant,” Eff said. “It means that it can be a jumping-off point for other projects on the Lumbee.”
A feature story on the Lumbee of Baltimore in the September 1957 issue of Ebony Magazine depicts Minner’s aunt, Jeanette Jones (Locklear) at top left of the right page. The caption reads: “Typical Indian girl,” with no mention of her name. Sean Scheidt
“I couldn’t do any of this on my own,” Minner says, as she opens a box of photos from the Baltimore News American archive. “Most of the elders are in their 70s, and they are the greatest resource available to anybody right now about what we had here.”
When she discovers a photo or an old newspaper clipping that corresponds with an elders’ story, Minner gets excited. “Many times they don’t know they’re in the archives. I’ll take pictures and show them what I found, like, ‘Look where you were living in 1958!’”
“This is sister Dosha,” Minner says, selecting a photo of a jovial, silver-haired woman presenting a pot of fish to the camera with the pride of a new grandparent. “She had a beautiful voice and her song was ‘How Great Thou Art.’” She picks another photo from the folder, featuring a taxidermy eagle posed menacingly behind three women who grasp opposite ends of a quilt as if preparing for the bird to nose-dive into the center. “That’s Alme Jones,” she says, pointing to an elder wearing oversized spectacles. “She was my husband’s grandmother.”
Next, Minner opens a massive R.L. Polk directory and begins searching for Lumbee names that correspond with addresses in Upper Fells Point. “In the 1950s, it’s still kind of a mix. We can see some Jewish names, Polish names.” She carefully turns the delicate pages, scanning the list of diminutive print. “There’s a Locklear. Here’s a Hunt,” she says. “As it gets into the 60s, all the names become Lumbee. There’s a Revels, Chavis…”
The Lumbee have a handful of common last names that make them easily distinguishable—to another Lumbee, at least. She finds the 1700 block of Baltimore Street, the heart of “The Reservation.”
“And that’s where my Aunt Jeanette lived, right there, on Irvine Place,” says Minner.
Jeanette Locklear (above: as a young girl in North Carolina) directed the Indian Education program in the Baltimore City Public School District to instill pride in Native students. Photo courtesy of Jeanette W. Jones, née Locklear
Jeanette W. Jones sits next to her niece on the couch at Jones’s home in Dundalk, Baltimore County. The side table is crowded with a collection of porcelain and glass angels. A white cross hanging in the doorway between the living room and kitchen says, “God Protect This Family.” Minner says Jones has been “front and center” in her research and a source of inspiration for the archive project.
“I told Ashley, you’ve got to know your people.” Jones speaks in a deep baritone, her Robeson County lilt adding bounce and verve to the words. She has a stern gaze which flickers warm when she laughs and an air of authority harking back to her days as an educator in the public-school system.
One of the many accounts of racial prejudice that Minner has recorded for the Lumbee archive features Jones. In 1957, a journalist and a photographer from Ebony Magazine were sent to document Lumbee of Baltimore—deemed “mysterious” by the magazine. Unbeknownst to Jones, a photo of her as a 14-year-old attending a youth dance was featured in the spread, with the caption, “Typical Indian girl.” The headline of the article read: “Mystery People of Baltimore: Neither red nor white nor black, strange “Indian” tribe lives in world of its own.”
Despite being a publication written and published by people of color, Minner points out that the tone of the article was derogatory. “They were trying to understand us within a racial binary where people can only be black or white. They probably thought, ‘Well they look black-adjacent, but we’re not sure.’”
Jones made it her mission when she directed the Indian Education program in the Baltimore Public School District to instill pride in Native students. She advocated for college scholarships for Native Americans, created an Indigenous Peoples library with books on Native cultures, and provided one-on-one tutoring for struggling students. She was equally determined to expose her niece to the richness of her Lumbee heritage. She took Minner to culture classes at the Baltimore American Indian Center, taught her traditional recipes, and invited her to Native American-themed field trips with her students.
When she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with her BFA in fine art, Minner discovered she too had a passion for working with Lumbee youth. Jones groomed her niece to take over her job with Indian Education. Minner devoted 12 years to working in the school district. During that time, she also founded and directed a successful after-school art program for Native American youth and earned two master’s degrees. Eventually, the low pay and daily challenges of working as a community advocate began to affect her health. Minner felt guilty about quitting, but Jones encouraged her to move on and advance her career.
“I didn’t have kids. I had a family to help support me,” Minner says, settling back into her aunt’s plethora of sofa pillows. “A lot of things made it possible for me to spend that much time and give that much of myself. Most people in our community can’t. They’re just not in a position to.”
“She’s educating people beyond the classroom,” Jones says. “She’s surpassed me now.”
Heyman ”Jonesy” Jones grew up in North Carolina and moved to Baltimore as a young man to work at General Motors. Xueying Chang, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
They lead the way to the “Indian room” of her home, as Jones calls it, aptly named for its assortment of Native American themed trinkets and traditional handicrafts. The mantelpiece is adorned with Hummel-esque statuettes of Plains women wearing buckskin dresses and feathered headbands. A bow and arrow are mounted on the wall, along with family photos and an oil painting of teepees. Heyman Jones, Jeanette Jones’s husband of four years, is watching TV. He wears a plaid flannel shirt and a red baseball cap with the Lumbee tribal insignia. At 82-years-old, he possesses the spirit and stride of a much younger man.
“He’s a newlywed,” Minner quips, as if to explain his boyish enthusiasm. “They go everywhere together. Wear matching outfits.”
“Mr. Heyman” grew up in North Carolina and moved to Baltimore as a young man to work at General Motors. He bounds out of the chair to show off a group photo of his family at his father’s house during Homecoming, when Lumbee gather together for barbecue, church hymns, a parade, a powwow and other activities.
“Mr. Heyman’s father was a famous singer,” Minner says.
“Would you like to hear one of his songs?” Mr. Heyman inquires, and after a resounding yes, he opens the sliding glass door to the backyard to retrieve a CD from the garage.
“He just went right out in the rain!” says Minner, shaking her head and smiling. Back inside, Mr. Heyman, his shoulders damp with rain, places the CD in the player and turns the volume up full blast. First, a tinny piano chord intro, then a swell of voices layered in perfect harmony. Finally, his father’s high tenor solo, bright and clear, vaults over the other singers as he belts out, “Lord, I’ve been a hardworking pilgrim.” The den in Dundalk is momentarily filled with the sounds of the beloved Lumbee church of his childhood in North Carolina.
“He always sang for the lord,” Mr. Heyman says, his voice choked with emotion as he remembers attending church with his father. “He was a deeply religious man. He’d be out working in the field, and if somebody passed away, they’d call him in to come sing at the funeral.”
Minner and Jones exchange a glance, as if they’ve heard this story many times before.
According to Minner, Mr. Heyman knows everyone, both in North Carolina and in Baltimore. He’s like a walking, talking family tree—an invaluable repository of knowledge about Lumbee family ties.
Jones and Minner no longer work in the public-school system, but Minner has discovered a different way to give back to Lumbee youth. She is creating a bridge between the past and the present, the seniors and the teens, through the power of collective memory.
“Our young people can be particularly unmoored,” Minner says. “There are all kinds of ways society makes you feel like you don’t belong. I think when you realize that your history is much deeper than what you knew, it gives you a different sense of belonging. I think this [archive] project could help with that. We are part of a long, rich history. We helped build this city. We helped develop the character it has now. It’s ours too.”
A version of the article was originally published by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
When the context calls for a comma at the end of material in parentheses or brackets, the comma should follow the closing parenthesis or bracket. A comma never precedes a closing parenthesis. (For its rare appearance before an opening parenthesis, see the examples in 6.129.) Rarely, a comma may appear inside and immediately before a closing bracket as part of an editorial interpolation (as in the last example; see also 13.59).
After several drummers had tried out for the part (the last having destroyed the kit), the band decided that a drum machine was their steadiest option.
Her delivery, especially when she would turn to address the audience (almost as if to spot a long-lost friend), was universally praised.
“Conrad told his assistant [Martin], who was clearly exhausted, to rest.”
“The contents of the vault included fennel seeds, tweezers, [straight-edged razors,] and empty Coca-Cola cans.”
Here are a few comments from the CMOS forum. These examples should help this rule stick in your mind!
• I went to Bob’s (he didn’t realize I was on my way) and caught him kissing my girlfriend.
Lowercase “he” and exclude the period at the end of the sentence within parens? Is this correctly punctuated?
• I told Mary (does she think I’m stupid?) that I was aware of the affair.
Lowercase “does” and use the question mark within parens? Is this correctly punctuated?
• Joe may apologize (he is such a creep!) for the affair.
Lowercase “he” and can I use the exclamation point within parens? Is this correctly punctuated?
I think that the only terminal punctuation that is omitted in parens is the period. The question mark and exclamation mark, I believe, are the only ones that can be used at the end of a sentence within parens.
Maeve Maddox at Daily Writing Tips talks about “Dummy Subjects” in her blog today. Her discussion is intriguing. I wasn’t very familiar with the expletive used in this way or with the idea of Dummy Subjects.
This bit from her blog enticed me to do some more research. So I’m going to investigate dummy subjects for my next several posts. As always, I’ll be exploring how the idea of Dummy Subjects can aid us in Capturing Voices.
Common terms used in teaching the expletive use of it and there are “dummy it, ” “dummy there,” and “dummy subject.”
expletive: Of a word or phrase: serving merely to fill out a sentence or a metrical line without adding anything to the sense.
Dummy
A derivative of dumb (“unable to speak), dummy boasts twenty-one shades of meaning in its OED entry. There’s even a verb, to dummy up: “to render silent.”
Merriam-Webster arranges its definitions of dummy under five headings, one of which is “an imitation, copy, or likeness of something used as a substitute.” This is the word’s meaning in the general terms “newspaper dummy,” “ventriloquist’s dummy,” crash-test dummy,” and “dummy corporation.” All stand in for or act as a substitute for something else. The usage is clear.
When it comes to the grammatical terms—“dummy it,” “dummy there,” and “dummy subject”—connotation enters the picture.
Words exert power.
Some words exert so much power that they must not be spoken or written.
For the orthodox Jew, the word God is so fraught with divine power that it is written as G-d. In speech, a different word altogether—Hashem (“Name”)—is used.
An English word that centuries of contemptuous use have imbued with toxic power is now referred to as “the n-word.”
A word that seems innocuous or even pleasant to one speaker may stir feelings of discomfort in another. For example, an insect name that had always sounded romantic to me—the “gypsy moth”—has been officially changed by the Entomological Society of America. The change was prompted by the fact that—for Romani people—the word gypsy has distressing connotations.
In Anglo-Saxon times, our linguistic ancestors used the adjective dumb only to mean “speechless” or “unable to speak.” The word dummy was coined to refer to people so afflicted. It didn’t take long for the noun to acquire the meaning, “stupid person.”
It can be argued that the dummy in “dummy subject” is so totally removed from use of dummy as an accusation of stupidity as to be irrelevant. But, although words can be conveniently categorized in a dictionary, connotations often overlap in use.
Take the British word for a baby’s pacifier, for example. In the UK, crying babies are given a “dummy.” In this context, the word dummy is a substitute nipple, but it is also a means of obtaining silence from the baby.
The word dummy used to label a grammatical construction implies that there is something wrong, if not stupid, about the usage. Here are some sentences that might be said to contain a “dummy subject.”
There’s a unicorn in the garden.
There will be a time to sleep, but not now.
It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring.
It’s too late to apologize.
So what exactly is a dummy subject? And how does it figure in writing and speech? The Editor’s Manual explains:
What is a dummy subject?
A dummy subject conveys no meaning of its own but simply fills the position of subject in a sentence. The subject is whom or what a sentence is about. It usually precedes the verb.
EXAMPLES
Maya wants to travel the world.
We don’t know where Poco is.
The book you were looking for is on the bookshelf.
A sentence must have a subject. When one isn’t available, the pronounsit and there fill this position.
EXAMPLES
It is raining today. Not “is raining today.”
There is no way Farley can win this match. Not “Is no way Farley can win this match.”
Note how dummy subjects don’t refer to anything specific. Compare this with it being used as a pronoun in place of a specific noun.
EXAMPLE
Look at this wooden table. It is three hundred years old. In this sentence, it refers to something specific: a wooden table. Therefore, the word isn’t being used as a dummy subject.
TIP
The dummy subject is variously called a fake, artificial, or empty subject.
“If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse — a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech — you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.” DailyWritingTips.com
Daily Writing Tips, one of my favorite blogs, has some thoughtful observations about the difference between written language and spoken language. (You can find the blog at dailywritingtips.com.)
He’s talking here about phrases like “so to speak” and “In my opinion,” but the difference between the written and spoken words goes much deeper. A transcript is a “written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech.”
“Readers expect your prose to be direct and dynamic,” and the spoken word is not. It’s riddled with “um”s and “uh”s, self interruptions, reactions to distractions, and lazy speech. You know can be a bid to buy more time or a request for reassurance that the listener is actively listening and understands your point.
There are a wealth of differences between the spoken word and the written word, and most people don’t give them a second thought. But that is precisely the focus of transcription. A transcript of the spoken word edited to the expectations of the written word would be unrecognizable.
Recently, I wrote about word patronage, the often-unnecessary inclusion of self-referential expressions as “as you will” and “so to speak” in one’s writing. This post expands on that one to recommend that you inspect your writing for anything that smacks of spoken English.
If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse — a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech — you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.
Spontaneous speech, at least, is riddled with qualifications and equivocations. It’s easy enough to dispose of “um”s and “uh”s, “well”s and “you know”s when converting a transcript to an essay, but writers should purge their prose of other utterances, words, and phrases as well that add a lot to a word count but little to a description or an argument. (See this post, for instance, for a list of adjectival intensifiers and their adverbial forms to avoid.)
In addition, omit hedging phrases such as “as I see it,” “from my point of view,” “in my opinion,” and “it seems to me.” Search and destroy such pompous filler as “be that as it may” or “other things being equal.” These are all understandable (though not necessarily forgivable) indulgences in spoken English, whether impromptu or rehearsed — at best, they’re nearly meaningless phrases one tosses off while thinking of what to say next, and at worst, they clutter a speech, distracting and discouraging listeners. But readers expect your prose to be direct and dynamic, and there’s no place for such self-gratification in written form.
Thanks for reading Capturing Voices! You can find us on Substack, too!
My friend and colleague Bitra Nair extracted this story from an oral history. It was a very poignant story and we felt like it had to be retold. Thank you Bitra!
Related by Mr. Lee in his oral history.
Now, one of the other things, as I mentioned to you before about people and friendship. When we were young kids, I had a little classmate. We went to school in second, third, fourth, fifth grade together — and he was a Japanese boy. They lived in a fish pond right next to my home, and so we were close buddies. I remember his name was Toshi Yamamoto. I remember going over to his house, eating, playing games, always there. We were inseparable. We used to do so many mischievous things together. And he was the leader because I think he was a little older than I am, but we were good friends.
Hey, there was a plum tree where we used to play marbles all the time, and I went out there and call Toshi, “Toshi, where are you?” There was no answer. Like we always did before, whenever I called, boy, he would be coming out. He didn’t answer. So I ran to his house. His house was right around the edge of the fish pond where we used to play hide and seek under the house. I ran under the house and called Toshi, “Toshi, where are you?” No, Toshi. Ran upstairs into the house where he used to sleep in the house. The house was empty. “Toshi, where are you?”
I remember when I started going to school, I used to write little notes that I would send to the newspapers and say, “Toshi, where are you? Come see me.” There was never any answer.
To move that story ahead, for 71 years, I did that. I’m not saying every day, not every year, and I really wasn’t worried as to what happened. But there were rumors that their family was spies; the thing is, of course, rumors were that they were spies. This is what we always thought. But yet at the same time, we didn’t know whether they were killed or not. But for 71 years, I did this—trying to find Toshi because I was concerned. Where are you, Toshi? Again, for all of those years, I was hoping that one day, an old man like me would come up and say, I’m Toshi, but it never did happen.
I happened to be on TV, and I happened to get on the radio. Finally, the broadcaster said, “Jimmy, can you tell the story about your friend, Toshi?” So I did. He asked me about this. You know what happened? All of a sudden, there was a phone call to the radio station. That guy told the station that, “Hey, he’s talking about my dad.” When the note came to me, I was speechless. I couldn’t believe that I found him or anything. I still didn’t believe the story. But he called, and I tell you, I was speechless. I couldn’t say any more on the radio. I was crying, speechless, just shocked that somebody would call and say you’re talking about my dad after 71 years.
On December 14, he told me that his dad died several years before. I said, “Oh gee, where in the world was he buried?” He finally told me he is buried up in one of the cemeteries of a certain place. He couldn’t tell me exactly where it is.
I talked to the son, and finally, on December 20, I managed to meet the son. Not only meeting the son, but also the grandkids of Toshi and a cousin. And on December 20, we went back to the old house where the father was born and where I used to play with him.
Now, what happened to them? The thing is, during the war years, many of the Japanese here on the mainland United States were relocated. They had to be relocated and moved away. But in a way, we had about 140,000 Japanese. But the thing is when my friend, Toshi and his family came home that day, they were met by soldiers—soldiers that, what they tell me, aimed the machine guns at them, told them to go home, and remove all your belongings in 20 minutes and get out of here and don’t come back.
