“In Which” Craft

December 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Student writing.  I’ve gotten used to the random apostrophe that makes it’s appearance in some plural’s but not others.  But now, in the last couple of years, I’ve been seeing a rise in the gratuitous “in which ” where “which” would do.  On the final exam Monday one student wrote.

The workers had a specific task in which they did and left.

I get a half dozen or more of these “in which” constructions each semester.  Montclair students are not the best writers, and I thought that this might be a local thing.  But I recently came across a blog post by a graduate student in a writing course at an expensive private university.*

It seems that memes and videos of violent and/or grotesque images are constantly posted to social media sites in which people find humorous and are quick to like, repost, retweet and share.

Maybe she meant to say, “sites in which people find humor” and then changed it to “humorous”  and forgot to delete the “in.” If so it’s just a proofreading error.  But maybe it isn’t.  The examples I see from my students are not proofreading errors.  The students apparently like the way “in which” sounds. But why?

My guess as to the origins and appeal of “in which” is the same as my guess about “for Robert and I.”  It sounds more upscale, more sophisticated.  If you’re taught that educated people say, “It is I” instead of the more common, “It’s me,” and “Robert and I went swimming” rather than “Robert and me went swimming,” you might assume this more general rule: if you’re not sure, and if the objective pronoun sounds ordinary, switch to the subjective pronoun.**   

In the same way, educated people also say “in which.”  Stiffly formal English required “in which” so that speakers and writers could avoid ending a sentence, or even a clause or phrase, with a preposition.***  Not “the town I live in” but “the town in which I live.”  The first one sounds like the way ordinary people talk, but the second, with its “in which,” sounds like the way educated people talk.

My hunch is that this use of “in which” will not catch on.  But then I would have said the same thing about “between you and I”  (or in the Easy Aces’ version, “entre nous and me”).

(An earlier post on talking sophisticated – duplicity instead of duplication, idyllic instead of ideal, etc. – is here )

--------------------------------
* The course is taught by a good writer who, I think, emphasizes clear and simple language and warns against pretentious sounding writing.

** The real problem is that English does not have a disjunctive pronoun – the equivalent of the French moi.  “C’est moi”  and “pour Robert et moi.” In strictly correct English, we would have to use I in the first phrase and me in the second.

***A silly rule probably based on the silly idea that English is really Latin. 

Talking Sense About Gun Laws

December 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Both Chris Uggen and Ezra Klein  have sensible things to say about guns – much more sensible than my rant of a few days ago.  They both argue that no legislation can prevent mass killings like the one in Newtown, though restrictions on assault rifles and other weapons might reduce the number of deaths in such incidents.   But these mass killings, although newsworthy, account for a small fraction of all gun deaths.  What new laws might be able to do is reduce the far more frequent gun deaths – the less newsworthy street-crime and gang killings.

The Naked (Lunch) and the Dead

December 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Glenn Reynolds has a USA Today op-ed  scorning gun control laws (and really scorning people who want gun control).  Here’s the lede:

“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

Reynolds is a law professor and presumably knows a lot about the law and maybe a lot about guns, but apparently he doesn’t know a lot about Burroughs.  If he did, he might not have given the naked lunchman pride of place in his argument. 

As TBogg at FiredogLake reminds us, Burroughs is not exactly the poster child for loose gun laws.  In fact, he is prime anecdotal evidence for why having easy access to guns might not be such a great idea. 

When Burroughs was living in Mexico in 1951, he shot his wife in the forehead. He was playing a game they called “William Tell.” He was, of course, drunk.

At first the killer declared that in the said gathering, after there had been a great consumption of gin, he tried to demonstrate his magnificent marksmanship, emulating William Tell, and to that end he placed a glass of liquor upon the head of his wife, and aiming over the glass, at a distance of two meters, he fired, but as a consequence and result of the state of drunkenness in which he found himself, he missed the shot lamentably and injured the forehead of his wife with a bullet.

That’s one version.  In a second version, given after Burroughs’s lawyer arrived on the scene, Burroughs “claimed he misfired while showing the gun to a friend he was trying to sell it to.”

After two weeks in jail, Burroughs was released on bail and eventually went back to the US.  Mexico tried him in absentia.  He was convicted and given a two-year suspended sentence.

It is believed Bill’s wealthy parents dispensed thousands of dollars in legal fees and bribes to Mexican authorities. [More details are here.]

As for the Norman Mailer allusion in the title of this post, it’s a good thing he only had a knife and not a gun.

Game Over - Guns Win

December 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s still too early to know what went on in the Newton CT elementary school shooting.  Right now, the report is that 25 are dead, at least 18 of them children. 

I’m waiting for the reaction of the “gun rights” activists – if only third grade teachers (and maybe third graders too) carried guns in class every day, lives would be saved.

They’re right.  Weaponized teachers and students might have killed the shooter before he had killed so many.

Let’s face it, the logic of the gun lobby has won – not just in court but in everyday life.  If you create a world where every person, no matter how angry or demented, can easily get a gun  it makes sense for everyone to be armed, the deadlier the weapon the better.  And we have created that world.

So spare me the “terrible, terrible tragedy” version.  How many terrible, terrible tragedies do we need before we see that starting decades ago, we began setting the stage for this drama?  Why are we surprised each month, each week, when the scenario is played out?

How did we get to this world where there are so many guns around that it’s a fairly simple matter to buy one, legally or illegally, or steal one (as in the Oregon mall shooting earlier this week). 

Blame the NRA?  I do not know the history or the research on this, but a Marxist voice in my left ear is whispering, “Follow the money.”  The NRA is merely the ideological superstructure built on the economic substructure of the the gun industry.  It’s not the NRA that produces, sells, and makes a handsome profit from the millions of guns. 

You can’t sell, of course, if nobody wants to buy.  But gun economics may be a variant of Say’s law: supply creates its own demand.  If you increase the supply  of  guns –  especially if they fall into the hands of robbers, drug, dealers, and other bad guys –  the more you will increase the demand from people who want guns for protection.  The more guns that are out there, the less effective will be any attempts to restrict them. 

There are now hundreds of millions of guns in circulation.  Even if public opinion shifted to overwhelming support for gun control, even if laws were passed, attempts keep guns out of the hands of people with bad motives would be futile.  That might have worked a few decades ago.  Not any more. 

The gun people have won.  They always knew that guns were deadly and dangerous.  That’s why they want them for protection – guns are far more effective than knives or other weapons.  The gun people have also known that a relatively few people use them to commit horrible slaughter.  But to the gun rights absolutists,  these are acceptable losses. 

If the the NRA, and other gun lovers  thought that this loss of life were not acceptable, they would have taken a different position on proposed laws.  The innocent victims are just so much  collateral damage in the noble battle for freedom (and profits). 

I wonder if the gun lovers will talk about their wonderful freedom to the parents in Newtown, Connecticut.

(An earlier post on policy and acceptable risks is here.)