A fear of Spanish

In yesterday’s New York Times, Sam Roberts wrote a piece titled "In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority." Nothing grabs people’s attention like the threat of foreign invasion.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2050, there will be more non-whites in the U.S. than whites. The cause is not an increase in immigrants, but higher birth rates among immigrants.

For some reason, this drives people crazy. Personally, I don’t believe that the average American is too racist to deal with a non-white majority. (This could be true though; I’m just giving people the benefit of the doubt.) Instead, I think they’re just afraid that Spanish will become the official language of the United States.

And really, who wants to learn a foreign language?

Of course, I doubt the U.S. will ever be a Spanish-dominated country. Sure, you can push the number 2 on your touch-tone phone for a Spanish menu, but this is an accommodation, not a linguistic takeover. Everybody calm down.

This prediction by the Census Bureau supports my point. We’ll see an increase in immigrant births rather than aliens. Minorities born, raised, and educated in the United States learn English. They want to and, more importantly, have to. This should be compelling reason to naturalize immigrants and give them a fair place in our school system.

Somewhat ironically, the same folks who fear the immigrant population most are also the same people attempting to limit their upward mobility. Much of it has to do with the way articles like this are phrased, which I can’t stand. Even by these projections, whites will still make up 46% of the country, with the Hispanic population at 30%. I think it’s misleading to lump all minorities into a single category, because what that’s really saying is "non-whites will outnumber whites."

God forbid!

That, to me, is the most compelling evidence that people are still very uncomfortable with a little ethnic diversity.

What Facebook teaches me about language

I learned the difference between the words "quote" and "quotation" last night. As it turns out, quote should be used solely as a verb, while quotation is a noun. So you couldn’t have a Kanye West quote, but you could quote him. More specifics here.

This is one of those common misusages that has now become accepted, similar to the way octopi is now an acceptable plural for octopus.

I noticed this only because Facebook changed the Favorite Quotes field in their user profiles to Favorite Quotations. This reveals that I either have an eye for detail or just spend too much time on Facebook.

Still, I think Facebook reveals some discussion-worthy issues with the English language.

Another problem the site has confronted is the grammatical person. The issue stems from users who don’t define their gender, which forces the Mini-Feed to report, "Sally Shapiro posted new photos in their album Drunk Party Photos Part 10." This is grammatically incorrect. Even though "they" is gender-neutral, usage is strictly for the plural third person, not singular. Wikipedia documents the trouble in full. The right way would be to say, "Sally Shapiro posted new photos in his/her album," but of course, this looks silly.

Recently, I had a long, nerdy conversation about the development of language and the need for a singular third-person pronoun, even if that meant inventing one. Some writers, most notably Steven Levitt of the Freakonomics blog, default to "she" rather than "he/she." It’s not a bad alternative, but I think we can come up with a better answer. We also have to consider the movement of people who don’t want to specify a gender.

Anyway, back to Facebook. The site has over 80 million users worldwide, and if Zuckerberg and Co. implemented a new singular third-person pronoun – and it really doesn’t matter what that word is – they could have a hand in the way the English language evolves. It's hard to deny that the internet won't have a major effect on how we write and speak in the future.

Hopefully it’s the influence of Facebook rather than this site.

Muphry's Law

Here's a great concept, not to be confused with Murphy's Law.

1. if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written;
2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
3. the stronger the sentiment expressed in (1) and (2), the greater the fault;
4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

This is bound to bite me in the ass one day. When I'm not criticizing bad typography, I'm usually criticizing someone's writing. Then again, I've never been wrong about anything, ever.

And to hat-tip, I discovered this on neat blog called Language Log, which I immediately bookmarked. Don't miss the Muphry's Law Wikipedia entry.