Sam Smith – As an editor I try to follow the advice of my high school teacher, Mr. Braunniger, namely “Speaka United States.” But over recent decades, as more liberals have become better educated, I’ve noticed excessively complicated words and phrases creeping into the political and media vocabulary. One of the examples that bothers me most is infrastructure. Back when we actually used to build infrastructure, people knew what it was because we called it public works. I suspect you could find a statistical relationship between our decline in new bridges and the rise of infrastructure as a word.
Another word – again virtuous in substance but difficult in verbality – is LGBTQ. A survey by YouGov a couple of years ago found that only 53% of the general population understood it while 66% of Millennials did. 80% could decode LBGT but just one added letter – in this case Q – caused the comprehension to drop.
It gets even worse if you use something like LGBTQIAPK which has been defined as meaning “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual/Polyamorous, and Kink “ One online citation explained confusion as to its meaning, this way: “Maybe you were looking for one of these abbreviations: LGBTQ - LGBTQ2S - LGBTQA - LGBTQI - LGBTQIA - LGBTTIQQ2SA - LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM - LGBW - LGC – LGCB”
If you’re hoping to have your culture absorbed favorably by the larger society, an excess of initials is not the most useful approach. Absent some new phrase, I use alternative sexuality or alt sex and even the first choice troubles me because the easiest things to understand have three syllables at most. And unless you have been part of the cultural language for decades – like the ACLU and NAACP – initials aren’t the best solution given how excessively they are used by various bureaucracies.
Then was another problem the younger and better known Sam Smith has raised. Last year he posted:
I’ve decided I am changing my pronouns to THEY/THEM after a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out. I’m so excited and privileged to be surrounded by people that support me in this decision but I’ve been very nervous about announcing this because I care too much about what people think but fuck it! I understand there will be many mistakes and mis gendering but all I ask is you please please try. I hope you can see me like I see myself now. Thank you.
In reading something the singer-songwriter had written using “their” in place of “his” mainly distracted me from what he was talking about. Now I only remember the pronoun and not the topic. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t come up with a new non-binary pronoun (one suggestion is heris) but one of the things you learn as an editor is that readers are not your students or your employees. They judge you first by whether they can tell what the hell you’re talking about. And if they can’t , that’s the last you may see of them.
It is worth noting that today only about 39% of Americans have a BA and in the 1940s the figure was 6%. It has long been my sense that as liberals have gotten better educated they have become more removed from the general public and have paid for this at numerous elections. One reason has been their language. Part of the secret to expanding comprehension and appreciation of a situation or status is to use words that others understand in ways they can understand.
