Ask an Amateur Poet

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Dear Amateur Poet,

My teenager says my Facebook posts are “basically slam poetry.” Is this a compliment?

Melinda S, Chicago, IL

Dear Melinda,

I confess I am not an expert on Facebook, having never actually seen it. But from what I understand, it’s primarily a platform for sharing brief written updates and photos. I would think slam poetry, with its emphasis on vociferous and dramatic delivery, more performance than document, would be better served by, say, TikTok (though I confess I’ve never seen that, either). So your teenager’s assertion is essentially that you are pushing the boundaries of what Facebook is widely accepted to be. All this implies you’re maybe a bit too intense, which of course would embarrass your teen. But to call anything poetry, well—that’s got to be a compliment, right?

Dear Amateur Poet,

What cologne goes best with the poet vibe and aesthetic?

Kyle M, Arcata, CA

Dear Kyle,

Please don’t take this wrong, but I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. It could be you’re mocking the affectation of a young person trying to embody the persona of a poet … or it could be that you’re completely earnest and would like a nice scent to go with your black turtleneck and goatee. If you’re the latter, please take my puzzlement as a caution against putting too much stock in appearances.

Now on to the question itself. In my entire life I have not encountered a man wearing cologne who didn’t seem to be overdoing it. I think a safer way to smell nice is with an aftershave (though I’ve never tried one) or Old Spice deodorant, which I’ve been wearing for as long as I’ve written poetry. I don’t know how “literary” Old Spice is, but I did have an impassioned (if brief) debate about it with Maxine Hong Kingston, a noted poet, author, and memoirist. (She hates it.)

Dear Amateur Poet,

I feel called to “give voice to the voiceless” through my poetry, but I’m not entirely sure who among the voiceless is most deserving or underserved, and to be completely honest I feel like I am only guessing about who those voiceless people might even be. Can you help steer me in the right direction?

Leslie A, Portland, OR

Dear Leslie,

I think it’s worth challenging yourself with a fundamental question: how authentic is your calling? To survey available voiceless populations, in order to determine which among them should be represented by your poems, seems a bit more analytical and pragmatic than I would expect for a natural poet. William Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” With this idea as a guide, perhaps you should try to recollect (when tranquil) a strong emotional reaction you once had when encountering someone specific who lacked a voice. Was it the toddler on the pool deck who screamed as if in horror when his beach ball floated out of reach? Was it the cat who kept looking up from his food bowl as if perplexed, unable to articulate why he couldn’t just scarf down his dinner?

There’s also the issue of how exactly you intend to assume the perspective of somebody you cannot hope to fully understand (given his or her lack of voice). One tried-and-true edict of creative writing classes is “write what you know.” I’m not sure this is always good advice, but it may apply pretty nicely here: how about starting with yourself? Have you ever felt voiceless, and could you use your poetry to finally articulate something you’d always kept inside? To whet your appetite, you might check out “Love Poem From a Coward“ on albertnet.

Dear Amateur Poet,

I have a lot of questions. Number one: how dare you?

Mindy A, Santa Barbara, CA

Dear Mindy,

I gather you’re asserting that poets, especially amateur ones, must answer for their audacity. And you’re not wrong: it really is audacious of us to provide something that the general public has almost no appetite for. (I almost wrote “reading public” before realizing that’s pretty much an oxymoron these days.) Anybody who writes poetry does so, presumably, because he or she considers it a higher form of communication than the kind of casual, off-the-cuff prose we see on social media or other commentary. Thus, poets can seem to be turning their noses up at what other people write.

But really, isn’t almost every assertion of ourselves something of a pose? Sure, poets work hard to make their words say more, but don’t Instagrammers put plenty of effort into composing themselves, doing that thing with their lips, angling their face just so toward the camera, and/or touching up the photo afterward?

Where my defense falls short is that an Insta photo or TikTok video can only be so bad, whereas bad poetry can be truly awful, perhaps one of the worst forms of expression ever conceived by man. It’s particularly abysmal when it’s dead earnest and tries to be deep. Before I met my wife, she was dating this guy she said was pretty hot, but with whom she eventually broke it off largely due to his poetry. He took it upon himself to write her a poem and mail it to her, when they were just dating. The act itself was of course deeply questionable—I mean, he was on thin ice before she even opened the envelope—but on top of it the poetry was bad, really bad: totally emo, as though that made him seem complicated, like some sensitive, artistic, tender soul. She may well have thought, “How dare you,” just like you did. Needles to say I’m stoked about the dude’s poetic blunder, since it opened the door for me to come along and woo his ex, but we should take this is a cautionary tale.

All I can say in my own defense is that at least I don’t thrust my poetry upon people. I don’t read it out loud in public spaces, and I don’t insert it in anybody’s “feed.” If I write a poem to give somebody, I  make sure it’s short and light and has something undeniably positive going for it, such as a rhyme scheme and/or metric consistency showing some skill and effort. I have written poems for my wife, but I made sure that a) I didn’t presume to inflict them upon her until we were married; b) they passed muster literarily since she’s an English grad like me; and c) I didn’t try to punch above my weight intellectually. I won’t share any of those poems here since they’re private, but here are a couple of “cover letters” in poem format that I enclosed when sending money to my daughter at college:

A girl in SoCal wrote her father,
“I don’t want to seem like a bother
But I’m terribly low on granola
Not to mention I’m out of cashola.
Can you spare me a handful of coppers?”

Her dad, though his mood had been sunny
Didn’t find this the slightest bit funny.
But despite being quite the cheap bastard
He knew there was no getting past her,
And wrote back, “Okay, fine—here’s some money.”

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A girl in SoCal, where it’s sunny
Told her dad (in a voice sweet as honey):
“I don’t want to strike you as greedy,
But the fact is I’m terribly needy,
So couldn’t you send me some money?”

Her dad, far from being a hero,
Had budgeted something like zero.
He sighed loudly, “Oh, bother,”
And then wrote to his daughter:
“Okay, fine—here’s a little dinero.”

I don’t recall getting any feedback on the above poems, which at least means no complaints. And to my credit I predisposed my audience to look favorably upon the poetry by enclosing money with it. So in answer to your question “How dare you?” my short answer is: carefully and respectfully.

Dear Amateur Poet,

All your poems are so rigid in terms of literary structure: iambic pentameter or dactylic trimeter, formal rhyme schemes, predictable length … did you not get the memo that real poets, that is professional ones, have long ago abandoned all that formality in favor of free verse? I mean, when’s the last time you read a sonnet in The New Yorker? Get with the times, man!

John M, Boston, MA

Dear John,

The way I look at it, a very gifted writer can produce beautiful poetry that doesn’t adhere consistently to convention, and yet manages to deliver satisfying effects due to skillful literary techniques that the poet is essentially inventing. It’s kind of like a dancer who, instead of following a tango or salsa or other established form, is able to improvise on the dance floor and look great. But let’s be honest, how many people on the dance floor just look like total jackasses? It’s much easier to match an established form that is beautiful than to try to invent your own.

So it is with poetry, I think. So much of the free verse stuff just reads like a tossed salad of words, and it’s up to the reader to try to glean some impression of highbrow sophistication. It’s the literary equivalent of modern art, with these “artists” who fling paint at the canvas with a spoon or squirm naked on it. I love the cartoon of two toddlers looking at a modern painting and one of them says, “I could do that in about five minutes.”

Let’s take a real life example of a totally unstructured poem published in The New Yorker earlier this month, “Birdbath” by Henri Cole. The first line is, “Standing at the window, I watch robins clean themselves in the cement birdbath, splashing water on their backs to remove dirt and parasites, before hopping to the ledge to fluff their feathers.” Is this even poetry? Is there anything unexpected, moving, or dare I say even poetic about this description? Anybody who has seen a bird do this would record the activity in pretty much the same way. Cole’s poem goes on like this, with seven more very basic sentences following the first one. There is no rhythm, no rhyme, no assonance, no consonance, no alliteration, no discernible metaphor, no strategic repetition or cadence … in terms of the techniques that define poetry, all I can identify is a single simile. What makes this a poem? Just two things: 1) it’s too short to be an essay, and 2) The New Yorker calls it one.

On top of that, this birdbath poem isn’t even efficient. Last time I checked, at a bare minimum poetry was supposed to condense meaning into as few words as possible, fewer even than good prose, with the understanding that the difficulty the reader may have interpreting it is offset by its brevity. So why does the poem also include this sentence: “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe”? If I wrote a poem to my wife that included the line, “You make me feel such tenderness and awe,” she’d probably leave  me.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t great poets who can totally wow us with free verse. Because they have a great literary gift, they get to break all the rules. Let’s not pretend we mere mortals can do this and get away with it. Let me make an analogy. Consider how Muhammad Ali, early in his career, was so good at dodging punches he didn’t even put his fists up to protect himself. That worked for him, but no trainer in the world would advise such a thing to a budding boxer. And that’s why, as an amateur poet, I recommend the tried and true literary devices that are likely to make your poem more fun to read. Consider these lines I from a poem I wrote:

So many forty-somethings end their day
Exhausted, whining, winding down with wine.

I’m not going to say they’re anything close to “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table” (from T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). But you have to admit, my lines at least have a certain snap to them that far exceeds the kill-me-now reaction you surely had to “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.” And why is that? Well, the iambic pentameter kind of bounces you along, doesn’t it? You realize, perhaps instinctively, that there’s metrical precision in play, and this satisfies you for the same reason a drum beat does. Then there’s the alliteration of the repeated Ws and the internal rhyme of “whining,” “winding,” and “wine.” If I’d given you more than two lines of this sonnet, you’d also appreciate the end rhyme baked in to whole thing. You would anticipate (again, perhaps subconsciously) that the next line would rhyme with “day,” and the one after that with “wine.” These conventions are like an unwritten contract with the reader so that, if nothing else, the poem won’t ultimately feel like some guy writing whatever pops into his head.

No, of course T.S. Eliot doesn’t need to resort to such parlor tricks, but he’s T.S. frickin’ Eliot! Are you? Would your loosey-goosey anything-goes poetry produce something like “There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” or would it be more like, “Staring into the brown bits of this avocado/ I contemplate mortality/ And think, ‘I really need to hit Trader Joes’”? (Damn, you know what? I was trying to be bad but that’s still better than “Red robins, you make me feel such tenderness and awe.” And I’m a rank amateur!)

One more point on this and then I’ll shut up. Consider the massive popularity of hip-hop/rap music, which the Recording Industry of America reports is now the most widely consumed genre in the U.S. Drake reaches about 88 million listeners a month on Spotify alone; Bad Bunny reaches ~86 million, Eminem ~73 million. Per month. A survey from the National Endowment of the Arts shows that only 9-12% of U.S. adults report reading poetry in a given year (which works out to about 2 million per month). Given the technical sophistication of rap music—which includes complex rhyme schemes, assonance, consonance, alliteration, metrical consistency (i.e., beat), wordplay, layers of slippery persona, metaphor, allusion—it far better resembles traditional, formal poetry than the totally unstructured collections of words that we call poetry today. The popularity of rap strongly suggests that people still have an appetite for the literary techniques that modern poets seem to have abandoned. And to my mind, all these listeners aren’t wrong. I just ripped a recent Doechii album, but it’s been years since I bought a book of modern poetry.

An Amateur Poet is a syndicated poet and journalist whose advice column, “Ask an Amateur Poet,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Poetry on albertnet

• Corn Cob
• Ode to South Park
• Ode on a Chain Lube
• Shakespeare Knockoff
• Dead Week Poetry
• Urination Poetry
• Ode to Lomas Cantadas
• Kroopian Poetry (Dactylic Trimeter)
• Unemployment Poetry
• The Big [Bike Shop] Screw-Up
• The Paperboy
• Ode to Cat
• From the Archives - Starving Little Student
• A Father's Day Poem
• From the Archives - Latin [Class] Is for Lovers
• Ode on a Double-Edged Razor
• Love Poem from a Coward
• Radio Station Poetry
• What’s in a [Domain] Name?
• Ode on a Belly: Mine
• A Valentine Poem
• Ode on an IPA
• Ode to Thrifting

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

My Bad Habits

Introduction

My daughter A— read one of my old posts recently (this one) and drew my attention to a passage from it:

Even less promising [in a list of 101 blog post ideas] was prompt #51, “Create a blog post about your bad habits,” which said, “Smoking, alcohol, drugs, yes they could be blog ideas too! Tell them something shocking!” In general, not just with my blog but in life, I try to avoid incriminating myself in writing. Meanwhile, my bad habits are not exactly shocking. Sometimes I go to bed without flossing, or get crazy and have a second beer.

My daughter said that this actually could be a good blog post. I reminded her how harmless my habits are. She said no, they don’t have to be bad bad, just outlandish, and cited my “neuroticism about loading the dishwasher” and “compulsion about bike gear,” along with “rapping Eminem lines randomly” which is “peculiar for an old(ish) white dude.” Well, Eminem himself is an old(ish) white dude, but point taken … he’s the poet, he gets the poetic license. My family doesn’t actually need (or deserve) my drastically inferior cover versions.

And so, I’ve taken the bait and compiled a list of my “bad” habits. How many of these do you share? And how many inspire you to think, “That’s nothing, compared to the way I…”? Post your comments below, or email me them, and if I get enough I’ll do a follow-up post! And now, with no further ado, here they are.

Neuroticism about loading the dishwasher

My daughter hasn’t elaborated on this point, and my wife seems reticent to do so. I will say I am a meticulous sort, and have been known to remove and reload recently placed mugs, saucers, and plates even while my wife is still loading. There is historical basis for my corrections; a  mug that’s not properly inverted can fill with sudsy water and turn the dishwasher into a steam room instead of a sauna during the dry cycle. But the fact is, the dishwasher actually stopped working months ago and is now only a dish dryer, so my fastidiousness is arguably overdone. Meanwhile, reading over this paragraph I realize even just the description of this could be more than any sane wife could take. Clearly this is a good habit gone bad.

Compulsion about bike gear

I ride bikes a lot, and will not go out unprepared. The amount of gear in my pack for mountain biking is arguably excessive (details here). And (as my wife just reminded me), when something is missing or I’m packing the car for a race, I can get pretty agitated. This is surely based on “my favorite failure” which you can read about here. But gosh, I sound like a pain in the ass, don’t I? Don’t worry, not all my habits are this tedious.

Rapping Eminem lines randomly

Is it ever not random to rap Eminem lines? Some of them are very apropos and deserve to be cited; for example, there are many scenarios where one could sagely point out, “I don’t go around fire expecting not to sweat.” But I don’t rap that line; I’m more likely to just say it, with the preface, “In the words of the famous philosopher Marshall Mathers…” The random rapping really is more of a spontaneous outburst. On some level I think I’m training myself for when I become senile one day … if my utterances are going to be random anyway, they might as well be interesting. I can picture myself in a long bleak hallway of the old folks’ home, picking my way along with my walker, and suddenly yelling, “PISTOL-WHIPPIN’ MOTHAFUCKIN’ BOUNCER SIX-TWO!” to the shock and mystification of fellow codgers and staff alike.

Pondering unimportant grammatical matters

Words and grammar take up far too much of my brain activity. Whenever I see a sign saying “Entrance,” as in “enter here,” I automatically think that it might as well be saying the word we pronounce “en-TRANCE,” meaning “to put into a trance.” This gets me thinking about heteronyms in general, which really nobody needs to ever do. I’m also picking apart sentences all the time. For example, the recorded message that plays on the subway at every stop, saying, “The doors are closing … please stand clear of the doors” gets me thinking about how “the doors” got to be the subject of the first half of the sentence, and then became a mere object in the second half, like it got demoted. What a pointless realm of thought. Think of how much good I could do in the world if I used this brain power for good!

Apologizing for belching

I don’t belch on purpose—a belch will just suddenly overtake me—so I can’t call that a habit. Apparently there’s a way to muffle them, but I haven’t really mastered that, much less made it a habit. (Lack of a good habit isn’t the same thing as a bad one.) But without fail, I’ll say, “Sorry!” afterward. I guess this is faster and more efficient than saying “excuse me.” I think I got this from my brother G— because I seem to say it with a bit of a Dutch accent, like the one he’s acquired after over thirty years of living there. Or who knows, maybe he’s unconsciously modeled this behavior on some Dutchman’s. Anyway, it’s weird, I’ll admit it, and the strangest thing, is I’ll apologize even if I’m completely alone. Someday there’ll be an intruder in my house, sneaking up behind me, and suddenly I’ll burp and apologize and scare the crap out of him, since he’ll think I knew he was there all along. Until that day, this is a pretty pointless behavior.

Gesticulating broadly while belching

Sometimes I realize I’m about to belch and it’s gonna be a good one: loud and long. So I’ll make it as big and proud as possible, and part of that is making a grandiose gesture such as a master orator would make when delivering a speech in front of a vast audience. I totally got this from my brother G— and amazingly I was barely aware that I do it, until my wife pointed it out as one of the habits to list on this blog. I was like, oh yeah, I guess I do do that! I’m not sure if she was complaining or what, but she’s never, like, applauded or anything.

Buying boxers online

There are spam emails from J. Crew that I actually open … on purpose. Are they still spam? Decidedly yes, as for the most part they’re a waste of my time. I’m talking about the emails with titles like, “Time’s running out: extra 60% off sale.” The “extra” means it’s 60% off the already discounted price, so it’s actually a good deal. I can get a pair of boxers for like $4.50 instead of $24.50. The trick is that they’re usually the seasonal ones, so I get boxers with hearts all over them in late February, or Santas in January, or raccoons on skis in spring.

You see, there’s apparently a romantic tradition of a woman buying thematic boxers for her boyfriend as a gift. I actually received a couple pairs of these when I was younger. The first pair was way, way too big and my girlfriend was super embarrassed, so much so that when she bought me another pair, they were way, way too small. Maybe I’m trying to made amends for all the money she wasted … naw, I’m just a cheap bastard. The upshot is that I now own more pairs of boxers than I could possibly go through, with themes like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, even Easter. And yet, like all guys, I don’t retire a pair until it’s like twenty years old and literally falling apart at the seams.

Is there anything wrong with this habit? Sure! At $4.50/pop, for something I already have plenty of, this is still a waste. If I bought three-packs of manufacturer’s seconds at Ross Dress for Less (never mind that they’d fit wrong, like they’re on backwards), and donated the money I saved to UNICEF or Oxfam, I could make a big difference in the world. Instead I have boxers featuring St. Bernards with Christmas wreaths for collars.

Edgy humor

I think some of the best humor is edgy. For example, when my late father was in a nursing facility after a cancer surgery that hadn’t gone so well, he decided he should revise his will and get fresh signatures on it. We were in his room helping orchestrate this, and while trying to explain something to us he suddenly suffered a massive coughing fit, that, given his gravely ill state, made it look like he could actually expire. This inspired my brother M—to thrust a pen at him and yell, “Sign it, quick!” This was obviously totally inappropriate and our dad sure didn’t appreciate it, but man … it was just so damn funny! Another time, my brother G— was in the ICU after a terrible car accident, and though he wasn’t technically supposed to have visitors, my other two brothers and I were in there hanging out. We were supposed to be really quiet but just couldn’t manage it. Finally G— motioned to us to come closer so he could whisper something to us—you know, the kind of thing a guy does before delivering his last words —and as we craned to hear him he croaked, “Could you guys try and keep it down? There’s people trying to die in here.” It killed me. And so, a lot of the time I just can’t resist dark humor. For example, when this charity solicitation arrived in my mail, addressed to my father  (who passed away almost seven years ago and had never lived at this address), I couldn’t help but to annotate it a bit:

(No, I did not send that to the good folks over at the Ocean Conservancy ... just to a couple of appreciative family members.)

Workplace humor

At my workplace we all had to take this harassment training—a guy in our Legal department did a road show and gave the training in person to everyone—and one of the things he advised was just to never make jokes in the workplace. He says that’s what gets people in more trouble than anything, and most of the time they’re not trying to make anyone feel bad, but humor is just too subtle and it’s not worth the risk. And yet, I often just can’t help myself. A workplace with zero humor just doesn’t seem like anything anyone should have to put up with for an entire career. Of course I try to be careful and so far, so good. I go for the goofy stuff which seems like safer ground. For example, I cracked wise during a team All-Hands online meeting with like 70 people. Normally people are muted by default with this big a group, but in this case we actually weren’t, and I could hear some background chatter as people joined. And then we all heard, clear as a bell, some guy say in a singsong voice, “Do you need to go potty outside?” I came off mute and said, “Nah, I’m good.” That got huge laughs but I know I’m messing with fire. Somebody I’m gonna, like, offend a sensitive pet owner, and my career will be over.

The Wordle

As explained here I wasn’t initially inclined to do the New York Times Wordle puzzle, but was won over because it’s a fun way to have an ongoing (but low-stakes) dialogue with my daughter. I can now say I’ve done 654 games, and it’s a good thing they usually take under a minute. Actually, just to amuse my daughter, I spend as much time adding fun stickers to my completed game card as I do on the puzzle itself:

My daughter has gotten into the decorating too, though her picture editing tools are perhaps not as sophisticated:

I guess this is harmless, but man … 654 games. Seems like in that amount of time I could have created a critical vaccine or something.

Trying to interest my wife in sports

As much as I enjoy pro cycling coverage, such as of the Tour de France, I cannot interest my wife in it. And yet I still try. I showed her the breathtaking final kilometers of the recent women’s Olympic road race, but she was somehow unmoved, even with Kristen Faulkner claiming the first American victory in that event since 1984. And still, I keep trying. I mentioned how I had to school my brother after he suggested it was Alexi Grewal who last won the gold … he was tied with Connie Carpenter, who won the women’s event that same year. My wife couldn’t even be bothered to yawn. So I said, “And Connie’s was arguably the more impressive win because she didn’t deliberately screw over her teammate, as I have it on good authority Alexi did.” Absolutely no response, but that’s okay, because a had an ace up my sleeve. “You know what I mean by ‘good authority’?” I asked. “I don’t mean I read it somewhere or somebody told me. I got the entire story from Alexi Grewal himself, in the flesh!” She looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, as if to say, “So what! I don’t care!” I said, “How many people do you know who got to hang out with an Olympic gold medalist?” Another blank look. She has been steadfastly uninterested in sports in the entire time I’ve known her … so why do I still try? Force of habit, I guess.

(In case you’re interested in the story of how Alexi screwed over his teammate, Davis Phinney, you can read it here. Alexi had told it to me so I could turn it into freelance article, but then revoked the permission when he found out it would be in an online-only magazine, dailypeloton.com. He eventually wrote it up himself for his now-defunct blog; fortunately for those among us who do care about sports, Velo Veritas picked it up.)

Yanking out white sideburn hairs

I get these really weird, wiry, long white hairs growing in my sideburns. They aren’t that noticeable against the blonde ones around them, and I’m not exactly vain, but they annoy me. So I frequently take a moment to try to grasp a hair and yank it out. It’s easier said than done … in the mirror it’s hard to focus on a tiny hair because I have to be close up and the depth perception is tricky. Plus, it’s hard to get a good enough grip. Why do I bother? It’s not like I’m a model or anyone is paying that much attention. The time I spend doing this must add up … time I could be spending doing something more useful, like emptying the cat box more often.

albertnet

As of this past February, as detailed in my 15th Anniversary post, I have spent something like 3,500 hours—that is, 1.9 years if this were a full-time job—writing this blog. I guess that counts as a habit. Is it a good one? Well, I just compared it to the 7 habits of highly successful people, and even the 8th habit I came up with myself, and it’s not looking so good. Blogging doesn’t really match any of the effective habits. But hey, better than drinking, smoking, and gambling. If you are hungry for the salacious details of a blogger’s bad habits, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

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Tour de France FAQ - A Guide for Newbies

Introduction

The 2024 Tour de France bike race is about half over, and presumably the most exciting stuff is still ahead. It’s been really good so far—at least, to me, a bicycle road racing afficionado. But what about the typical American sports fan, who doesn’t know a white jersey from an albino cow? That’s what this guide is for. Now, even if you already know all about the Tour, you should still read on, because the real point of this post is, “What’s funny about this race?”

2024 Tour de France Frequently Asked Questions

How do I watch the Tour de France live?

In America, you have to either subscribe to Peacock Premium ($6/month) or Flobikes (which literally doesn’t post any pricing—if you have to ask, you can’t afford it). Otherwise, you can use a VPN to pretend you’re in Europe and watch Eurosport. If none of these options appeals to you, you can watch highlights on YouTube, or (best of all) move to Europe. Then you won’t have to get up so early.

What does “GC” mean?

It stands for “good climber.” Kidding! It’s actually General Classification, meaning the overall race. The GC leader is the guy whose cumulative time, across all days of the race, is the lowest. Whoever leads the GC at the end of the final (i.e., 21st) day has won the Tour de France. For all those who aren’t in contention for the GC, the there’s the prospect of winning a single day’s event (aka stage) of the race … that’s also a pretty big deal.

What is a time trial?

In the time trial event, each racer rides by himself and his time is taken. It’s basically the same format as downhill skiing. The time trial is called “the race of truth” because tactics, psychological gamesmanship, and drafting don’t come into play. Frankly, I think these more complicated aspects of cycling are the best things about it; by that measure, time trials aren’t the true test at all. Moreover, I think mass-start downhill ski races would be awesome.

The Tour de France sometimes features team time trials. They are totally badass, featuring each nine-man team going alone against the clock. I wish TTTs figured in every Tour.

What are the special jerseys about?

There are basically three categories of jersey: standard, leader’s, and what I’ll call “other.”

The standard jersey is what almost everyone on a team wears (i.e., if he’s not wearing a leader’s or “other” jersey). It’s basically a billboard for the team’s sponsors. This is how this sport gets its money: through advertising, like with NASCAR. Otherwise there’d be no feasible way to pay all the salaries, since nobody has to buy a ticket to watch the Tour. If you’re lucky enough to live in France, you can just stumble out your door and wander out to the road to see them all go by.

Then we have the leader’s jerseys, for those leading one of the overall categories of the Tour. The yellow jersey, or “maillot jaune,” is what the GC leader wears. Then you have the white jersey with red polka-dots which is worn by the King of the Mountains (aka KOM) leader. You’d think this would indicate the best climber of the race, but often it’s actually not. It’s the guy who wins the most sprints to the tops of climbs and is awarded points for doing so. Obviously this guy needs to be consistent, but not perfectly; if he lost 20 or 30 minutes on a mountain day he’d miss the opportunity for more points on that stage, but could hang on to his overall KOM lead. Why is this jersey polka-dotted? Beats me.

Next is the Points jersey, which is green, and identifies the guy who’s most consistent in the races that end in a sprint finish, and for extra (“intermediate”) sprint opportunities along the way. This jersey is green because … money? I have no idea. Doesn’t matter. Finally, we have the plain white Best Young Rider jersey, for the highest-placed GC rider under age 26. This jersey is white because this rider is also required to be a virgin. (No he’s not.)

The “other” jerseys exist because of distinctions riders have earned beyond the Tour. For example, the winner of the previous season’s World Championship road race gets to wear a white jersey with rainbow stripes for the entire season, including the Tour. Also, many countries have their National Championship road race before the Tour, and the winner of each gets to wear his champion jersey, which often resembles the country’s flag. This can be confusing, of course.

Has a rider ever won more than one jersey?

Yes, it happens sometimes. For example, Eddy Merckx won all the jerseys on offer back in 1969. More recently, in both the 2020 and the 2021 Tours, Tadej Pogacar won the yellow, white, and polka-dot jerseys. Note that if a rider is leading in more than one category, he wears the jersey for the most prestigious one, and the next highest rider in the lesser category wears that jersey. For example, right now in the Tour, Pogacar is leading the KOM category but also the GC, so he’s in yellow while the second place rider in the KOM, Jonas Abrahamsen, is in polka dots. There are cases of one jersey trumping another as well; for example, in this year’s Tour, Remco Evenepoel wore his white jersey (for best young rider) during the time trial, despite being the current time trial World Champion. (No, nobody else wore the rainbow stripe jersey for that stage.)

I’ve heard announcers call the Tour a “chess game on wheels.” Is it?

Well, not exactly. In chess, only half a player’s pieces (the pawns) match one another in terms of what they do and how, while you’ve got all these other pieces that move in unique ways. Imagine a cyclists who could only go in an L-shaped direction, like a knight. It’d be ridiculous. Cycling is really more like checkers.

But in terms of the more general question about tactics and strategy, this is a team sport where most teams have a single leader (occasionally two), and the rest of team members are trying to help him (or them). And some teams aren’t even trying for the GC victory but only want stage wins, based on what they can realistically hope to accomplish. So they might have one guy who goes for sprint wins and another for mountaintop wins, and the rest of the team supports that day’s leader.

What makes cycling so tactical is that you can save gobs of energy by riding right behind another rider, or ideally a bunch of them. (If you wondered what I meant by “drafting” earlier, that’s what it’s called.) So a team’s job is to a) keep their star rider out of the wind, and b) force other teams’ star riders out into the wind. This is why riders “attack,” which means to sprint off to try to “break away” (i.e., get ahead of the rest and build up enough of a gap not to get caught by the end). In cycling, “attack” rarely means to hit, kick, or bludgeon. When that does happen, it’s usually hilarious.

What is a domestique?

A “domestique” is literally a servant. Per the teamwork discussion above, sometimes a domestique’s job is to attack other riders to “put them into difficulty” (to use a favorite term of the sportscasters’), but at other times their job is to ride back to the team car to pick up water bottles and then carry them forward to the star riders. They’re also around to offer up their bike if a leader’s is broken, or to pace him back up to the group if he goes off the back for any reason.

There is a documentary about cycling domestiques called “Wonderful Losers: A Different World.” It suggests that a domestique’s main job is to crash his bicycle. I’m not sure how this movie got to be so warped; perhaps they just had gobs of crash and first aid footage they couldn’t resist using. I don’t recommend this one if you are a cyclist with a significant other who worries about your safety.

The riders all seem to have hearing aids, or maybe earbuds. Are they music lovers, or deaf?

Those are the race radios, which keep the riders in constant contact with their team directors. The directors give them instructions, warnings about road hazards, encouragement, and sometimes recite poetry.

Do the directors really recite poetry to the riders?

No. Of course not. What gave you that idea?

It seems like the helmets are just getting out of hand. Is this some kind of joke?

I assume you’re talking about the time trial helmets, like this one:

These helmets, designed to confer an aerodynamic advantage, are no joke, mainly because they’re not funny. They’re proof that people will do just about anything to gain an edge, when their careers are on the line. I think goofy helmets should be banned, for the good of the sport. And yet, for some reason, the Union Cycliste Internationale (aka UCI, the governing body of cycling) has not asked my opinion on this. Shoot, I’d be the arbiter for free, just to be nice.

By the way, if the helmet above doesn’t look like it would even cut through the wind very well, bear in mind it’s designed for a rider who’s got his head down. With any luck, said rider would run into something and learn his lesson.

I guess the silver lining is that cycling helmets seem to work pretty well … maybe the NFL should try them.

Why are pro bike racers so dang skinny?

It turns out that humans can be pretty close to starving and still perform at a very high athletic level, if their nutritional needs are being met (e.g., balanced diet). The Tour de France features gobs of brutal mountain passes, and to be competitive every rider needs to have a very high power-to-weight ratio. So Tour riders eat as little as possible in training, so they come to the race extremely lean. They do eat a lot during the race but then they’re burning probably 5,000 calories a day.

Of course not all the riders are that skinny (except by the standards of other sports like baseball and curling). The sprint specialists, who go for victories in the flatter stages, are pretty muscle-bound. But they still have to get over the mountain passes, and within a time limit based on when the leaders finish. So, they can’t be as ‘roided out as, say, an American football player.

Speaking of which, do the Tour riders use performance-enhancing drugs?

Short answer: probably. Surely not all of them, and maybe not even most of them, but the sport will never be rid of doping no matter how much it claims to have cleaned up. I base this on current race leader Tadej Pogacar’s absolute domination of this year’s Giro d’Italia (aka Tour of Italy, similar to the Tour de France), where he won by an extraordinary margin while setting a new record for the highest average speed ever in that race. Higher, even, then in the years where infamous dopers like Marco Pantani and Ivan Basso were winning it.

Couldn’t this mean only Pogacar is doping? No, because he lost the last two Tours de France, and there are plenty of other riders who, on a given day, manage to beat him. Too many riders are putting up overly impressive numbers (that is, data points like average speed, power output, and the ratio of rider’s power to his weight, which many consider to be the smoking gun). Even the domestiques are turning out unrealistically strong performances.

All that being said, cycling is probably no dirtier than most pro sports. At least the footage isn’t embellished with CGI like in the movies, and all the riders do their own stunts. As long as the doping arms race doesn’t get too unbalanced, it’s still a fun sport to watch.

In the context of bike racing, what does “stack” mean?

It means to crash. All the road cyclists I know use this term (e.g., “Dude, I hit some gravel and almost stacked!”) but, oddly, none of the commentators ever say it.

Speaking of commentators, they keep talking about this or that rider “getting back on terms.” What does this mean?

I think only the Peacock commentators, Bob Roll and Phil Liggett, say this. It means “catch back up” or “get back into favorable position,” but nobody else on the planet uses this term. I think those two are trying to start a thing.

Is there an official anthem of the Tour de France?

No, but in 1983 Kraftwerk recorded a song called “Tour de France” and you can watch the video here. Although Kraftwerk is German, the lyrics are all in French. They’re not all that interesting, but if you croon along or sing this in shower, you can substitute this line: “An American will never win/ Tour de France, Tour de France.” That’s what I was doing in the mid-‘80s before Greg LeMond surprised everyone. Actually, I still do this. Force of habit.

What has been the highlight of this year’s Tour so far?

I would say the highlight so far was Mark Cavendish breaking the record for most career Tour de France stage wins, with 35 of them, at age 39. What makes this so special, at least to me, is that it came after a long dry spell. Cavendish failed to win a single Tour stage between 2017 and 2020, and many thought he was all washed up. Perhaps he’d become a bit jaded, kind of lost the hunger. I think a lot of us can relate, especially as we age. For example, another middle-aged superstar, Eminem, has rapped eloquently about this:

Man, in my younger days
That dream was so much fun to chase
It’s like I’d run in place
While this shit dangled in front of my face
But how do you keep up the pace
And the hunger pangs once you’ve won the race?
When that dual exhaust is coolin’ off
‘Cause you don’t got nothin’ left to prove at all
‘Cause you done already hit ‘em with the coup de grace

Miraculously, in 2021, Cavendish suddenly regained his form, and perhaps his mojo, and won a remarkable four stages of the Tour, picking up the green jersey in the process and matching Eddy Merckx’s record for most career stage wins. It looked like Cav was back on track and positioned to break the record the next year. Amazingly, though, his Deceuninck Quick-Step team director, Patrick Lefevere, didn’t put him on the team for the 2022 Tour de France, and in fact terminated Cav’s contract at the end of the year. While Lefevere didn’t really explain himself, it’s widely acknowledged in cycling circles that he’s is a vainglorious, narcissistic, power-crazed douchebag. (Note: by “widely acknowledged” I mean it’s my personal opinion.) I can imagine this was very inspirational for Cav, to come back and show the world what an idiot Lefevere is for not believing in him.

So Cav changed teams for what he thought would be his final Tour in 2023, only to crash out early before winning anything. I think all us cycling fans thought that would be it, but Cav decided to go one more year and take a final crack at Merckx’s record. Clearly, he put in all the work required—which is a lot, for a 39-year-old trying to beat the young bucks in pure speed—and his sprint victory in Stage 5 of this Tour was glorious. He lived up to the rest of Eminem’s rap:

Still you feel the need to go full tilt
That Bruce Willis, that blue steel, that true skill
When that wheel’s loose, I won’t lose will
Do you still believe?

(Does Eminem have any idea who Mark Cavendish is? Surely not. But Eminem doesn’t read albertnet either, so it’s all good.)

Belief came up in the post-race interview after Cav’s amazing win. The journalist asked, “But that makes you the best? That mindset—that mental strength that you have?” Cav replied, “It’s definitely a benefit, you know, especially when you’re not physically as good as everybody else.”

Do exploits like Cav’s—coming back from the doldrums, persevering, and achieving great triumph—cut across all sports, inspiring all of us whether we’re cycling fans or not?

Why, yes. Yes they do. And thanks for asking!

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Workout Megamix Liner Notes - Part V: Recent Updates

Hear my playlist!

Hear my entire Megamix (200+ songs) on Spotify - click here!

Introduction

“Don’t smile until February.” These are words of wisdom I heard recently from a third-grade teacher, on how to maintain order in the classroom. But these words could just as easily apply to a winter workout regimen. Staying fit just isn’t as much fun when the cold, dark, and rain send us inside.

Almost seven years ago in these pages, I started a series on what music I recommend for indoor workouts. The tedium of riding rollers or a trainer requires a meticulously curated collection, or “megamix,” of fast-paced, hard driving rock or rap songs. (Do you also need a great playlist for brisk walking or running on that treadmill you bought during the pandemic? Of course.)

I don’t discover new music as quickly as Gen-Z does, but I have added a lot to my collection over the years, and now have many more tracks to recommend. (This makes even more sense now than it did seven years ago, because now everyone has Spotify and doesn’t have to buy or borrow CDs. Click here for my Spotify playlist.) And so, here are my current recommendations, along with “liner notes” (a more metaphorical concept than ever, since so many young listeners have never seen a record jacket liner). 

Liner Notes – Dana’s Ultimate Superfly Workout Megamix Part V

212 - Azelia Banks

              I discovered this song, and this artist, through one of those YouTube algorithms. It figured since I like M.I.A. videos, I’d like this video too, and put it into my feed. Well, the algorithm wasn’t wrong. The video is fun and funny, and I dig the song too. It’s perfect for riding rollers. (But I’m still not a big fan of these algorithms.)

16 Shots -  Stefflon Don

              My daughter turned me on to this one. As with “212” above, I cannot figure out what the singer is even talking about. The song seems political and probably relates to current events, which it’d be easy enough to google, but none of that matters to me. As has been observed by the philosopher Rakim, “It’s just the beat, the beat, the beat.”

Borders - M.I.A.

              I really like M.I.A. and lots of her songs have made my workout megamix, but I have to admit, I like each album a little less than the one before it. This is my favorite song from her fifth album, AIM, from 2016. And if you have a giant plasma TV in your home gym, be sure to check out the video too. It’s pretty awesome … possibly more extras than I’ve even seen in a music video.

Broke as Fuck -  YBN Cordae

              YBN Cordae, according to Wikipedia, is “known mononymously as Cordae.” What? You don’t know this word, “mononymous”? I didn’t either. It means having only one name. But of course that’s not the case with this musician, unless you decide to call him Cordae. I mean, you could as easily say I’m known mononymously as Dana, except that I’m not known. Now, I don’t know much about Cordae except he got his start doing a remix of “My Name Is” by Eminem. How does a rapper whose name isn’t Slim Shady or Eminem make a name for himself doing a remix of “My Name Is”? Are you as confused as I am? Well, who cares. This is another song my daughter turned me on to, and you can totally pedal to it.

Celebrity Skin - Doja Cat

              This is a cover of the Hole song. If you’re reading this post out loud to somebody, you’re going to have to pause here and explain it’s H-O-L-E, not W-H-O-L-E. Anyhow, I was never crazy about the original version of this song, but the vocals in this cover take it up a notch. Solid.

Cops Shot the Kid - Nas

              This one starts off with a dude telling a story, and he does a pretty funny imitation of a white cop saying sternly, “All right you kids, stop having so much fun. Move along.” This monologue goes on for about twenty seconds, which gives you a nice respite from all that hammering, as you just soft-pedal and listen, but then the song suddenly gets hard and fast and disturbing and dark. If you sync up your pedaling, you’ll start to really suffer, but you’ll go ahead and pour on the pace because you know the song is fairly short. Man. It’s a good one.

Down In It - Nine Inch Nails

              You’re thinking “What? I thought this was new music albertnet is recommending!” No, just new to my workout megamix. This song is definitely old school. I can’t hear it without thinking of my old college roommate who, as described here, listened to this song constantly to the exclusion of all others. Nevertheless, it’s a good one and easy to dance—er, to work out—to.

Everlong - Foo Fighters

               I fricking love this song. It’s old-school at this point too, being from 1997, and though I was aware of it then, I only came to love it recently. (I was like that with avocados too … just really late learning to appreciate them.) The drumming on this in particular song is so good, I not only wish it were louder, but I wish I could be inside the drum while the song is being played. Alas, the Foo Fighters’ drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died this year, very suddenly. So it’s kind of sad to hear this song now, but mostly it’s just awesome.

Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd

              Okay, this song is almost as old as I am. What’s it doing on this list? Well, I asked my older daughter to give me her top 10 workout songs, and this was one of them. I think it’s adorable how these youngsters somehow discover music this old, totally on their own somehow. I also tend to associate this song with El Freebird’s, the taqueria in Isla Vista where I won the Burrito World Championships, so it brings back good memories. And the song, though it picks up gradually and is super long, does freakin’ rock out eventually so it does totally belong in my megamix.

Get Free - Lana Del Rey

              I read somewhere that Lana Del Rey was sued by Radiohead over this song, their claim being that it ripped off “Creep.” I couldn’t make out any resemblance at all and thought this seemed crazy. So with no preamble I played the song for my daughter and asked if it reminded her of anything. She replied, “I’m getting a pretty strong ‘Creep’ vibe from it.” OMG. I obviously know nothing about music. Clearly the ripoff (or tribute, if you want to prevaricate) was clear enough to my kid, and as described here, “The Guardian found that the chords used in ‘Creep’ were rare in pop music and that the melodies bore an ‘uncanny resemblance.’” But ignorant as I may be, I do know what I like, and this song is great. I was going to say something about the pacing of it, along with that of other songs, but I can’t remember my point. Suffice to say, virtually all the songs in this megamix can be synced with your pedaling, at one cadence or another, and the variety helps since sometimes ya wanna spin, and sometimes ya wanna get out of the saddle and mosh.

Godzilla - Eminem

              There seems to be a tendency among music critics to be hard on Eminem and suggest he’s washed up. This is the clearest example of incompetence I have ever seen. Not to sound like a troll or anything , but anyone who bags on Eminem is just an idiot, and the critics need to evaluate how far they’ve drifted from actual listeners, considering Eminem’s last eleven albums have hit number one on the US charts. This guy is amazing—he just gets better and better. If I gave him his due on this list of killer workout tracks, his songs would dominate and the whole post would look like an ad.  Godzilla is a lot of fun, has perfect energy for hammering your ass off, and even set a new record for speed: 10.65 syllables per second. The video is a hoot as well. You should definitely add the following tracks to your mix, too: No Regrets, Yah Yah, I Will, Gnat, No Regrets, The Ringer, and Darkness. Oh, and just about all his other songs, too.

To be continued

I thought I could cram all my new recommendations into a single post, but you lucked out: I’ve run out of space (or more to the point, you’ve run out of patience). Next week I’ll cover the rest of my modern megamix. I’ll also include, as an appendix, my entire workout song list, comprising over 200 tracks. Watch for it!

More reading

Here are links to the rest of my series of Workout Megamix liner notes:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part VI
• Entire playlist on Spotify

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

More Q&A With a Grammar Lover

Dear Grammar Lover,

A friend put it to me that “fuck” is the most elastic word in the English language, since it can be a noun, adjective, verb, etc. I’m guessing it’s not truly unique in this, but I can’t really prove it. What’s your take?

Tom G, Brooklyn, NY

Dear Tom:

By my count, of the eight parts of speech, “fuck” can be used as five:

• Noun: I don’t give a fuck
• Verb: He really fucked it up
• Interjection: Fuck!
• Adjective: He doesn’t have a fucking clue
• Adverb: Are you fucking shitting me?

These last two are of course gerunds, which to me isn’t as wholly satisfying as if “fuck” itself could be used as an adjective or adverb. Thus, I’m tempted to say “well” is more elastic, because (as detailed here), it can also be used as five parts of speech … and it doesn’t need an –ing suffix. However, as one commenter pointed out, “well” isn’t actually one word. It’s a pair of homonyms. “Well” as in “good or satisfactory” is an entirely different word, with a different etymology, from “well” as in “shaft sunk into the ground.” So to my mind, “fuck” wins, at least between these two.

One more thing: bonus points go to “fuck” for being useful not just as an interjection, but as the most powerful interjection of all time.

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you asserted that it’s not always appropriate to correct somebody’s grammar. What’s the most tasteless, tactless context for a grammar correction you’ve ever encountered?

Wanda L, Las Cruces, NM

Dear Wanda,

When my father was dying of cancer, I suggested he write up his own obituary, just so I wouldn’t miss a life detail he felt was important. He inadvertently wrote his draft from the perspective of someone who was still alive, which is understandable … he may not have fully accepted yet that he would actually die. Accordingly, among my revisions were a number of necessary verb tense changes. I also included an email address so people could send tidings without wasting paper on cards (feeling that this was what my dad would have wanted). One of his friends sent a very terse email pointing out that I’d made a verb tense error in the obituary. The obituary had noted, “He has also done work for NBS/NIST on computer peripherals, power supplies, and the atomic clock” which, as this guy pointed out, should have read “He also did work for NBS/NIST….” The guy was right, of course; my sentence did not properly convey that my father was dead, dead, dead and would never do any more work for NBS/NIST, or anyone else, ever again. (The email itself didn’t say “dead, dead, dead,” but it might as well have.)

Since the email didn’t say anything else beyond pointing out the error, my (admittedly ungrammatical) response was quite brief: “Asperger’s much?” (Just kidding. I did not respond.)

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you said the silliest example of bad grammar you have come across in music is “exactly whom I’m supposed to be” in the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. How is this any worse than Eminem repeatedly using the non-word “insaneness” in the song “Brainless”?

Sean C, Boston, MA

Dear Sean,

For one thing, using a non-word isn’t the same class of error as using “whom” incorrectly; “insaneness” is more like a playful stylistic stretch in the Ogden Nash vein. And this non-word opened the door for Eminem to rhyme with “brainless” and “pain in the anus,” whereas the Clash’s goof didn’t accomplish anything. Besides, Eminem freely acknowledges the poetic liberty; in a muted aside at the end of the song, some nameless adversary says, “‘Insaneness’ ain’t even a word you stupid fuck,” to which the singer replies, “Neither is ‘ain’t.’” Meanwhile, at least two dictionaries (such as this one, for example) do include “insaneness” as a legit word. And above all, the whole point of the song is that the singer is brainless, so why wouldn’t he use a non-word?

Dear Grammar Lover,

What do you make of “their” as a singular possessive pronoun? I know this has long been used when the speaker doesn’t wish to specify one sex or another, but it’s technically wrong and can cause confusion, such as with singular vs. plural. Doesn’t clarity trump convenience here? Can’t we all agree that “their” as a singular pronoun is just plain wrong?

John S, San Leandro, CA

Dear John,

I try to avoid using “their” to refer to an unnamed or hypothetical person, preferring “his or her” or some other way around the construction. But I haven’t traditionally worried too much about other people doing this, as it doesn’t tend to cause that much confusion, really. For example, “Everyone must bring their workbook” could imply that a bunch of students share a single workbook … but common sense should easily put that vagueness to rest.

Things get a bit more complicated around the more recent trend of using a plural pronoun for an individual who doesn’t wish to identify as one sex or another. For example, a non-binary person may request that people use “they” or “their” to refer to “them.” This plural pronoun begets a plural verb, to achieve subject-verb agreement, which can also add confusion.

I will cautiously assert that spoken grammar evolves more quickly than formal, written grammar, so if we’re looking for what’s officially “correct,” it’s useful to take after the dictionary publishers and see what’s in print in a mainstream magazine written for an educated audience. (I wouldn’t look to “Us” magazine, which is all about celebrities, because they don’t even get their own name right; the magazine should be called “Them.”) So, as I’d done when trying to determine the definitive spelling of “kindergartner,” I looked for non-gendered pronouns in “The New Yorker.” Consider this passage from a recent article:

    Caro Murphy … said that a Disney rep had told them not to talk about their work at the park, so we spoke about LARPs in general terms. “There is this tension between the commercial part of LARP and the community part,” they said.

The word “them” confused me a bit initially because I thought perhaps it referred to Murphy plus one or more colleagues previously mentioned or implied. But the confusion was dispelled when the quote was followed by “they said.” Obviously this was not two or more persons speaking in unison.

Still, this new usage can get a bit confusing when obvious clues like that quotation aren’t provided. This was the case in the previous paragraph of the same article, which coincidentally involved another non-binary interviewee. And more confusion arose later, with Kes, a LARPer whom the writer and her colleague Tim met onboard a Disney theme park spaceship:

     [Tim] told me he thought that Kes might be a cast member. He’d seen her being chummy with Croy in the engineering room.

     I [Googled] the name of the LARPer Disney had just hired. I edged around the crowd. “Caro?” I whispered to Kes.

     “Yes!” Murphy said, grinning.

Some of the confusion here comes from a single person being referred to by three different names in the span of seven words, which has nothing to do with pronouns. But the earlier bit about “her being chummy with Croy” did complicate things. Kes, when in character, may have identified as female, unless the writer just made an assumption. But when out of character, Murphy prefers they/them. The writer, when composing the article, knew that Kes was Murphy and thus could have said “them” instead of “her,” but this would have spoiled the surprise of the secret identity.

I got some good advice once in a writing class, which is that a writer should never make the reader do extra work unless there’s a good reason. So is honoring the preference of a source a good reason? Of course! Interviewees are at the crux of journalism (and in this case in particular, Murphy was taking some risk, having been told by Disney not to talk about their work). Meanwhile, professional courtesy aside, I think acknowledgement of any human’s self-identity is more important than ease of reading comprehension. Yes, this can mean extra work for the reader, especially for those of us with a lifelong habit of thinking about gender as a very cut-and-dried, binary matter, but isn’t this kind of work good for us, as we grapple with the more complicated reality?

Dear Grammar Lover,

How good are the grammar checkers in Microsoft Word and Google Docs?

Linda S, Broomfield, CO

Dear Linda,

Artificial Intelligence is really bad at grammar. If you asked A.I. to diagram a sentence it simply couldn’t. It is powerless to understand context, so its suggestions can seem practically random. Thus, software grammar checkers are pretty much worthless.

To validate this assertion, I ran a Microsoft Word grammar check against a recent blog post, and then ran the same post through the grammar checker in Google Docs. In theory, both programs should flag the same “errors,” right? After all, if you handed an essay to two different human newspaper or magazine editors, the feedback on grammar and spelling would be similar, one to the next. What I found with the software was that a) there was zero overlap in feedback between the two grammar checkers, and b) most of their suggestions were flat-out wrong.

Here are some of the “errors” flagged by Word (click to enlarge):

As you can see, Word was wrong in every single case. I sincerely hope nobody is trying to learn grammar by reviewing this software’s suggestions and rationale.

Google did a bit better, finding one bona fide error (I had “other the internal” instead of “other internal”), and only making four incorrect suggestions. One suggestion was particularly inane: in the sentence “I considered his feat from the perspective of coach,” Google suggested I change “feat” to “feet.” Why does this software think I’d be looking at a rider’s feet? Does it assume coaches, and/or writers, are likely to have a foot fetish? The less facetious question is this: as an educated human, why would I ever outsource my editing to software that makes so many mistakes?

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you said the silliest instance of bad grammar you’ve found in rock music is “exactly whom I’m supposed to be” in the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. How is this any worse than “If looks could kill they probably will” in “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel?

Simon Taylor, London, UK

Dear Simon,

Indeed, this is a clear example of inconsistent verb tense, but why would you suppose it is unintentional? Not only does “will” create a nice internal rhyme with “kill,” but the sudden shift from the hypothetical subjunctive to the future indicative active creates the most jarring—and best—lyric in the whole song. It’s a similar effect to what the masterful novelist Muriel Spark achieves in her story “The Portobello Road” with the immortal line, “He looked as if he would murder me and he did.” In both cases, death goes from hypothetical to real in a split second. So Peter Gabriel’s verb shift isn’t just intentional; it’s brilliant. I wouldn’t say rules were made to be broken, but in the right hands they can be, and to good effect.

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