Their, Someone, Everyone, Everything

Did you ever write a sentence like the following, where you just knew something was wrong, but you couldn’t put your finger on it? For example, “Someone forgot their ticket.”

Most people know that the word THEIR refers back to a plural subject, such as in this sentence, “They forgot THEIR tickets.” THEIR refers to THEY, both being plural. So what do we do about the sentence, “Someone forgot their ticket.”?

(If you're getting ready to lie down in bed, then this is perfect timing, because this next paragraph will put you to sleep.)

The obvious is to use SHE or HE instead of THEIR, but what if you don’t know the gender? And please, please, please, do NOT use HIS without knowing. That’s gender bias and with over 60% of merchandise purchased by females, you do not want to alienate your buyers. The English language lacks of a neutral, singular personal pronoun; the only singular personal pronouns are SHE, HE, and IT. It does seem to be more acceptable these days to use THEIR in this situation; but be cautious! If you do this in academic writing, you’ll be treated like a criminal. If you use this in a professional report, you may get away with it, but not without jeopardizing your reputation. Most people just use my #1 trick for looking and sounding smart: rewarding to avoid the problem.

I don’t want to make this more complicated, but I’m going to. The same problem arises when you use the following words: EVERYONE, EVERYTHING, SOMEBODY. Yes, I know two of these words sound plural, but they’re not. Do I LOOK like I’m joking? Here are some perplexing examples:

“Everyone wants their paycheck.” (Yeah, it sounds okay because everyone sounds plural—but it’s not.) Just avoid this mistake by writing, “Everyone wants a paycheck.”

I've come upon an alternative, and I cannot take credit for this pure genius, but I can, at the very least, pass it along to others, who need a nuetral personal pronoun. This word can be broken down like this: she/he/it, hence s/h/it, shorter even, shit. Okay, I realize it's known as a profanity in our language, but let's get past that.

A Case of Meningococcal Disease in Healthcare Workers

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Background
An infectious disease is one that is triggered by various pathogens that can be transmitted by means of either a biological or physical agent to a host. Some of the common infectious diseases are as follows: influenza, mononucleosis, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), hepatitis, and tuberculosis, and meningococcal disease. Having an infectious disease management program in place can cut down considerably on the possibility of spreading the infection and thus putting more people, including both hospital staff and patients at risk.


In the journal Lancet, of November 11, 2000, researchers Anna Gilmore, James Stuart, and Nick Andrews, describe the risk to health-care workers who are exposed to meningococcal disease. In the particular situation discussed by these researchers, modes of contact for the primary infection included while doctor was performing a full clinical admission when patient coughed in doctor's face, daily contact with infected patients, during the process of airway insertion of a patient on an ambulance, during delivery and fitting of oxygen while patient was restless, and close contact with coughing, crying child over a prolonged period of time.

Organizational Management Behavior
Awareness: The first step in dealing with the potential threat for infections is awareness. Health care workers are, or should be aware of the potential for infection in the hospital setting but this should not be taken for granted. A good program that will cut down on the potential for infections should start with ascertaining that these health care workers do have the necessary knowledge. While the most effective way might be to test the knowledge of these workers with respect to modes of transmission of various infectious diseases, a more effective method might be a regular program of discussions among health care workers regarding how they could avoid being the victims of such infections. Probably quarterly meetings of health care staff where issues of this nature are discussed are likely to keep the issue on the forefront for all health care workers, at least, until the next meeting. At such meetings, staff may focus both on the possibility of avoiding such infections in their particular setting and also discuss what might have occurred in other settings. The citing of current or past journal articles should be encouraged. Since it might appear unnecessary to focus on only one topic every three months, staff may focus on different particular issues regarding the health care setting but with the view to protecting both staff and patients foremost on everyone's mind.

Hygiene regime:
Nurses and health care staff, as part of their routine operations, often have to touch patients or articles that are infected. A regular program of hand hygiene, through either washing or hand disinfections, can cut down on the rate of cross-infection in hospitals (Pittet 2). Though this seems to be an elementary item in the health care setting it appears that in many cases there is poor compliance among health care workers, with doctors being the worst offenders (Pittet 2). To increase compliance, it is important to raise what seems to be a minor matter to one of giant proportions. By dramatizing the situation and showing what some of the negative outcomes might be for neglecting hand washing, it might be possible to increase compliance. A Hand Washing campaign that enlists the help of patients is likely to be the most effective. This might meet with initial resistance from health care workers, but plastering the hospital with posters that empower patients to ask health care workers if they have washed their hands prior to dealing with them could be very useful. Since health care workers would want to say yes rather than go and wash their hands to show that they have not already done so, it appears that such a campaign would promote hand-washing frequency among health care workers. But it should not be limited to health care workers.

Consciousness

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In the mid 1970s psychologist Charles Tart (1975, 1972) showed that consciousness can be usefully understood from a systems perspective. He argued that ordinary waking consciousness, or ordinary reality, can be seen as a state of consciousness surrounded by a large number of alternative or “altered” states. Dream sleep is another system, although several states may be accessible in dreams (Krippner, 1994). Others include an unknown number of ecstatic states that can erupt spontaneously into ordinary consciousness, plus states that are accessible through meditation, the shamanic trance, hypnosis, and drug induced states, as well as ordinary non- dream sleep. Tart states that consciousness is composed of a harmonious set of psychological functions, which include memory, cognition, sense of humor, sense of self, external perception (exteroception), and perception of internal body states (interoception). Together they form a gestalt- like whole, or a working system.

According to William James, “Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness” (James,1929, 378).

Allan Combs’ Theory of Consciousness

According to Combs, transitions between states of consciousness can be brought about by disrupting the stabilizing processes and the positive patterning of forces in the direction of the new desired state. For example the technologies of consciousness, found in yoga or shamanism, involve many patterning techniques designed both to disrupt ordinary consciousness and to move the practitioner toward extraordinary states (Combs, 1993, 1995).

Cicero’s Philosophy of Style

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Through the voice of Crassus in Book III of De Oratore, Cicero discusses embellishing style by making language correct, brilliant, ornamental, and appropriate; additionally, the orator must be suitably knowledgeable, cultured, and gifted in delivery. However complex this style, the key component—to this reader—is knowledge, reflected through Cicero’s desire to see the reuniting of the schools of philosophy and speaking. Throughout Book III of De Oratore, philosophy of style is developed through the principles of knowledge.

The subject of the orator’s level of knowledge is given great attention by Crassus, making this a significant component of Cicero’s philosophy of style. Crassus begins his exposition by asserting that philosophy and oratory are inseparable (De Oratore 17); this is a strong indication that knowledge is a key component of his style. Cicero appears to value Socrates’ notion that knowledge is most important, but he does not agree with the subsequent separation of knowledge and oratory: “This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain…” (De Oratore 49).

Socrates and Plato would have commended Cicero on his defense for knowledge as the foundation for any speaker. First in Plato’s Gorgias, and again his sentiments are echoed in Phaedrus when Socrates states an important method for obtaining knowledge—the definition: “In every discussion, my dear boy, there is one and only one way of beginning…that is to know what it is that one is discussing” (Phaedrus 46).

The Role of Grandiloquence in Advancing Humor

Sample: Audience: Academic, Length: 500 words.
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In the Old Southwestern story, “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” written by George Washington Harris, is humor found in the juxtaposition of the narrator’s grandiloquence to the speaker’s orality or in the union of the speaker’s somewhat advanced vocabulary and sentence structure to his obvious level of education and speech patterns?

For this text, it would be difficult to successfully argue that the humor is derived from the juxtaposition of the narrator’s grandiloquence to the speaker’s orality because there is little presence of the narrator—in terms of dialog. But, the text is humorous, and it is not because of the irony in the “hell-sarpint aplicashun.”

The text is humorous because, Sut Lovingood, the main character, has an above-expected level vocabulary, detail, and sentence structure nestled in the middle a down-home dialog. The grandiloquence shines even brighter through the sentence structure and spelling. The reader expects to see, after five or six words of dialog, short, simple sentences and little detail, but Sut’s long, drawn-out sentences, sentence structure, and attention to detail pull the reader into a text made up of social irony. The bigger the words he uses, the funnier it is, the misspelling adding a good deal of the humor. The misspelling and truncated words are important to the style because they confirm the reader’s belief that the character is uneducated. This excerpt exemplifies the detail, structure, vocabulary, and spelling that combine in a synergic mix to make the story laugh-out-loud-funny.

“He tole ‘em how the ole Hell-sarpints wud sarve em if they didn’t repent; how cold they’d crawl over thar nakid bodys, an’ how like ontu pitch they’d stick tu ‘em es they crawled; how they’d rap thar tails roun’ thar naiks chokin clost, poke thar tungs up thar noses, an’ hiss intu thar years.”

Print Remediation: Expanding our Boundaries

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The printed text is finite in content, allowing the reader to blind herself to all other texts while she pages through the contained subject. The very nature of this printed text limits its reader, during the reading of the text, to the information captured on the pages. These borders may, for some readers, proffer a devaluation of the printed text.

Devaluation of the printed text, with regard to its limitations, may be acerbated by the increasingly accessible Internet, which presents to its readers an encyclopedic selection of related material from which to browse. The advent of the World Wide Web offers an alternative, or supplement, to the printed text: hypertext.

Most Web pages contain hypertext, displayed images and/or text that are linked to other information--most often related or supportive. In some ways, these hypertextual links are the "electronic equivalent of the footnote" found in the printed text, offering a network of related information and immediacy not available through the purely textual state of the footnote (Bolter 27). The Internet's boundless reservoir of information, immediacy, and ease of accessibility entice many writers to deliver their texts, or alternative versions of them, via the World Wide Web.

Cultural Pluralism

Cultural Pluralism and Ethnic Violence in America


Since early in the 20th century, the dominant goal of American liberalism, in relation to minorities, has been that of assimilation into the mainstream of American life. “Cultural pluralism” is a term sometimes used to describe a society in which various cultures co-exist in a state of mutual tolerance and respect. Cultural tolerance is usually equated with democracy and progress. The liberal claim that all human beings are essentially equal, and so deserve fair and equal treatment and protection under the law, is now so generally accepted that even the most conservative politicians pay lip service to it. Liberalism could be considered the dominant ideological “discourse” of modern industrial (and post-industrial) society, although it has certainly been threatened by other ideologies – for example, by Fascism and Communism.
According to the liberal ideal, different communities, with different beliefs and traditions, ought to be able to co-exist peacefully within a democratic framework. To their credit, liberals have always recognized that the presence of many different cultures within American life is not only a necessity for the functioning of an industrial system, but also, ultimately, beneficial to the political order. Yet, throughout American history, the co-existence of different cultures has often been a locus of intense conflict. The liberal ideology of cultural pluralism within a democratic framework has not always been able to contain or to resolve these conflicts. Why?
The mass immigrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created enormous tensions in American society and political culture. Yet, one might argue, it was this very immigration that fueled rapid industrial progress, and with it the creation of fortunes like that of the Mellons and the Carnegies. Here is a perfect example of what the Marxists called “the contradictions of capitalism.” Capitalism, in its dynamic, unrestrained phase, transformed American life from top to bottom. But it did not transform every part of American life in the same way, or at the same rate of speed. Nor did it make every American financially secure. As American transformed itself into the world’s greatest industrial power, it was also drawn into an international monetary and trade system. The current fashionable word for this process, still going on at more rarified levels, is “globalization.” On the plus side, globalization increased American wealth through trade relationships. On the minus side, it drew the country into brutal international conflicts such as the First World War.

These developments were threatening to many Americans, particularly to those who did not benefit in any obvious way from industrial capitalism. Instead of sharing exuberantly in the liberal vision of universal equality and social progress, such Americans longed for the hierarchical, pre-industrial past. This was particularly true in the American South, where entire communities of white Anglo-Saxon Americans fastened onto romantic myths about the Old South of the type generated by films like The Birth of a Nation.

So, even as the United States emerged from World War I as the most powerful industrial nation in the world and the major champion of liberal democracy, many American citizens – and not only in the backwoods – were clamoring for isolationism, segregation, and the closing of America’s borders to new immigration. Capitalism’s discontents, one might call them – although they did not see themselves in this way. Quite often, they seem to have seen themselves as heroic defenders of cherished moral values. Racist and anti-ethnic attitudes are, more than likely, part of our anthropological nature as human beings, yet such attitudes normally exist in an inchoate form. Something happened to American political culture during this period to focus the energies of racism into specific kinds of deadly action.

The authors of “The Rosewood Report” -- one of the detailed sources John Singleton used for his film, Rosewood – describe a dramatic rise in intolerance for racial and ethnic diversity in American society after World War I:

"In his study of the race riot in Chicago in 1919, William Tuttle noted that whites believed that blacks "were mentally inferior, immoral, emotional, and criminal. Some secondary beliefs were that they were innately lazy, shiftless, boisterous, bumptious, and lacking in civic consciousness." Many whites accepted these racial rationalizations because they wanted to, and their newspapers reinforced such attitudes by publishing stories that highlighted black crimes and immoral behavior and by seldom reporting positively about the daily lives of black citizens. Many whites had such a low opinion of blacks that they were prepared to treat them in the most inhumane fashion whenever they felt themselves threatened by the minority." (Jones, et al 4)

Perhaps whites were confused to see African-Americans benefiting more dramatically than they themselves from modernization. Not only had African Americans served in the military in World War I, they were also receiving the same wages as whites for industrial work. Capitalism challenged the racist attitude in an unforeseen manner – not from the angle of religious values or higher moral standards, but in pragmatic terms. In a capitalist society, one’s value is defined by money. As soon as some African-Americans began to make as much (or, in some cases, more) money than whites, it was no longer necessary for them to argue with racists. (Similarly, the African-Americans who served in World War I found themselves on equal footing with white men in the South, where manhood had traditionally been associated with the ability to handle weapons. Maybe this is the real explanation for why whites, during the post-war decades, became obsessed with the idea of African-Americans having sex with white women. Inter-racial sex represented the last border to be crossed before the dawn of a terrifying equality.)
The authors of “The Rosewood Report” are careful to note the influence of newspapers on white communities’ perceptions of African-Americans. Yellow journalism, during the early ‘20’s, tended not only to legitimize racism on a daily basis, but also played a large part in provoking acts of savage violence against minorities. Moreover, secret organizations such as The Knights of Liberty and the Ku Klux Klan evolved a rigid but internally consistent ideological world-view justifying cynical acts of brutality as the necessary means of preserving the white race.

As in the Fascist movements that swept Europe during this same period, the beatings, lynchings, and pogroms of the American 1920’s were not isolated outbursts of rage, but deliberate, theatrical, highly propagandistic events designed to at once frighten minorities into submission and to create a sense of solidarity among the perpetrators. They were also, it seems, the result of an ingrown, parochial, paranoid world view. As Scott Ellsworth noted, in an article on the 1921, Tulsa race riot,

"The vast majority of white Tulsans possessed almost no direct knowledge of the African American community whatsoever. . . most Tulsans had never set foot in the African American district, and never would. Living in all-white neighborhoods, attending all-white schools and churches, and working for the most part in all-white work environments, the majority of white Tulsans in 1921 had little more than fleeting contact with the city’s black population. What little they knew, or thought they knew, about the African-American community was susceptible not only to racial stereotypes and deeply-ingrained prejudices, but also to rumor, innuendo, and, as events would soon prove, what was printed in the newspaper." (49)

It would be pleasant to be able to conclude that it was only poor and ignorant white people, whipped into frenzy by yellow journalists, who committed brutal acts of racial and ethnic intolerance. But the truth is more disturbing. In both Tulsa and Rosewood, local law enforcement officials up to the very highest levels joined both in the violence and in the subsequent cover up.

Moreover, the brutal strikebreaking tactics used against unionized minors, factory workers and coal miners during this same period show that race-prejudice was not limited to the South. The captains of industry used race and ethnic prejudice to serve their own ends, whenever and wherever the profit motive came into conflict with the dangerous temptation of human empathy. A note in the “Afterword” to Thomas Bell’s working class novel, Out of This Furnace, quotes the following passage from a biography of Andrew Carnegie:

The Hungarians, Slavs and Southern Europeans. . . were a savage and undisciplined horde, with whom strong-arm methods seemed at times indispensable, and when strikes broke out murder and arson became their favorite persuasions. (Henrick, quoted in Demarest, 419).

Union-breaking violence, sometimes turning into all out war between National Guard units and coal miners, was a common feature of industrial capitalism in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Once again, the victims of such brutality were portrayed in the press as subhuman. In these instances, liberals themselves suspended the proud ideology of human equality to speak the language of ethnic hatred.

Bibliography

Bell, Thomas. Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

Scott Ellsworth. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Foreword by John Hope Franklin. New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Scott Ellsworth, “The Tulsa Race Riot.” In The Final Report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trrc)

Jones, et al. The Rosewood Report: A Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred At Rosewood, Florida, in January, 1923, Submitted to the Florida Board of Regents December 22, 1993 (http://www.tfn.net/doc/rosewood.txt)