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Am I Obligated to Save You From Yourself?

August 3, 2011, 9:15 am

By Allison M. Vaillancourt

Imagine you’re at a reception and encounter a colleague with something green in his teeth. Do you say something, or keep quiet?

I’ve polled several people about that and there seem to be three schools of thought. Some folks argue that pointing out the spinach or stray parsley is the right thing to do. Period. End of story. The second group worry about causing embarrassment and weigh the strength of the relationship in evaluating the best way to proceed. Still others tend to assess the situation based on their feelings about the person in question. Said one person in the third cohort, “If I like them, I’ll say something. If I don’t, I’ll keep quiet and let them go on like that for the rest of the night.”

I’m sure we all agree that having food in your teeth is not the kind of thing that can permanently destroy your career or credibility, but we often have opportunities to help people present themselves better or to be more successful. But do we step in, or do we hang back?

Because I’m grateful when people give me feedback, I tend to offer it to others, but there are certain matters that challenge me. My latest struggle is related to two colleagues who are members of what I call “The Had Went Society.” They are both very well educated, successful, smart, articulate, and engaging. They also say “had went” all the time, as in “I had went to his seminar” or “she had went to Northwestern.”

I like both of those people and it pains me to see others flinch during those “had went” moments, but conversations about speech habits often feel personal and intrusive. That’s why I didn’t say anything for a long time. Eventually, I decided the honorable thing was to mention it to them both, individually, of course. One said I must have misheard and one thanked me for my honesty. Did my unsolicited intervention change anything? Nope; not at all.

Perhaps you’ve noticed behavior that is “career limiting” for friends or colleagues. In addition to demonstrating grammatical challenges, they might be excessively sarcastic or negative, talk about themselves too much, show up late to every meeting, have a tendency to send vitriolic “reply all” e-mail manifestos, or drink too much at official functions. When you observe someone you actually like doing things that might have career consequences, do you speak up or keep quiet? How do you decide?

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  • crankycat

    A friend and I did run a “what were you thinking” intervention when a Very Junior Colleague let emotion run way ahead of thought and sent a fiery email to a Very Senior Administrator. Not a wise way to garner attention. 

    Minor annoyances, like being late to run-of-the-mill meetings, don’t really seem worth comment or concern. Most meetings are much less important than we think. Though I would not recommend being late to the meeting with the Very Senior Administrator. 

  • dpmccain

    Too much of our behavior is determined by whether we “like” people, rather than recognizing that nobody can be everybody’s cup of tea.  If someone has food in his/her teeth (every time I use he/she now I recall the character in the novel Straight Man, who is dubbed Heshee).  Anway, taking someone aside (moving them through a crowd with conversation and close to a restroom) will gain an ally (sometimes) when things get sticky, and let’s face it.  It’s a nice thing to do.  Much like offering a kleenex when you notice…snot..in someone’s nose. Sometimes if someone hates your guts, he/she (there I go again), will not tell you, but all of a sudden you have 5 people coming up to you…all staring at your nose.  People…heavenly days.

    As to “had went” I hear that constantly from people who I would think “should” know better.  I simply structure a sentence with the correction, much like, “Oh, if you had gone (no voice inflection), …blah blah.” If someone doesn’t pick up on the correction, then you are spitting in the wind, and will only fatigue yourself.  Some of my students tell me I visibly flinch when I hear someone who holds a higher position than I do (I am an adjunct instructor) speak in such a manner.   I am trying to enact a poker face, but it isn’t going well.  I remain hopeful.
     

  • singfasola

    I find that in “speak up or keep quiet” situations, timing is everything. I can’t save my colleague from himself but I can plant the notion that HE can save himself. Still, he has to be ready to hear me, and I must wait until he’s ready.  Sometimes I can strike while the iron is hot; sometimes the right time never comes.

  • boiler

    A lot of times, things that sound like grammatical errors are really regionalisms. I live in a place where people routinely say “needs done,” as in “the oil needs changed” or “the carpet needs cleaned.” It sounded bizarre to me when I first moved here, but after a decade and a half it’s become a homey locution that I miss when I travel. Had went may be something similar. If your colleagues are in fact well-educated, smart, articulate, and engaging, this probably isn’t a matter of ignorance, but of dialect, and there’s no particular reason they should change it.

  • jffoster

    Boiler (vid supra) is quite correct, and one ought be  pretty careful about “correcting” colleagues’ speach and grammar.  No native speaker of a language has “bad grammar” or “poor grammar” in that language — just different grammar.   Boiler’s point even applies in some instances to ‘had/have went’.   The verb GO’s paradigm in standard English is suppletively irregular — instead of the past form ‘gang’, it uses the past form of the verb WEND.   That verb, though largely gone from standard nonpoetic English, is still in common use in some parts of the United States, and is in the   spend, spent // send, sent,   pattern.  So ‘went’ for those people is both the past tense of WEND and its past participle as well, and the past tense of GO.  Small wonder then that such Americans would generalize it as the past participle of GO also.  

  • anon1972

    “No native speaker of a language has ‘bad grammar’ or ‘poor grammar’ in that language”  

    Really??  I can produce numerous students by way of evidence to the contrary.  ”Had went,” if consistent, may be dialectal, but some errors are just that — errors.

  • wmr333

    The top culprit in my experience is when colleagues use “myself” instead of “I” or “me.”  I have one colleague who is unable to differentiate between “bring” and “take” so he always says “bring.”  Finally, “fame” has lost its use in favor of omnipresent “notoriety.”

    I am sure that I am clueless as to what errors I commit in practice, but it is easy to be annoyed by others.  As someone who more than occasionally finds spinach caught in my teeth, I guess that I would appreciate either a verbal or a nonverbal alert to that fact.

  • 11196496

    What’s wrong with helping someone in an awkward position because of their [choose one or more: spinach in teeth, odd dialect, snot]? Life is not a zero-sum game and many philisiophical and religious traditions see strong value in assisting even those who are not terribly likeable. Being mean and self-centered does not make one a more likeable person.

  • missoularedhead

    There’s always the humor angle.  ”I’m sorry…did you say ‘Hedwig’?’

  • ebrownst

    I appreciate the article. Privately helping a colleague with spinach between one’s teeth (or a slip showing) is a genuine act of kindness. But i am on the fence about grammar. The one that bothers me is the dangling preposition. For example, “Where is the library at?” It could be construed as insulting or judgmental. Because the intention is to just help, the risk of upsetting has to be considered.

  • jffoster

    Yes indeed. Really.  And I doubt very much that you can “can produce numerous students by way of evidence to the contrary.”.  To do so, you would have to show that they have no consistency in some facet of their own dialect which all or nearly all other speakers of that dialect do consistently.  Showing that their speech or writing is different from some regional variety of Standard English does NOT in se show that they have “bad” or “poor” grammar. 

    To understand the linguistic aspects of the world we live in, we must distinguish the starts and stops, the forgetting in long sentences whether the subject was singular or plural, and the like from the underlying competence that enables people to talk consistently in certain ways and to produce and understand sentences they’ve never heard before.  Even William F Buckley would occasionally get himself entangled in long center embedded sentences but nobody would claim because of that that WFB had “poor” grammar.  

    You might want to take a look at Steven Pinker’s _The Language Instinct_ and especially Chapter 12 “The Language Mavens”.

  • jffoster

    You may live the rest of your life unbothered.  Sentences are things which English has long allowed prepositions to come at the end of.   Modern Standard Dutch, a “1st cousin” of English, and I believe also Frisian, a Sister language to English and its closest relative, also allow sentences to be structures one can end a preposition with.   (The mors distantly related German does not, although even there I am told that some Western German dialects can leave propositions “dangling”. 

    As many real linguists writing on the history of English have pointed out, the _no prepositions at ends of sentences_ “rule” isn’t really a natural rule of English at all but a made up artificial fabrication of the 17th or early 18th century by third string literati who thought that Latin was the epitome of how language ought be and that where English worked differently from Latin, it, English, was broke and ought be fixed.  These were the same people who gave us the non-rule “rule” ageinst “splitting” infinitives.  You might say they didn’t want English to boldly go where Latin had not gone before.

    For some reading you might enjoy, see my reply above to Anon72. 

  • emwhitephd

    We should distinguish the trivial, like most of the above, from the important. As a senior professor, I took mentoring more junior faculty as part of the job. For instance, I reminded a young professor that it was a good policy to keep the office door open during conferences with students. I counseled new PhDs taking new jobs to listen carefully during their first year on the job before they began offering opinions, since they needed to understand context. There are enough hidden rules in our complex profession that we need to share with younger folk; we shouldn’t waste time or social capital on the minor matters. 

  • mmullins

    It depends on the nature of your relationship to the faculty member in question, and the nature of the save.  Because I have been in these situations myself (having something in my teeth pointed out to me, graciously, by a colleague), I would more than likely help another colleague out by mentioning this in a tactful way.  Regarding the grammar question, I would not correct a colleague, and especially not in a public venue.  This has also happened to me, in a public venue.  It was completely and totally humiliating, and I will never forget that moment.  I still cringe when I think of the superior tone with which the gaffe was pointed out to me.  It was not, in my view, meant to be a gracious correction, but a cruel and tactless attack.  If there are other areas where junior colleagues need assistance, I usually point these out, but again, in a tactful manner and never in public.  The saying “praise in public, criticize in private” resonates. 

  • johnbarnes

    I’ve been grateful for nearly all the comments and notes of that kind I’ve received.  (Even ones I suspected were given with at least partial intent to hurt my feelings, so long as they were probably truthful, though in those cases I did make a tiny little mental advisory note).  Gronk think this “civilized” thing hard. Gronk glad get help.

    Regarding “had went,” I find “had drank” is much more common in educated people who came from less-educated backgrounds.  As in “I had drank at Northwestern.”  But your mileage may vary.

  • westfalldavis

    Allison,  tell me about the spinach in my teeth–but not in front of anyone else. Chalk up the grammar differences as a speech pattern from a region or social class that is grating to your ears but not likely to be changed in another adult. Other career advice, if done in the good spirit of a mentor or coach, I would welcome. I know while I know my subject matter on a world class level, it’s the subtle social nuances that drive me nuts!

  • 5768

    While some sins are greater than others, those that are the most common likely cover a multitude of others. Increasingly frequent misuse of “less” for “fewer” among the populace is without doubt symptomatic of a widespread yet slumbering mathematical illiteracy, for example. Correct at the level of the the grammatical and thereby raise the consciousness if not the mathematical acumen of the culture. Be public about it–write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Nothing less is “polite.”

  • kathden

    I think you are right in a very general sense, but your comments here overlook the phenomenon that linguists call “code switching.” For example, what you will use in Western Ohio (say, in one of your classes at the University of Dayton) as a regionalism you won’t at the MLA in Los Angeles.

    If we ascribe ignorance of language to the person who fails to code-switch (or who makes a genuine mistake in his/her current code through inattention, confusion, or the like) we are being ignorant ourselves. But there are errors relative to code….

  • jffoster

    The use of ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ in Standard Literary but less and less often among fewer and fewer and fewer people in Spoken English, Standard or not, has nothing whatever to do with mathematics.  It has rather to do with whether a noun is of the type we call _count_ noun (horse, book, kinds of cheeses, &c) versus the kind we call _mass_,  butter, cheese, …).
    The use of these two lexically unrelated quantifiers is an irregular unpredictable peculiarity of English and it is not surprising that one would expand at the expense of the other. Moreover, in many instances it is ambiguous whether items individually is considered or a collection of items as a whole. So it is small wonder that Express Checkout Lane signs will vary, some reading “12 items or fewer” (which I, being an Old Fogey, prefer) or “12 items or less”, which is coming to be the more common form.  Keep in mind that when fewer and fewer people say “fewer”, that will become Standard English.

    But it has nothing to do with mathematical “literacy”  — (“numeracy” ??).  It has no more to do with that than does the general convention of verb~subject number agreement in languages that have it and we do not send people who are having trouble learning it in a target language to remedial arithmetic class.

  • jffoster

    Sorry, the edit function doesn’t work any more.  The last sentence in the 1st pgf above should read  “Keep in mind that when fewer and fewer people say “fewer”, that will cease to be Standard English and _less_ will become the quantifier for all nouns, count or mass.”

  • cgoodson

    If I feel that they will be able to accept the criticism in the spirit in which it is given, I try to be honest and find an occasion to tell them discreetly, especially if they are people I supervise whose future I care about.  For example, I told one person who reports to me that his habit of entertaining himself prior to meetings by sitting at the table with a deck of cards playing Solitaire just looked bad… nothing WRONG with it, but looked BAD… I suggested that instead, he should bring some professional reading with him, to send the subtle message that he is very engaged with his profession and interested in improving his knowledge.  

  • wrappedupinbooks

    I’m originally from the south, and almost everyone I know from back home belongs to the “The Had Went Society.” A variation that I particularly enjoy (and hear from friends and family members all the time) is “I had done went.”  

  • 5768

    Ordinal numbers and cardinal numbers have nothing to do with mathematics?  Did Cantor know that?

  • jffoster

    5786, You didn’t say anything about ordinal and cardinal numbers — or even ordinal and cardinal numerals–in your comment to which I was replying.  You wrote about _less”_and _fewer_ and claimed that their “frequent misuse is without doubt symptomatic of a widespread yet slumbering mathematical illiteracy.”   What has that got to do with ordinal and cardinal numerals?   BTW not every language distinguishes morphologically or lexically between ordinal and cardinal numerals.  Even English has alternative forms — e.g.  “book number five”.

  • erlibrarian

    After reading this article, I now have “had went” stuck in my head and will probably inadvertently use it during the course of conversation. :)

  • temporaryname

    (Actually replying to kathden’s response to jffoster, but the Chronicle apparently doesn’t allow such deeply nested responses.)

    I don’t use ‘had went’, but I’m from the linguistic South, and I’ll stop using y’all and double modals (e.g., ‘We all might would improve things by relaxing about usage conventions’) when I’m dead, no sooner—and that includes at the MLA.

    For many of us, after all, our linguistic regionalisms are a point of pride, not shame—and if you pointed out my use of a ‘might should’ somewhere and suggested that I change what I do to appear more “professional”, I’d (gently) tell you as much.

  • kathden

    (likewise, a response to temporaryname)

    Fine, you can do that. Many people will, or something like it, and they’ll be perfectly intelligible at the MLA. They also might appear–depending on how they pull it off–a bit of a character, or a rube, or a crank (probably a variable mixture of these and other possible characters, according to the receptivity of each hearer).

    Be proud of your regionalism! But I still might gently point it out to how you were being heard. And if you were my graduate student, I would in no uncertain terms explain personal vs. professional rhetoric and the realities of the academic job market.

  • minnesotan

    Oh, Foster, just stop! ;)

    If I have to hear one more student say “I want to diversely and impactfully contribute to student life, here at Big State U.,” I’m going to hang myself. (And for the benefit of my students, I will then be hanged. Whether or not I’m hung is none of your business!)

    As I am the professor, I am the arbiter of professional English in my class. This means marketingese/admissionsese words like “diverse” and “impactful” will not be overused, *especially* when splitting a verb in half. (You don’t say “I’m going to lec about philosophy today ture,” do you?) As a teacher I take very seriously the responsibility of making my students sound less like idiot frat boys and bimbo sorority girls than they did when they first entered my classroom. I am the last line of defense before these teen-and-twenty-something children get let out into the real world, where their rhetorically unsophisticated utterances can batter everyone’s tender sensibilities.

    To paraphrase a classic film: Good, bad, I’m the guy with the grades. I intend to use them to make my students realize that the discourse communities they want to join as professionals and scholars do not look kindly on memos begun with the salutation, “Whassup, dudes.”

  • http://twitter.com/JLBMedia Jessica B.

    One of my colleagues and I email each other if we notice the other drifting toward a faux pas. It’s extremely helpful!

  • jffoster

    Just for the record, Kathden, I’ve never been to an MLA meeting in my life and have no interest in going.  I went to LSA, ALT,  and AAA meetings — Linguistic Society of America, Association for Linguistic Typology,  and American Anthropological Association.  And that’s significant because the attitudes toward and understandings of the nature of linguistic differences among these latter v. the MLA are somewhat different, though more overlapping than they once were.

    As to your comments about “code switching”, I don’t necessarily disagree but code switching is actually a kind of fuzzy notion.  People often in complex societies learn more than one dialect, and some of course they learn less completely than others.  So to say there are “errors relative to code” is simply to say that a speaker may make errors in speaking another dialect of their own language not native to them just as those of us who  speak other languages not native to us may and often do make errors a native speaker would not consistently make.  It never seemed to me that “code switching”  did much work for us, i.e. led to much insight.  

  • jffoster

    Stop what, Minnesotan?  Talking about how language really is rather than how you wish it were?  

    You ask, rhetorically, “You don’t say “I’m going to lec about philosophy today ture,” do you?

    No. And neither does anybody else. So what’s your point with this straw man?  Nobody splits verbs like ‘lecture’  into  *lec   X  ture.’    Verbs on the other hand like  ‘make out’ meaning ‘discern’  are always split by native English speakers when the direct object is a pronoun,  as in
       You must have a point but I can’t quite MAKE it OUT.      
    Not *make out it.’

    What you seem so upset about is not matters of grammar at all, but matters of style, register (social dialect, roughly), or things Kathden might cover under “code switching”.  Your students still do not have “poor grammar”. 

    BTW, they have a good Linguistics Department at the U.  Might try a course or two.

  • talk_nerdy_to_me

    I am from the American South also. When I am at home, I hurt when I say y’all, and the other person becomes visibly concerned that I might be a complete moron. I do not use the term when I travel because I understand that many other regions see it as ignorance personified in pronoun form. At these times, I am intensely aware of the power of language as a system of subjugation that extends far beyond the grammar rules that intend to clarify meaning. As professors, we should be mindful to this fact and seek to teach students that grammar is used for clarity as well as other less virtuous reasons.

  • 11161452

    I’d like to hear some comments about the more serious, career-destroying mistakes. For example, a professor has a midlife crisis involving having an affair, and in his emotional fog he decides to install the affair partner as his next graduate assistant, no matter what the handbook says about such arrangements. Should a colleague/friend even try to save him from himself?

  • kathden

    This a reply to the last jffoster entry:

    Well, you don’t believe that it’s possible for a native speaker of X to make a semantic or grammatical error in X. I know that this is possible in English–for me at least–with respect to both. And I don’t believe that I am committing a category mistake.

  • jffoster

    Kathden, 
        Read again my first response above to Anon1972.  You’ll see that I DO believe it is possible for a native speaker to make an error semantic or grammatical. It happens all the time. Read in particular my 2nd paragraph.  But if a certain pattern in a native speaker is used consistently, that’s not “poor grammar”, it’s just different grammar.  

    Remember that a Standard Language is simply a dialect that has the army, navy, police, control of the schools or other normative institutions, and control of access to jobs usually deemed more desireable.   Only state level societies can have standard languages — can have, not must have.  It is not clear for instance that there was a Middle High German standard dialect.   It is not possible to speak a language without speaking a dialect — every language has at least one dialect.  But whether a dialect is a standard dialect or not is a social-cultural-historical set of facts, not a linguistic set.  There is nothing inherent for instance in

    “Jane and me went to the movies.  that renders it incapable of being a standard and of high prestige or somehow the product of “poorer grammar”   than is
    ‘Jane and I went to the movies.        In French in fact   “Jane and me went to the movies.’ is exactly what one says.,

        Jeanne et MOI  sommes alles au cinema.    not  
      ***Jeanne et je sommes alles…… 

    And _moi_ is the form that is the object of a preposition (as well as of a conjunction.)

    Now,  does French have “poor grammar”?

  • averah

    The only person who needs saving, in the examples above, is the one who answered, “If I like them, I’ll say something. If I don’t, I’ll keep quiet and let them go on like that for the rest of the night.” People forget spinach in one’s teeth, and will pretend to forget one’s skirt caught in the back of one’s pantyhose, but nobody ever forgets the uncharitable people.

  • temporaryname

    So why not just go ahead and use what you grew up with, and teach students that grammar is nothing to be ashamed of?

  • temporaryname

    Good point—yeah, there are things like the whole “had went” issue, but those are sideshows.

    The problem is that telling someone that they’re making a career-threatening mistake is that doing so might itself be a career-threatening mistake for the person giving the advice, particularly if the person making the initial mistake is senior or politically well-positioned. People aren’t always rational about being told they’re wrong, after all.

  • 11161452

    Yes, even though I am not employed by the university where this professor sits on the faculty, he is a person who could potentially help me professionally, so an intervention would indeed carry risk. And yes, midlife crises are notorious for leading to irrational thought and self-destructive actions. Bottom line:  if I thought it might do some good, I’d venture it…but this guy is so delusional that he’d ignore the advice and think less of me for offering it. Sometimes people just have to move through rough patches on their own.

  • seannotkelly

    [sic] LOL

  • http://twitter.com/DeSaillyRecruit Rosalind De Sailly

    Speaking using a dialectic that is only used within a part of the US and that is not widely used in academic publications or media will reduce intelligibility to international audiences. Bear that in mind – there is a wider world out there, for engaging audiences, with impacts on student enrollments, research collaborations and potential career options for those involved.

    From Sydney, Australia

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