If you haven’t Neville Longbottomed yet, maybe there is still hope for you. But if you are unaware that Neville Longbottom, a character in the Harry Potter films played by actor Matthew Lewis, became a verb in 2013, then Emmy J. Favilla’s style guide, A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, might be all the self-help you need in an age and time contemplating the banishment of the subjunctive mood.
Neville Longbottoming debuted as a verb when the actor tussled with puberty only to resurface unscarred, “the pinnacle of beauty” as per Favilla. It means becoming attractive after battling the onslaught of teenage hormones, and is a somewhat whimsical indicator of what this handbook, published in November 2017, has set out to achieve, and who it intends to instruct.
Favilla is chatty, honest, and self-deprecatory, informing the reader in the introduction to the guide that she is neither an academic, nor a lexicographer, nor a grammar historian, “I did not study linguistics in my collegiate years. I wasn’t even an English major,” she admits. “I am constantly looking up words for fear of using them incorrectly and everyone in my office and my life discovering that I am a fraud.” Cutesy confessions and persistent horror at her many deficiencies notwithstanding, the former global copy chief of BuzzFeed (she is now senior commerce editor) examines the tricky business of English syntax, punctuation, and changes in the lexicon since the dawn of the internet age, and in subsequent eras when its lower-case usage became acceptable.
A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, Emmy J. Favilla,
Bloomsbury, 2017
The guide is never pedantic, but it does inform the reader about the difference between whet and wet, capital and capitol, stationery and stationary. “Sorry. Low-hanging fruit,” Favilla writes, in the chapter titled ‘Getting Things Right: The Stuff That Matters’. In it, she is unequivocal about the need for grammatical accuracy and sentence clarity: “For professionals who work in the digital space, integrity is especially important; competition is stiff, and there are countless other sources out there clamouring for our attention, their clammy virtual hands outstretched towards our exhausted virtual faces.”
Digital writers and editors are warned against frolicking in the World Wide Web with their thoughts and feelings flashing unedited on websites, blogs, and news portals. To blithely disregard the rules of grammar for the sake of appearing cool or conversational or attuned to millennial audiences is to compromise the integrity of a piece. To capitalise and punctuate correctly, to fret over singular subjects agreeing with singular verbs (and plural subjects with plural verbs), to keep tense consistent, to know when a slash is more appropriate than a hyphen are all hallmarks of responsible editing, and content that is as error-free as it is engaging.
The style guide effortlessly prances into difficult terrain, to examine the language of inclusion and political-correctness with the glee of a smiley-face emoji. Chapter four, ‘How to Not Be a Jerk: Writing About Sensitive Topics’, is disarmingly self-explanatory. It discusses terminology commonly used to write about controversial and emotionally-charged issues like abortion or suicide or rape and sexual assault or disabilities and diseases.
Favilla deliberates upon why certain words and phrases are insensitive; she suggests alternatives that are contemporary and less offensive to politically-aware readers. For instance, when writing about adoption, she proposes: “Avoid any form of the phrase give up for adoption when referring to a child who has been placed for adoption; preferred phrasing is place for adoption, a neutral term that is absent of the implication of abandonment by a birth parent or the idea that the adoptive parents robbed the child of their real parents (e.g., she placed the baby for adoption rather than she gave up the baby for adoption).”
Emmy Favilla. Credit: Twitter
The ease with which Favilla tackles the stylistic quandaries of all that is unsettling or provocative or morally ambiguous is perhaps the greatest achievement of this handbook. It is appropriate, for instance, to use the word slave in a historical context, for, “we don’t want to whitewash the severity of slavery in US history.” In modern contexts, however, Favilla suggests the term enslaved person – “use people-first language when writing about slavery, unless it appears in a direct quote.” When writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, she advises the use of the word queer or the acronym LGBT, when referring to the community, not the word gay. And then again, “LGBT is only appropriate when referring to the broader community or groups of people, not when referring to individuals.”
The style guide has valuable lessons for Indian newsrooms, digital portals, and websites. Squabbling tribes of desk editors, frantically seeking validation for an inelegantly placed em dash, or confused about the basic functions of a semicolon, could benefit from Favilla’s bubbly guidance. There are other transgressions that reporters, columnists, and editors might be alerted to, if they choose to consult this handbook. The word alleged, for instance, which appears frequently in news reports about crime, and in particular, rape, is one that Favilla is wary of: “Much like claims, alleged can imply doubt, though its use is often legally necessary to avoid a libelous statement; try not to overuse it.” She suggests the use of more specific verbs, and establishes her point with these sentences:
Original: The woman looked shaken as she described how the man allegedly pushed her.
Edited: The woman looked shaken as she testified that the man pushed her down.
Several of Favilla’s recommendations have riled grammarians, and others of crotchety temperament. British-American linguist Geoffrey Pullum writes in Lingua Franca, the language and writing blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ And this ‘world without whom’ of which she speaks? In reality, whom already has zero frequency at the beginning of clauses in conversation: Whom are you dating? is something real people simply never say. Yet whom survives immediately after verbs or prepositions, especially the latter: Real people do say things like politicians for whom truth doesn’t matter.”
Real people and real language are preoccupations that Favilla readily admits to, and the style guide embraces ‘real’ words. Concocting words like science-ing or science-y, without feeling guilty or embarrassed, is a practice Favilla describes as “freeing and fun”. Non verbs, when used as verbs, are also similarly liberating. For instance, words like personing and adulting, which represent certain emotional inconsistencies rather than real functions, are common on the internet, and lend a certain casual-silly tone to a sentence that is very real.
A world without ‘whom’ is perhaps a contentious proposition; one with awkward commas and bloated parentheses and en dashes in place of their longer counterparts is downright unbearable. Favilla’s style guide, if acknowledged for its merits and forgiven for its perceived impudence, could speed up the Neville Longbottoming of many a gawky piece of news or literature.
Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
