Perspective from the 19^th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Those who know me know that I like words and try my best to use them correctly, not always perfectly though that is my goal.

So, two stories in national publications caught my attention in the last couple days.

• An essayist for the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein, showed up recently with a story about hackneyed words that have outlived their usefulness.
• A Columbia University linguist, John McWhorter, according to the Washington Post, published a witty book entitled, “Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.”

It was good for me to read both stories because they called to mind two issues for me – words I often use that have become hackneyed and the trouble with knowing what pronouns to use these days.

Here is the introduction to what Epstein wrote under this headline:  “The Incredibly Massive Number of Hackneyed Words Is Surreal; Overused, meaningless phrases fall out of fashion:

“A hackneyed phrase is one characterized by its unoriginality, overuse and, not least, imprecision.  The air seems filled with such phrases just now.

“Consider how the often-used word ‘focused’ has taken on the adjective ‘laser,’ to become the fully hackneyed ‘laser-focused.’  Not all hackneyed language comes in full phrases; some single words also qualify. How they catch on remains a bit of a mystery but catch on they do.  ‘Incredible,’ you might say.

“You might say it, that is, if you have no ear for language and don’t mind sounding like everyone else who currently avails himself of this hackneyed word.  Incredible, a synonym for unbelievable or surpassing belief, has become the hackneyed word of the day.  The word has a hackneyed history.”

For me, there also are words I use too often.  And my wife often points them out.  Good for her.  Bad for me.

I won’t bore you here with my hackneyed words and phrases because, you see, I would have to use them again to outline them.  Not worth it, but, upon reflection, here are two:

• “In the category of more than you may want to know…”
• And, when I play golf and someone asks me how I am, I often answer, “I am on the right side of the turf.”

As for the book on pronouns, here is how the Washington Post characterized it:

“Back when McWhorter started his book, the subject must have sounded a bit abstruse, but in a weird coincidence with reactionary politics, pronouns now feel hotter than climate change.  After Trump’s executive order ‘Restoring Biological Truth,’ government employees were ordered to scrub pronouns from their email signatures.  Suddenly, ‘they’ could get you fired.

“’To mess with our pronouns,’ McWhorter writes, ‘is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself.’  We’re naturally possessive about our pronouns. But he acknowledges early on, ‘My positions on these matters do not stem from any ‘conservatism’ with which I am sometimes associated.’  Indeed, he’s a descriptive linguist, a scholar interested in observing the evolution of language, not railing against its perceived misuses.”

For me on this issue, I have continued to encounter it over the years I was in government and as lobbyist, and even now as volunteer.  Especially in the case of women.

Do they want to be called “she, her, or they” – though the latter sounds bad to me, if not, at least, awkward.  On this, I’ll just continue to muddle through and use the pronoun for a woman that woman wants me to use – if, of course, they tell.  I also don’t want to make a mistake that comes back to bite me.

So, there you have it – two issues about words. 

To write about this, I could have opened one of five departments I run as director, the Department of Words Matter.  But I chose simply to write about the words, not open the department because I, like Elon Musk, am cutting my form of government.

Happy reading and make your own decisions about overused words and the proper use of pronouns.