User:Debaron

Dennis Baron (born in New York City, May 9, 1944) is a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research, which seeks to explain the present state of language and communication in historical terms, focuses on the technologies of communication; language legislation and linguistic rights; language reform; gender issues in language; language standards and minority languages and dialects; English usage; and the history and present state of the English language.

Education and Professional History

Baron received a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1965; an M.A. from Columbia University in 1968; and a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1971. He taught high school English in New York City and in Wayland, Massachusetts. Before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1975, he taught at Eastern Illinois University and at the City College of New York.

Baron has held a Fulbright Fellowship (France) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He directed the writing program at the University of Illinois for many years and served a term as head of the university's English Department as well. He twice chaired the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Public Language, which gives out the annual Doublespeak and George Orwell Awards; he edited the monograph series Publications of the American Dialect Society, and he has served on professional committees of the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America.

Research

Baron's most recent work, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), puts our still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into historical perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. Baron explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. He shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.

In The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? (Yale Univ. Press, 1990), Baron asks, "Should the United States declare English its official language?" And his answer is, "No." The "English-only" question has plagued American citizens since the founding of the country, and it has once again become the focus of heated debate, often in connection with immigration reform. Baron explores the philosophical, legal, political, educational, and sociological implications of the official-English movement, tracing the history of American attitudes toward English and minority languages during the past two centuries. Baron describes how battles to save English or minority languages have been fought in the press, the schools, the courts, and the legislatures of the country. According to Baron, the impulse to impose English and limit other languages has repeatedly arisen during periods of political or economic ferment, when non-English speakers have been targeted as subversive, unemployable, or otherwise resistant to assimilation. However, says Baron, many supporters of official English are not xenophobic but are people who believe in the ideal of one language for one nation and who argue that mastery of English is the only way to succeed in America. Baron discusses the recent background of the official English movement, explains the arguments on each side, and assesses its future.

In his Guide to Home Language Repair (National Council of Teachers of English, 1994), Baron--a.k.a. Dr. Grammar--answers the questions that he is most frequently asked about what is right and what is wrong with English. His answers stress that English is lively and elastic, that language lessons can delight as well as instruct. In refusing to tell readers whether to use that or which, Baron insists there is no simple answer to that question. Instead of prescriptions, Baron discusses timely topics: Is there a language police? Is there a politically correct term for the president's spouse? Can a doll write like a person? And, is "Make my day" a cliché?

Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary (National Council of Teachers of English, 1990) contains essays about English words, and how they are defined, valued, and discussed. The section entitled "Language Lore," examines some of the myths and misconceptions that affect attitudes toward language--and towards English in particular. "Language Usage," examines some specific questions of meaning and usage. "Language Trends," examines some controversial trends in English vocabulary, and some developments too new to have received comment before. "Language Politics," treats several aspects of linguistic politics, from special attempts to deal with the ethnic, religious, or sex-specific elements of vocabulary to the broader issues of language both as a reflection of the public consciousness and the U.S. Constitution and as a refuge for the most private forms of expression.

Grammar and Gender (Yale Univ. Press, 1986), traces the history of the sexual biases that exist in our language and describes past and present efforts to correct these biases by reforming usage and vocabulary, exploring proposals for gender-neutral language, gender-inclusive pronouns, and marriage-neutral titles like Ms. Baron argues that the way men and women view each other is reflected in--and influenced by--the language they use. He surveys dictionaries, etymologies, grammars, and general linguistic treatises from the Renaissance to the current time, looking at the ways in which etymologists have contrived stories about how words originate that often demean women and assert the superiority of men and male activities. He finds, for example, that a common assumption of early etymologists was that the language of women was derived from men's, in the same way that Eve was supposed to have come from one of Adam's ribs, and that many women's words are therefore interpreted as having negative or inferior connotations. Baron examines numerous efforts to reform sexist language, ranging from the attempt by female seminaries in the nineteenth century to grant Maids of Arts degrees, to the temporary popularity of designations such as doctoress, clerkess, and janitress, and to the evolution of the term Ms.[] He concludes with a history of more than eighty pronouns coined to fill the void of a gender-neutral pronoun.

Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1982), traces both our current concern for correctness in speech and writing and our continued suspicion of formal language regulation. In this book, Baron explores the history of American language reform and failure, examining early attitudes toward the English language in the New World, and the development of the concept of Federal English in post-Revolutionary America. Baron discusses the movements for spelling reform and for the creation of a language academy on the model of the French Academy. He examines the role of the common schools in directing the course of English through grammar instruction and considers the numerous nineteenth-century guides to correct usage, which picked up where the schools left off (or which tried to succeed where the schools had failed) in their mission to create a linguistically orthodox, uniform, and sophisticated American public. Baron concludes with a brief look at the state of current language reform, which differs very little in form or substance from its precursors. Altogether, the chapters demonstrate that language reform in America, for all its good intentions, has proved an exercise in futility.

'''Contributions to public discussions of language and technology '''

Baron blogs regularly about communication technology and about language issues on the Web of Language, a popular site read by more than 20,000 people each month, and he has written op ed essays on language issues for the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; the Chicago Tribune; and other newspapers, on topics such as official English, American resistance to studying foreign languages, and grammar. He has been a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education and has written for ''Inside Higher Education.  His article "The Epicene Pronoun: The Word that Failed" (American Speech,'' 1982) details more than eighty examples of gender-neutral English pronouns coined between the mid-nineteenth century and the present. "The President's Reading Lesson" (Education Week, 2004) critiques the direct instruction reading pedagogy being demonstrated as Pres. George W. Bush visited a second-grade class reading "The Pet Goat" at a Florida elementary school on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Baron has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, the CBC, the BBC, the Voice of America, and other radio and television stations discussing topics ranging from the impact of computers on language, to gender-neutral language, to official English, to slang and profanity.

Baron has been a legal expert witness as well, interpreting the language of contracts and advertising materials and offering opinions on the readability of documents. Baron was lead author, together with colleagues Richard W. Bailey and Jeffrey Kaplan, of "the Linguists' Brief," an amicus curiae brief in District of Columbia v. Heller[] before the U.S. Supreme Court, providing an interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the "right to bear arms" amendment) based on the grammars, dictionaries, and general usage common in the founders' day, and showing that those meanings are still common today. The brief was alluded to positively during oral arguments by Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer, and it was cited negatively in Justice Scalia's majority opinion deciding the case.

References

Baron, Dennis. 1982. "The Epicene Pronoun: The Word that Failed." American Speech 56 (1981), pp. 83-97.

Baron, Dennis. 1982. Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, pp. x + 263. ISBN 0-300-02799-0

Baron, Dennis. 1982. Going Native: The Regeneration of Saxon English. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, pp. iii + 63. Publication of the American Dialect Society no. 69.

Baron, Dennis. 1986. Grammar and Gender. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, pp. ix + 249. ISBN 0-300-03526-8

Baron, Dennis. 1990. The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, pp. xxi + 226. ISBN 0-300-04852-1

Baron, Dennis. 1990. Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. ix + 240. ISBN 0-8141-1073-8

Baron, Dennis. 1994. Guide to Home Language Repair. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. vii + 165. ISBN 0-8141-1942-5

Baron, Dennis. 2004. "The President's Reading Lesson." Education Week, Sept. 8, p. 43.

Baron, Dennis. 2009. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. xviii + 259. ISBN 978-0-19-538844-2

External links

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage