[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

After last month’s summer music review, a number of readers wrote in with some very personal stories of how pop music has changed their lives. Jennifer from Minneapolis wrote in with a touching attempt at a poem that described how Neil Diamond helped her get through puberty without having a breakdown and “Kelly” from Brooklyn credits her ringtone version of Mims’ “This Is Why I’m Hot,” which contains the lyrics “I’m hot ‘cuz I’m fly/You ain’t ‘cuz you not,” with subconsciously teaching her enough about logical reasoning to help boost her LSAT score 5 points and catapult her into our very own Law School.

Kelly’s transformative experience notwithstanding, the plentiful linguistic gifts of popular music, it seems, are mainly lexicographic.  That is, it gives us lots of new words. For instance, Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy” provided the world with the endlessly useful ‘pompatus,’ and hip hop is responsible for the diffusion, if not the generation of, ‘crunk’ and ‘shorty.’  In the case of Snoop Dogg’s ‘-izzle’ language we have a vocabulary so rich that some linguists believe it will soon replace both the dreaded Pig Latin and Oppish, that hideous invention of middle school girls that involved, inter alia, putting ‘Op’ at the ends of words, as the preferred nonsense language of the nation’s young people.

Some of our finest musicians, however, are not content to merely introduce new words.  They aim to influence the architecture underlying interpersonal communication – our grammar.  Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” known to Dylan scholars as one of his most widely popular hits, is actually an extended commentary on the disappearing colloquial distinction between “lie,” which means to recline or be situated, and “lay,” which is generally a transitive verb meaning to put down or arrange.  Moreover, it’s believed that Dylan set the lyrics to such an easy melody in order to sow the seeds of confusion among the hoi polloi while simultaneously increasing the antipathy that the traditionally upper middle class grammarians of the world feel for the untutored masses and thereby ignite the Revolution that so many were working for in the late 60s.

In the past ten years, this tradition of linguistically conscious pop music has been carried on by the warrior poet Ludacris and, most recently, by Stacy Ann Ferguson, better known as Fergie.  And but so whereas Dylan’s song seems deliberately calibrated to foment rebellion and tear our country apart, Fergie approaches her songs with a message of unity. If we all spelled the same way, her music implies, there would be no war.

Now, some of you may know Fergie as the leathery former frontlady of the Black Eyed Peas and the one responsible for one of the worst songs of the last few years, 2005’s “My Humps.” Others as the maxillofacially curious fiancé of Transformers‘ heartthrob Josh Duhamel. All of you waiting for a slightly more sophisticated reason to kneel in front of Fergie and kiss the hem of her daisy dukes can now refer to her subtle foray into the field of linguistics as evidence of her much-deserved celebrity status. I’m actually not talking about the fact that listening to a Fergie song often doubles as an advanced lesson in self-promotional orthography  – e.g., “Fergalicious,” which teaches you how to spell ‘Stacy’, ‘Fergie’, and ‘delicious’ in the same song – but instead about her slightly more controversial embrace of the ’singular they,’ one of the hobbyhorses of prescriptive linguists everywhere.

The ‘singular they’ is the use of the pronoun ‘they’ in a sentence such as “Any girl who dates a fellow law student is dumb; they must have an IQ below 100.”  The powdered wig set would insist you substitute ‘she’ for ‘they’ in the second sentence. There are complicated linguistic arguments about the different semantic work each of those choices does, but it’s safe to say that people have been using ‘they’ in this fashion since before the time of Shakespeare, and that when somebody tries to tell you it’s grammatically incorrect, they’re usually wrong.

By way of illustration, I present a verse from Fergie’s recent (and terrible) “Big Girls Don’t Cry”:

I hope you know, I hope you know

that this has nothing to do with you.

It’s personal, myself and I

we got some straightening out to do.

And I’m gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket.

Stephen Pinker talks extensively about the problem of nominally singular antecedents being associated with plural pronouns (them, they, etc.) in his book “The Language Instinct.” A related excerpt from page 391 of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition:

“Everyone returned to his seat” [ed. What your elementary school teacher would have you substitute for the allegedly ungrammatical ‘Everyone returned to their seat.’] makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission to be in the audience, and everyone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph […]

The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:

Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.

Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

Pinker goes on to explain that the dissonance we intuitively hear in the ‘improvement’ has to do with the linguistic relationship between everyone and they. That is, they are not functioning in this case as ‘pronoun’ and ‘antecedent’ but as the more obscure ‘quantifier’ and ‘bound variable,’ a distinction that while interesting is sufficiently wonky as to be beyond the ambit of this here humble column.

This is all a very long-winded way of encouraging you all to really listen to the music around you, even the stuff you think is garbage.  The music of Fergie and Bob Dylan has important lessons to teach us all about the world we live in, and for those of you who don’t read the Language Log blog on a regular basis, you’ll sleep soundly knowing that you can probably absorb a freshman course in generative grammar by listening to Top 40 radio.

Song of the Gunner by Walt Whitman

1

I raise my hand, and sing myself,

And what I assume nobody should assume,

And all I read in Hornbooks will be shared with you.

I never loaf or smoke a bowl,

I preen and gloat at my ease observing ev’ry post-hoc fallacy.

Torts class, every atom of my life, form’d from this toil, this school.

Born here of lawyers born here from gunners the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now twenty-three years old, talking begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Meads and nap’d drools forsaken,

Non-latin phrases shunned for what they are: plebes’ language, verboten.

My ardor for precedents made, I wish to share at every hazard,

Thoughts unchecked without creative energy.

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

G. Edward Terwilliger began twisting Charlotte’s nipples as if they were radio dials, simultaneously palpating her soft palate with his tongue, alternately flexing and relaxing the tip with strokes in a ratio that matched the vote distribution in Heller. District of Columbia v. Heller 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008). Flick flick flick went the tongue, but it was the delicate dance of his thumb and forefinger that occupied his cerveau, was his bailiwick. Suddenly, like a flash of fluorescent light, he remembered the 20^th anniversary edition of Men’s Health that his roommate had slipped under the door earlier that afternoon as he was preparing to deliver a world-historical bowel movement into the toilet’s gaping white porcelain maw.  Brown it was, inert with extinguished life, an ex post indictment of an entire day’s worth of time wasted at student org meetings.

There, on page 36 of his mind, a firm reminder to vary the deployment of one’s sexual arsenal with each new conquest. God forbid the rest of the females in Law Firms & Legal Careers catch on to his lack of imagination. Mutatis mutandis, Terwilliger retreated deep into his mind, reached deep into his quiver – oh god! And now she quivered in kind! It must be fate!  – and, caressing the entire dimpled terrain of her areola, traversing back and forth between its murky surface and the milky white mammary tissue that spread out beyond it in invisible axial rings, looking very much like the surface of Venus on a summer solstice’s eve… – and he lovingly explored her breast with the élan of Marco Polo making his way to Asia, finally pressing triumphantly on her nipple and then waiting, mouth agape, for what that venerable periodical assured him would be Her Best Orgasm Ever.

Just then, like the Mighty Colorado at its confluence with the Green River, a wash of acetylcholine overwhelmed her synaptic cleft and she reared back like a horse frightened at full gallop. “Will you still love me tomorrow when your blood is no longer saturated with the eponymous Iced Tea from Long Island?.” she asked. “I’ll never keep you at arms length,” he whispered. “Your five-pointed highlighter is poking me,” she groaned. “I’m sorry,” he said, and removed his pants.

The Law Student’s Odyssey by Homer

LEEWS, speak to us now of those study techniques

that assure him a top 1/3 finish after managing

to suck his bank account Dry.

He came to see

some undergrads’ panties, maybe learn the common law.

While drunk at Rick’s his spirit suffered many torments.

And he fought to buy a Shark Bowl and take some co-eds home,

but though he wanted to, he could not get their digits—

They all replied and said they had no phones, the fools.

So he feasted on the burritos of Panchero,

God of Post-Bar Food—that’s how was snatched away his chance

of sleeping without distress. So now, son of Mass Produced Study Aids

tell us his fall from glory, starting anywhere you wish.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer left Harvard College and went to study experimental physics at the famous Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge (England), he showed up and was, for the first time, surrounded by lots of people that were better than him at something. This is the guy who ended up knowing more about quantum physics than all but a handful of people in the US by the age of 25.  The same man who in the early 1940s helped figure out how to harness the recent discovery of nuclear fission and build an almost unimaginably destructive bomb out of comparatively tiny amounts of material.  Which is to say that he changed the course of the 20th century.  Oppenheimer was by all accounts a certifiable genius, but he was clumsy enough in a lab that he was apparently unable to conduct the high level experiments that he wanted to pursue.  He was so thunderstruck by this realization that he became depressed and suicidal.

What’s the point of all this, you ask? Well, this little parable is meant to illustrate one of the ineluctable facts of life: you are not as smart or good at stuff as you think you are.  Most of us, however, do not need didactic stories from the pre-Internet days to hammer this point home.  The closely related corollary is that at some point in your life–and for many of you law school is that point–you will in fact realize that you are not as spectacularly, effortlessly brilliant as your Mom led you to believe.  But the good news is that you can’t, and don’t have to be, good at everything.  What matters is what you do when confronted with these abrupt confirmations of your own vulnerability, inadequacy, ultimate meaninglessness, untreatable athlete’s foot, etc.

Oppenheimer ended up moving to Germany to become a golden god of theoretical physics.  Those of us with slightly more pedestrian brains don’t have that option.  But all but the very lucky or delusional will have to make similar choices.  We can either plow ahead, camouflage our deficiencies and become consumed by desperately trying not to be found a fraud, or we can embrace our own particular level of incompetence and harness it.

I know there’s a special kind of marrow-level sadness that accompanies the end of what, for many of us, was a prolonged period of adolescent self-regard.  But there are few people who go on to do great things without abandoning this egoistic perception of their own intelligence.  Even if you’re the second coming of Eve Brensike-Primus, there’s value in assuming the position of the dull student and asking questions accordingly.  Hell, even Socrates is believed to have said, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”  Now, you can quibble with the meaning of the phrase in context all you want, but I’m choosing to give the middle finger to the intentional fallacy and use it here in accordance with its popular deployment in countless self-help books.

For all their faults, many of the students often derided as gunners are on to something.  The first year of law school is full of collections of simple words that give way to entire subfields of incredibly complex scholarship.  Some of it is probably so much tenure-track onanism, but scholars in these areas aren’t completely inventing all of the difficulties in deciphering phrases like “to regulate Commerce.” The law isn’t rocket science, but neither is it tiddlywinks, and a merely superficial understanding of a deceptively simple concept will frequently manifest itself further up the pyramid where the really interesting and important stuff is happening.  So, follow the lead of your local gunner: take a foundational concept and assume, if necessary, that you’re too dense to understand it.  Ask questions, break it apart, roll it around up there.

To unburden oneself from this idea that you either immediately get something and are smart or don’t and are a moron is really liberating.  There’s no shame in failing to understand something the first time around.  In fact, I would argue that a kind of willed idiocy is a virtue.  This can obviously be taken to an extreme, and I wouldn’t recommend walking into Kroger and demanding to know why Grape Nuts have neither grapes nor nuts.  Some of our zany language’s logic-defying quirks are in fact better left a mystery.

But there’s a reason why that annoying, extroverted person in your Spanish class was able to learn things much more quickly.  For better or worse, they weren’t worried about looking like a buffoon, like they didn’t know something.  And most areas of study are the same way.  If you can get rid of your preconceptions about what you’re supposed to be able to effortlessly understand and stop worrying about how that might directly reflect on your intellectual capacity, you will find a measure of comfort and, paradoxically, self-belief in the embrace of your own idiocy.

Sometime in the spring of 2007, just before I decided to enroll at Michigan, I read about “Building a Better Legal Profession,” a new group composed of Stanford Law students devoted to, well, doing that thing in their name.  What a great idea, I thought; who doesn’t want better things?  Similar bursts of creative thinking did wonders for the mousetrap!  So these folks proceeded to put together a much-ballyhooed report cataloguing the mostly self-evident evils of BigLaw and otherwise communicating their earnest desire for more work/life balance and co-workers with varied skin color.  And while many of their goals are laudable, if you read the manifestos they’ve sprinkled around the web it becomes quite clear that these students are engaged in what has to be called, only slightly uncharitably, a T-20 circle jerk.  Essentially, they want the option of doing less work for less money and they want this opportunity at the country’s most prestigious firms (manifesto #1 was sent to the AmLaw 100) even though they claim that “[i]t’s not about finding the most prestigious place with the highest salary.”  It would be a stretch of only the physical sciences to say that the sense of entitlement oozes out of these papers.

Of course, now that we’re all cattle-class passengers on the silver gleaming death machine known as the Law School Graduating Classes of 2010-2012 (aka Those Students Considerably Less Idiotic but More Hopelessly Screwed Than the Class of 2013), it’s tough to say precisely what the intrepid students of BBLP hath wrought.  They barely had any chance at all to work their magic before the bottom of the legal market fell out and the door of opportunity flew out the window.  That’s right, the door flew out the window; that’s how bad things are out there.  Continue to imagine, if you will indulge the onslaught of metaphors, the atmosphere on this plane.  The engines have stalled, the nose is pitched sharply downward, and an unrepentant Kevin Smith is hurtling past the bulkhead as a human projectile, endangering the lives of countless passengers.  Which is to say, the current environment is such that it doesn’t seem likely that law students are going to be particularly receptive to the idea that they have any market power at all, let alone the ability to wield it for the benefit of the rest of the profession.

And yet, just last spring, students at such “premier law schools” as Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia (quoting a National Lawyer piece on the group) gathered en masse (50 people total, actually) at the BBLP’s hilariously named  “National Conference of Student Leaders” to talk about the so-called movement.  While the group’s goals ostensibly include increased diversity and the desire for a positively robust pro bono program, the main rallying cry is about work/life balance.  In late 2007, the BBLP blog published the results of a survey claiming that summer associates were willing to take less money for fewer hours.  “Firms, take note,” they said, with no small measure of confidence that somebody was listening.  And sure, this was a few months before the start of the massive BigLaw layoffs in early 2008, so a certain small amount of the solipsism here is forgivable.  Sometimes it can be difficult to realize how good you have things.

But this idea that law students and new associates are going to drive any of the much-needed change in BigLaw culture is absurd.  This complete detachment from the realities of the working world is a symptom of the total lack of work experience among law students.  One of the many reasons you don’t see a comparable group of Business School students threatening to march on Goldman Sachs is that they found out from time spent working that you usually can’t have your cake and eat it too.  If you want to do interesting work and leave at 5pm, you’re going to have to poke around a bit to find that job, and it’s not going to be with an AmLaw 100 firm as a first-year associate.

Happily, these magical bastions of work/life balance and lower starting salary already exist.  They’re the smaller firms in smaller cities with less demanding clients.  Or they’re in any number of other industries that don’t involve having clients at all.  Newsflash, folks: you’re in the service industry! If Goldman Sachs wants that prospectus combed over for the 15th time, you (or some other overpaid associate) are going to do it, because Goldman is paying a lot of money for the privilege of telling you what to do.

Now, the billable hour is undoubtedly a hideous way to do business.  But its death is going to be brought about by clients that demand an end to astronomical bills for the half-awake efforts of an army of entitled know-nothings.  Or maybe firms are going to realize that the billable hour creates terrible incentives for their own employees.  But the billable hour is not going to go away on the strength of arguments about the inhumane treatment of associates.  And until firms are no longer constrained by the huge per-employee overhead costs, they’re going to be completely unwilling to even countenance the idea of hiring 1.5 times as many people to do the same amount of work.  Your fantasies of working from home and shoveling fistfuls of Count Chocula into your mouth while you complete exactly 8 hours of due diligence are going to have to wait a while longer.

I applaud the efforts of the BBLP to collect and provide information that was previously hidden away on NALP’s byzantine website.  And I think that students should certainly consider diversity and a firm’s demonstrated commitment to pro bono service when deciding where to go work after law school.  But let’s not kid ourselves about the differences between most of the top firms.  There are certainly exceptions, but most of the firms are functionally indistinguishable, and they’re only going to change in the ways the BBLP wants when both parties’ interests align.  And so long as big firms continue to want to make large amounts of money by doing large amounts of work, a lot of that work is going to get done by recent graduates.  If law students want to love their job and love it exclusively between 9am and 5pm, they need to look outside BigLaw for that experience.

As your 1L year gets under way, increasing numbers of adults in your life will describe the main difficulty of the first year of law school as “learning to think like a lawyer.” Not only do they make it sound exhausting and terrible, but loads of them have packaged this observation along with a general admonition against becoming a lawyer at all. This is information that might have been helpful a year or so ago but now seems more like hostility cloaked as advice. They’ll come brandishing out-of-context Shakespeare quotes and bemoaning the state of tort reform in two-sentence talking points and will aggressively accuse you of mortgaging your future only to be turned into a bigger and more useless jerk than you already are. There may be something to that last bit, actually, but now’s not the time to sort all that out.