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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

Tag Archives: children

January 15, 2024 at-risk behavior

at-risk behavior

(1980’s | bureaucratese | “taking chances,” “running risks,” “courting OR flirting with disaster”)

The shift here is grammatical. “At risk” was already a common phrase, almost invariably in the predicate of the sentence, quite often preceded by a form of “to be” or “to put.” Lives are at risk/put lives at risk, and so forth. Somewhere around 1980 the hyphenated adjective phrase, falling before the noun rather than after the verb, started to turn up in the press. While the first couple examples found in LexisNexis had to do with vulnerable buildings, by the end of the decade “at-risk” had been commandeered by doctors and social workers, especially epidemiologists combating the spread of AIDS. Actions that were likely to hasten the spread, such as sharing needles or unprotected sex, were referred to delicately as “at-risk behavior.” Around the same time, “at-risk children” became popular as a term for kids who faced serious disadvantages, up to and including bodily danger, when it came to getting an education or bettering their lot in general. The two have marched together into the present with no change in usage or meaning.

“At risk,” the prepositional phrase, had several synonyms, the most grammatically similar of which was “at stake,” which formed an exact match in certain contexts (lives at risk/lives at stake). Then there was “in danger” or “in jeopardy.” They were stronger, though, suggesting immediate peril rather than a chance something might go wrong. “At risk” sometimes conveyed peril, but more often didn’t. Another roughly equivalent expression is “not secure,” (as opposed to “insecure,” signifying a state of mind) which I think comes closest to “at risk” in terms of magnitude. There is doubt about the future, and you must remain vigilant.

“At-risk behavior” carries some heft, though — stuff that can ruin your life if not end it. Today it is likely to be used not only for good old sex and drugs, but in the context of gambling, failing to wear a seat belt, or bullying and various forms of self-harm among the young. Which makes sense, because “behavior” turns up most often around children and teenagers, a word for “conduct” or “actions” that tends to have a patronizing tone because of that persistent association. The word also has a sneaky duality that allows it to denominate single acts, or a number of actions forming a telling pattern. “At-risk behavior” can go either way as a reference to one deed or many. It stubbornly remains a word of ill omen; its use almost inevitably presages disaster or decline.

Bureaucrats are a fertile source of new expressions; Lex Maniac has covered fifteen or so and at least as many more that may stem from the same root. The essential point about bureaucratese is that it strives to be neutral. “Risky” is not neutral, because it has a clear negative implication. “At risk” attempts to mitigate that by noting in a matter-of-fact manner that certain things you do, or fail to do, may put you in harm’s way. Bureaucrats don’t want to make moral judgments; they want to place you in the correct category. When the language they use denigrates the people they are trying to help, it interferes with the mission. The push for neutrality runs against the usual current of language, in which expressions pick up connotations and implications; that’s why bureaucratese must always introduce new terms as the old ones become unsuitable, or counterproductive.

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August 14, 2023 happy place

happy place

(2000’s | therapese? | “hog heaven”)

“Happy place” requires a possessive pronoun to work. It is your, or my, or her happy place, where one is most content, most enraptured. (I am not sure about this, but it sounds odd to hear it with a plural subject — “we” don’t have a happy place. To each his/her/its/their own.) It generally begins with a specific activity — playing with dogs or kids, hiking in the woods, yoga, karaoke, managing a balance sheet — that induces the desired state of mind. The happy place is soothing, inviting, beguiling, perhaps stupefying (cf. “zone out“). Once we figure out how to get there, we do it again and again, like rats harvesting pellets in their maze.

Now “happy place” has a long history, with an unusual tendency toward the negative (“not a happy place”). It was a pretty boring, literal-minded expression; you had to be Jacques Derrida to make anything of it. It called attention to a characteristic of a household, company, institution, etc., where residents felt secure without irksome constraints. It almost always took the indefinite article.

Somewhere around 2000, the new version with pronoun took form — there don’t seem to have been many precise pre-1980 equivalents — and “happy place” became the preferred term for that carefree state we covet, a refreshing if temporary escape from the stress and trouble the world imposes on us. In a twist from the old literal use, one’s happy place was not generally understood as a physical location; it was in your head (cf. “in a good place“). In today’s use, it seems to refer more often to an actual spot, but always with the understanding that being there brings about the same feelings, so that the distinction no longer matters. The phrase adorns several on-line shopping sites and a lifestyle blog; it also titles a recent novel by Emily Henry.

To my mind, there’s no question that the idea harks back to childhood, when such blissful interludes seemed slightly more possible. When adults go to their happy places, they are regressing. I find it revealing that the phrase is composed of the sort of fundamental words we associate with very young English speakers. I can’t help but wonder if “Happy Meal” influenced the development of the expression. (As regular readers know, I blame McDonald’s for everything.)

Here we have another instance of an ordinary, entirely unrhetorical string of words, with no inherent distinction or zing, turned into a stock phrase. You guessed it, time for another Lex Maniac list: at the end of the day, be careful out there, has left the building, how cool is that?, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, my work here is done, play well with others, what’s your point?. There are a few others that might qualify, but I will refrain.

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June 27, 2018 do-over

do-over

(1990’s | athletese | “mulligan,” “redo”)

This week’s expression probably arose among athletes, or sportswriters, and it is closely related to “mulligan” (according to one lexicographer, an equivalent term was “shapiro”), a golf term that referred to other players agreeing to let one of the foursome have another tee shot after a poor drive, particularly on the first hole. Needless to say, mulligans occur only in friendly games — an on-the-spot handicap that allows a player to avoid falling too far behind too early. I’m not a golfer, but I believe the word could be used to cover different shots and situations now. “Mulligan” is a little older than “do-over,” but not a lot; the first citation in Lighter dates from 1949, and it doesn’t seem to have penetrated other fields for at least thirty years after that. “Do-over” followed a similar historical pattern, but more condensed. I found a few instances in the late eighties, all in sports talk; by the mid-nineties, political and financial journalists were using it without hesitation. Today it is quite common, used all over the language, and available as an adjective.

There is an important distinction between “do-over” and “mulligan.” Mulligans are casual — a quick, informal consensus reached within a group of peers. “Do-overs” are decreed by a higher power, such as the referee or a government official. In the earliest instances I found, the purpose of a do-over was righting a wrong. The previous play, or the outcome of a competition, was nullified because one side’s rights were taken away somehow, or because a sudden change of condition resulted in an unfair advantage that tainted the result. It was up to the officials to determine what level of injustice or mishap required a do-over. While this sense has remained, the word need not suggest a fundamental injustice any more. Sometimes it’s intended to correct a flaw or problem created by previous action, and sometimes it tries to recast an unwanted, as opposed to an unfair, situation. A recent example: Stephen Colbert offered Bill Clinton another chance to address questions about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky after he botched an earlier one. While Colbert used the word “do-over” to describe the offer, it was really a mulligan. In effect Colbert was saying, “We’re all friends here, Bill; take another whack at it and we won’t count the first one.”

I don’t recall using or hearing “do-over” (does it have anything to do with “make-over”?) on seventies sandlots, but one writer suggested it originates in children’s games, where often the easiest solution to a problem on the field is just to expunge the previous play and do it over again. I think in such cases we said “Doesn’t count; do it over,” or possibly “replay it,” but I don’t have any clear recollection. Maybe simply “do over!,” easily recast as a noun and any other part of speech you want. There’s something innocent about a do-over in its pure form, a childlike faith that you can remake the past. But in the real world, that faith leaves out too many complexities, which leaves it vulnerable. It will fade and even dissolve if the arbiters decide to grant do-overs based on one side’s advantage rather than uphold fundamental fairness.

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June 18, 2018 baby on board

baby on board

(1980’s | “child in car”)

Strictly an eighties phenomenon in the U.S., these signs, designed to stick to the inside of a car window and look like miniature roadside warnings of sharp curves and other hazards, were imported from Germany (“Baby an Bord” or “Kind [child] an Bord”), where they were in use by 1980. By 1985, they were a fixture on American roads, and by 1986, the backlash had begun, both in the form of innumerable parodies and law-enforcement crackdowns, justified on the grounds that the signs obstructed the driver’s view. The manufacturer, ironically, touted them as safety equipment, and there were two common arguments for their use: they alert other drivers to be solicitous of the precious cargo inside, and they alert police and paramedics to ditto. (In my suburban youth, it was common to see stickers on house windows telling the fire department where the children’s rooms were.) Unbelievers tended to ascribe obnoxious parental officiousness to those who so decorated their cars, an uncharitable interpretation, but probably not far wide of the mark in many cases. The fad rose quickly and fell slowly; “Baby on board” remained common in back windshields for some time, though you see them much less often now. But they have never shed the taint cast by the quick rise and reaction of the eighties.

Parenthood has become more demanding since my parents were in the business, and “Baby on board” was part of that evolution — yet another precaution parents might fail to take, thus endangering their children instead of protecting them. I’ve commented before on the oppressive growth of parenting as competitive sport, or competitive anguish, and on changes in standards and expectations for those unlucky enough to give birth. Whether intended as a sinister marketing scheme or not, “Baby on board” signs did their bit to harass new parents, promising increased safety, or at least a chance of it, at a low price. It wasn’t just fear of losing a young child because you hadn’t told first responders to look for him. It was a quick, cheap way of avoiding the appearance of negligence, and what parent wouldn’t want that?

Why doesn’t “baby on board” mean pregnant? Now it does, sometimes, but I don’t recall anyone using it that way, or understanding it that way, even in a fit of explication du texte. Khloe Kardashian used it to mean “having very young babies in the house” in a trailer for the next season of “Keeping up with the Kardashians” (a modern-day soap opera), alluding to the newborns produced by members of the clan, and it may be used, with a hint of jocularity, to refer to expectant mothers as well (as in “if you have a baby on board, you can expect . . .”). It feels to me like the shift to this usage has been slower and less general than you might expect. For reasons unclear to me, some expressions never stray far from their original senses, while others fan out far and wide. “Baby on board” strikes me as an example of the former that ought to be an example of the latter.

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March 4, 2018 performance anxiety, separation anxiety

performance anxiety (1970’s | therapese | “stage fright,” “fear of failure”)
separation anxiety (1980’s | therapese | “fear of loss”)

These expressions emerged around the same time, as far as I can make out, say the late sixties? If anything, “performance anxiety” is older, but I’m not about to swear to it. “Performance anxiety” started as a technical-sounding way to say “stage fright” (athletes can have it too, which may be part of the reason for the broader term), but within a decade had come to be used primarily about impotence or other bedroom failures caused by insecurity as opposed to a physical problem. The same dichotomy holds true to this day; therapists for musicians and unconfident lovers alike still use the term. If you google it, links to sites having to do with sex vastly outpace any others, at least in the first few pages of results. (Sadly, Google is probably as good a barometer as we have of what’s preoccupying America this week.) Separation anxiety is generally attributed to kids — it’s nervousness, unhappiness, or acting out that arises when someone important is going or gone, whether an anticipatory tantrum or silent expressions of fear and loneliness after a parent’s extended absence. It may be used to talk of adults or even abstractions (as in discussions of Brexit), but it always has at least a faintly jocular quality in such cases.

The move in meaning from performing in public to performing in private interests me, because it seems so essential but makes so little linguistic difference. At first, there appears to be a great chasm between being shy about speaking in public before an audience of dozens or hundreds and doubting one’s sexual abilities, where the audience is much smaller. The intersection of those two sets is, I suppose, the porn actor, who must set aside both forms of performance anxiety in order to get the job done. But in either case, you’re under pressure — self-imposed pressure, often — to do well and look creditable. “Perform” has a longstanding euphemistic use in discussions of sex, of course. Separation anxiety also involves a small but crucial audience: the person the subject wants to remain close to, along with anyone nearby who is involved in some way. It’s hard to say to what extent a young child is expressing irrepressible feelings versus putting on an act to try to get her way. The older the kid gets, the more one suspects there’s an element of acting involved, or at least a covert eye on the target(s). But it’s not always easy to find the line between genuine emotion and the manufactured variety in an actor’s performance, either.


The “noun + anxiety” formation sounds familiar; there are a few other examples to be found, such as “stranger anxiety” (an infant’s strong adverse reaction to an unknown person) or “illness anxiety” (hypochondria). (Mercifully, “social anxiety” did not come out as “society anxiety.”) Freud’s concept of “castration anxiety,” ironically enough, is the grandpappy of them all. Note that Freud’s term was “Kastrationsangst,” and “Angst” in German lies much closer to “fear” than “anxiety” in English. He wasn’t talking about a short-term attack of nerves, but the kind of salutary terror that causes a kid to get with the program. (Whatever you think of Freud, we can all agree that he has suffered from inept or just plain weird English translations.) Not that anxiety can’t be crippling. And it certainly seems to be much more common among kids than it used to be, from the quite specific disorders mentioned above to generalized anxiety disorder, which is similar to what we used to call “free-floating anxiety.” It’s no good telling people not to worry when they feel surrounded.

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February 25, 2018 tough love

tough love

(1980’s | evangelese? therapese? | “discipline,” “punishment”)

Just as “tough love” was gaining a toehold in the discourse, a television film called “Scared Straight” rocked America, showing what happened when a group of juvenile delinquents (that’s what we called them back then, honest!) was assigned to participate in a state-sanctioned program that took them to Rahway State Prison in New Jersey. Inmates shouted at them, told lurid stories of prison life, even threatened the kids with violence. The cameras recorded it, and the resulting film made a very big noise indeed, winning both an Emmy and an Oscar in 1979. The idea, of course, was to bully dangerous kids into reforming by showing, in graphic detail, what you go through when you get sent up. The film included disturbing images and raw language (remarkably so, for its day) and was shown late at night, mainly on independent channels. I don’t recall watching it, but I remember the hoopla.

“Tough love” was already around, but it was only used, as far as I can tell, by Christian child-rearing specialists and Alcoholics Anonymous counselors. In 1978, an organization called Tough Love was founded by a husband-and-wife team of family therapists, David and Phyllis York. They advocated laying down the law, with strict rules and rigid enforcement, until the kids straighten up and fly right. (Tough love is reserved for children and those deemed unfit to run their own lives — politicians use it to talk of welfare recipients and other inferiors — and in this respect it resembles last week’s expression, “act out.”) By 1980, “tough love” was getting dropped into mainstream press articles. Its niche in the popular mind had been opened by “scared straight,” and they formed a powerful alliance to beat back the malign influence of the permissive, anything-goes sixties, with tough love working to soften and humanize “Scared Straight” and its pornographic violence. And it worked! Reagan got elected, and being respectable became respectable again. Parents buffed their reputations by refusing to take any more crap from their bored, coddled kids. I have no doubt that a lot of kids benefited from a little firmness, but tough love isn’t a cure-all. For one thing, it’s easy to overemphasize “tough” at the expense of “love,” which leads to unfair or even sadistic treatment. And like everything else, it doesn’t work for everybody. As John Hinckley’s father put it, “If mental illness is involved, ‘tough love’ is the worst thing you can do.” It won’t just fail; it will make matters worse.

Before there was tough love, there was “for your own good.” The scene went like this. Parent: You’re grounded! Kid: Aw, Mom/Dad! Parent: It’s for your own good! (Parents who got swept up in the role might add, “You’ll thank me one day.”) It came up any time parents made unwelcome demands on their children, from taking cod liver oil to giving up the car keys. A related adjective was “stern,” which was roughly equivalent to “tough,” strict and unyielding. The point of including “love” in the expression is to draw attention away from its harshness, of course. Tough love cares; it demands obedience out of genuine and abiding concern for the child’s welfare.

Grammatically, “tough love” follows a common pattern, expressing an existing general idea in a new part of speech. In this case, the shift arguably contributes punch and directness and certainly opens up new syntactic possibilities. It always makes me think of “tough luck” and its variants, though it isn’t exactly cognate. (My sister used to say “tough toenails,” which I liked, except when she used it on me.) Such expressions carry disdain, which tough love is not supposed to do, but can’t you just hear a righteously angry parent saying, “Tough love, kid!” It hasn’t made any inroads as an interjection, though.

The few pre-1970 instances of the phrase in Google Books had an entirely different definition: persistent or resilient love that triumphs over obstacles and returns the lost sheep to the fold, or helps a loved one through a bad time. It’s a shame that sense didn’t catch on, if you ask me. It’s much more appealing.

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March 18, 2017 latchkey kid

latchkey kid

(1980’s | therapese?)

Also latchkey child, though that wording seems almost archaic now. Some sources date the expression to the 19th century, but it’s probably later. Random House assigns an origin between 1940 and 1945, and Dorothy Zietz in “Child Welfare: Principles and Methods” (Wiley, 1959) cites not only “latchkey child” but “eight-hour orphan” and “dayshift orphan” as synonyms. Zietz points to “’emergency’ day care programs which became prominent during World War II [that] are now regarded as part of the community’s basic child welfare services,” which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever heard of Rosie the Riveter. Nonetheless, in 2017 it is generally assumed that Generation X both invented and perfected the concept of the latchkey kid. Scattered references can be found before 1980, but the phrase really took off afterwards, which explains why Gen X gets the credit. (Full disclosure: I’m a proud member of Generation X (the older end) but was not a latchkey kid.) I can’t find any sign that “latchkey child/kid” came along before World War II, certainly not as early as the nineteenth century. It’s easy to imagine a Victorian illustration of a disconsolate waif with a key on a string or chain (not a lanyard) around her neck, but the term was not needed then because the kids were working the same hours as their parents. We still have plenty of latchkey kids, of course, but the novelty has worn off. Today, Free Range Kids carries on the tradition of advocating unsupervised time for children.

God help us, a lot of those Gen X’ers are parents now, and they indulge in the eternal practice of contrasting their kids’ experience unfavorably with their own. The Generation Next of parents proclaims that all that time with no adults in the house made them resilient and self-reliant, and maybe it did. But then why have so many turned into helicopter parents who starve their own kids of opportunities to learn how to manage without adult intervention? I suspect such generational shifts aren’t all that unusual, because parents have a commendable desire to spare their children the traumas they had to go through. But the wider tendency to bewail these kids today goes back a long time, too long and steady to be wholly unfounded. Every generation of parents sees their own experiences as definitive and notices only that which has deteriorated. The thing is, a lot of the time they’re right; standards do change, sometimes for the worse, and good parents must be especially alert to such slippages.

We associate latchkey kids with working single mothers and always have, though plenty of them have working fathers. From this has arisen a certain stigma the phrase can never seem to shake. Even today, it is used as a class marker, one of many indications of poverty, crime, substandard education, and the rest of it. Numerous studies suggest that latchkey kids don’t generally do worse than average; they share the fate of all studies that call easy explanations into question. We just know that the kids are worse off now and/or will do worse as adults; don’t try to tell us different. It is common to read nostalgic accounts of eighties childhoods, but at the time most press coverage — and there was quite a bit — was marked by dubiety. Some researchers pointed to pervasive fear among latchkey kids of emergencies they were unequipped to handle, or of intruders, or just of being all alone in an empty house. Latchkey kids may not want to relate such feelings to their parents, knowing that expressing doubt or anxiety will disappoint or irritate their hard-working elders. Then again, some kids learned to keep house, manage their time, or just watch lots of television. It’s unlikely that most parents want to leave their kids alone day in and day out, but unless the kid shows obvious ill effects, there’s no point feeling guilty over it.

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December 15, 2016 empty nest

empty nest

(1980’s | therapese | “the house feels so empty”)

This is one of those effortless phrases. The first example I found in Google Books dates from 1968; by the late 1970’s it was turning up in the mainstream press now and then, and everyone seemed to get it right away. At that early date, it still required quotation marks and a brief gloss, but little time elapsed before the expression made itself at home. It was well arrived by the time a sitcom of that title debuted in 1988, spun off from The Golden Girls. “Empty nest syndrome,” an early elaboration, is the most common use of “empty nest” in adjective form; “period,” “phase,” and “blues” are other possibilities. As noun or adjective, it retains an innocent, “literal” quality — of course, the phrase is not literal at all, but its evocation of pure-hearted little birdies seems to shield it from irreverent wordplay. Even after thirty years, the phrase has not developed much of an ironic life, and it is not often used to refer to anything other than a home (or family) from which the last resident child has departed. “Empty nest” does have unlooked-for complexity when you take it apart. The first half is literally false — the nest isn’t empty because the parents are still there. The phrase as a whole requires knowledge of how birds bring up their young, sheltering them until they reach maturity, then sending them on their way.

The semantics of “empty nest” may tickle the analytical brain, but the concept appeals to the emotions, and it soon found a home in the long-running debate between parents and grown children over whether it’s really a good idea for the kids to move back in rent-free after college. The kids are all for it; parents are much more divided on the question. In my own case, the model was the great economist or perhaps sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who returned to his parents’ farm after taking a Ph.D. because he couldn’t find work, and filled the time with reading and long conversations about society and politics with his father. That sounded pretty good to me, but Dad saw disadvantages to the scheme and suggested graduate school instead, which ultimately got me out the door for good.

Not all parents are unhappy at the thought of their children moving back in. Some parents get all broken up when the last child leaves the house, and they are the most vulnerable to later irredentism on the part of their down-and-out offspring. Other parents can’t wait to see the back of their kids and have looked forward to the empty nest for years. I haven’t done a study, but I doubt such empty nesters (is it my imagination, or does that term imply a certain affluence?) relish the prospect of having their uncouth twenty-something kids cluttering the living room. This antidote to the empty nest is now known as “boomerang kid,” a term which arose within the last thirty years. By the way, that news article we’ve all read about how unprecedented numbers of college graduates are moving back in with Mom and Dad has been a staple at least since 1980. It’s a wonder anyone under fifty lives on their own.

It is less true now, but in the olden days empty nest syndrome was primarily associated with women, a rough complement to the midlife crisis for men. True, mothers nostalgic for having surly kids in the house didn’t usually buy sports cars or cheat on their husbands, but both middle-age traumas mark a troubled transition to a later phase of adulthood. How can you tell “empty nest syndrome” was a well-established concept by 1985? By that time a whole new branch of the advice for the lovelorn industry had already sprung up, especially in women’s magazines, soothing unhappy mothers with an endless stream of counsel and reassurance.

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October 9, 2015 special needs

special needs

(1980’s | therapese | “handicapped,” “disabled”)

Presumably descended from the already widespread phrases, “special education” and “Special Olympics.” The crucial change in recent years has to do with part of speech; “special needs” has gone from noun-adjective phrase to unhyphenated compound adjective — not that the old formulation has disappeared. The compound adjective started getting tossed around in the eighties. Before it was applied wholesale to students, it went with orphans and foster children. As one commentator put it in 1984, the old word for “special needs” was “unadoptable.” (Another was “problem,” as in “problem child.”) Now it can apply even to pets. “Special needs” come in many forms, from familiar physical handicaps to mental or emotional instabilities of various kinds, or maybe your kid is just slow (excuse me, has a developmental disability). It has become standard to talk about special needs kids, or the institutions that serve them — classes, programs, transportation — or the group that they are part of; “special needs community” is a common expression now, and it wasn’t twenty years ago. When you’re talking about children, “special needs” refers to disorders of individuals; when it is used to talk about the elderly or anyone else, it normally encompasses conditions common to most members of the group.

That distinction is interesting, and to see why we’ll have to go back to the noun-adjective construction, which has been available for a long time. Kids generally do not claim special-needs status for themselves; there are plenty of people anxious to claim it for them. But other kinds of special needs are advertised by the group they belong to. Take a phrase like “special needs of the oil industry.” In 1975, this phrase could easily have been used (in fact, it was) not to emphasize the burdens fossil-fuel barons labored under, but the privileges that their circumstances entitled them to. It was the sort of thing a lobbyist or legislator might remark upon just before pushing through a big tax break. You didn’t have to be underprivileged (does anyone use that word any more? — it was all the rage back in the seventies) to have special needs. And you don’t now. But we are much more inclined to hear it that way thanks to the last thirty years’ worth of education policy. Before 1985 or so, “special needs” meant “I’m better than you” rather than “I’m worse off than you.”

What does “special” mean, anyway? When it doesn’t mean “specific or distinct” (as it did in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance) or “extraordinary,” as it did then and still does, it means “unique,” a much more recent definition dinned into us by pop psychology. When I was a kid, this use of “special” was common, but it had grown up only in the previous couple of decades. “I am special” came to mean “I am unique,” with the corollary that uniqueness entitled you to respect. It was a word used by eager kindergarten teachers to reassure children that they were valued. “Special needs” doesn’t rely on that definition, though there is a clear echo in parents’ insistence that each special needs child is unique (and adorable, and so forth). But lots of kids may have the same, or very similar, maladies, so that they can be grouped together for purposes of education or therapy. “Special needs” doesn’t have to refer to extreme or bizarre conditions; almost any kid with a problem may qualify if their parents are persistent enough, and some of ’em are, because special needs is where the money is.

The phrase seems more like a euphemism than anything else, a way of coating disabilities — mild or severe — with kindergarten cheer. Language so used is ripe for parody, and “special,” which for centuries had a generally favorable connotation, has become an insult. Uttered with a smirk, it means “substandard,” and every kid knows it, just as they understand that students with special needs have something wrong with them. Yet the expression has hung onto a palliative quality in spite of all the currents running the other way.

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July 20, 2014 model

model

(1990’s | therapese?, academese (education)? | “serve as a model of or for,” “exemplify”)

Here is a verb that has turned right around in the last thirty years. Back then, when applied to conduct, “to model” meant “follow another’s example.” It was normally used with “on,” or maybe “after,” as in children modeling themselves on a popular athlete, a rock star, who knows? maybe even a parent or teacher. And now? Now it means “set an example for another.” Those responsible for raising or schooling children must do things like “model appropriate behavior,” so their charges will see their way clear to becoming civilized. When did the change occur, and why? The first example I found on LexisNexis lurked in a review of several children’s books at the beginning of 1988, but it doesn’t seem to have become commonplace for at least another decade. My recollection, which I have learned not to trust very much, is that I started to hear it certainly by the late nineties, but I’d be hard-pressed to say when it became customary. Neither is it clear to me where the word arose, although therapese seems the most likely answer. But the verb was also used in its new sense early and often in the ed biz (as the immortal (so far) Tom Lehrer called it), so the educators may have a claim to ownership as well.

The shift in meaning looks larger than it is. “Model” has been used for centuries as a noun or adjective, generally denoting a pattern or example worthy of emulation or copying, in general or in particular. The model citizen or the model of bravery or generosity, to say nothing of the artist’s model, have an ample pedigree. But Noah Webster’s dictionary gives only one definition of “model” as a verb, which encompasses the notion of following a pattern described in the first paragraph. (Artist’s or fashion models of the day “posed,” one supposes.) Scientists and economists have long used the term in a way that seems analogous to today’s meaning: “create a model of.” The phrase “role model” came along in the fifties, according to Random House, and that phrase led to a veritable gamut of post-Freudian psychological usages of “model.” Role models do not generally embody one specific quality but are thought to be worth studying across the board. Instead of emulating Washington for this or Socrates for that, we started concentrating on finding just one all-around good person to emulate. It’s hard enough just finding one pair of coattails to ride.

And why did the word change meanings? When we think of “modeling” good behavior, we think primarily of adults doing it for children. When we thought of “modeling” one’s acts after others’ examples, we thought primarily of children doing it with reference to adults. The subject-object switcheroo goes along with a cultural shift in demands on parents. In the old days, kids had to buckle down and learn to do what was expected of them in public. Responsible adults offered guidance and were expected to help, or at least not retard the process, but it was the kid’s responsibility to work out ways to control himself and make an effort to comply with social conventions. As we make ourselves at home in the twenty-first century, parents are expected to do more and more of what used to be regarded as the kids’ work. The older generation must lay everything out so plainly that no child could possibly misunderstand — willfully or otherwise — the rules they are expected to follow. The grown-ups have to come up with a way to train the kids that doesn’t require them to exert any effort or risk failure. Deprived of any stake in their own improvement, the young’uns will infallibly turn into enviable adults, right? Of course, most kids turn out o.k. if their parents do even a middling job raising them, but it seems to me that conventional wisdom — and a parade of parenting manuals — demands more of parents, and less of children, than it did in the old days.

Actually, I was channeling my sister in the previous paragraph, who was ruminating recently on changes in our child-rearing practices, and who is well-qualified in general to discuss these kids today. I may have misrepresented her views, and I alone am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation.

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