Ladies and Gentlemen...

I recently finished my twentieth children's book, The Girl From Binfield.  I have written a book for each of our children's birthdays, plus a couple of others for them along the way.  When they were quite young, the books were all rhyming stories with pictures, but when each turned seven, I began writing them chapter books.  None of them are available to the public at this time because our children have preferred to keep them for themselves.  Perhaps someday they will see a wider audience.

The latest for our daughter's seventh birthday is a 27,000 word, 125 page, work that tells the imagined story behind Alexander Pope's poem "Upon a Girl of Seven Years Old," which he wrote in 1713 and published in Bernard Lintot's Miscellanies in 1714.  The story begins in the fall of 1712 in the village of Binfield, just outside Windsor Forest, and focuses on Polly Spencer, the youngest of six in a farming family.  Polly shows great interest in stories and has the ability to speak in rhyme, but is often underfoot in the busy household.  Their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Pope, invite Polly to serve in their home in exchange for Mrs. Pope's teaching her.  Polly begins her studies and work with Mrs. Pope in January of 1713 and quickly develops into a fine student.  Edith Pope shares Polly's verses with her son, Alexander, who is quite impressed.  Alexander, who has just decided to begin translating the Iliad, sends some of his advance money to his parents to join him in London for the debut of Joseph Addison's play Cato, which debuted in April of that year.  Edith Pope takes Polly instead of her husband, and in London Polly encounters the fashionable world of Teresa and Martha Blount, Alexander's friends, and has a wonderful time at the play.  Alexander writes the poem "Upon a Girl of Seven Years Old" for her birthday, bringing the main story to a close.  An epilogue shows Polly a married woman with a daughter of her own.  Polly has become a playwright, married to an actor, and she shows her daughter the poem that Alexander had written for her years before.

One would think that, given such context, the words "ladies" and "gentlemen" would not have elicited the green underline that alerts a user of Microsoft Word that there is a grammatical error.  I have written about this politcally correct grammatical tyranny before (here and here), so I am not surprised when Word highlights something like this.  I clicked on the explanation, and, true to form, Word suggested alternatives such as "woman" or "man."  This is unfortunate, for the proposed substitutes are not synonyms.  Any grown girl is a woman, but not all women are ladies, and many a man there is who could hardly be called a gentleman.

Such is part of the flattening of our lexical and therefore our social topography, a greying of the landscape.  As Anthony Esolen has said, "No one is too poor for poetry."  I am unwilling to surrender even one color from the lexical palette, including those words that are painful and dangerous.  They are part of who we are.  They describe the human experience, and we are just so much less human to the degree that we pretend they do not exist.  Hopefully there are still a few ladies and gentlemen in the world.  If not, then they can at least live on in our lexicon to help us remember what we have lost.