We’ve determined that the 18-22 is way, way too young to be married. There is definitely some truth to this insofar as the way the system is set up now. Most 18-22 year olds have yet to take responsibilities for themselves so it seems insane to expect them to take responsibility for a family. But part of the reason that we’re not ready at 20 is that we’ve not been expected to take responsibilities and we’ve provided a plethora of excuses if our responsibilities don’t work out. After all, we don’t expect marriages to work out between 19 year olds and so when they don’t it’s not a surprise.

Statistically speaking, Deseret has a pretty average divorce rate. Considering how important marriage and family is to the Mormon Church this may sound underwhelming. And perhaps it is. On the other hand, they maintain their average divorce rate despite the fact that an abnormally high number of their marriages are within groups that shouldn’t make it. Young couples, couples still in college, couples with little work experience and a less thorough dating experience than I saw back in Delosa. I haven’t looked at the facts and figured but I suspect if you compare the demographics, Deseret would come out very favorably. Why? Because Deseretians and Mormons expect their kids to be able to handle marriage at a young age. They demand it, at least more than most churches do when the rubber hits the road.

Of course, I think about my own life and experiences and it doesn’t wash. If expected to, I probably would have married and settled down with Julie. The thought of that these days sends shivers down my spine. The darkness I felt in that final year was our destiny and as time passed it got better and not worse. On the other hand, if it had been expected of me maybe I would have found ways to make it work. A couple of pregnancy scares have left me debating the issue for stretches when I haven’t had a lot of other things to think about.

Maybe I could have risen to the occasion. Maybe, if we’d been Mormons or good Catholics or from a culture where young marriage was encouraged or demanded. But it seems that the most spectacular of my not-huge (or at least I like to think not-huge) collection of failures and missteps have stemmed from a desire to rise to an occasion and be someone that I am not or fill a role that I am not the person to fill.

Yet when I think about concerns of identity, who I really am and what I am meant to do, I am left to wonder: aren’t these questions the frivolous spiritual tedium of the citizens of a wealthy nation? Throughout history it’s pretty rare that a people get to have so much control over their destiny. Has it served us that well? Might we be better off in conscription to service to family, god, and country? As miserable as I think I might have been with Julie, most of the married Mormon couples I know seem to be relatively happy. Even or especially compared to marriages between those people that have the idle time to consider what it means to be who they are.

By my observation, the more concerned a person seems to be with such questions the less happy they are. Are they searching for these answers because they’re unhappy or are they unhappy because they spend their time and energy looking for these answers?

One of the more annoying characters I’ve run across recently is Janice Soprano from the Sopranos. If you’ve never seen the show that’s fine (I’m not far into it) as it’s not required. Janice Soprano has spent the past 10-20 years of her life finding essentially doing nothing that would differentiate herself from a 20 year old college drop out. She’s smoked some pot, done some protests, and that (at least thus far) appears to be about it. But that’s not what’s annoying about her. What’s annoying about her is that she thinks that her drifting from one location to another with no forward progress on anything ever qualifies her as some sort of enlightened renaissance woman whose worldly wisdom the world can really use (and those that can’t use it are just not enlightened!). She has no kids but is not at all hesitant at lecturing Tony and Carmella Soprano about how to raise there kid (the advice was correct, but only after she completely contradicted her previous advice). She’s been out of the mafia circle for fifteen years but lectures her boyfriend and her brother about how things really are.

Yeah, I’ve known a few people like that throughout my life.

I’m not completely referring to unrepentant potheads here, as Janice is. I’m thinking of all sorts of people that have done nothing with their life and thinks that the (usually self-inflicted) hard knox they’ve faced imparted some sort of wisdom. This is usually belied by the very fact that they look at their failures in life that were usually self-inflicted and see themselves as Job at the hands of a curious God and mischievous Satan. And they confuse their experience and whatever angle they’ve derived from it for philosophy or morality.

What actually comes to mind more than potheads are embittered failures. I almost said “cynical” but a cynic has to a degree found peace with his or her world as he or she understands it. Bitterness is something different. And it’s not a philosophy. It’s one thing to believe in the nefarious nature of The Government or Big Business or The Church, but without any explanation as to the underlying weakness of capitalism or socialism or religion they are not actually contributing to the conversation and generally speaking, they’re not helping. But they don’t know anything beyond the Cliff Notes of the philosophy they claim to hold even while they claim expertise. They have one or two stock answers for just about everything and those answers are never challenged because any question they can’t answer they determine comes from a questioner that “doesn’t get it.”

And not to pick fights, but the other thing that comes to mind is a particular strain of Christianity that I am reminded of any time I take a trip back to Delosa. Jesus is not the answer to every question and The Holy Bible does not contain the solution to every dilemma. I’m less offended by the content of their teaching than I am by the pure stupidity of it. I’m not talking about Christianity’s theological and philosophical history and I’m not even talking about the people that believe that every word of the Bible is 100% literal truth. I’m talking about this cotton-candy game wherein people are selling books about what The Bible tells you to eat and how God thinks you should go about trying to get rich and that a bigger problem just means that you need to scream “Praise Jesus!” a that much louder.

If any particular person wants to guide their life with this philosophy, I say “power to’em”. If it works for them and enough other people I may give it a go myself! The problem is that they don’t stop with themselves. They figure what has worked for them (which actually has rarely actually *worked* for them except by possibly blinding them to its failure) must work for everyone else and must work under all circumstances, even those that the person has never, ever been in and is not remotely familiar with.

It’s worse than a reluctance to grow. It’s even worse than proudly regressing into an adolescent intellectual mentality. It’s demanding that the world regress to your own level.

A discussion over at Bobvis got me thinking about the romantic fates of nerds. I summarized the dilemma as follows:

I’m sure that there are some supernerds that honestly don’t want relationships and I’ve known some, but by and large even the dateless ones I know do want a relationship. They just don’t know how to relate to people very well, meet comparatively few girls, and don’t know what to do with them when they have them. Often they have lofty expectations of what a relationship should be like because they’ve spent a lot more time imagining ideal ones than being in real life ones.

An anonymous commenter rightly pointed out that this applies to only some nerds. Nerds, after all, are typically smart people and should be able to learn. Leaving out for a moment the fact that it’s hard to learn when you simply don’t have much information and a lot of it is incorrect (the reasons that some relationships bloom dead) and the fact that the nerd pool is infested with people of mediocre intelligence that have convinced themselves that they’re smart due to commonality of interests with smart people, he’s actually quite right as far as that goes.

But nerds that can actually learn human lessons don’t actually stay nerds. They don’t suddenly start donning Armanis and watching NFL football or anything, but by the time they meet their generally non-nerdy wives they are no longer immediately identifiable as nerds. They may continue to have the same nerdy interests, but they no longer carry the nerd identity.

Being a nerd is not unlike being a jock or kicker or frat boy. It’s an identity you try on when you’re younger, but if you’re still identifying yourself (or identified as such) by that later in life that’s actually a sign of developmental failure rather than personal tastes. We all know the Springsteen Glory Days stereotype of the young athlete that never quite gets beyond their high school achievements and the frat boys that never truly grow out of it. The same is true for nerds. In fact, the parallel between the nerd whose glory days were in academia when his smarts were all that were needed for self-defined success is eerily comparable to the Al Bundy whose life highlight was scoring four touchdowns in a single high school football game.

But eventually we are to leave the comfortable confines of academia and our parents house and enter the real world. Our interests are supposed to expand. If we do it at all right, the high school (or college) label just shouldn’t fit anymore ten years later. We should outgrow it. We should integrate with the world as it is, not as it once was or as we think it should be.

The problem is, of course, not everyone does. And by the time you’re thirty most of the people that really identify as nerds are the people that haven’t grown. They’re the ones that haven’t found a way to integrate with mainstream society. They don’t have marriages to tend to or kids to take care of, so they just wave the banner of their malcontent. They concoct theories to explain why things didn’t just magically fall into line with them. Mostly, though, they just turn bitter. Above I explained how they become bitter towards women, but nerds are also disproportionately drawn to libertarianism out of bitterness towards the government that has somehow kept them down and drawn to socialism out of bitterness towards the capitalist system that has failed to recognize and reward their talents.

But most of us move on. Most of my nerdy friends are married now and the girl we married was far from the only option we had and I’m passed the point of being surprised about any of this. Most work in the computer field, though not all of them. Some are successful, some aren’t. Some are happier than others, but for the most part we are happy or not happy based on what is happening with us now and not the perpetuation of conflicts a decade old.

That of course makes it a little ironic that I spend as much time thinking about the fallen comrades that didn’t make it and are still stuck somewhere in the swamps. I suppose that I should just be happy that I made it across and I should thank the people that helped me get across.

Capella has a few things to say about the word “slut” and its meaning.

Specifically, she attacks the usage as a method to attack women with which the speaker has some other disagreement. It doesn’t really matter whether the speaker is male or female, it’s a mode of attack.

However, she asks the question:

A slut is someone, generally female, who has sex with a large number of people. It is supposed to mean she has sex freely or indiscriminately, although accusations of sluttishness are often made simply on the basis of the number of partners. A woman can also be called a slut on the basis of clothing or behavior that might correspond to sexually free behavior.

But what does a slut do that is bad? She engages in sex – an enjoyable activity – with consenting adult males. (Yes, I know it is possible for women to commit rape, especially statutory rape, but there is nothing in the word “slut” that implies the woman in question does that.) In other words, she does something that makes other people happy. Why is that bad?

Depending on your perspective, this alone can be perceived as bad (and yes, the behavior of the men ought to be condemned as bad as well). The implied behavior – that of seeking sex without consequences – is a short-circuiting of the societal idea that sex is something for committed relationships and that should be, well, special and with someone you care about. A “slut” is a woman who acts or by behavior is deemed uninterested in finding a permanent or semipermanent partner, which in the past would be a “bad thing.” Personally, I’d still consider that a bad thing today, but the “hook-up” culture seems to disagree.

What are the effects of this behavior? Possibly, a child (or multiple children) outside of wedlock or even put up for adoption. Is having kids bad? Depends on your point of view – I’m increasingly of the mind that there ought to be a required training class and certification before people are allowed to breed. Hey, we require that before we give people licenses to drive a car or to have a gun, and you can do a lot more damage to society with a poorly brought-up child (or worse, a gaggle thereof) than you can with either of those two mechanical devices. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is a lousy way to go about procreative behavior.

Possibly, the woman is being put on the spot for encouraging men to seek out like-minded women, rather than themselves seeking out relationships. The theory there goes that (somewhat like prostitution), the availability of “guilt-free” sex to men lessens the chance that the men will need to settle down into more permanent relationships. Whatever stock you put in the theory, there it is.

Possibly, there’s the worry about sexually transmitted diseases, which a somewhat randomly promiscuous person can transmit a lot faster than someone who’s got a steady partner. The old phrase “you’re not having sex just with them, but with everyone else they had sex with before you, and everyone else their former partners had sex with before them” applies. Stuff spreads fast.

Capella’s overriding point seems to have been outrage that there isn’t an equal term to use against promiscuous men, and she’s got a legitimate reason to be feministically outraged there. Still, I don’t agree with her sub-point that the “slut” is not doing anything bad, for the reasons stated above.

Dizzy over at Dizzy Does It got a letter published by an advice column in Salon regarding a problem she had with a classmate that broke her nose and was entirely unapologetic about it. Part of the question is whether or not she should have immediately gone to the cops. The consensus was that she should have, but Bob mad a very good point:

The above-the-law link features some commenters who are presumably very self-assured about their ability to do the right thing even in context. Furthermore, they can’t believe that anyone without these these skills must be lying.

Think about this in a relationship context though. If you have been in a relationship for any length of time, you have done some truly horrific-sounding things to your partner, and vice versa. However, in the context of being in the relationship, these horrific-sounding things may be very minor even though girlfriend-less armchair critics proclaim they would dump someone right there for doing that to them.

While discussing the media sexism issue with Clancy I found myself getting on my high horse about what I would definitely do if a woman did to me what was being done to the guys on the shows. Not only does my track record completely contradict my high horseriding pose, but I can’t say that it would have been any different had I met someone with less integrity and honesty than my lovely wife and if she’d jerked me around, too. The more I thought about it, if confronted with the situation in the here-and-now with the Not Clancy standing right in front of me, the surrounding circumstances would matter a great deal.

The reason for all of this is that it is really scary to take a stand. And like many scary things it is scary for a reason. If you had the perfect relationship would you throw it away because of some mistake he or she made in St. Louis in a moment of weakness? If you found out that there was a time when they weren’t sure that the two of you were going to make it and they drifted, temporarily, into the arms of another that everything you’ve done is entirely worthless? It depends on if everything else you’ve done together is worthless. Of course, once something unacceptable starts happening more than once or with more than one person, you’ve got what can be considered a more systemic problem rather than an isolated one.

And as Bob points out the same is true when it comes to calling the cops. Sometimes it can really cause more problems than it solves. Sometimes the actual punishment doled out is just enough to piss them off but not enough to really deter them. Maybe there are institutional problems in your surroundings wherein by stepping forward the social cost to you would be much higher than it would be to the person you’d be turning in. Of course, unlike a relationship the morally right and morally wrong is a little more clear, but in many cases so are the consequences!

So all of this is the long way around to agreeing with Bob that it’s really easy to say what you would and would not put up with. It’s another thing entirely to actually be in the situation and step forward and say “this is unacceptable and I will say so at great personal cost!”

Addendum: Another great example of the armchair moralizer came up last night. Though Clancy’s residency made a good faith effort to adhere to the 80-hour workweek, a lot of other residencies are not acting in such good faith and implicitly apply sanctions on employees that don’t “voluntarily” stay after they’re clocked out. The most obvious thing that these residents need to do is contact the residency board and turn their program in. But to do so, however, puts one’s career at great risk and it’s easy for those of us who wouldn’t suffer the consequences of stepping forward to tell those that would that it’s a price worth paying. We’re willing to risk their livelihood in the name of all that is good and right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we would risk our own if it were our livelihood on the line.

Scott Adams is apparently under the opinion that we have a permanent age:

I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42 years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.

It would explain a lot of my permanent age were something like 37 or 39, which would explain the sort of “out-of-place” self-perception I’ve had since I was a kid. A more likely explanation is, of course, some sort of innate social “otherness” or something, but next to “I’m too smart for my peers” this permanent age thing sounds like the next best option!

I’m the kind of person that has always been better inside a relationship than outside of one. I make a better boyfriend than a suitor and a better husband than a boyfriend. And for most of my life I wanted kids and by that age I’d theoretically have them. Also, the older I get (ie the closer to 37-39) the less out-of-place that I feel. I was terrible socially in junior high, better in high school, better than that in college, and have taken to the whole “making money” thing better than I took to schooling.

Also, I’m not sure why, but when I was a kid I had a sort of fascination with the late 30’s. Most of the characters I came up with for my lamebrained little stories were between 37 and 39. Maybe I’ve just always known. Or I’m smarter than everyone else. I could really go either way.

-{via Dustbury}-

My best friend Clint is a very bright guy, though he always had trouble applying himself. He went to his mother’s alma mater Southern Cross University, a conservative Christian university in my home state of Delosa and initially majored in Music Education to become a music teacher. Despite his smarts, he struggled a bit to balance his newfound freedom (his parents were a little too protective of him at home) with his academic responsibilities, but the former usually won out. But all was not lost until he decided that he was going to change his majors from Music Education to Music Composition. The reason he gave was that he would do better following his passion rather than being forced to take classes that he didn’t want to take.

The results were disastrous. His grades never improved. It took him eight years to get through and he ended up nearly $75,000 in debt, despite the fact that his first four years were paid for. Clint is certainly to blame for his own failures, but I believe a lot of it could have been avoided had his parents prevented him from changing majors in the first place. He may have graduated, he may have dropped out, but he would not have a financially worthless degree with several years worth of earnings to pay back.

Capella wrote a great post on a New York Times article on parents subsidizing their kids’ fancy New York lives and a spectacular discussion ensued in her comments. There are at least three areas of interest in the post, but first I want to tackle the main subject of Capella’s post: how appropriate is it for parents to attach conditions to the financial support they give their children. Most of the commenters lean towards it being inappropriate most if not all the time. I disagree.

I think back on Clint and my other friends where the parents did and did not intervene at crucial points and with only a couple of exceptions the ones where parents did intervene ended up much better off for it. And I honestly believe that all of the parents had the moral right to intervene, even when they did so wrongly. As long as they’re footing the bill I believe that they get to call the shots.

If Clancy and I have children*, they’re not going to get $100k from us (or whatever college costs 20 years from now) to major in basket-weaving or comparative literature. I believe that we’d be doing them a disservice by subsidizing a degree that will take them out of the economy for five years and give them a degree that is completely unmarketable. If they want to major in computer science or engineering or business, they’ve got my blessing.

Some degree of flexibility is important in all aspects of parenting. Parents that have a pre-determined that they will insist their kids will follow are likely to have a lot of problems. Though within their rights as parents, withholding money unless their kid goes to their college and chooses their major is almost certain to backfire even if that’s what they otherwise might do. I might have gotten a military economics degree from the University of Delosa like my father did, if given the choice, but it would have a bitter pill to swallow and the chance that I might have failed there where I would otherwise succeed.

I don’t mind an English degree so long as it’s a double-major with an education degree so that they can teach or involves a masters degree in something marketable. If they want to major in philosophy or political science or psychology in order to get into medical or law school, then that’s fine provided that they continue to make the kinds of grades that will get them accepted. If they major in something like physics and plan to go to graduate school, it’s possible that we can come to some sort of arrangement. One way or another, though, I’m going to know how they intend to make a living majoring in whatever they’re going to major in or they’re going to pay for it themselves. That’s not blackmail, that’s responsible parenting.

Beyond college, I think that the same is true if they’re going to live life in The Big City on our dime. Life requires making tough decisions and one of those decisions will be to accept the conditions of our support or decline our support. I’ll love and support them (emotionally, if not financially) either way. We will love them if they choose to to cohabitate with a lover over our objections, but we’re (probably) not going to pay for it. But to allow them to accept money and then demand autonomy is to give them a sense of entitlement that would do them more ill in life than good.

When she was working her way through high school, Clancy wanted nothing more than to escape the influence of her father. This motivated her to make sure that she did well enough in school to get a full-ride scholarship out-of-state (despite being ineligible for need-based financial aid). Her parents were happy to help, but she knew that taking their money meant that they could exert a degree of unwanted influence in her life (as it did with her sister, wherein they insisted that she major in finance in addition to French, her preferred line of study) and that propelled her to be self-reliant well ahead of most college students and independence she achieved ultimately helped her relationship with her dad, which is now rock-solid.

Autonomy is earned, and that’s one of the most important lessons parents can teach their children.

* – always a risky hypothetical as she and I discuss the issue of having children.

-{Note 1: None of this post was run by my wife, who may have some… uhhh… different ideas about this. Really, though, she’s more the stickler about much of this than I am.}-

-{Note 2: I’m not talking about attaching strings to every bit of money given and I only consider big gifts, not a sofa or even an old, used car, as being worthy of attaching conditions}-

There’s a heated discussion going on over at Half Sigma about the appropriateness of statutory rape laws regarding sex and minors. I’m not going to touch that with a ten-foot cattle prod at the moment, but I thought I would comment on one of “Gannon’s” arguments in opposition to the laws: Some girls are really mature for their age.

As it turns out I got involved in a certain social circle growing up where relationships between older guys and younger girls was not at all uncommon. In fact, the guy that Tracy jilted me for was 23 and she was sixteen and the age gap was barely on the periphery of the circle’s discussion. I knew a 19/14 couple in which age was the least of the issues between them. One guy I knew dated a 33 year old when he was 18 and then married a 17 year old girl when he was 23. And that’s excluding the DJ, who was one of the few that manage to escape our very wide range of acceptability. And even then only barely.

The argument went like this: we all mature at different rates. Girls, on average, mature faster than boys. Some girls, as though touched by the scepter of the mighty Jove, are considerably more mature than their peers. When this is the case, it makes more sense for her to be with a more “mature” (read: older) guy than for her to waste time with her “immature” friends.

Looking back over ten years later, I can safely say that was a hot, heapin’ helpin’ of crap. But it was a feast in which we all have incentive to dine. It allowed guys to go after younger women with moral impugnity. Some were guys that could not get girls there own age, some were genuinely more comfortable about the younger set, others simply enjoyed the malleability of the younger ones, and the particularly odious ones (who were relatively few) enjoyed tainting innocence. And it allowed the girls the self-esteem boost of feeling superior to the guys around it and a chance to feel outright womanly at the tender age of 15.

If we were serious about pursuing this theory to its logical conclusion, we would have to have admitted that the opposite was true as well: if a 15 year old girl that dates a 23 year old guy is mature for her age, a 23 year old guy that dates a 15 year old girl is immature. But we never thought of it that way. That was a bummer and we were all about empowerment! In reality we used a certain circular logic that any 15 year old that’s willing to date a 23 year old must be mature for her age because… well because she’s willing to date a 23 year old.

I remember a late-night conversation I had with my best friend Clint, wherein we were talking about a younger, pretty girl that had at one point or another been interested in each of us. We were talking about the maturity theory and that girls can be mature for their age. I can’t remember which one of us came out with it, but one of us said “But she’s not, really. Is she.” It wasn’t really a question. “No. She’s not.”

That sent a ripple through our perspective on the matter. The truth is we weren’t even looking for sex. We were so inexperienced that we only had a vague idea of what sex was (in addition to celibate, we were insufficiently familiar with pornography). But we did want a girlfriend in a dopey John Hughes kind of way. And we’d moved heaven and earth to convince ourselves it that the ends would justify the means if we broadened our horizons just enough. But at some point we were able to take a step back and admit to ourselves that no matter how much we wanted to, we had nothing in common with these younger girls. We considered it a shame, though of course looking back it was actually a sign that we weren’t as warped as we thought we were and that good things would catch up with us in time.

Maturity is not something that magically happens. It is something that occurs with growth and growth occurs in conjunction with responsibility. Most sixteen year olds, boys and girls, have relatively similar sets of responsibilities. Even responsible teenagers have very limited responsibilities from the perspective of an adult. They have varying degrees of fake responsibilities wherein if they don’t live up to them the consequences are minor and/or are not immediate. Whether or not we consider this a good thing is open for debate, but right now it is what it is. And as long as expectations don’t vary too greatly, neither will maturity vary outside of certain parameters too often.

With that in mind, I have known some young ladies that were mature for their age. I was vaguely involved with one significantly younger girl that at least acted more mature than most women my own age. But that was because her father ditched her, her mother was never sober, and she was more-or-less taking care of herself since she was 14. Far from being an accomplishment her maturity was instead a sign of tragedy. And even then we had come by our maturity in such different ways that it was hard for us to break through. Even then, she needed someone that could relate to her experiences, not just her maturity level.

So as such, I am generally pretty suspicious of relationships where the age gap is too wide, particularly in the younger years. Looking back at those relationships I saw with the 19 year old guys and 14 year old girls, the only reason their years didn’t matter was because there was hidden in the tall grass of all their other problems. I do think that sometimes two wrongs make a right and such relationships can work out in the long run, but I think when it does it’s usually as much a sign of personal, familial, or cultural failure as it is true love finding its way against all odds.

On a side-note, a slight touch of irony is that as much as I’d flirted with the idea of dating younger, almost all of my successful relationships have been with people very close to my own age or slightly older.

In interesting but irrelevent fact about myself. When I was in grade school I wrote a song called “The Arkansaw Rivers of Spring” even though I’d never been to Arkansas.

Anyhow, the state of Arkansas has designated an official spelling of the possessive. It is now Arkansas’s rather than Arkansas’. This has left Arkansan HDC unhappy:

In my experience, most grammar teachers use the possessive rules as described in the Associated Press Handbook, which would have the correct possessive spelling for Arkansas as Arkansas’. Just because there is a silent ‘s’ at the end of Arkansas, does not entitle you to add another for enunciation’s sake. It looks funny in written text, and causes people to stumble over the word. Naturally, your brain will look at the spelling and try to pronounce it as “Ar-kan-sass-es” which is far from the correct pronunciation of “Ar-kan-saws”.

Even discounting the pronounciation issue, it’s not as clear-cut as HDC suggests. When I was in grade school I was indeed taught that singular nouns (and proper names) ending in “s” are accompanied only by an apostrophe, but that changed sometime in high school or college when I was told to put the “s” on after all. The latter always made more sense to me, so that’s what I do. But HDC’s adamance got me curious, so I consulted some university websites to see what they have say. Surprisingly, I got five answers and one punt from six universities on what I thought was a pretty binary question:

Meredith College says that there is “generally” no “s” added in a singular nouns that end in “s”. But strangely, they say that the same applies to words that end in “x” and “z” and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a word end in either x’ or z’. Example given: Dr. Seuss’.

Purdue, on the other hand, says that there is always an “s” following the apostrophe after a singular word ending in “s”. Examples given: James’s.

The University of Oregon sites a rule that I have never heard: a singular noun ending in “s” is followed by an apostrophe-s except when the object referred to begins with “s”. Examples: Boss’s car, boss’ sister.

Emory, on the other hand, says that it depends on pronounciation, which is consistent with Arkansas’s position. Kind of. It says that it’s apostrophe-s unless adding the “s” makes it sound strange, in which case it can go either way. Example given: Pardes’, Pardes’s.

The University of Calgary does not care.

Anyway, I can agree with HDC that it doesn’t seem like a particular good use of the legislature’s time. But if he or she is worried that Arkansas codified it incorrectly and is thus making itself look stupid, he or she shouldn’t sweat it.

Addendum: Even the Stylebooks can’t agree! As HDC points out the AP Stylebook veers towards simply adding an apostrophe, but the Chicago Manual of Style veers towards apostrophe-s (except in words of two or more syllables ending in an ‘eez’ sound, which is where Emory was coming from.

-{found by way of Dustbury}-

I was chatting with my coworker Pat the other day. Pat has a sister back in Appalachia named Marie. Marie has lead, for lack of a better term, a disorderly life. She’s been married a couple of times and has three kids who are in the care of her parents because… well because no one seems to dispute that it’s better that way.

Next to the periodic bouts with narcotics, the thing that hurts Marie most is her choice in men. She is attracted to jerks. Rather, she is attracted to foolhardy, aggressive men and is, except in the thick of conflict, rather indifferent to whether or not his foolhardiness shows a disregard for her well-being as well and whether or not his aggression is aimed at her. I’ve never met her, but judging by her picture she’s a pretty girl and from Pat’s discription is not completely devoid of intelligence. She could, if the inspiration struck her, find a man that would help her put her life back in order. That is, of course, the furthest thing from her mind.

As Pat and I talk about it, we sort of lament those that made reckless choices with their lives. In the case of her sister, the inability to tell a good guy from a bad guy. Not even an inability but rather an attraction to those traits that strongly corrolate with abusers and neglectors. We lament her life choices with a saddened shake of the head.

Then we go grab lunch at Taco Bell.

I’m not sure there is anything much better than a Meximelt (hold the tomato), except maybe their grilled beef burritos. I love their beef burritos. She prefers the ground beef chalupa. There’s something about Taco Bell’s ground beef. It provides a heavy metal concert to the tastebuds. The music isn’t good but it’s loud enough that it doesn’t matter how good it is. It’s not how it tastes but rather the volume of the taste. And if the meat were an ounce leaner, the taste would not be but a fraction as good. You know how some peopleput a napkin on pizza to demonstrate how unhealthy it is? Pat and I are the kind of people that get upset that they’re removing that perfectly good grease from the pizza. It’s not that we’re indifferent to the unhealthiness so much as that we love and adore and cannot resist those things that make it so unhealthy to begin with.

Of course, such grease and naughty goodness leaves us much worse for the wear. Just as Marie always seems to end up alone despite her feast of young suitors, we surely end up alone on the toilet thanks to our feast of delectible nutritional sewage.

And of course when she reads this, Clancy will lament our life choices with a saddened shake of the head.