Roger Brown on “Ms.”

In the fall of 1992, my senior year of college, I took a seminar on Social Psychology of Language with Roger Brown. (Roger Brown the psychologist, not Roger Brown the painter, one of my very favorites since I saw this exhibition in 1987) — how have I never blogged about him?) This was the class where we learned about universals of politeness, the way a direct demand (“Pass the salt”) is always impolite, and is euphemized into a nominally factual question about the possibility of the demand being granted (“Could you pass the salt? Is there salt?”) We developed a habit of asking “Does salt exist?” Brown seemed incredibly old to me at the time. In fact, he was only 68, but in poor health. (He would die in 1997 — Stephen Pinker’s obituary for him is rich in incident.) About two-thirds of the way through the class, he had some kind of medical event and his grad student had to take over the rest of the term. But back in October, I turned in a short paper about singular “they,” which I was…