The Vine: June 2, 2006
Sars,
I have a grammar question for you.Over the last week I’ve been hearing the same radio commercial for Brokeback Mountain‘s DVD release.It includes a phrase that has troubled me grammatically and since I am not remotely an authority on this sort of thing, a friend and I (avid Vine readers) thought you should be asked for your thoughts on the matter.
The description I have trouble with is how the movie “captured the hearts of America.”
I have no problem with the movie or the acclaim it is getting but for some reason, the wording in this commercial just doesn’t sit well with me.What are your thoughts?
An unconvinced American mind
Dear Mind,
“Captured the hearts of Americans” or “captured the heart of America” might be marginally more correct, but I don’t have a huge problem with the wording as is.I think “America,” as a country, can function as a collective noun, i.e. “the hearts of our people,” and the way it reads now is smoother (“the hearts of Americans” is a little…I don’t know, fussy) and more accurate (“the heart of America” implies that everyone in the nation saw it and loved it).
When you’re talking about countries or organizations, I think it’s all right to fudge the modifiers a little.
Howdy, Sars.
Got a bit of an awkward situation and I’m really not sure how to handle this one.I should probably apologize in advance, as brevity is not my strong suit.
My oldest sister called me yesterday evening to tell me that she and her husband are separating.Not “we’re seeking counseling and trying to work this out” separating, but “stick a fork in us, our marriage is D-O-N-E” separating.I’m still trying to process the whole situation, what this means for our family, what this means for my nieces and nephew (ages 11, 8, and 6), and what brought them to this point in the first place.My sister isn’t really ready to talk about it, and I made it clear to her that I wasn’t going to make her rehash everything that’s happened just so I can understand it better.I know that she’s going to need time before she’s ready to talk about it, and that she may never reach that point, so I’m just trying to do my brotherly duty and be supportive of her.This is not a problem for me, I’m pretty okay with not knowing everything that’s going on.
Where I’m running into a problem is that she wants us all to maintain a friendly relationship with her soon-to-be-ex-husband (our parents live in the same area).I understand why she wants this, it’s certainly best for the children if nothing else.Our parents went through a very nasty divorce, and my sister was the only one of us old enough to really remember what happened.I know she wants to avoid that, and that she needs help from the rest of the family to keep things civil.I don’t want my nieces to never have their father at one of their soccer games because he’s scared to show his face around the rest of the family.I’m just not sure how to handle being around him right now.
I always liked the guy, and the two of them have been together since I was 8 years old.He’s been somewhat of a fixture in my life, really. We had plans to grab a beer after work this week, and I assumed this was off the schedule after I got the news.But apparently he still wants to go, and my sister has come right out and asked me to do it.
I’m just not sure how to approach this when I don’t even know what happened.I know my sister initiated the separation, and it doesn’t appear that he did anything truly horrible.It just seems like things slowly fell apart, and they woke up one day and realized that they couldn’t fix it.I keep hearing from our mother that “he’s not a bad person, he just wasn’t a good husband.”I can grasp that concept just fine, but it was my sister that he wasn’t being a good husband to!I know my sister is not the type to confront a problem, so who knows if they could have worked things out if the issue had been addressed sometime earlier on in their 16 years of marriage.But they didn’t, and it wasn’t, so here we are.
I guess now might be a good time to pose an actual question, given that advice usually comes in response to those.How do I handle this?Do I blame him for taking her for granted and tell him that I just can’t hang out with him anymore?Do I bite the bullet and go knock back a couple of beers and work through the awkwardness?I don’t want to make things harder than they already are, and asking me to drink a few beers isn’t exactly an unreasonable request.Odds are good that I would be doing that anyway, so this will just be a change of venue and company.I’m the only member of our family that he made much of an effort to establish a relationship with, which is presumably part of the problem, so I feel like I have a responsibility here.But I also feel like I should be angry with him, even though I know my sister is more than willing to let a problem fester until it reaches the point of no return.
So what do you think, O Wise One?How do you handle a situation that’s so far into the grey that Black and White are all “Hello?Is there somebody out there?”
If He Had Cheated On Her, I Could Just Go Kick His Ass
Dear …Right,
I would go; I would continue hanging out with him, albeit perhaps in a more modified way.But I would also make it clear, if the conversation gets into an uncomfortable or overshare-ish area, that you aren’t keen on discussing his marital problems, and that, you know, you like him and you’re happy to spend time with him, but certain things, you don’t want to hear and shouldn’t hear, and he should rely on his other, more uninvolved friends for that kind of thing.
If he’s weirding you out in any way, or trying to crab about your sister and get sympathy from you, you just need to tell him that that isn’t appropriate and that you won’t be doing that for him.If you feel like the direction the discussion is going makes you disloyal, change the subject pointedly and talk about something else.
Ignorance is bliss, so as far as his take on why the marriage failed goes, try to remain ignorant if you can.Your sister isn’t a perfect person — who among us is — but you don’t want to get too deeply embroiled in this on his side.
Dear Sars,
I am dating Tim, and for the last nine months have been very happy.
He’s rational, intellegent, and overall our relationship seems much more
simple and loving than the dramatic, explosive ones I’ve had in the
past. However, one problem keeps cropping up, and I have no idea how to
resolve it, or even what it is.
It happened again yesterday: After joking about a mutual acquaintance,
Tim said he wouldn’t “trust her as far as he could throw her.”I asked
him how far he could trust me, and fully expected nothing other than a
lovey-dovey response. “To the ends of the earth, my sweet,” that sort of
thing.Instead, he looked hesitant, and ended up saying that he didn’t
trust me completely, which he revised to mostly trusting me. I looked
upset, so he quickly explained that he’s had problems trusting people in
the past, the only ones he completely trusts are those he’s known for
years, we only met a few short months ago, for that time period he
trusts me more than anyone else he’s ever met.This makes sense, I tell
him I understand, he apologized for turning my silly question into a
pseudo-fight.End of story, yes?
Not quite.Later, while lying around at his apartment, he took my lazy
internet surfing to be sulking, and became visibly upset about
“fighting” with me, even though I repeatedly told him I was fine, it was
just a misunderstanding, that there’s nothing wrong.He continues to
visibly upset for the rest of the night, which frustrates me since
there’s no reason for it other than my perceived sulking.I ask if he’s
still upset about what happened earlier, he tells me that he doesn’t
know why he’s upset, leaves the room, refuses to say anything further or
talk to me at all, and eventually we have a real fight about what
amounts to nothing.I say he’s being irrational, he says I don’t
respect his emotions, he decides I’m too angry to share a bed with, and
decides to sleep on the couch.
Eventually he crawls into bed with me, and it all starts up again. He
says we are fighting about nothing, I agree, he asks what I’d like him
to do, I say either stop being so silly, or at least have the decency to
try and resolve things with me instead of leaving the room and being
silent.He says he can’t trust himself to be polite when he’s upset, so
he was trying to spare me by leaving.Back and forth, back and forth,
about nothing.I know I shouldn’t have told him to stop being silly,
but I was frustrated that he could neither explain nor resolve this
mysterious hurt that grips him every time we have a disagreement.
This happens pretty much every time I get upset about something. And by
“upset,” I don’t mean crying, or yelling, just a bit unhappy about a
misunderstanding, usually.I’m fine after a bit of explaining, but he’s
upset for the rest of the night.They never really last much longer
than that, and it doesn’t happen often, but I’m at a complete loss as to
how to prevent these from happening.
What exactly is going on here? How can I prevent it? If I can’t do that,
how can I solve things in a way that won’t keep both of us up all night?
Confused and Upset
Dear Up,
Well, this isn’t true all the time, but sometimes, not trusting other people is tied up with not trusting yourself — not believing in your instincts, not believing you’re worthy or deserving.So, when he overreacts like this, it might have less to do with you, or his feelings for you, or anything you are or are doing, and more to do with certain feelings of inadequacy (and the resulting anxiety about being abandoned) on his part.
All of which are deeply buried, probably, and not things he’s conscious of, but also not really your responsibility, past a certain point.And this isn’t to say that you should be blithely unconcerned that he’s freaking out, or that as long as the argument is settled for you, he can go hang.This is to say that, if this reaction is coming from him, there just isn’t much you can do to prevent it or to affect it once he gets into that mode.
So, you might consider talking to him about this tendency — using “I” statements, of course.”When you continue to be upset over what I think is a minor, resolvable disagreement, it makes me feel misunderstood and anxious.””I don’t know what to do with these reactions when I tell you everything’s kosher; I don’t feel heard when you keep telling me I’m still ‘sulking.'”Don’t make it about his overreacting; make it about the fact that it’s kind of emotionally surreal for you, and that he’s not listening to you very well.Ask him what the two of you should do next time to avoid one of those patchy all-night fights where you feel like you slept in those chairs at the emergency room the next day.
And if it comes up again, and you’re annoyed at something but you get over it and he’s all flouncing off to the sofa?”This is a non-issue for me at this point, and I wish you could believe that, but: suit yourself.”And decline to deal with it.If he wants to stomp off, fine.If he wants to insist that you’re angry, let him believe that.But after a while, it just becomes this vicious cycle where you actually are still pissed off — because he won’t let it drop, and if you’ve told him you’re not upset and you’ve asked if he wants to discuss what’s really going on with him, and you’re not getting anywhere with that, just end the conversation.
But if it has to turn into a scene from Verdi every time you have a minor disagreement…he needs to get that you’re only going to deal with so much of that, because “rational” this ain’t, and that’s fine.Nobody’s rational every minute.But sometimes you have to carry your own baggage.
Tags: boys (and girls) grammar the fam
