An Interview with Jennifer Margulis

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Jennifer Margulis is is an award-winning travel, culture, and parenting writer. She is a former contributing editor at Mothering magazine and her writing has appeared in many of the nation’s most respected and credible publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine.

A Boston native, Margulis has a Ph.D. from Emory University and is Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She was also a Fulbright fellow in 2006 at the University of Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger (West Africa) for the 2006-2007 academic year. Her cover-story on Niger for Smithsonian Magazine was chosen by Natalie Angier for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2009 (Harpercollins).

Margulis has written/edited three previous books about parenting: Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love (Seal Press); Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained (Willow Creek Press); and The Baby Bonding Book for Dads: Building a Closer Connection to Your New Baby (Willow Creek Press). Toddler won the Independent Publishers Book Association Award for best parenting book and Why Babies Do That won the Midwestern Publishers Book Association Award. She has was also prominently featured in a PBS Frontline TV documentary, “The Vaccine War” (April 2010).

Jennifer Margulis lives in Ashland with her husband and four children. The Business of Baby is released this week by Scribner.

EB: What made you decide to write The Business of Baby?

JM: I was shocked to learn that the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized country, and I wanted to investigate why.

EB: You travelled extensively and look at mothering practically across cultures. What are other countries doing that we’re not?

JM: The United States is also one of the only countries in the world that does not offer paid maternity or paternity leave. I visited Norway, which has been voted by Save the Children as the best country in the world to be a mom. And for good reason! Norwegian moms get 47 weeks of paid leave (and they must take several weeks off work before their baby is born, even if they plan to return to work sooner than 47 weeks) and dads get an additional three months of paid paternity leave. There’s a tremendous amount of support for breastfeeding, and a recognition that being a mother is an important job that deserves remuneration. They also have among the safest birth industry in the world, and a C-section rate that is half of what it is in America.

EB: Why is our mortality rate so high?

JM: We have so overmedicalized birth in the United States that it has become dangerous to go to the hospital. American doctors are not trained in vaginal delivery. Our C-section rate is 32.8 percent, and C-sections have gone from being a life-saving operation to a life-threatening operation in this country. Nearly 68,000 women almost die in childbirth or from childbirth related causes every year.

Part of the explanation is the gross inequities in America — African-American women and other non-white women are more likely to die during pregnancy and birth. But the real problem — which is related to our country’s way of treating ethnic minorities and the poor — is that our medical system is completely profit-driven. Doctors and hospitals prioritize their bottom line instead of safety and good outcomes.

In Norway, it is illegal to advertise to children under 8 because they cannot distinguish between fantasy. In America, the average preschooler watches at least 11 food and beverage ads (designed to addict them to junk food) a day. In Norway, pregnant moms would never be given formula samples (the Norwegian breastfeeding rate is close to 100 percent!). In America, corporations use willing obstetricians and pediatricians to sell harmful things — like infant formula and unnecessary medication — to pregnant women and newborns.

EB: What was the most striking thing you discovered?

JM: That the pediatrician who has been most vocally championing child-led potty training (a concept that sounds right but turns out to be detrimental to children and their parents in so many ways), T. Berry Brazelton, was a paid spokesperson for Pampers.

EB: Can you give our readers an example of how profit-making and profit margins impact the birth process?

JM: There are, sadly, many many examples. It is in the hospital’s best financial interest to deliver a woman as quickly as possible. That is one of the main reasons for unnecessary C-sections. It is also the reason we “augment” labor with Pitocin. Why would we possibly need to hurry a woman’s labor along if the woman and the baby are doing fine and there is no medical indication that something is wrong? For two reasons: doctor convenience and hospital financial gain. I interviewed a former hospital consultant whose job was to make California hospitals more profitable. He told me that in closed door meetings doctors with low C-section rates would be chastised and told to increase them because doing too many vaginal births was not cost effective.

EB: Your book is very much in the “follow the money” tradition. What are your inspirations as an investigative journalist?

JM: I’m inspired by Jessica Mitford, who wrote The American Way of Death, and many other excellent books. I’ve also been inspired by Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Nickel and Dimed.

I read nonfiction voraciously (right now I’m reading The Death of Innocents by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, and Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree). I learn so much from every book I read, both how to become a better writer and what pitfalls to avoid.

EB: What’s been the reaction from the mom-on-the street?

JM: My editor got pregnant while she was reading the book, and wrote me a personal note afterwards to thank me for helping her. She said the book changed her thinking about pregnancy and labor. Because of it, she chose to have a midwife instead of a doctor. She had a 35-hour labor, most of it at home, and an unmedicated vaginal birth (and she was considered “high risk.”) She felt totally empowered afterwards.

Moms who read it who have already had their children either tell me it’s the book they wish they had or that they feel sad after reading it because they realize that the way their children came into the world could have been gentler and healthier. Here’s one reaction by an L.A. mom. She loved and hated the book AND wants to give it to everyone she knows.

EB: Are there some medical practitioners who are trying to reform the way the birth and parenting process works?

JM: Of course. There are so many wonderful obstetricians and pediatricians who are fed up with the system and concerned about our bad outcomes. I interview many of them in my book. They are actively trying to change the system from the inside out, and their work is inspiring.

Buy the book.

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See the book trailer.

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The Arguments of Jonathan Swift, a guest post by Cat Seaton

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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It’s the End of the Term So This Paper is 100% Sassafras
Or, The Arguments of Jonathan Swift:
Or, More Aptly: Jon Swift Claims to Care about English but is Actually Just Asking for Money

Swift is a clever man. So clever, in fact, that in “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue,” he couches his eventual request for a pension (this, itself, well hidden) in a proposal to correct the English language. Sure, he argues well. He states a grievance (the language is extremely “imperfect,” that it is full of more “daily Corruptions” than improvements, and that those who seek to refine it have only multiplied its “Abuses and Absurdities” [Swift par. 2],) and explains why it is he feels the language is in such a poor state, but it all comes down to one thing: that, wouldn’t his most honorable Lord High Treasurer be so much more successful and well-respected if he were to offer geniuses some sort of reward? And Jon Swift, having proven himself only a most concerned citizen and well-learned man—of course—in this most humble entreaty to the English language, has certainly not implied that he is such a genius, oh no, not at all. And not that the reward must be money, Swift is quick to correct, for “if any such Persons were above Money, (as every great Genius certainly is, with very moderate Conveniences of Life) a Medal, or some Mark of Distinction, would do full as well” (par. 23).

Still, there is enough evidence that, despite his eventual plea for “recognition,” Swift does in fact believe the English language is falling into decay. He often calls back to the golden days of the Latin tongue, which only fell apart through the dissolution “of their Government into a Tyranny” (par. 5) and its frequent exposures to other languages. He implies that, because the “German, Spanish, and Italian, have admitted few or no Changes for some Ages past” (par. 7) they are the superior languages and their examples should be followed. (French is both praised and scorned, for it was “polish[ed] as much as it will bear,” and then “declin[ed] by the natural Inconstancy of [the French] people” [par. 6].) That is, language should remain stagnant. That is, there is “no absolute Necessity why any Language would be perpetually changing” (par. 7).

Really, Swift seems to loathe change. The only things he loathes more than change are poets, plays, and writers of entertainment. Of the three, the brunt of his hatred falls to poets. He contributes the “spoiling of the English Tongue” (par. 10) to these poets, particularly because they engage in “[the] barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses…as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure” (par. 10). (Take a moment to imagine this phrase spoken with a full and classist British mustache abristle and aquiver, as certainly his must have been.) Yes, heaven forbid: in order to fit words into their dreaded and terrible rhyme scheme, they have removed the vowels! This “abuse” results in such fowl and deformed words as “rebuk’t,” and “disturb’d,” and even calls for the pronunciation of those words to change. It is “…so jarring a Sound,” writes Swift, “and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain” (par. 10).

Swift feels the only way to fix the English language would be to “fix on Rules by which…to proceed” (par. 14). These rules include discarding the many “gross Improprieties” used in the practicing of the English language, throwing newer words out of the language, and bringing back words which, though antiquated, deserve restoration “on account of their Energy and Sound” (par. 15). He then promptly proceeds to contradict himself, saying “a Language should not be wholly perfect…it should be perpetually changing” (par. 16), but it seems, only when the changes are agreed upon by the higher ups who set out to fix it in the first place. I believe this contradiction shows he intends to cover all his bases, pleasing the High Lord Treasurer well enough on all accounts, that he might eventually be able to request a sum from him.

In fact, shortly after this, he begins to butter up the Treasurer. He compliments him on his familiarity with the Bible, how great and wonderful a man he is, how he must have a “true and lasting” desire of honor, and how he has “exposed [his] Person to secret Treachery, and open Violence” in order to preserve and increase that desire (par. 20). He continues on in that vein of praise for a good while, and then in short order, moves on to subtle threats that the High Treasurer should be summarily forgotten unless he “take[s] some Care to settle [the English] Language, and put it into a state of Continuance” (par. 20), with this settling of the language, of course, being done by the encouragement of “Genius and Learning” (par. 23). From there, Swift glides easily into his assertion that learned men (geniuses in particular) should be offered a pension, solely because “[t]he smallest Favour given by a Great PRINCE, as a Mark of Esteem, to reward the Endowments of the Mind, never fails to be returned with Praise and Gratitude, and loudly celebrated to the World” (par. 23).

It’s easy to see that Swift used his discontent with the English language as a stepping stone to prove his own “genius” to the High Treasurer, convince him that care to the language was the only thing which would preserve him in posterity, and that the only way to preserve the language was to reward “genius” men, such as himself. Very clever indeed, and certainly not unadmirable. While I do not particularly agree that language should be halted in its ability to change (the effort is nigh on impossible,) I do believe that developing a sound thesis and arguing upon it is a good way to sneakily ask for favors and/or money. And I can understand his intense dislike of poets (I am a poet, and I don’t particularly care for my breed), but I am still on the opposite spectrum (perhaps because I am a poet): I feel that language should be played with. Sure, further down the line it may make the reading of antiquated works (such as this proposal) significantly more difficult, but reckoning them would not prove impossible, as Swift seems to think.

All in all, I disagree with his pronouncement that the English language is declining—rather, I feel it is evolving and blooming into something new, but I don’t disagree that it would be nice for the higher-ups of the world to reward intelligent folk with pensions, awards, or other shiny things. It would, at the very least, be loudly celebrated by me.

Cat Seaton is graduating SOU this year with a degree in Creative Writing. She intends to be a playwright.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 7: NYMS

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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April is both a personal name and the name of a month. It’s a homonym (a word with two meanings) and nyms are the theme for this post. We’ve got synonyms, acronyms, homonyms (and homophones—which sound alike but spell differently, like bear and bare—and homographs—which spell alike but sound different like bow and bow). A student suggested homosapiens (pronounced like homonyms) for people that look alike. It was a nice idea but too hard to explain the phonetics because homo sapiens would be a homograph. We’ll have to stick with doppelganger, which doesn’t quite capture the idea of a family resemblance. There are hyphenyms, and acronyms and their cousins initialisms (if you say FAQ as letters, that’s an initialism; if you say it as fak, that an acronym).

Retronyms are new compounds that come about when the meaning of an older term shifts: acoustic guitar, snailmail, print book. One of the ways too that we fix the meaning is by reduplication: instead of a print book we may refer to a book book.

There are contranyms, too—words that have two opposite meanings, like oversight (watching over or not noticing) or sanction (to approve or to forbid). When you get a speeding ticket you can call it a citation of expediency (and list it on your resume). The contranym that everyone loves to hate (and vice versa) is literally, which is used to mean either literally or figuratively. Hence the non-word illiterally, meaning either figuratively or literally, I suppose. By the way, don’t blame literally on today’s youth or Rob Lowe’s character on Parks and Rec. It was used by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and others. It’s literally more than a century old.

In the course of the year I wanted to invent a few new nyms, so I added fetonyms (words or meanings joined by folk etymology, such as May Day and mayday, from the French word for help) and transponyms (words that differ only in the switching of two letters, like chai and chia, casual and causal, gasp and gaps). Polyphones are words (like economics or either) that have more than one acceptable pronunciation and a sesquipediment is a very long word that you have to stop and look up.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 6: VERBING NOUNS AND MORE

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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This post is about some of the non-word tricks that I haven’t been able to use and about some that I have.

One of the tricks that I haven’t been able to use is to verb nouns. Verbing nouns means making verbs out of nouns. So when you workshop a piece of writing or dialogue with someone or snowboard or gift, you are verbing nouns. Linguists call this functional shift because you are shifting the function of one part of speech to another. You can actually verb lots of things: prepositions (to up the ante), interjections (I wowed them), even hesitations (he ums a lot), compound conjunctions and articles (they if, and and butted me to death).

And, by the way, you can noun sentences, fragments and phrases as well: Tell whatshisface I need to see him (my New Jersey persona emerging). Or whatchamacallit, whoziwhatsis, thingamajib, and shitforbrains. You can adverb prepositions (to sit up). You can adjective nouns (a stone wall), and I added the word adjectify just for that. And you can exclaim or interject just about anything. It’s all functional shift and it seems curious sometime because English doesn’t always use affixes much we change a word from one part of speech to another.

As far as making up new words, it would be a bit a cheat to take a noun meaning and list it as a non-word verb. I did that with birch (to walk by someone and pretend you don’t see him/her), an eponym (we’ll talk about these later) suggested by Becky Bartlett. In general, meanings change pretty often. So functional shift is a trick that language uses a lot but I haven’t been able to take advantage of because reasonable readers will object that the words aren’t new new. I added a new meaning to the obscure biological word thecal (relating to a sheath, especially a tendon sheath), extending its meaning to of or relating to a master’s thesis. The joke was impossible to pass up.

Some tricks that I have been able to use, that language doesn’t use much, are internal punctuation and special symbols, and violations of normal English sound patterns (what linguists call phonotactics).

And I’ve tried to invent some words that aren’t just nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This is again, something that languages rarely do. When was the last time you learned a new article, auxiliary verb or preposition? So I introduced wusta (meaning should have and would have if I had thought of it), alsomore (a transitional word used in a sentence after one has already used also.), and ofrom (a blend of off of and from as in I got it ofrom the internet.) and whych, (interrogative pronoun meaning both which and why).

Spelling tricks included o’nomastics, (the yearly process of putting an apostrophe in names beginning with the letter O), artisn’tal (having the quality of artisanal products but lacking the pretension and cost), in@ention (obsessive, unproductive toggling between writing projects and email or social media, whew!able (characterizing a close call, as in a whew!able drive).

And some of the violations of normal English pronunciation include snlob (someone who is snobbish about being a slob), sgaggle (a succession of noisy groups), and fnast (the sound of nasal passages being cleared inward, an ingressive snort). Twalkers (people who walk and text at the same time and nearly run into others) is probably right on the border of possible pronunciation because of the phonetic similarity of the wa and the aw. There’s more on sound structure to come.

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