At my recent college reunion (notice how I’m not saying which number this one was…), we were lucky to catch an art exhibition by current students about gender identity. The entrance to the exhibit packed a powerful punch: a wall of participants’ spectacular self-selected headshots and bios. On the bottom corner of each artist’s panel was the student’s name, a bio that included the artist’s thoughts about art and gender, and, finally, the artist’s personal pronouns.

Years ago, I was an instructional coach for STEAM and arts integration at a DC Public Charter School. Many of my colleagues hailed from Jamaica, and I flat-out adored listening to the musicality of their voices. The accent entranced me.

As intense as I can be about punctuation and grammar, one of my Jamaica-born, -raised, and -educated DCPS colleagues could best me any day in the “Grammar Queen” category. And she proudly shared her thoughts on this topic with all of us at the school.

Roxy Hart and Velma Kelly bemoan the loss of civility in their song “Class” from the award-winning Kander & Ebb musical, Chicago. They sing of how “kids these days” use disrespectful language and treat others rudely and impersonally, all the while using crass language themselves to sing the story. The musical irony of ruing the loss of civility in an uncivil tone has tickled audiences for years. What is this civility of which they sing?

My first non-babysitting job was running a snack bar at a small swim and tennis club. An opening weekend task was to write the menu on the chalkboard, and in my best block printing I wrote “ice tea.” The club manager swooped down, erased the entry, handed the chalk back to me and said, “It’s iced tea, not ice tea. You don’t make tea out of ice; you put it on ice.” I made the correction and chalked it up to a learning experience. (See what I did there? Chalk? Chalked it up? Okay…)