(This is a conversation I've had quite a few times. I thought it might be useful to be able to get it down here better fleshed out.
I wrote most of this post before the 2014 Isla Vista killings. I think this tragic event gives this topic a particular relevance, which is why I'm publishing it ahead of schedule, but I think it's been a matter that we as an Internet have needed to examine much more closely for a long time.
Content warning: Some NSFW language.)
I'm aware that using the above title on the Internet is basically signing my own death warrant, but hear me out. I'm not arguing that the terms geek/nerd should be abolished, or disapproving of people identifying with them - identity policing is the last thing that I want to do. My intention is to explore why being occasionally labelled as such by other people makes me feel uncomfortable, and it has to do mainly with the societal attitudes towards such groups.
Origin Story [link]
I doubt it's really necessary for me to explain what geek/nerd culture is for a lot of my audience, but anyway. Basically, after being ostracised and victimised apparently from 80s films onwards, people interested in non sport-related, recreationally intellectual pursuits appear now to have been declared okay by mainstream culture. Partly as a symbol of this, such groups have reclaimed the taunts geek and nerd (there's supposed to be a distinction between the two, but I've never heard a satisfactory or consistent one) as a badge of empowerment. You know, I have no problem with that. I have a lot of sympathy with it, in fact: as a dyspraxic kid (it turns out) I run like someone whose legs have gone to sleep. When I dance it looks like someone's hanging a marionette. As you might have dimly picked up from my ramblings I liked to read and did okay at classwork. If the places I was at had a Homecoming King and Queen (staying in the 80s stereotype zone for the minute) I probably wouldn't have been in the running. I don't mean to imply that my life at school was an unending montage of having my lunch money stolen and being swirlied (I had some great friends that I keep in contact with to this day), but I feel like I was always a little odd until I got to university. And then I decided that normal is a setting on a washing machine and I don't have to interact with people I don't want to interact with. Score!
I don't mean to relate all this to get sympathy from you, dear reader. I've heard some completely horrifying stories about being driven to the verge of suicide by complete arseholes and the people who should have stopped that happening being too overstretched or too uninterested to help. What I mean to say is, I'm not attacking people who are unashamedly in the demographic that geek/nerd traditionally covers, partly because, I'll freely admit, I'm largely there myself.
I feel like in my case the whole mild social ostracism thing was useful to a certain extent - it taught me (a fairly introverted, anti-social person when all's said and done - I'm pretty sure my spirit guide would be a cat) how to get the hell over myself and muck in, as it's termed. Which is useful. It taught me how to tell when no-one's interested in what I've got to say, which is also useful (still working at that one, as you might have noticed...). I could go on, but you get the picture. And I don't mean to come off like I'm saying bullying is character building or any of that toxic bullshit - what I mean is that in my case I feel like I got at least something positive out of the whole experience. I wasn't particularly happy at the time, but then I'm not exactly a little ray of sunshine anyway.
Eech, this is rapidly descending into a LiveJournal entry or something...
Geek Social Fallacies [link]
Anyway, there are some residual problems in a community born of social exclusion, that many more insightful people than me have gone into. There is the danger of having a persistent outsider and victim mentality, meaning that tolerance is extended what I would argue is too far in some cases (humouring people whose behaviour is selfish and harmful long past the point where elsewhere people would have called them on it) and the culture is seen as some kind of secret club that you have really have to have suffered and/or learnt your stuff to get into (viz the appalling treatment of women and girls that show an interest in fields that are deemed to belong to "real" geeks/nerds). As a musician I see just the same types of snobbery and insularity (think of hipsters using their music tastes as an assault weapon), but I think there's an additional, slightly unsavoury element at work that acts to preserve a kind of infantile sense of entitlement.
And again, I don't mean to tar everyone who identifies as geek/nerd with the same brush. But I imagine you can think of a few examples yourself of what I'm talking about. I think it's partly because as a movement it's fairly young (as is the Internet). There are a lot of people who engage in flame wars, thinking that if you shout loudest it makes your opinion more valid. Look at the abhorrently full bloom that the word misandry has come to after taking root in the bowels of the Internet, and geek/nerd culture in particular. (A great quote I saw recently - "In a debate you are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.") With this sudden onrush of completely democratic free speech (let's try and keep Net Neutrality a thing, shall we?) anyone can pretty much say what they like about anything, and it's a big enough Internet that there'll be someone who agrees with them. There have always been conspiracy theorists, creationists, climate change deniers, Scientologists, people who like The Eagles (That Last One Was A Joke BTW), but the advent of the Internet has meant that previously isolated and disparate subcultures can clump together like a reverse amoeba. And you know what, for the most part that's really great. (I can write and you can read my ponderous meanderings from anywhere in the world for free! Which is good, because I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to pay to be subjected to this stuff...)
My personal pet theory/hope is that as the Internet matures we might grow out of the flame war thing. I mean, I can think of few things more pointless than two people yelling at each other via keyboard for protracted periods of time over a topic that they have opposite views on. I personally find that instead of "YOU'RE WRONG" "NO U" it's more useful to go "I think this" "I think this" "Why do you think that?" "Have you considered this?" (the latter two delivered as genuine questions rather than thinly-veiled put-downs). We already seem to be getting over trolls gradually (I've been seeing a lot more "Obvious troll is obvious" posts in the past few years than people taking the flamebait), so who knows what could go down.
Boxing Matches [link]
But this is aside from my main objection to the current societal presentation of geek/nerd culture. When trying to articulate my point, I've find it useful to draw an analogy with the second wave of feminism. Whoa there. I said an analogy, meaning that in certain aspects I feel the comparison is useful, not that I'm equating the systematic violent and dehumanising oppression of women that has been a mainstay of our society since time immemorial with a group of people with unashamedly intellectual interests getting victimised in childhood and adolescence. I'd like to make that very clear right now.
The aspect I'm comparing is the idea that society accepts members of a formerly marginalised demographic on the condition that they adhere to a particular set of norms. So for instance around the time of the second wave (what most people think of as feminism - broadly, the first wave was women getting the vote, the second was the social and theoretical developments of this, and the third wave the movement's growth away from the idea of one homogeneous way to "do" feminism) it becomes acceptable (well, more acceptable) for a woman to have a career and to take a more active role in her social (including romantic and/or sexual) interactions. However, many have noted that this is still prescribing roles for women, just different ones. The woman is told be tougher than the men to show her dominance, use her sexuality like a weapon, play down any traditionally feminine aspects that can be seen as weakness. And all the while there's this nasty undercurrent of "Isn't it sweet/hot, she's all dressed up like a man, swearing like a man, she thinks she can throw her weight around with the grown-ups".
This isn't even to remotely begin on the fact that a lot of this empowerment mostly left out any woman who wasn't straight, white, middle class and cisgender. My point is, while it was a definite advancement on the submissive, patriarchal housewife box, it was still a box that women were crammed into - my definition of a box in this case is a set of expectations that a person with one attribute (in this case, being a woman) is compelled to meet, which have little to nothing to do with the attribute in itself. Failure to fit in this box incurs shame, mistrust and other sorts of societal foulness; one of the worst aspects of this is that it causes people who have the attribute to use how much they fit into this or another box (and it's very rare for someone to do so without contorting or amputating part of themselves) to attack each other with all the seething viciousness that comes from seeing a part of yourself you've been trained to hate in someone else.
See anything you recognise yet? I mentioned before the idea that one of the best ways to stop a society from becoming troublesome is for its ruling class to make sure that the lower and middle classes are at each other's throats - the classic divide and conquer strategy. If the whole of a society is working together, there isn't really a ruling class per se anymore, and those with interests (financial and otherwise) in avoiding this type of democracy have a variety of ways to accomplish this. The main one, as I just mentioned, is to make sure that there are robust social divisions in place - make sure that the income gap between rich and poor is as wide as possible, and education and healthcare are as expensive as possible. Spout rhetoric of inclusivity for those who try, while doing nothing to counter the institutional forms of bias against people from different backgrounds. If someone tries to call you on this, show them one or two token individuals who've "made good" from said underprivileged backgrounds, so that the rest feel that if they fail then the problem is with them, not with the broken society that they live in. Emphasise that some people are just "born" good at certain things that the ruling caste are trained extensively for from birth, just as a little extra kick in the teeth. After that, let human nature simmer with resentment and you and your descendants should be comfortably in control for a very long time.
This Way Up [link]
The way we fight this is by talking and thinking. Tempting as it is to ascribe it to the evils of one group, fascism and patriarchy are really just a known bug in the human mind. The Internet has meant we have more scope to talk than ever before, so that leaves the thinking part. My real problem with geek/nerd culture is how it turns enjoying thinking (how else do you show you enjoy something and get good at it other than when you're doing it for fun?) into a reductive, fetishised box. You know what? I don't think having an active and inquiring mind should be a labellable thing. If you like to read (or consume media) and analyse and talk about what you've read (or consumed), that should be encouraged if you want every person to be as functional a person and member of society as they can. It shouldn't mean that people will expect you to have no social skills, be unathletic, have (what you deem) childish interests and poor personal hygiene. The geeks/nerds of today are the intellectuals of yesterday, people who have the gall to have wide cultural interests (and yes, judging a demographic by the excesses of some of its members as if that's the group's failing rather than the individuals' is just another form of boxing - ask feminists) in a way that makes people feel insecure. If someone makes you feel insecure deliberately, they're an arsehole. If they're not doing it deliberately, then that might be an indication that the problem is at your end.
There are very few words that I don't use. As you might see from my writing style, I believe in using all the words you can to make your point; for me to blacklist one is a pretty big thing. The words I don't use are mostly slurs, racial, gendered, ableist etc. Another is the word pretentious. At root, the word means laying claim to what you have no right to (like a pretender to the throne). What the fuck gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't like if it isn't harming anyone? I've never yet heard a use of the word that hasn't been small people trying to make others feel small. If someone inadvertently makes you feel insecure, that sounds like it's your problem, not theirs. If you've been societally bullied into policing your own thinking as "pretentious", "geeky"/"nerdy" (the latter when used deprecatingly), then that's even worse. The rise of sites like I Fucking Love Science gives an indication of the worst side of people appropriating the external imagery of traditional geek/nerd culture without actually bothering to engage with the subject matter (as illustrated here), but I don't call that pretentious, I just call it a shame.
TL;DR Version...
Let me say again that I don't have a problem with people identifying as geeks/nerds. Someone's identity is their affair. I choose not to identify as such because I don't think intellectual interests should automatically mean you are a geek/nerd. When having intellectual interests is something to be apologised for or self-deprecatory about (the way society currently treats geek/nerd culture, see The Big Bang Theory) is when I have a problem. Having an active mind shouldn't be a divisive factor - while natural aptitude does affect predisposition to a certain skill, the majority seems to come from practice. All the people called geniuses that I've ever heard of worked really, really hard to get where they were, often from very early ages. Some people take that to mean no-one is ever a genius - why not take it to mean everyone can be?
(We'll be back to our regular scheduling next week. I'm probably going to look at boxing and entitlement in future posts, if you fancy sticking around.)
Thursday 29 May 2014
Tuesday 27 May 2014
On Some Problems With Problematic Things
(This week I'm back on social justice and how we do it on the Internet - specifically, the practice of calling things "problematic", which probably only gets less hate than telling someone to "check their privilege".)
In one of my previous excursions into social justice territory, you may recall that I cited John Lennon and then put in a footnote (which, despite my undying love for parentheses, I make a point of not doing normally) saying that while I value and respect many of his contributions, there are aspects of his behaviour that I disapprove of strongly, and in fact if I met someone with only those latter qualities I would probably want nothing to do with them and warn people I cared about to do likewise. This is frequently described (online, at least) as a person or work being problematic.
As previously, it is very, very easy for me to misconstrue what my point is and to make large sections of the audience I hope to appeal to feel like I'm attacking them. My point this time is that I find the current usage of problematic on the Internet can be harmful, mainly to the people making the judgement call. (I'm not going to blanket defend people who are called problematic. That's their job. If I engage with them or their works, it's despite their problematic aspects, not ignoring them.)
Problematisation [link]
Let's examine the mechanism of declaring works or people problematic, so we've got a base to work from, and so I can make clear exactly what it is I'm critiquing - this being the Internet, many terms have many meanings to many people, and there's rarely much cause to declare one interpretation more authoritative than another. We come across a work (I'm going to use the less emotive strain of works rather than people) that we like. The writing, the execution, the characterisation, whatever - it appeals to us. We get that great feeling of meeting a new thing and thinking, "Yeah, this is pretty good". If it's a one-off thing like a film or a game or a book, we consider buying it. If it's a series, we consider getting more instalments by paying or subscribing. We might tell our friends and relations about this Cool New Thing we've found, and seek out other people who think the Cool New Thing is also Cool. This is one of the nicest things about the age we live in - there's a boatload of free or cheap stuff out there that we can sample and dive into, and we can meet and join communities formed around appreciating that same thing, all without even having to leave the house (whether this is ultimately a good thing or not isn't really what we're discussing just at the moment). This could also be a work we enjoyed when we were younger and have fond memories of.
But... there's a problem. Some corner of the work expresses attitudes that you don't agree with, whether actively promoting them or passively continuing them because it assumes that everyone thinks like that and it doesn't see anything wrong with them. You might notice them yourself (they might be tucked away in the corner of a later or earlier installment, or just not so noticeable from your first pass through) or you might have them pointed out to you by someone else (in Real Life or in an online community). In any case, there's this part of the work that you (or the person pointing it out to you) would really prefer wasn't there. So what do you do? To my mind there are a few options:
1. It Doesn't Matter
Simple, just ignore it. The rest of it's great, so why should one little bit of it (or one person's reading of it) spoil the fun for everyone involved? This is sadly quite a prevalent viewpoint, and it has some really ugly consequences. By ignoring the oppressive aspect of the work, or by arguing that the rest of the work being something that you enjoy or agree with somehow cancels the oppressive aspect out, you are legitimising it, and consequently undermining the voices of those at risk from it. Oppression doesn't need a culture of active oppressors to flourish - all it needs is a minority of active oppressors and an apathetic majority. You may remember that I said previously that the opposite of activism isn't oppression, it's apathy; this holds true here, and indeed, it's one of the clearest examples of this principle.
2. Lighten Up, It's Just an X
This is kind of an uglier extension of the previous, specifically in the scenario where an individual points out the oppressive aspect to a group. The group is presented with the choice of really examining this thing that they've previously accepted less critically, and just carrying on as they were by dismissing (and even vilifying) the complaining party and their concern. A handy rule of thumb is that if someone's dismissing a member of X group (or for bonus points, all members of X group) for being "thin skinned" about a particular topic, usually while the dismisser is not themselves a member of X group, this reaction is probably in play. The core fallacy for this is the assumption that everyone should read things in the same way that you do - basically, being unaware of your own various kinds of privilege. And again, checking your privilege requires quite a lot more effort than carrying on obliviously, so it is tempting in the early stages of social awareness just to ignore it or to dismiss the concept entirely. It involves accepting that other people have lives and struggles and experiences that you fundamentally can never fully understand, because your life and struggles and experiences are different from theirs. The act of dismissing someone's complaint about oppressive aspects of a work is akin to saying, "Actually, I know more about your life and how you should behave than you do, so shut up". If you don't see the problem even with the implicit expression of such a view, I imagine there's not a lot of point in you reading the rest of this entry or indeed blog.
3. Oh God, It's Ruined Forever!
This seems, on the surface of it, to be the most appropriate reaction to being made aware of the oppressive aspects of a work. If you recoiled in horror at the implicit statement at the end of the last paragraph, I imagine the thought of being inadvertently complicit in oppression makes you feel ill. It certainly does me. And indeed, depending on your life experience and views, the existence of particular oppressive aspects may be a deal breaker for you. I feel that a person's own Deal Breaking threshold is a really, really personal thing that shouldn't be treated as a negotiable quantity. All you're going to achieve by meeting a statement of, "I'm afraid X aspect of this work means I can't enjoy it or engage with it further" with "But, Y aspect is great!" or requiring an in-depth justification of why X aspect is a deal breaker is to jeopardise any standing you have with the person you're proselytising to. Have you ever seen a situation where someone was talked out of a long-held personal view in a single conversation? I know I haven't. I think you owe someone the respect of their convictions regardless of whether you think your view is better or in would make them happier. If the person is open to hearing about why you like X work or movement, then by all means tell them, but forcing your opinion on them (or interrogating theirs) in an effort to convert them is just really bloody rude.
4. Ugh, That Sucks
That said, I don't think complete disengagement should be the default option when encountering oppressive aspects. There, I said it. In saying this, I don't mean to invalidate people's right to disengage from a work that crosses their Deal Breaking threshold - what I do mean is that I think it's a shame for aspects of a work that you disagree with to mean that you automatically drop the work in question. I think the most responsible thing to say, if you still want to engage with the work at all, is, "That aspect does suck, majorly. I would prefer that it wasn't there, and if for you it means that you can't continue to engage with the work, then that's your decision which I will support. For me, though, the rest of the work is good enough that despite its problems I still feel able to enjoy it." Now, that might look quite similar to option one above ("It doesn't matter"), but to my mind the crucial distinction is that you aren't denying or making excuses for the problem's existence, nor are you dismissing the complaint or the right of the complainer to raise it.
Binary Chop [link]
You may have noticed that in the above schematic I've avoided using the term problematic beyond the opening description. This is because to my mind, it can end up promoting the third option above over all else. I've noticed that people sometimes describe works (or people) as "problematic" and just leave it at that. Does that mean that we should expect (and ideally prefer) works that are "unproblematic"? I contend that this is a dangerously reductive binary, and as we in the social justice sphere are familiar with in other contexts, enforcing binaries is Rarely A Good Thing. I contend that genuinely unproblematic works either cannot exist or are rare enough that seeking them out exclusively would reduce our cultural intake and participation to minuscule proportions.
Everyone has problems. It's not surprising to learn that everything has problems as well. Humans seem to be hard-wired to engage in splitting - that is, dividing arbitrary items or groups into a "good" and a "bad" pile, an "us" and a "them". Going back to Plato, we have the idea that objects in the world are merely imperfect reflections of an ideal - a doctrine that endeared him to early Christianity by its adaptability to the concept that people are an imperfect reflection of God or Christ (however at odds with the actual teachings of the Bible that may be). The splitting into an ideal and non-ideal is distressingly prevalent in modern society, too - think of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, or the almost equally foul insistence that only one body type is beautiful or desirable, even when it requires extensive modification (surgical or digital) even to approximate.
My beloved Derrida writes brilliantly on the idea that ideals can be helpful in inspiring us to be the best that we can be, so long as we accept that the pure ideal is unachievable, by definition. (One example of his is that you never really give a gift - you always want something back, even if it's just gratitude. Another is the ideal of justice - it's patently impossible to be perfectly just and impartial. But, the key point comes, that impossibility doesn't mean that the whole exercise is pointless.) Using the fact that an object falls short of an ideal as a tool to instil shame and guilt is a gross perversion of the idea of what an ideal is for in the first place. I'm sure you can draw oppression parallels with whatever group or organisation you're familiar with in this context.
This feeds into the deeply unfortunate prevalence of using "being right" as an offensive weapon (on which more in a separate post). It's a sadly frequent occurrence that someone will use the fact that a work is "problematic" without qualification or discussion to shame those who enjoy it. Now, this is a very delicate point with the distinct possibility of not being understood how I mean it to be. Calling people out on oppressive behaviour is a vital part of spreading awareness of social justice - as I mentioned earlier, the majority of complicity in oppression comes from being unaware of the full harmful effect an attitude can have. However (as I said before), I think that if we genuinely want to help people become aware of social justice, it's equally vital that the calling out come from a fundamentally positive place. Using things that people like being problematic as a method of point scoring to my mind seriously achieves less than nothing - it gives people a distorted, negative view of those engaged in social justice. We don't complain about stuff because we like complaining - we'd much prefer not to have to complain at all; we try to live as responsibly as we can, understanding that our words and actions weigh on the whole of the world and trusting people from other vantage points to tell us when we're pressing too heavily.
In Summary...
To round up, I agree with Mallory Ortberg (who is amazing, and if you like literariness, humour and social justice you should check out The Toast yesterday) that the term problematic is of questionable use when it's extended to the point of talismanic, unqualified demonisation. It seems to me that it enforces a kind of aggressive, reductive binary; it is my opinion that for our own benefit and for the benefit of the social justice movement, it is far more useful to accept that an "unproblematic" work or person is largely an inherently unattainable ideal, rather than an absolute standard against which other works and people must be put on trial.
That said, I'd like to reaffirm that this is not an excuse to dismiss complaints about certain aspects of people or works, or to dismiss the people that make the complaints. If someone finds that the oppressive aspect or aspects of a work or person are enough to make them want nothing further to do with the it/them, then that is their choice and we should respect it, as well, perhaps, as re-examining what it is in the work/person that stops us from doing likewise. The person in question does not owe us an explanation if they do not want to give one. In this way, hopefully, we can grow more considerate of each other than we perhaps always manage to be.
(It's been quite a month for soapboxes, even by my standards. Next week is some more music analysis. See you then!)
In one of my previous excursions into social justice territory, you may recall that I cited John Lennon and then put in a footnote (which, despite my undying love for parentheses, I make a point of not doing normally) saying that while I value and respect many of his contributions, there are aspects of his behaviour that I disapprove of strongly, and in fact if I met someone with only those latter qualities I would probably want nothing to do with them and warn people I cared about to do likewise. This is frequently described (online, at least) as a person or work being problematic.
As previously, it is very, very easy for me to misconstrue what my point is and to make large sections of the audience I hope to appeal to feel like I'm attacking them. My point this time is that I find the current usage of problematic on the Internet can be harmful, mainly to the people making the judgement call. (I'm not going to blanket defend people who are called problematic. That's their job. If I engage with them or their works, it's despite their problematic aspects, not ignoring them.)
Problematisation [link]
Let's examine the mechanism of declaring works or people problematic, so we've got a base to work from, and so I can make clear exactly what it is I'm critiquing - this being the Internet, many terms have many meanings to many people, and there's rarely much cause to declare one interpretation more authoritative than another. We come across a work (I'm going to use the less emotive strain of works rather than people) that we like. The writing, the execution, the characterisation, whatever - it appeals to us. We get that great feeling of meeting a new thing and thinking, "Yeah, this is pretty good". If it's a one-off thing like a film or a game or a book, we consider buying it. If it's a series, we consider getting more instalments by paying or subscribing. We might tell our friends and relations about this Cool New Thing we've found, and seek out other people who think the Cool New Thing is also Cool. This is one of the nicest things about the age we live in - there's a boatload of free or cheap stuff out there that we can sample and dive into, and we can meet and join communities formed around appreciating that same thing, all without even having to leave the house (whether this is ultimately a good thing or not isn't really what we're discussing just at the moment). This could also be a work we enjoyed when we were younger and have fond memories of.
But... there's a problem. Some corner of the work expresses attitudes that you don't agree with, whether actively promoting them or passively continuing them because it assumes that everyone thinks like that and it doesn't see anything wrong with them. You might notice them yourself (they might be tucked away in the corner of a later or earlier installment, or just not so noticeable from your first pass through) or you might have them pointed out to you by someone else (in Real Life or in an online community). In any case, there's this part of the work that you (or the person pointing it out to you) would really prefer wasn't there. So what do you do? To my mind there are a few options:
1. It Doesn't Matter
Simple, just ignore it. The rest of it's great, so why should one little bit of it (or one person's reading of it) spoil the fun for everyone involved? This is sadly quite a prevalent viewpoint, and it has some really ugly consequences. By ignoring the oppressive aspect of the work, or by arguing that the rest of the work being something that you enjoy or agree with somehow cancels the oppressive aspect out, you are legitimising it, and consequently undermining the voices of those at risk from it. Oppression doesn't need a culture of active oppressors to flourish - all it needs is a minority of active oppressors and an apathetic majority. You may remember that I said previously that the opposite of activism isn't oppression, it's apathy; this holds true here, and indeed, it's one of the clearest examples of this principle.
2. Lighten Up, It's Just an X
This is kind of an uglier extension of the previous, specifically in the scenario where an individual points out the oppressive aspect to a group. The group is presented with the choice of really examining this thing that they've previously accepted less critically, and just carrying on as they were by dismissing (and even vilifying) the complaining party and their concern. A handy rule of thumb is that if someone's dismissing a member of X group (or for bonus points, all members of X group) for being "thin skinned" about a particular topic, usually while the dismisser is not themselves a member of X group, this reaction is probably in play. The core fallacy for this is the assumption that everyone should read things in the same way that you do - basically, being unaware of your own various kinds of privilege. And again, checking your privilege requires quite a lot more effort than carrying on obliviously, so it is tempting in the early stages of social awareness just to ignore it or to dismiss the concept entirely. It involves accepting that other people have lives and struggles and experiences that you fundamentally can never fully understand, because your life and struggles and experiences are different from theirs. The act of dismissing someone's complaint about oppressive aspects of a work is akin to saying, "Actually, I know more about your life and how you should behave than you do, so shut up". If you don't see the problem even with the implicit expression of such a view, I imagine there's not a lot of point in you reading the rest of this entry or indeed blog.
3. Oh God, It's Ruined Forever!
This seems, on the surface of it, to be the most appropriate reaction to being made aware of the oppressive aspects of a work. If you recoiled in horror at the implicit statement at the end of the last paragraph, I imagine the thought of being inadvertently complicit in oppression makes you feel ill. It certainly does me. And indeed, depending on your life experience and views, the existence of particular oppressive aspects may be a deal breaker for you. I feel that a person's own Deal Breaking threshold is a really, really personal thing that shouldn't be treated as a negotiable quantity. All you're going to achieve by meeting a statement of, "I'm afraid X aspect of this work means I can't enjoy it or engage with it further" with "But, Y aspect is great!" or requiring an in-depth justification of why X aspect is a deal breaker is to jeopardise any standing you have with the person you're proselytising to. Have you ever seen a situation where someone was talked out of a long-held personal view in a single conversation? I know I haven't. I think you owe someone the respect of their convictions regardless of whether you think your view is better or in would make them happier. If the person is open to hearing about why you like X work or movement, then by all means tell them, but forcing your opinion on them (or interrogating theirs) in an effort to convert them is just really bloody rude.
4. Ugh, That Sucks
That said, I don't think complete disengagement should be the default option when encountering oppressive aspects. There, I said it. In saying this, I don't mean to invalidate people's right to disengage from a work that crosses their Deal Breaking threshold - what I do mean is that I think it's a shame for aspects of a work that you disagree with to mean that you automatically drop the work in question. I think the most responsible thing to say, if you still want to engage with the work at all, is, "That aspect does suck, majorly. I would prefer that it wasn't there, and if for you it means that you can't continue to engage with the work, then that's your decision which I will support. For me, though, the rest of the work is good enough that despite its problems I still feel able to enjoy it." Now, that might look quite similar to option one above ("It doesn't matter"), but to my mind the crucial distinction is that you aren't denying or making excuses for the problem's existence, nor are you dismissing the complaint or the right of the complainer to raise it.
Binary Chop [link]
You may have noticed that in the above schematic I've avoided using the term problematic beyond the opening description. This is because to my mind, it can end up promoting the third option above over all else. I've noticed that people sometimes describe works (or people) as "problematic" and just leave it at that. Does that mean that we should expect (and ideally prefer) works that are "unproblematic"? I contend that this is a dangerously reductive binary, and as we in the social justice sphere are familiar with in other contexts, enforcing binaries is Rarely A Good Thing. I contend that genuinely unproblematic works either cannot exist or are rare enough that seeking them out exclusively would reduce our cultural intake and participation to minuscule proportions.
Everyone has problems. It's not surprising to learn that everything has problems as well. Humans seem to be hard-wired to engage in splitting - that is, dividing arbitrary items or groups into a "good" and a "bad" pile, an "us" and a "them". Going back to Plato, we have the idea that objects in the world are merely imperfect reflections of an ideal - a doctrine that endeared him to early Christianity by its adaptability to the concept that people are an imperfect reflection of God or Christ (however at odds with the actual teachings of the Bible that may be). The splitting into an ideal and non-ideal is distressingly prevalent in modern society, too - think of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, or the almost equally foul insistence that only one body type is beautiful or desirable, even when it requires extensive modification (surgical or digital) even to approximate.
My beloved Derrida writes brilliantly on the idea that ideals can be helpful in inspiring us to be the best that we can be, so long as we accept that the pure ideal is unachievable, by definition. (One example of his is that you never really give a gift - you always want something back, even if it's just gratitude. Another is the ideal of justice - it's patently impossible to be perfectly just and impartial. But, the key point comes, that impossibility doesn't mean that the whole exercise is pointless.) Using the fact that an object falls short of an ideal as a tool to instil shame and guilt is a gross perversion of the idea of what an ideal is for in the first place. I'm sure you can draw oppression parallels with whatever group or organisation you're familiar with in this context.
This feeds into the deeply unfortunate prevalence of using "being right" as an offensive weapon (on which more in a separate post). It's a sadly frequent occurrence that someone will use the fact that a work is "problematic" without qualification or discussion to shame those who enjoy it. Now, this is a very delicate point with the distinct possibility of not being understood how I mean it to be. Calling people out on oppressive behaviour is a vital part of spreading awareness of social justice - as I mentioned earlier, the majority of complicity in oppression comes from being unaware of the full harmful effect an attitude can have. However (as I said before), I think that if we genuinely want to help people become aware of social justice, it's equally vital that the calling out come from a fundamentally positive place. Using things that people like being problematic as a method of point scoring to my mind seriously achieves less than nothing - it gives people a distorted, negative view of those engaged in social justice. We don't complain about stuff because we like complaining - we'd much prefer not to have to complain at all; we try to live as responsibly as we can, understanding that our words and actions weigh on the whole of the world and trusting people from other vantage points to tell us when we're pressing too heavily.
In Summary...
To round up, I agree with Mallory Ortberg (who is amazing, and if you like literariness, humour and social justice you should check out The Toast yesterday) that the term problematic is of questionable use when it's extended to the point of talismanic, unqualified demonisation. It seems to me that it enforces a kind of aggressive, reductive binary; it is my opinion that for our own benefit and for the benefit of the social justice movement, it is far more useful to accept that an "unproblematic" work or person is largely an inherently unattainable ideal, rather than an absolute standard against which other works and people must be put on trial.
That said, I'd like to reaffirm that this is not an excuse to dismiss complaints about certain aspects of people or works, or to dismiss the people that make the complaints. If someone finds that the oppressive aspect or aspects of a work or person are enough to make them want nothing further to do with the it/them, then that is their choice and we should respect it, as well, perhaps, as re-examining what it is in the work/person that stops us from doing likewise. The person in question does not owe us an explanation if they do not want to give one. In this way, hopefully, we can grow more considerate of each other than we perhaps always manage to be.
(It's been quite a month for soapboxes, even by my standards. Next week is some more music analysis. See you then!)
Tuesday 20 May 2014
On Gender (Linguistic and Otherwise)
(Here we are with more linguistics stuff, but still flavoured with a bit of the old social justice angle. I'm sure you'll cope, right?)
The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):
"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."
This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...
Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]
The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.
A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)
Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.
This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.
Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...
A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").
Rooting About [link]
The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:
You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.
What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.
Typecasting [link]
If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?
If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.
The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:
The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?
There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.
It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").
The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.
You Are What You Speak [link]
Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.
Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".
As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".
There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?
We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.
You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.
This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.
In Summary...
What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.
Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...
(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)
The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):
"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."
This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...
Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]
The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.
A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)
Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.
This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.
Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...
A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").
Rooting About [link]
The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:
| Noun | Stem | Gender | Meaning |
| annus | annō | masculine | "year" |
| bellum | bellō | neuter | "war" |
| mēnsa | mēnsā | feminine | "table" |
| spēs | spē | feminine | "hope" |
| gradus | gradū | masculine | "step" |
| genū | genū | neuter | "knee" |
You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.
What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.
Typecasting [link]
If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?
If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.
The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:
| I | - | Animate objects, men |
| II | - | Women, water, fire, violence |
| III | - | Edible fruit and vegetables |
| IV | - | Everything else |
The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?
There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.
It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").
The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.
You Are What You Speak [link]
Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.
Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".
As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".
There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?
We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.
You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.
This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.
In Summary...
What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.
Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...
(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)
Tuesday 13 May 2014
On the Balance Between Mad and Even
(This week I'm going to try my hand at some social commentary. Wish me luck...
Content warning: cited NSFW language)
Here I go wading into politics waters without a whisper of training in commenting on them. Then again, Chomsky (who's never been afraid to shoot his mouth off, thank God) mentions that the self-designated ruling class often use their position as a tool to restrict discourse on politics to their own terms. Aka "You're a linguist, am I right in that? Yes, I am a political advisor. I believe I have more experience in these matters than you do." (Aka Let us do your thinking for you.)
So sod it. I'm going to say my piece and hope I get my point across. Politics is my business because it's everybody's business - it's got to be for democracy to have any meaning. My thought is, there are ways to use anger at oppression: ways that will help, and ways that will play into the hands of oppressors. This is a bleedingly delicate point that I'm going to try to qualify below.
The Tone Police [link]
One of the ways that privileged parties (consciously or otherwise) oppress is in what is called tone policing. I mentioned it previously in the context of people referring to Northerners who dislike Southern cultural and economic dominance as "chippy". Thankfully, the class-based cultural and economic oppression of the North seems mostly to have died a death; I don't mean that class-based oppression has disappeared in the UK, just that it's now no longer based on regional provenance in the way it once was.
Tone policing is, essentially, the refusal to listen to an oppressed party's grievances unless they are voiced in a manner that the oppressor approves of. People dedicated to fighting oppression in all forms come up against this frequently, amongst other derailing techniques. Tone policing attempts to delegitimise anger. If you're angry, this faulty logic goes, you aren't being rational, and so your complaints can be dismissed. This ability to stay detached, of course, is itself yet another manifestation of the privilege which is being complained about in the first place.
I bring this up because it's quite difficult to articulate my point without opening yourself up to accusations of tone policing. I agree wholeheartedly that this it is an insidious form of oppression that we have to be on our guard against, and I've put in the above partly as an acknowledgement that the burden of proof is at my end.
Looking Back In Anger [link]
Anger is the most useful force we have in fighting oppression. It's the natural reaction to injustice - why the hell have people put up with this situation? It's rare these days to find people who actively support racial/societal oppression; the opposite of anger (in this case and others) is indifference. Social and political apathy is what holds us back for the most part, not overt croneyism with privilege. When trying to encourage others to adopt a socially just cause, it's rare to find people who say "Actually, the oppression of X group benefits me quite a bit. I'm happy for them to suffer." Most of the time it's just the Internet's favourite word - "Meh".
There are reasons for this - it takes a non-trivial act of humility to come to the awareness that you are privileged in a situation. It's uncomfortable to realise that all along, you've been the bad guy in some way. That's not how we're sold the narrative of our own lives. Blame mass media if you like - Plato was in on the game when he noted that no-one considers themselves evil (or rather, unjustifiably evil). People might think that what they are doing is wrong on some level, but they will usually be able to provide a "but I'm not a bad person because..." clause. If someone thinks that what they are doing is unjustifiably harmful (without even the justification that they enjoy it) they will usually take steps to stop or to rectify what it is they've been doing.
This, to me, appears to be why some meet discussions of privilege and oppression with hostility and aggression. It's uncomfortable to be dragged out of our cocooning narrative where we're on the winning side. It's easier just to ignore or to attempt to delegitimise the complaints being levelled. Again, this is nothing new, with Plato's parable of the Cave describing the protagonist (by analogy with Socrates) discovering that there is more than the shadows on the Cave wall and being put to death by his neighbours on coming back to tell them the good news. It's a classic persecution narrative, one which any number of people (ironically including those who support oppression, whether actively or passively) can buy into, as it's also more comfortable than Oh Right, So I've Been Inadvertently Oppressing People This Whole Time.
Because it is a lot more effort. I mean, being aware of other people takes a lot more energy than only thinking about yourself and your wants and needs. My social activism mostly consists of consciously avoiding using oppressive language (as a male I refuse to use gendered insults where I can find replacements (I don't think the word "cunt" has any equivalent non-gendered insult, unfortunately, so I use it regardless of gender when I do), and slut-shaming is definitely out, for instance) and trying to call people on it when they do likewise, as well as signing petitions online because I'm a student stereotype. I can't claim I succeed perfectly at either of the former - trying to use my various strains of privilege to counter oppression doesn't mean that I magically don't have the privilege anymore, so it's more than likely that I'll still slip up occasionally. (There's no shame in being told you've got something racist stuck in your teeth.)
The problem of when to call someone out, and how you should do it, is complicated; in the video I mentioned Jay Smooth offers one way out. I myself try to be detached and to the point. (Prejudicial assumptions, for instance, seem mostly to collapse under the strain of being explicitly questioned. "So what makes you think that all X group people are Y?" "What grounds do you have for thinking that?" etc) I think it's vital that it isn't a point-scoring exercise - you're helping someone out, ideally, not delivering a put-down couched in social justice rhetoric.
Spitting Fire [link]
So we come back to anger. What I hope I've demonstrated above is that I do not oppose expressing anger at oppression, nor do I think that expressed anger invalidates action against it. As I said above, anger is the source of social progress. What I am saying is that there are ways to use your anger that are productive and ways that are counterproductive.
The example that sparked this thought was a chant that was used on a march protesting the current unelected Conservative regime's cuts to education funding. We were marching in solidarity with out lecturers and tutors, who were being given a pay increase below the rate of inflation, i.e. a wage cut in real terms. I don't need to spell out the horrifying disregard for the welfare of the country that the current government has shown in favour of lucrative privatisation under the guise of austerity; suffice it to say that their cost-cutting measures have systematically targeted the most vulnerable in our society, who by definition have little power to protest.
After chants like "No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!", the organiser holding a megaphone announced that they would lead us in an old favourite: "I say Tory, you say scum!" There wasn't much I could do at the time (being in the middle of a crowd), but it gave me a feeling of real unease. Before, we were demonstrating for something - in this case, showing that we were against the cuts to education in solidarity with our lecturers. On starting what is effectively name-calling, I felt that this undermined our position.
This expression of our anger has no rational aim. The oppressors can look at it, say, "Well, you see, we can't engage with them, they can't be reasoned with" and refuse to attempt further dialogue. It invalidates the previous statements, not because of its anger, but because it has no positive content - worse, it affects the rest of the message negatively by relinquishing the high ground of mature discourse for attempting to engage in a slanging match. As cathartic as it may be, it absolutely harms the cause that it is trying to fight for. Look at the riots in 2011 - there was anger and momentum, but it led to people smashing and looting their own communities and justified all manner of oppressive governmental measures.
Unless we want a blood-soaked revolution (which I think it's worth any price to avoid), this formless anger can have no place in civilian protest. We are protesting the discrimination of the government against particular groups (teachers, those on benefits, the poor generally), and if we compromise ourselves by indulging in statements that effectively promote the same kind of group-based discrimination we weaken our cause fundamentally. I don't think it would have been as bad or even a problem if the chant had started from within the marchers; a large part of my problem was that it was given by the same means and with the same endorsed authority as our grievances with the regime themselves.
No grievance is enough that it justifies dehumanising its perpetrators. We may disagree virulently with a person or group's views or ideas, but as soon as we stop respecting their fundamental, universal humanity we start to become as bad as any oppressor. The fact that someone disagrees with you does not in itself invalidate their opinion. Any number of cyclical wars and acts of violence have shown that oppression never justifies oppression. And by that, incidentally, I don't mean that hate speech has to be protected - any private individual or enterprise can choose whether to listen to or to promote an opinion without in any way oppressing its holder's freedom of speech.
In Summary...
I think that it's vital that we put our anger caused by oppression to good use. In civilian protest, we have to use our anger for putting our case to those in power in undeniable terms - those opposing oppression have the moral high ground, and to abandon it for momentary catharsis is an awful injustice in itself. If the oppressors start using violence, then that's another situation entirely; but we have to play by the rules, even if the oppressors don't - not for them, but for us, and for the rules themselves. I reject the proposal that this is the same as tone policing - I don't want to delegitimise anger, rather suggest that there are unconstructive uses of political anger.
In another regard, I think I agree with John* on the narrative of class warfare - it becomes a method of control. So long as the different hereditary factions are kept at each other's throats the real societal injustices those perpetrating them are free to keep right on oppressing. And we can't let that happen. Never before have we had such a great voice - if we can use our anger positively we could really accomplish something.
* I showed a draft of this post (believe it or not, I do those) to a friend who is actively involved in this field, and they objected to my inclusion of John Lennon because of his history of domestic violence. I may do a follow-up post on this topic (for now see the excellent Being A Fan of Problematic Things), but suffice it to say that I have little respect for his personal life - there's some indication that he later became a functioning human being under Yoko Ono's influence, which I think is what makes it possible for me to engage with him at all. My gut reaction to Sean Connery's unrepentant misogyny is mostly "Dear God, you should be in a museum. I will never voluntarily give you another penny and will discourage others from doing so."
(I hope that made sense. Join us next week for more linguistics malarkey as per.)
Content warning: cited NSFW language)
Here I go wading into politics waters without a whisper of training in commenting on them. Then again, Chomsky (who's never been afraid to shoot his mouth off, thank God) mentions that the self-designated ruling class often use their position as a tool to restrict discourse on politics to their own terms. Aka "You're a linguist, am I right in that? Yes, I am a political advisor. I believe I have more experience in these matters than you do." (Aka Let us do your thinking for you.)
So sod it. I'm going to say my piece and hope I get my point across. Politics is my business because it's everybody's business - it's got to be for democracy to have any meaning. My thought is, there are ways to use anger at oppression: ways that will help, and ways that will play into the hands of oppressors. This is a bleedingly delicate point that I'm going to try to qualify below.
The Tone Police [link]
One of the ways that privileged parties (consciously or otherwise) oppress is in what is called tone policing. I mentioned it previously in the context of people referring to Northerners who dislike Southern cultural and economic dominance as "chippy". Thankfully, the class-based cultural and economic oppression of the North seems mostly to have died a death; I don't mean that class-based oppression has disappeared in the UK, just that it's now no longer based on regional provenance in the way it once was.
Tone policing is, essentially, the refusal to listen to an oppressed party's grievances unless they are voiced in a manner that the oppressor approves of. People dedicated to fighting oppression in all forms come up against this frequently, amongst other derailing techniques. Tone policing attempts to delegitimise anger. If you're angry, this faulty logic goes, you aren't being rational, and so your complaints can be dismissed. This ability to stay detached, of course, is itself yet another manifestation of the privilege which is being complained about in the first place.
I bring this up because it's quite difficult to articulate my point without opening yourself up to accusations of tone policing. I agree wholeheartedly that this it is an insidious form of oppression that we have to be on our guard against, and I've put in the above partly as an acknowledgement that the burden of proof is at my end.
Looking Back In Anger [link]
Anger is the most useful force we have in fighting oppression. It's the natural reaction to injustice - why the hell have people put up with this situation? It's rare these days to find people who actively support racial/societal oppression; the opposite of anger (in this case and others) is indifference. Social and political apathy is what holds us back for the most part, not overt croneyism with privilege. When trying to encourage others to adopt a socially just cause, it's rare to find people who say "Actually, the oppression of X group benefits me quite a bit. I'm happy for them to suffer." Most of the time it's just the Internet's favourite word - "Meh".
There are reasons for this - it takes a non-trivial act of humility to come to the awareness that you are privileged in a situation. It's uncomfortable to realise that all along, you've been the bad guy in some way. That's not how we're sold the narrative of our own lives. Blame mass media if you like - Plato was in on the game when he noted that no-one considers themselves evil (or rather, unjustifiably evil). People might think that what they are doing is wrong on some level, but they will usually be able to provide a "but I'm not a bad person because..." clause. If someone thinks that what they are doing is unjustifiably harmful (without even the justification that they enjoy it) they will usually take steps to stop or to rectify what it is they've been doing.
This, to me, appears to be why some meet discussions of privilege and oppression with hostility and aggression. It's uncomfortable to be dragged out of our cocooning narrative where we're on the winning side. It's easier just to ignore or to attempt to delegitimise the complaints being levelled. Again, this is nothing new, with Plato's parable of the Cave describing the protagonist (by analogy with Socrates) discovering that there is more than the shadows on the Cave wall and being put to death by his neighbours on coming back to tell them the good news. It's a classic persecution narrative, one which any number of people (ironically including those who support oppression, whether actively or passively) can buy into, as it's also more comfortable than Oh Right, So I've Been Inadvertently Oppressing People This Whole Time.
Because it is a lot more effort. I mean, being aware of other people takes a lot more energy than only thinking about yourself and your wants and needs. My social activism mostly consists of consciously avoiding using oppressive language (as a male I refuse to use gendered insults where I can find replacements (I don't think the word "cunt" has any equivalent non-gendered insult, unfortunately, so I use it regardless of gender when I do), and slut-shaming is definitely out, for instance) and trying to call people on it when they do likewise, as well as signing petitions online because I'm a student stereotype. I can't claim I succeed perfectly at either of the former - trying to use my various strains of privilege to counter oppression doesn't mean that I magically don't have the privilege anymore, so it's more than likely that I'll still slip up occasionally. (There's no shame in being told you've got something racist stuck in your teeth.)
The problem of when to call someone out, and how you should do it, is complicated; in the video I mentioned Jay Smooth offers one way out. I myself try to be detached and to the point. (Prejudicial assumptions, for instance, seem mostly to collapse under the strain of being explicitly questioned. "So what makes you think that all X group people are Y?" "What grounds do you have for thinking that?" etc) I think it's vital that it isn't a point-scoring exercise - you're helping someone out, ideally, not delivering a put-down couched in social justice rhetoric.
Spitting Fire [link]
So we come back to anger. What I hope I've demonstrated above is that I do not oppose expressing anger at oppression, nor do I think that expressed anger invalidates action against it. As I said above, anger is the source of social progress. What I am saying is that there are ways to use your anger that are productive and ways that are counterproductive.
The example that sparked this thought was a chant that was used on a march protesting the current unelected Conservative regime's cuts to education funding. We were marching in solidarity with out lecturers and tutors, who were being given a pay increase below the rate of inflation, i.e. a wage cut in real terms. I don't need to spell out the horrifying disregard for the welfare of the country that the current government has shown in favour of lucrative privatisation under the guise of austerity; suffice it to say that their cost-cutting measures have systematically targeted the most vulnerable in our society, who by definition have little power to protest.
After chants like "No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!", the organiser holding a megaphone announced that they would lead us in an old favourite: "I say Tory, you say scum!" There wasn't much I could do at the time (being in the middle of a crowd), but it gave me a feeling of real unease. Before, we were demonstrating for something - in this case, showing that we were against the cuts to education in solidarity with our lecturers. On starting what is effectively name-calling, I felt that this undermined our position.
This expression of our anger has no rational aim. The oppressors can look at it, say, "Well, you see, we can't engage with them, they can't be reasoned with" and refuse to attempt further dialogue. It invalidates the previous statements, not because of its anger, but because it has no positive content - worse, it affects the rest of the message negatively by relinquishing the high ground of mature discourse for attempting to engage in a slanging match. As cathartic as it may be, it absolutely harms the cause that it is trying to fight for. Look at the riots in 2011 - there was anger and momentum, but it led to people smashing and looting their own communities and justified all manner of oppressive governmental measures.
Unless we want a blood-soaked revolution (which I think it's worth any price to avoid), this formless anger can have no place in civilian protest. We are protesting the discrimination of the government against particular groups (teachers, those on benefits, the poor generally), and if we compromise ourselves by indulging in statements that effectively promote the same kind of group-based discrimination we weaken our cause fundamentally. I don't think it would have been as bad or even a problem if the chant had started from within the marchers; a large part of my problem was that it was given by the same means and with the same endorsed authority as our grievances with the regime themselves.
No grievance is enough that it justifies dehumanising its perpetrators. We may disagree virulently with a person or group's views or ideas, but as soon as we stop respecting their fundamental, universal humanity we start to become as bad as any oppressor. The fact that someone disagrees with you does not in itself invalidate their opinion. Any number of cyclical wars and acts of violence have shown that oppression never justifies oppression. And by that, incidentally, I don't mean that hate speech has to be protected - any private individual or enterprise can choose whether to listen to or to promote an opinion without in any way oppressing its holder's freedom of speech.
In Summary...
I think that it's vital that we put our anger caused by oppression to good use. In civilian protest, we have to use our anger for putting our case to those in power in undeniable terms - those opposing oppression have the moral high ground, and to abandon it for momentary catharsis is an awful injustice in itself. If the oppressors start using violence, then that's another situation entirely; but we have to play by the rules, even if the oppressors don't - not for them, but for us, and for the rules themselves. I reject the proposal that this is the same as tone policing - I don't want to delegitimise anger, rather suggest that there are unconstructive uses of political anger.
In another regard, I think I agree with John* on the narrative of class warfare - it becomes a method of control. So long as the different hereditary factions are kept at each other's throats the real societal injustices those perpetrating them are free to keep right on oppressing. And we can't let that happen. Never before have we had such a great voice - if we can use our anger positively we could really accomplish something.
* I showed a draft of this post (believe it or not, I do those) to a friend who is actively involved in this field, and they objected to my inclusion of John Lennon because of his history of domestic violence. I may do a follow-up post on this topic (for now see the excellent Being A Fan of Problematic Things), but suffice it to say that I have little respect for his personal life - there's some indication that he later became a functioning human being under Yoko Ono's influence, which I think is what makes it possible for me to engage with him at all. My gut reaction to Sean Connery's unrepentant misogyny is mostly "Dear God, you should be in a museum. I will never voluntarily give you another penny and will discourage others from doing so."
(I hope that made sense. Join us next week for more linguistics malarkey as per.)
Tuesday 6 May 2014
Primer: Metre
(When I was thinking of setting this blog up, my initial vision was of a place where I could explain things that interest me to the interested layperson. The thing that strikes me about Internet learning resources is that they're usually either very introductory or very advanced; there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in the spirit of the primers of yore, where with a bit of concentration you'd be briskly presented with the rudiments of the particular subject and then sent on your way to jump into the real deal.
Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.
In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.
This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...
Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:
Learning Your Scales [link]
The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).
When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:
Accent
So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)
Length
The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.
In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.
Weight
Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).
A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).
The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).
Moving Your Feet [link]
English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)
So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.
A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:
If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.
A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.
Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:
x4
- v v | - v v | - -
- - | | - v
So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.
So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:
- - | - v v | - - | - - | - v v | - -
- v v | - - | - v v | - - | - v v | - v
Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.
Acute Angles [link]
As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.
So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:
v / | v / | v / | v /| v /
"The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)
(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)
You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.
Some common tricks are:
The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.
It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.
Volta Means Turning Away [link]
All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.
For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:
x / x / x x | / x x / x
"To be, or not to be - that is the question:
/ x x / x | x x / x / x
Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer
x / x / x | x x / x / x
The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune
x x / / | x x x / x / x
Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles
x x x / x / x | x / x /
And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)
(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)
Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)
I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.
(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)
The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:
([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)
Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.
A Glance at Rhyme [link]
I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.
As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:
My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)
Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).
A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!
In Summary...
Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.
So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.
(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)
Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.
In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.
This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...
Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:
- Metre is not restricted to sonnets and the like
- Neither is rhyming, though it's a bit more obvious
- If you think writing using them makes the work clunky or unnatural, I would suggest that you're not reading very good examples.
Learning Your Scales [link]
The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).
When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:
- Is its vowel long or short? (Length)
- Does it end in a consonant? (Weight)
- Is it stressed or unstressed? (Accent)
Accent
So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)
Length
The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.
In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.
Weight
Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).
A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).
The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).
Moving Your Feet [link]
English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)
So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.
A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:
| [v v] | Pyrrhic | (PIR-ik) | |||
| [v -] | Iamb | (I-am) | |||
| [- v] | Troche | (TROH-kee) | or | Choree | (KOR-ee) |
| [- -] | Spondee | (SPONN-dee) | |||
| [v v -] | Anapaest | (AN-uh-peest) | |||
| [- v v] | Dactyl | (DAK-til) | |||
| [v - v] | Amphibrach | (AM-fi-brak) | |||
| [- v -] | Amphimacer | (AM-fi-may-ser) | or | Cretic | (KREE-tik) |
| [- - -] | Mollossus | (muh-LOSS-us) |
If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.
A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.
Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:
x4
- v v | - v v | - -
- - | | - v
So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.
So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:
- - | - v v | - - | - - | - v v | - -
- v v | - - | - v v | - - | - v v | - v
Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.
Acute Angles [link]
As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.
So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:
v / | v / | v / | v /| v /
"The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)
(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)
You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.
Some common tricks are:
- Feminine ending
You add an extra weak syllable to the end of the line. So-called because in French, grammatically feminine adjectives have an extra -e on the end.
v / | v / | v / | v / | v / v
"Be not | afear'd - the isle | is full | of noises" (The Tempest) - Trochaic inversion
You turn an iamb round into a troche.
/ v | v / | / v | v / | v /
"What's in | a name? | That which | we call | a rose
v /| v /| v / | v / | v /
By a|ny o|ther name | would smell | as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet)
- Pyrrhic and spondaic substitution
Where you replace the iamb entirely either with two weak or two stressed (can be one stressed, one heavy). With the features of Standard English outlined above, this will usually mean two separate, short words.
v / | v / | v v | / v | v / v
"To be | or not | to be? | That is | the question." (Hamlet)
v / | / / | v / | v /| v /
"Oh brave | new world, | that has | such peo|ple in't!" (The Tempest)
The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.
It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.
Volta Means Turning Away [link]
All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.
For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:
x / x / x x | / x x / x
"To be, or not to be - that is the question:
/ x x / x | x x / x / x
Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer
x / x / x | x x / x / x
The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune
x x / / | x x x / x / x
Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles
x x x / x / x | x / x /
And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)
(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)
Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)
I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.
(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)
The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:
| 1. | 2. | Stresses | |
| / \ x x / | / x x / | 2 | |
| THOU mastering me | I did say yes | ||
| \ / x x / x / | \ x / x x / / | 3 | |
| God! giver of breath and bread; | O at lightning and lashed rod; | ||
| / / / x x / | x / x /x x / x / | 4 | |
| World’s strand, sway of the sea; | Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess | ||
| / x / x x / | x / x x / x / | 3 | |
| Lord of living and dead; | Thy terror, O Christ, O God; | ||
| \ x / / x / x \ / x x / | x / x x / / x x /x x / | 5 | |
| Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, | Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: | ||
| x / x x / x x / / x / | x / x x / x x / x x / x \ / | 5 | |
| And after it almost unmade, what with dread, | The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod | ||
| / /x x \ x / x x / | / / x x / x x / | 4 | |
| Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? | Hard down with a horror of height: | ||
| / x x / x /x x / x x / / | x x / x x / x / x \ / x / x x / | 6 | |
| Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. | And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. |
([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)
Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.
A Glance at Rhyme [link]
I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.
As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:
My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)
Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).
A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!
In Summary...
Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.
So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.
(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)
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