(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.)
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
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, 15 April 2014
On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part Two of Two)
(Welcome back to my beef with eye dialect. Last week we looked at the English class system, my relation to it, and its oppression of dialect deemed nonstandard, drawing parallels with the oppression of minority languages. This week we'll examine the use of eye dialect more in depth and whether any alternatives are still viable in the case of Broad Yorkshire in particular.
Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.
Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)
She Sed Wot [link]
Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.
Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)
She Sed Wot [link]
Falling back to our eye dialect... First off, there
appear to be two similar but conflicting definitions of what we mean by eye
dialect. One is the use of phoneticised spellings of standard pronunciation (as
in the heading), the other is using phoneticised spellings to indicate
non-standard diction. The two senses combine in their design of othering the
speech recorded, and by extension the speaker, often in order to make fun of
them. After all, attacking what is different from you is the basis of a lot of
lazy humour. You could compare this to someone altering or distorting their
voice while telling a joke for a character - the one who gets the teller's
natural voice is always the one who is treated with the most respect within the
joke, if the teller is not the narrator themselves.
For example, here's a joke about Mancunians (inhabitants
of Manchester) and Scousers (inhabitants of Liverpool):
In a maternity unit there is a shortage of labels, so
the midwife goes out into the corridor and tells the three new fathers (a Manc,
a Scouser and a Nigerian) there that they'll have to go in and pick up out
their children by family resemblance.
The Manc goes in first, and comes out with a baby. The baby's black. The Nigerian guy says, "Excuse me, mate, I think that baby's
mine." The Manc says, "Sorry, man, I didn't want to take any chances
- one of them's a Scouser!"
When I heard that joke, the person telling it did an
approximation of a Mancunian accent on the last line - that's part of the joke.
The Nigerian man's line they delivered in their natural speaking voice, the
same as the rest of the narration. He's a straight man, the voice of reason,
the one we agree with. We're meant to laugh at the Mancunian (and by extension
the Liverpudlian as well). (It's important not to discount potential racism
informing the person (who wasn't a person of colour) deciding not to do an
impression of a Nigerian person, but I think this sympathetic straight-man aspect
is also decisive.)
We might suggest the same with eye dialect: you don't
write in eye dialect yourself; to do so would be a sign that you aren't
educated (and thus are unable to make the distinction). Eye dialect becomes a
way to mark a character's speech and thereby thoughts as substandard and open
to derision. Dickens (never afraid to stoop for a cheap laugh) does this all
the time with his working class characters; any number of butcherings of AAVE
(African American Vernacular English) in white authors' works throughout
American history have served a similar purpose.
An interesting case relating to BY is in Barry Hines'
novel A Kestrel for a Knave (set in Barnsley). Throughout the novel the
working class characters' dialogue is written in dialect (Billy says Alarm's
gone off tha knows, and Gi'o'er! That hurts! [short for give over,
meaning stop it]), the more well-to-do characters (and the narrator)
speaking SE. In the Penguin Modern Classics afterword, when talking about adapting
the book for the film Kes, Hines says that he wrote the script entirely
in SE, and the cast translated it back into BY for filming. He also mentions
that he regrets writing with dialect and would rather the dialogue were all in SE.
These two details, I feel, reinforce the interpretation
of eye dialect (or in Hines' case, of written dialect at all) as othering by
its very nature - the writer and the cast, both speakers of BY, have no need of
it; so we are left to assume that the inclusion of the novel's dialect is for
the benefit of outsiders not familiar with BY, even though it seems (in its
author's eyes) to demean the characters who speak it.
Pure Written Dialect [link]
I think Hines' discomfort with the idea of written
dialect is telling. English other than SE is stigmatised to the extent that it
is denied the legitimacy of being written down even by its native speakers. To
non-linguists, "accent" and "dialect" are things that
happen to other people - if you have an accent, or, worse, speak in dialect, it
is a mark of being uneducated. Linguists point out in vain that it is
impossible not to have an accent or not speak in a dialect, because these terms
have been co-opted into the oppressive narrative of aggressive linguistic normativity.
For the record, accents differ on how words are pronounced, and dialects differ
in terms of words and constructions used. The line between isn't always very
definite, but it has been observed that in the face of increased social and
popular mobility the traditional dialects of UK English have tended to be
replaced by more-or-less SE spoken with a particular accent. This coincides
with the far end of my mixed dialect continuum outlined above. I would also
argue that the demotion of dialects to "accents" is a common,
self-fulfilling weapon in their erasure.
It doesn't have to be like this, though. It is famously
said that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy
- just like the dividing line between different species of the same genus
becomes harder to see the closer you look, at what point a dialect becomes a
separate language has historically been more a matter of politics than of
taxonomy. The different "dialects" of Modern Arabic and Chinese are
divergent enough that they are often unofficially termed separate languages;
the Romance and Nordic languages are close enough that their individual
languages can be classified as different points on a dialect continuum. As the
usual rough test for two creatures being of the same species is whether they
can interbreed successfully, so the rule of thumb for the dialect/language
split is whether two candidates are mutually intelligible, and to what degree.
Take Scots. Debate rages over whether it is a dialect of
English or its own language, closely related to English but separate, in the
manner of Norwegian's relation to Swedish. As I described above for BY, the
situation is complicated by the imposition of SE on the pure form - many Scots
themselves appear to consider the language merely substandard English. But
thanks to the existence of a literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages and
including writers such as Robert Burns there is an established written form of
Scots.
Here's the penultimate stanza of Burns' To a Mouse
(of which the third and fourth lines have become proverbial in SE) with an SE
translation:
| But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! | But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy! |
There are several features that distinguish the Scots
original from the English: there are words that are found in archaic SE (thou
art, thy, nought), as well as ones that have no direct
equivalent in SE (lane, Gang
aft agley). There are words that do exist in SE, but that have more
consonants than the Scots versions (o', an', lea'e) - in
this case the apostrophe is called an apologetic apostrophe, as it is
apologising for Scots' divergence. Since the 20th century it is no longer used,
so for instance in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting we get passages like
Renton's analysis of Jean-Claude Van Damme films from the opening chapter:
As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory
dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the
tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot
thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae
some serious swedgin. – Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy
gasped, shaking his heid.
(It's worth noting that some Scots purists condemn Irvine
Welsh's writing as hopelessly Anglicised. It's noticeable that the very literate Renton frequently switches between SE and Scots forms - like and here, elsewhere realised as n.)
We can tell from the rhyme scheme in the Burns poem (men
rhyming with vain and pain etc.) that even the words that exist
in SE and are written exactly the same aren't necessarily pronounced the same.
I think this is a key point - in a pure dialect, there is no need to mark
consistent pronunciations if they differ from another, because the written form
is meant to be read without reference to it.
Writing Tyke [link]
Let's go further with that. There's a lot of dialectal
variation within Yorkshire, but around Sheffield (dialectally West Yorkshire),
where my family are from, the vowel in goat (using John Wells' lexical set)
varies between something like [o:] (like a Spanish o, but long) and [ow]
(quite Sheffield - if you've ever heard Sean Bean say O2 you'll
recognise the elongated vowel sounds we tend to come out with). I tend towards
the latter. Regardless, the underlying phoneme that stays the same across
different words in the goat set (old, poke, over etc.) and so wouldn't need to
be represented by a different spelling in pure dialectal writing. If it is
spelt out somehow (like eauw or something for the latter) it becomes
clear that we are in eye dialect territory - a difference is being marked from
a standard.
Another example would be the vowel in strut. In Yorkshire
it's [ʊ], which is the same as the vowel in put (and Wells' foot set,
though in many parts of the Yorkshire and the North in general that has [u:], the same vowel as goose).
People trying to parody a Northern accent often write things like "fookin'"
to indicate /'fʊkin/ (where they themselves would probably say /'fʌkiŋ/),
though to me (and people who pronounce Luke and look similarly)
that looks like it should be read /'fu:kin/. (This was, by the by, the point
that came up in the conversation that sparked this whole rumination.) Drawing
the attention of people gormless enough to do this sort of thing to that can
earn accusations of being "chippy" (i.e. having a chip on your
shoulder), because it's apparently unreasonable to be angry at the eradication of your culture being used as a badly-informed joke.
Anyway. There are features of BY that don't exist in SE,
though: the most famous is probably definite article reduction, where the
is reduced to a glottal stop, traditionally spelt t' (A were walkin
down t'road). There are other reduced forms that don't exist in SE like dun't
for doesn't (It dun't matter) and me for my (A've
lost me phone again). In pure BY the second person singular pronoun forms
are still used (thou realised as tha, thy reducing to thi
like me and taking third person singular endings), the reflexive -self
of SE is met with forms in -sen (If ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen), and while is used where SE has until (She's workin while five; occasionally causing quite a bit of of confusion), amongst other features.
It's important to note that features such as mesen
and gang (from the Burns) are not corruptions of SE forms – they are
different forms that have survived from Old English, often longer than their
equivalents in SE - take nowt (pronounced /nawt/ most places, but /nowt/ round Sheffield), continuing archaic SE naught, or tha continuing thou.
If you’re familiar with German you might recognise features in Mousie (Mäuschen)
and gang (sie ist gegangen). A good example is the present
participle: SE playing, BY laikin (same root as LEGO [laik
good]). The Old English form was closer to the German spielend – the
generalisation of the noun-forming –ing (German –ung) is a
hypercorrection that does not cross into most pure dialects.
In any potential pure written BY standard, a decision
would have to be made to what level to phoneticise the spelling. We can follow
Scots in ignoring sounds that are present in SE but absent in BY (so ow
right at the beginning of the first half for SE how, goin for SE going);
spelling the equivalent of SE I as A might be accepted (we could
argue SE I is a regular pronunciation of the price vowel, so pure BY
should be allowed to regularise it to the trap vowel), but the suggestion (as
some BY writers have done) of spelling the equivalent of SE weak to and for
as ter and fer is more contentious. Do we represent all weak
forms in spelling as a rule? To is already an exceptional pronunciation
(it doesn't rhyme with toe, after all), but weak for is
unresolved. Incidentally, the question of how representative to make an
orthography (and whether to make a new breakaway set more representative of reduction)
is an established pattern with the likes of Belarusian as compared to Russian.
A Sailed Ship? [link]
All this is really, though, just idle speculation. If BY
was to have its own literary tradition (beyond being othered as the speech of uneducated characters), the time to establish it was at the very latest the
beginning of the last century. The influence of SE has pulled us too far along
the gradient, I fear, for a pure BY to be able to be freestanding. While local
pride has grown stronger with the destigmatisation of "regional
accents", I very much doubt that there is enough of a foundation left to
build on; the pure dialect has to all intents and purposes been erased, just as
was desired. In the 19th century nationalising drive many previously minor
Slavic languages delved into medieval texts to reclaim words that were
definitely not Russian loans, and people began to use them again, but I don't
imagine that a parallel situation could ever really arise now that our society
seems (with such incredibly positive results, and which I completely support in
other regards) to tend towards the communal rather than the individualising. I
would love to be proved wrong, of course - though as I'm not a native speaker
of pure BY it's out of my hands.
That's the thing that really gets me about eye dialect -
it's waving the possibility of having a proper non-Standard literary tradition
in the non-Standard speaker's face, and then blowing your nose on it. It's a
disgusting distortion of the written word, which used right could be brilliant.
(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)
(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)
Tuesday, 8 April 2014
On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part One of Two)
(This next one is a two-parter because it's quite long. I also think there's at least some natural division between the first and second halves: in this first part I discuss English social class and its relation to dialect, my slightly complicated status in that regard, and how languages/dialects deemed non-standard are oppressed.)
Now'en, ow yer goin? Or rather, Hi, how are you
all? I found myself reflecting on eye dialect recently when it briefly came
up in a conversation. (As one of those boringly overeducated people, I find
most conversations involving me inevitably tend back to linguistics. Well, when all you've got is a hammer...)
So as it turns out, there are lots of things that I find
interesting associated with that particular topic! (Allow me to subject you to
all of them in short order...) On a more serious note, it's an interesting
jumping-off point to explore my slightly odd but by no means unprecedented
class/linguistic status, in the hope that (as I suspect may become more common
in the future) there are other people who newly find themselves in a similar
position and are wondering what to do about it, and to explore the concept of writing down
dialect in general.
Ideas Above One's Station [link]
Here's the deal. Historically in English society (i.e.
very roughly from the Reformation to the 19th century), the class division has been Working/Middle/Upper class: the Upper class was the aristocracy (who owned
their land and money by inheritance and didn't have to work for or at either of
them - aka Old Money), the Middle class was the educated professionals (who had
land and money through working for it - aka New Money), and the Working class
was the rest of the population (who had neither land, money nor (historically)
education, and would work apprenticed trades for little money). Lots of comment
has been passed on this three-part division; I'm no specialist on the matter,
though if you're interested in an informative observational comic slant on it
I'd recommend Kate Fox's Watching the English.
Anyway. Social mobility in this classic framework (let's
fix it at, say, the Victorian era to make it sound less hand-wavey) is limited:
you need a title to be an aristocrat, and you need an education to be middle
class. You can, of course, buy a title (if you're middle class to start with),
but you'll be sniffed at as New Money for a few generations; similarly, if a
person from the working class suddenly comes into money (the stereotype goes),
their lack of social graces and restraint with their money will mark them out
as another type of New Money; their offspring (or their offspring's offspring),
brought up and educated in a middle class manner, will in all likelihood be
accepted, provided they are suitably reticent about their parents' (or
grandparents') background.
These old school social climbers have it particularly
tough - they'll be looked down upon by the members of the class they want to
join, but that pales in comparison to how they'll be despised by the class
they're trying to leave behind. It's not hard to imagine why - the people
they've grown up with, who have supported and looked after them, are now made
to feel as if they aren't good enough, or that the climber thinks that they are
better than them. Well into the 20th century "class traitor" seems to
have been a stinging insult.
Then, most noticeably starting around the 1960s, things
changed. To my mind the most influential factor seems to be the two World Wars
fought within fifty years, at devastating cost to the British Empire and all
that it encompassed. Huge sections of the adult male population were killed,
leaving large vacuums that society instinctively moved to fill. The Old Guard
try to stand against the changes as best they can, but they are so depleted,
and the post-War economic changes have put enough of the money into the hands
of the other classes, that once the children born after 1945 (the Baby Boomers)
become a societal force there is little that they can do. Along with increased
immigration making the population more culturally diverse as well, English and
British society is commonly referred to currently as being in an egalitarian
age - indeed, some even talk about being persecuted for being "too
posh", sometimes calling this "reverse snobbery". Others claim
that we now live in a classless society.
Talking Proper, Like What I Do [link]
How does this relate to eye dialect? I'm getting there.
One of the most concentrated class indicators is the use of language. You can
probably come up with plenty of examples yourself of words, constructions or
pronunciations that are considered "colloquial", "uneducated"
or "vulgar". In linguistics this is called proscribed usage (not to
be confused with prescribed usage, which is the opposite!). With my
Social Justice hat on, I would say that adherence to arbitrary linguistic norms
is used as a tool of class oppression; you can find pages and pages of
exposition on why (for instance) splitting infinitives or ending a sentence
with a preposition or any number of pedantic bugbears are aesthetically,
logically or morally wrong, but the truth is there is literally no inherent
superiority in any one linguistic construct, and please do quote me on that.
The only fundamental requirement of language as a means
of communication is that each party understand what the other is saying. As
people like Jakobson explore, there are many more layers communicated in a
phrase than what each word literally means in a dictionary (think tone of
voice, colloquial vs. non-colloquial (aka register), references to shared
culture, poetic quality of the phrase itself etc.) - this is why formal,
written English is more long-winded than conversational English: we've only got
twenty-six letters and about twelve punctuation marks to get our point across
unambiguously, compared to the full range and expressive power of the human
voice (not to mention non-verbal cues). Of course, once democratisation via the Internet gets involved, the
collective genius of crowd-sourcing comes up with emoticons, but that's another
story.
But anyway, the idea of language use as class marker is
pervasive - it's commonly cited as the most enduring way to tell someone's
class. The educated middle classes are supposed to speak RP (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English or what most people overseas think of as "a
British accent"), the upper classes a distinctively archaic strain of it
(sometimes termed U RP, presumably after Nancy Mitford's beloved U and non-U word lists), and the working classes any other local dialect, referred to
collectively and somewhat pejoratively as "regional accents". Anyone
jumping a class is expected to acquire the native accent/dialect; hence adopting
RP is sometimes knocked as "talking posh".
Linguistically, RP can be called the prestige dialect of
UK English - it is seen as the standard from which other varieties deviate.
Under the language-as-communication idea I set out a minute ago you can see why
a standard dialect is needed - otherwise speakers of divergent dialects won't
be able to understand each other. This is more or less indeed how standard written English emerged; the problem comes (from an anti-classist perspective) when the
standard is valorised over other dialects.
Once-A-Nighters [link]
Here's where I come in. As you can probably tell from my
writing style, I've had quite a Classical education, all things considered. I
also speak with a Yorkshire accent despite currently being based in the South
for my studies, an accent and idiom that I've chosen to retain despite the
faint expectation for me to acquire RP. As it happens, at my secondary school
(also in the South) I did adopt RP, mainly in a bid to avoid drawing attention
to myself, but also to see if I could. At home I would revert to a Yorkshire
accent. While at school I could switch accents in the same sentence; I haven't
bothered with RP for a few years now, though when showing some non-native
friends how to speak RP I found it came back easily enough.
Where I fit into the classical English class system is unclear.
By education I'm clearly middle-middle or upper-middle class (going by Kate
Fox's subdivisions), but by accent and (apparently) demeanour I identify with my
family and my home, broadly working class. In 19th century Russian society
there was a group known as the raznochíntsy (singular razonchínets,
acute marks stress, pronunciation). The
name comes from the words rázny (different) and chin (class,
rank), so means something like "other-classers" - the heading for
this section comes from an anecdote my Russian tutor told me about one of his
classmates coming across the word and reading it not as razno-chinets
but raz-nochinets (raz means "once", noch'
means "night"), and coming up with the above. Anyway, the raznochintsy
were the sons of peasants made good - so they were educated, but not part of
the nobility (Russians haven't historically really ever had a middle class). This made them a
societal force to be reckoned with because they had the intellectual clout to
make themselves heard without the crippling guilt the more progressive nobles
inherited. Many ended up in Siberia for their troubles (link to the Decembrists for an example of how welcome dissent was), though not
before raising the intellectual fervour that ended with the Revolution.
On a Slide Rule [link]
I find the term quite attractive: I have an education,
but I refuse to allow that to negate my Northernness. I am quite capable of
speaking RP, but I will not enunciate for your benefit, which is a coded
classist way of delegitimising speech you deem nonstandard. (Though if you
legitimately didn't hear what I said I'll be happy to repeat it for you.)
I can imagine that some people, on reading the above,
would argue that I belong unquestionably to the middle class and am
intellectualising my denial. To which I would say, that's pretty damn rude. I
personally say that someone's identity is their decision, and people should
respect that, even if they would not identify similarly themselves and can't
understand why someone would want to.
I choose instead to conceptualise it like so: my identity
does not reduce to a single point without further reference. There are people
who can describe themselves as Yorkshire without further qualification and feel
that that describes them fully, just as there are people who can describe
themselves as from a part of London, or on a broader level as English, British,
Irish or whatever. I, however, see myself as a point on a line between
Yorkshire/working class and middle class. It took me a long time and a lot of
distress, but I have come to feel comfortable where I am, and feel no immediate
need to justify (in the typographical or rhetorical sense) to either end.
(I should probably mention here that I'm not entirely of
English blood; to my mind this doesn't factor overmuch into my cultural and
linguistic identity, though.)
Impure Dialect [link]
My idiolect (personal usage), therefore, falls on a
similar line between Standard English/RP (the former henceforth SE) and Broad
Yorkshire (aka Tyke, likewise BY). Historically (and rarely nowadays in rural
and deprived areas) there exist speakers of BY who speak without an awareness
of the forms of SE - they are typified as "uneducated", because of
the aforementioned equation of the standard/prestige dialect with education.
It is the defining characteristic of educated,
non-Standard speakers' idiolect that their diction is informed by two points,
not by one. In parallel with my scale of identity above, there is the
"pure" dialect at one end, and the standard at the other. Where there
is a divergence between pure and standard, the mixed speaker will have to
choose one form or another. This is a well-studied phenomenon in linguistics
known as code-switching, often examined in bilingual children for maximal
differentiation; the choice seems to come down in bilinguals to which language
a concept is felt to be easier to express in, or to which language the concept
itself is associated with. If you have learnt about a topic in your second
language, it may be easier to switch to the second language to discuss the
topic - you may not even know the relevant terminology in your first language,
even though it is usually the more "natural" to you.
For mixed dialect speakers this choice is coloured by
class. Regardless of whether a construct that exists in the pure dialect feels
more appropriate in context, the standard form will be preferred. This is a
concern quite apart from whether the listener will understand the pure form -
if this would not be the case, the choice is straightforward. (Or the pure form
can be given glossed.) It must be stressed that this is also separate from
concerns of colloquial/non-colloquial register - instances of native pure
speakers choosing standard forms over stigmatised pure forms in speech abound,
and besides, beyond the concept of possible inappropriate register, colloquial
standard usage is rarely stigmatised (outside of the most soullessly pedantic circles, at least). That a dialect is not permitted to exist except for in
negative reference to a standard is the essence of its linguistic oppression.
What I contend is the oppression of a dialect bears
comparison to the phenomenon of linguicide: the government of a country
attempts to exterminate a minority language and replace it with
the standard language. You can see the appalling treatment of Insular Celtic speakers by
the British and French governments (and that of Native American languages by
the nascent United States, or Aboriginal languages in Australia, and the list
sadly goes on) as examples of this enforced cultural assimilation; while
frequently enforced top-down by state education (in which children speaking the
"wrong" language are beaten, for instance), it also, more
pervasively, takes root from the bottom up when native speakers tragically see
no use in teaching their native language to their children, thereby depriving
it of vital new life and them of their cultural heritage.
(And on that cheery note we'll pause. Join us next week for the concluding half, in which I discuss how eye dialect fits into this framework by telling a Manc joke (aw yiss), how dialects/languages can use written tradition to legitimise their way from this linguistic oppression (with reference to Scots), and whether Broad Yorkshire in particular can ever expect to get one.)
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