Yesterday’s post is the second piece I have written on language this semester*, and indeed it is a significant topic of discussion for many contemporary issues. For those of you who find this topic interesting, concerning, or confusing, I want to share an excerpt from WNYC’s podcast On the Media. This segment aired in the last week’s episode entitled “Normalize This!” and focuses on the ways in which language has changed politically over the course of U.S. history. It taps nicely into the ideas I have brought up in both of my previous posts on language.

Host Brooke Gladstone talks with writer and linguist, John McWhorter in “Left Language, Right Language”:

To listen to the full episode, you can go to their website or download it on iTunes or your preferred podcast app. Now I’m back to writing final term papers…

*If you’d like to read my other post on language, you can find it here.

How do you think about language?
Do you view it as collections of words that represent “things”?
Do you view it as a tool that we use to communicate with one another? 

Those are common ways to think about language, especially when we find ourselves learning new ones. There are long lists of vocabulary and strange verb conjugation rules . . . all leading to hours of tedious memorization. Perhaps that’s your memory of language classes from high school, and now that Spanish or French (or Afrikaans and isiXhosa if you’re South African like me) is merely a distant, vague shadow in your brain.

If that is how you were taught to think about language, however, then you are missing out. Language is more than simply a tool or set of words. Language is something that humans use to actually construct our world. Here I am going to briefly turn to a Swiss linguist from the late 19th and early 20th century who revolutionized how scholars think about language–Ferdinand de Saussure. In the “Arbitrary Social Values and the Linguistic Sign”, he writes:

Psychologically our thought–apart from its expression in words–is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. (166)

Frederic Jameson helps us understand the philosophical shift that de Saussure makes: “The movement of Saussure’s thought may perhaps be articulated as follows: language is not an objectnot a substance, but rather a value: thus language is a perception of identity” (“The Linguistic Model” in The Prison-house of Language, 35). Language is dynamic and operates, along with our thought, to shape how we view and comprehend the world around us. Language, you could say, is a reflection of our perception.

This understanding of language is central to the plot of the recently released film Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. After twelve strange vessels from space appear across the globe, hovering in Earth’s skies, the world’s top linguists are employed by governments to try to communicate with the alien beings who command these ships. The goal: find out if the aliens come in peace or animosity. Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, one of those linguists who is hired by the US government along with Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist.

Together Louise and Ian make contact with two of the visitors and struggle to comprehend the nature and mechanics of the new language, along with linguists across the world who are also trying to make progress using different techniques. Simultaneously, military leadership and government officials impatiently await answers while they must manage the fears and anxieties of national publics who have no idea what is going on and want the aliens annihilated.

The film is about the tension between expectations and reality, and how our expectations can color how we use and think about language, which in turn shapes reality. In other words, if we are not careful, what we expect will be what we get–not because it was inevitable but because we believed it into existence. While the stakes are much higher in the context of this film, the narrative challenges the ways in which we the audience also participate daily within similar frameworks. The most direct example would be the ways in which we perceive outsiders to our communities, whether local or national. For example, fear of illegal immigrants affects our language, such as calling Japanese-Americans the derogatory term “Japs” during WWII, which in turn builds a culture that circulates fear while simultaneously dehumanizing the object of our fear.

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician wrote aptly about this topic. First he noted,

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

In addition, he said, 

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”

Of course, fear can also play a significant role in protecting us, but the danger is when fear becomes our trigger instinct. Before we accept the truths that our fear suggests, we should step back and challenge the framework of the world where that fear exists. And we should analyze the language that may be fueling the fear. 

This is precisely the situation in which the world finds itself in the movie Arrival, and Dr. Banks, a linguist, finds herself responsible for de-escalating potential world (or inter-galactic?) war. If you have not already, I encourage you to go see the film Arrival over break because the thoughts I have raised will become more clear in relation to the plot of the movie. If you do, I urge you to reflect on these ideas about the role that language plays in our society. As we head into Christmas break and spend significant time with families and friends, take the time to reflect on your conversations and your thoughts and how they, individually and collectively, are shaping our world of today. 

This week’s featured image is by Antonio Literrio, made available for use by a CC 3.0 License.

I have been steering clear of any posts discussing the impending elections–a topic I feel ill-equipped and wary to weigh in on. But this post will address a matter that is intimately woven into political debate, particularly in this country: the matter of language. In this context, I’m not thinking of language in terms of systems of communication used by cultural or national communities, such as Mandarin or Spanish, though that in itself is a complex conversation in politics. Instead, I want to consider language more broadly as a set of words and rules and symbols that we imbue with meaning and that ultimately shapes the way we think about and view the world. I am particularly interested in addressing those sets of words that have been labeled as political correctness.

Political correctness, or “PC” as it can be described, is a controversial point of debate that has been subject to frequent critique from mainstream news and the topic of several South Park episodes. Perhaps the most frequent, and most simple, challenge to political correctness is the statement: “But they’re just words,” often accompanied with exclamations like “Let it go,” or “Get over it.” Among the more complex critiques is the concern that political correctness infantilizes our citizenry–over-protecting people from the real world, while simultaneously limiting the constitutional right to free speech. For the purpose of this post, however, I want to seriously consider the impact that words have on our society. Why do the words we choose to use matter, and why might people spend time advocating for certain sets of vocabulary? Why might those vocabulary terms change over time? This is an extensive subject, so I will barely scratch the surface, but I hope the following might provoke some thought.

Most of us grew up with the playground verse, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never harm you.” We now know that to be quite untrue; in fact, psychological and emotional damage has a far greater and long-standing impact on a person than many physical injuries. There are certain names, described as hate speech, that the societal majority generally agrees are completely inappropriate and damaging in their use. We run into problems, however, when language changes and when individuals belonging to a particular affiliation ask for society-at-large to alter how it identifies that affiliation, or when in a debate, each side disagrees on the meaning of a term. Suddenly, it’s not quite clear anymore where the line between words being harmful or innocuous can be drawn.

Let’s make this more concrete with some examples. I’ll begin with an area of language that is personal to me: gendered terminology. In the last few decades, our language has seen a shift from assuming male-gendered pronouns and occupation titles, e.g. “policemen”, to using more inclusive titles like “flight attendant.” Though the title “policewoman” has traditionally existed, we still typically revert to using “policeman.” Why does this matter? It establishes the assumption that policing is a predominately male job, which further reinforces a male-dominated policing culture, making it difficult for those women who do enter into a policing career. (And discouraging many more from entering the police-force, further reinforcing the assumption that policing is a male job.) Imagine how cultural dynamics within police-forces might change if the gender dynamic shifted. Traditional expectations of policing, associated with aggression and force, could experience a fundamental paradigm revolution. Current conversations about national police brutality might look quite different.

Image courtesy of Timo, via CC 2.0 license.
Image courtesy of Timo, via CC 2.0 license.

Another example of nuanced language that can make a significant difference is the term “illegal alien.” Regardless of your opinion about how we should handle illegal immigration, the phrase “illegal alien” is loaded. As an immigrant myself, though I was legal, any time I was referred to as an alien, it immediately conjured up images of grotesque green slimy creatures with weird appendages and too many eyes. I felt dehumanized, an outsider, and unfit to be a virtuous white picket fence American. Imagine adding the adjective “illegal” to the term alien and how much more dehumanizing that must feel. On the other end, for those using the phrase, it also desensitizes speakers to the fact that the “illegal aliens” crossing our borders are people like ourselves, trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. When the debate about these issues uses abstracted, dehumanizing terms, we do a disservice to the actual realities of the issue. It is not enough to simply engage our reason; as holistic human beings, we must also engage our emotions, risky though it may feel. That does not necessarily mean not making rational, difficult decisions, but we owe people the dignity of confronting their difficult situation fully and face-on.

As evidenced in both of these examples, words are always burdened with a history, with associated imagery, and with assumptions. For each individual, a word is experienced with a story behind it. When we utilize words, we tap into those stories both in delivery and receipt. Words are also associated with power structures and can either reinforce or subvert those power structures. Words over time change and are changed, people injecting new meaning into the way words are experienced and used, such as the way certain African-American communities have taken ownership over the n-word, subverting and transforming a word that has been used to demean African-Americans for decades.

The famous British cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, wrote an entire book entitled Keywords that was dedicated to this subject. In his introduction, he noted, “no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) systematic properties of language itself” (22). He further describes his study of keywords as “not a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meaning which, because it is ‘our language’, has a natural authority; but as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history” (24).

In conclusion, I wish to urge you my reader to take it seriously when heated discussions or earnest pleas regarding terminology are raised. Instead of considering these moves as calculated political attacks, take the time to learn the stories behind the words and phrases discussed and spend some time listening to those who are expressing pain or disenfranchisement. Their stories are different to yours, and therefore, they will hear and experience words different to how you might. You don’t have to agree with them, but you can give them the courtesy of acknowledging that words hold power and can hurt. You can also pay more attention to your own use of words and phrases. Why do you say something the way you say it? What assumptions and privileges are built into that language? What stories do you yourself bring to the table, and how do they impact the way you experience certain narratives?

In this particularly tumultuous election, we Americans have gotten quite good at yelling at each other and arguing our point of views. As I’ve done before, I urge you to step out of the fray and model something different: compassionate listening.

Featured image courtesy of Matus Laslofi, through a CC 2.0 license.

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