My friend John and I just launched a new language blog, a sort of take-off from my column in The (Duke) Chronicle.
Check it out: http://thediacritics.wordpress.com/
I recently traveled to France to see the country and visit a couple of friends from Australia. It was absolutely spectacular. Here’s a map showing where I traveled, and below is a slideshow of some pictures from my trip.
France, in brief, a set on Flickr.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on April 21, 2011.
The sweet, humid smell of spring at Duke often reminds me of a day about four years ago, when I moved into Gilbert-Addoms Dormitory on East Campus. I remember it in flashes: Beautiful campus. Sweat dripping down my face. 105 degrees outside. 110 degrees inside. So much pastel clothing.
Of all the novelties that held my attention during those first few weeks here, my classmates’ accents and languages fascinated me the most. After coming from a relatively homogeneous hometown, I found it thrilling to walk down my hallway and hear voices from exotic and faraway places, like Zimbabwe and Pennsylvania. I felt like every person’s language provided an incredible window into their lives, their experiences and their worlds.
I began to see language as a powerful matrix on which to view our world. Language defines our species, but our understanding of its mechanics is limited because we aren’t provided any formal training in linguistics until college. And although many people find the topic of language in society interesting, the popular perception of linguists as dry, pedantic academics steeped in elaborate theory cripples their potential impact as descriptors of the world.
I wrote these columns on linguistics to attempt to understand Duke through the useful, but underrated, lens of language. This topic has been creatively productive for me in the past year, so as I’ve begun to wind down my tenure at Duke, I have been wondering how to describe the entirety of my time here through language.
My four years have been anything but consistent, but the amalgam of all my experiences has shaped who I am now. Perhaps my whole Duke experience is some sort of motley collection, kind of like terms in a dictionary—a Duke dictionary. In fact, what if we all have been writing our own Duke dictionaries? Maybe they’re complete with definitions, tables, charts… and, for some of us, maybe even PowerPoints.
As we define our Duke experience, and as we let our Duke experience define us, our dictionaries fill up—entry by entry, page by page.
Maybe we all write in our dictionaries daily as we experience new things here, whether we spend our nights in the lab, in the studio, in the library or in the cage at Shooters (or all of them). Each entry is a point in time, a memory that we all made together or alone. Even the most common terms transform into entries with new, deeply meaningful connotations, loaded with the memories that we made here.
For example, before Duke, “tenting” was just something I did outside while it was cold, wet and muddy. At Duke, tenting became something I did outside while it was cold, wet and muddy—with 11 other people. Before Duke, terms like “gardens” and “plaza” were unremarkable, but at Duke, I redefined them as the perfect places to shamelessly take a nap on a hot spring day.
Some dictionary entries, such as “engage” and “global,” are much longer than others.
At our first-year convocation, President Brodhead told us to get engaged. We do that: Every day, hospital volunteers engage with patients, young entrepreneurs with their big idea, and thesis students with their research. The DukeEngage program allows hundreds of us to define engagement by working with communities here and abroad. Some of us are even engaged to be married!
And because Duke is building new programs around the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we can define “global” right here, too. Cultural shows like Awaaz and festivals like Springternational remind me that Duke gives us opportunities every day—in Durham—to define ourselves as global citizens.
I also had to write down entries like sexism, racism, classism and homophobia, when I saw them. But despite how painfully long those descriptions were, I had the choice to counterbalance them with entries like community, friendship and commitment. I alone defined and redefined what each of my experiences meant to me—my agency defined my time here.
As I’m about to put the final entry in my collection—“graduation”—and as I’m about to begin my next adventure, I wonder how much I’ll look back to my Duke dictionary to define the experiences that I haven’t yet had. How often will I use the things I learned here, in the classroom and out of it, to define my world?
And how much will Duke look to us to define itself? Because the truth is, we do define Duke just as much as this University defines us. We are all entries in Duke’s own dictionary.
I am humbled to be in the company of students who passionately and habitually redefine Duke and our world. And I am not only proud of the collection of experiences that defined me as a student here, but I am so excited to be a part of a community that defined, and will continue to define, Duke.
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining the dynamics of language. This is his final column.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on March 24, 2011.
In my four years at Duke, I have noticed changes in our University’s co-curricular world. Our Women’s Center, Center for Muslim Life and Center for LGBT Life, for example, have all created safe spaces, increased visibility and fostered a stronger culture of acceptance.
Developments like these make me proud to be a Duke student because they affirm our community’s willingness to engage in cross-experiential exchange.
Some things haven’t changed, though. In this past year alone, certain emails, PowerPoints and conversations have damaged my optimism. With just seven weeks left before I graduate, I am unsure of what I can do to affect things at Duke. I wonder if my ability to make a structural impact on our community is limited because our undergraduate population changes every year.
So in my last weeks here, I am challenging myself to reject those helpless sentiments.
This past weekend, I facilitated dialogue on the Common Ground retreat, an intensive weekend-long conversation on race, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic status. This was my second time attending Common Ground; I had gone as a participant last Spring. Just like last year, I left the retreat on Sunday feeling overwhelmed with emotion and energized for the last few weeks of the semester.
One of the cornerstones of the retreat is personal reflection. Last year, and again this past weekend, I was constantly asked to place my feelings under a microscope. Why do I feel the way I do about race? How do my actions and language reflect, and not reflect, my views on gender and sexuality? What can I do on a personal level to change my world if I want to?
Introspection is a powerful tool, but I don’t know if we use it often enough to understand our communities and ourselves. And it’s incredible how our language facilitates or inhibits introspective thought.
“I-statements” are sentences that speak to one’s own personal experience rather than generalizations about others—for example, saying, “I believe…” rather than “Indians believe…” or even “I think that Indians believe….” Forcing myself to use them has begun to affect the way that I think. I-statements force me to confront my own experience, preventing me from clouding my process of reflection with impersonal, generalized language and thought.
Indeed, who am I to speak for other people, anyway? When I use generalizations like “Women at Duke act…,” I risk alienating others by invalidating their experience. When I speak on behalf of other individuals, I could be ignoring the richness of their lives, the complexity of their beliefs and the strength of their own agency. And when I speak authoritatively on behalf of others without their permission, I may foster silence. If I believe open dialogue is important for mutual understanding, then I owe others the right to speak for themselves. I owe myself the right of speaking about my own thoughts, too.
I don’t want to be impractical about this. Impersonal statements are often more grammatically expedient. Sometimes we need to exchange measured introspection for efficiency, especially in academic contexts where big-picture observation is prized. Generalizations can be useful when they are qualified. And it’s difficult to constantly frame thoughts with the words “I,” “me” and “my.”
But I find strength in that difficulty. In challenging myself to confront myself, I also challenge myself to understand my world. And if, in turn, I find myself wanting that world to change, I hope that I can act with self-aware conviction.
Linguists argue about the circular relationship between language and thought. Linguistic relativity is the controversial idea that our language determines how we think, popularly represented by Newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984.” Indeed, some analyses have noted that idiosyncrasies in our language may force us to think about certain things and vice versa. Just like gendered languages (French, for example) force me to reveal the sex of my dinner companion and even conceive of certain words as masculine or feminine, I trust that my measured I-statements force me to confront my conceptions of the world.
In Ayn Rand’s novella “Anthem,” society has destroyed the concept of “I.” When the protagonist rediscovers the word “I,” it gives him, for the first time, the powerful possibility of personal expression, reflection and agency. Our world is no collectivist dystopia, but I do often forget about the weight “I” carries.
If I develop a habit of introspection as a result of using I-statements, I would be proud. If I lead others to introspect because I frame my dialogues with them in terms of personal experience, I would be humbled. I don’t have much more time here. There are many ways I can leave my mark on the Duke community, but maybe the most meaningful is an open challenge to myself and to others to purposefully change our language and reflect.
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining the dynamics of language. His column usually runs every other Thursday.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on February 24, 2011.
Slam poet Mayda Del Valle minced no words when she took Reynolds Auditorium by storm last week: “And I’m speaking in tongues / blending proper with street talk / everyday meets academic / bastardizing one language / creating new ones.”
Her first piece that night, the frenetically melodious “Tongue Tactics,” was a send-up of the social dichotomy between “high-class” and “low-class” Spanish. Others can have their haughty tongues, she spat, but leave her the passionate, earthy, real street talk.
Although the poem was about Spanish, the English she used was “street” as well. And it was mesmerizing. The passion, simplicity and attitude of her language made it fantastically engaging. It just wouldn’t have been the same if it were delivered as a staid speech.
And yet, almost 300 miles north, President Obama and his speech writers are collaborating to enchant audiences, too. Although Obama is no slam poet, with his refined English, his words are poetic in a totally different way.
Do their different styles resonate with different aspects of our identity?
English-speaking societies delineate high- and low-class speech in many ways. For example, your accent, especially in Britain and the U.S., can give others information about your socioeconomic background. Non-standard grammar might lead others to stereotyped conclusions about your education or neighborhood.
Vocabulary choice, too, has been a marker of socioeconomic status in English for at least the last millennium. When the Normans invaded the British Isles in 1066, they brought their language, a Latin-derived Romance tongue related to French. For well over a century, Norman-speaking people formed most of the ruling class in Britain. Their language, and all of the Latinate words it carried, became known as high-class speech. Later, as the Normans assimilated into the local Briton culture, the English language that emerged was stratified between Latinate vocabulary (high-class) and native Germanic vocabulary (neutral or low-class).
The distinction persists today. Latin-derived vocabulary is perceived to be more intelligent and eloquent, whereas Germanic words are seen as earthier, simpler and unpretentious. It’s incredible how the social atmosphere of southern Britain nearly 1,000 years ago is still determining our performance of language and identity today.
Think about the dichotomous connotations of these pairs: ask/inquire; do/execute; begin/commence; drink/imbibe; speak/converse; lie/repose; small/diminutive. Which would you use in daily conversation, and which might you use in an essay or a speech? Would you feel comfortable crossing them over to the opposite situation? (The first word in each pair is Germanic and the second is Latinate.)
The deliberate choice of certain derived vocabulary is informed by our social surroundings. We speak in certain ways to impress certain people. Most socially aware native English speakers can suss out when to use different vocabulary. What identity are we attempting to embody? Are we Del Valle or Obama? Is it possible to be both?
Suppose we can describe our academic life, mostly confined to classrooms and professors’ offices, as our “Latinate” identity, and our social life, passionate and street, as “Germanic.” We use different social “vocabularies” throughout our day, with different people and in different locations. When we cross over these vocabularies—acting informal in a presentation, or speaking stiltedly at a section party—the effect is jarring: not necessarily always bad, but always noticeable.
It’s not that we owe a particular allegiance to either vocabulary: After all, we do work hard (Latinate) and play hard (Germanic). But for many of us, the “work hard, play hard” mantra implies a strict dichotomy.
The truth is that even though Latinate and Germanic vocabularies share a complex, stratified and sometimes dichotomous history, modern English wouldn’t work without constant interplay between the two. We cross over our lexicons constantly. Just look at this column, for example—I oscillate between “big” and “small” words, between Latinate and Germanic vocabularies.
English, because it has absorbed the ideas and mannerisms of so many different social strata and geographic variations, is one of the most expressive languages in the world. Both Del Valle and Obama can exist in the same linguistic sphere. English’s heritage and character gives it power.
So what if we saw more crossovers between work and play? What if we brought the same vigor we apply to our co-curricular activities and weekend parties into the classroom? And what if we brought more intellectual dialogues onto the quad? If Latinate and Germanic English words don’t have to be used separately, maybe we can bring the best of both worlds together—“work and play hard.”
Sandeep is a Trinity senior and a Program II major studying the dynamics of language. His column runs every other Thursday.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on February 10, 2011.
The weather is warming up, the shanties in K-ville are empty and Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching. Is it February already?
In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, I wanted to make note of a few things. I love my parents, my brother and my friends. I love Duke and our basketball team. I love my hamster, Oliver. I love walks along the Eno River at dawn. And I love the opportunities that my family and my education have afforded me.
I used the same word—“love”—in all of those sentiments, but I didn’t mean the same thing. To be sure, love is a complex, multifaceted idea in any language. But the unique English colloquial use of the word spans many different meanings, from appreciation to liking to lust to romance. To non-native speakers, the protocols around its use are often perplexing. Hell, even for native English speakers, finding the appropriate moment to say “I love x” can be difficult.
So let’s try to sort these out. Professing unconditional love to one’s family is common in Anglophone cultures. To tell your friends that you love them is fairly common, too. Saying you love abstract or inanimate things, like a university or a leisurely walk, is a common idiom in English, even though the feeling cannot be reciprocated. “Love” is also thrown around flippantly in situations where reciprocation is either unwanted, unspoken or unexpected. We have different situational terms to describe love, such as “platonic” or “unrequited.” “Love” can also be used as a euphemism for physical relations, from the phrase “making love” to the clever substitution of “love” for a certain four-letter word in clean versions of explicit songs.
But in English-speaking romantic relationships, the moment when someone looks at his or her partner and says “I love you” is a watershed—a fantastically significant event after which everything supposedly changes. Commitment! Soul mates! Indeed, to say “I love you” requires the courageous expectation that the statement and sentiment will be reciprocated. As any soap opera viewer knows, the seconds after that first “I love you” can be agonizing: Will she or won’t she?
But imagine for a moment that you’re having a whirlwind romance in Paris. You’re at your favorite café waiting for your date. You’re nervous—it’s only the second time you’ve met up—but after you share the obligatory bisous in greeting, you start to feel at ease. Then your date leans over the table, smiles and says, “Je t’aime.” Hold up. Did the L-word just get pulled out?
Sort of. “Aimer” is used for both “like” and “love,” so its use isn’t surrounded by the sort of momentous protocol that the English verb is. “It is an important phrase for a relationship,” French lecturing fellow Christelle Gonthier told me, “but a couple can use ‘Je t’aime’ when they’re just starting to go out. In France, there’s not so much restraint as far as feelings go.” This was baffling to me, especially since the epic misplacement of the “I love you” moment is a running motif in American culture.
Now close your eyes again and imagine that you’re on the hot streets of Bombay, holding hands with your significant other. It’s been a few months since you started dating, but you haven’t yet experienced the “I love you” turning point. Keep waiting, my friend—it’s not going to come.
In Indian cultures, love can be expressed through actions, but it is almost never explicitly spoken. If it is expressed verbally, it will likely be in English. I didn’t even know how to say “I love you” in my first language, Kannada, until I looked it up online about two years ago. Most of my Hindi, Marathi and Bengali-speaking friends don’t know how to say the phrase, either. I have never felt unloved by my family—it’s just that the explicit articulation of that familial love isn’t part of our style. Sometimes silent demonstrations are more powerful.
Other languages guard love, too. In Chinese, “wo ai ni” is a well-known phrase, but its use is rare. Germans save “Ich liebe dich” for exclusively romantic situations, preferring “Ich habe dich lieb” (roughly, “I like you”) for platonic relationships. To many cultures, love is an intensely personal and important emotion.
It’s different here. Despite how puritanical America can often seem, our non-romantic use of the word “love” is laxly enforced. We’re no steamy Latin culture, but it’s heartening to note how freely we distribute “love.”
To me, the permissive use of the word “love” in English doesn’t devalue the idea. It strengthens it through reinforcement. Even if we aren’t often open with our feelings, maybe the repeated and free use of the word “love” will eventually shift something in our collective consciousness. If the casual use of hateful speech can create pernicious environments, then why couldn’t the casual use of “love” do the opposite?
After all, who ever said that putting more love into the world was a bad thing?
Sandeep is a Trinity senior and a Program II major studying the dynamics of language. His column appears every other Thursday.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on January 13, 2011.
With 2010 behind us, I had fun over break looking at different dictionaries’ and publications’ lists of “the new words of 2010.” Sociolinguistic commentators always have a field day around every new year: Some loudly lament the decline of English, and others marvel at the flexibility of our language. Everyone seems to love a good invective against modern society—but why do we care about change in language so much?
Natural systems are dynamic, any scientist will argue that. But most things man-made—from buildings to morals—strive to achieve an intrinsic stability. Nature fluctuates, but the concrete and the abstract of man-made creations are designed to be constant. Language, one of the most fundamentally human of characteristics, straddles this dichotomy. It is at once a natural system encoded into society and into the human brain—an ability to process and synthesize communicative gestures of the same species—as well as a synthetic system based on arbitrarily assigning sounds and symbols to the human experience. As such, language has been torn between natural drift and conscious shift in ways that no mathematical or historical model will ever be able to describe or predict.
Amid this complexity, change in language—a perceived or documented shift in semantics, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, or writing—has engaged humanity because it is associated with some of the most important elements of the human condition: culture, identity and the origin of man.
We know at least some of the why of language change. Cultures attack, conquer and interact with one another. Language academies are created and maintained for the explicit purpose of standardizing written and spoken forms because there’s a historically and geographically universal perception that society in general and language in particular is falling precipitously from a refined past. Certain forms of grammar and vocabulary are stigmatized and others are praised; the same ones might be conversely mocked and admired by different groups. The inherent variability in the human experience, a necessary component for any change, allows that when different cultures interact, there is a productive exchange of ideas and language.
This is all well and good. We can name what has happened and offer some explanations as to why these changes occurred. I have shown above that language is inconstant: This much every linguistics student knows. But if language is a man-made system, then it was created to be constant: Man works toward homeostasis.
Language, ostensibly, arose because certain neural pathways more complex than those of our predecessors allowed for abstract thought and the use of symbols. This adaptive development allowed for complex social interactions and communication that made one Homo species more fit than another. And yet, as humans, we—by the same or different neural mechanisms—are capable of reflection on our behavior in a way that hasn’t been observed in other animals. So for the entire history of our species, where we are today is as much a product of natural forces as it is deliberate choice. Taken into context, if humans use language to communicate, and if language is useless without facilitating communication, then we ask why vocabulary isn’t finite and syntax isn’t fixed—this would seem to be the most effective way to ensure meaningful interaction. But the point is that it’s not.
This problem has occupied researchers and still isn’t resolved—but will it ever be? It seems to me that change in language might be such a complex, multifaceted, multivariable process that we may never be able to understand how all of the forces work together in one whole, coherent way such that we’ll be able to competently describe or predict past and future change in every respect. Language is natural and synthetic and neither, and it displays trends characteristic of both and none. Human behavior, the human mind and human interactions are all inconceivably complex variables. Linguists might always be consigned to dividing up language change into neat parcels and analyzing the hell out of each. This might not be such a desperate thing to do. As long as we recognize that the entirety of language change defies conclusive explanation, we can concern ourselves with functional explanations of certain trends in a way that is useful and productive.
Even if we don’t fully understand the mechanisms and processes of language change, it would be silly to believe that our language is declining: It’s difficult to objectively characterize any change as degradation. We’re not moving toward some end-goal, no matter what sort of a harbinger the “texting generation” is. The truth is that every generation has always experienced language change and called it decline. Change is just change.
As far as I’m concerned, the “new words of 2010” lists are only useful in reminding me how woefully square (we’re still using that word, right?) I am.
Sandeep is a Trinity senior and a Program II major studying the dynamics of language. His column runs every other Thursday.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on December 2, 2010.
What do you drink?
No, I’m not interested in your bar habits. I’m asking about the fizzy pop in your can at lunch. The sugar-rush soda you drink to stay up late. The caramel-colored coke in your cup. Which one is it?
According to linguistic surveys, the name of your soft drink is determined by your geographic origins. People in the Northeast and the West call it “soda”; people across the Midwest largely know it as “pop”; and Southerners call it “coke,” no matter the brand.
The emergence of a mass-market American image in the last few decades has reduced regional differences like these. With mainstream newscasters and sitcom stars speaking in essentially the same dialect and accent, successive generations concerned with embodying a normative American identity have readily adopted linguistic traits that were once confined to certain regions in the central Midwest. They created a General American standard that now defines “average” in this country. This dialect of English is so unconsciously “normal” in the U.S. that speakers of General American identify themselves in a vacuum of identity: “I don’t have an accent.”
But General American isn’t a monolith; it’s a heterogeneous amalgam of related accents. Don’t believe me? Try these simple tests.
Pronounce these words: “Mary,” “merry” and “marry.” Are they all the same? You are seemingly in the majority, at least in America. The Mary-merry-marry merger is associated with rhotic dialects—that is, those that pronounce the written “R” at the ends of words or before consonants. General American is a rhotic form of English.
But I grew up near coastal New Jersey, and although I didn’t speak with the non-rhotic Jersey Shore—excuse me, Jersey Shwa—accent, my schoolteachers and my friends’ parents did. I was surrounded by it. Speakers of non-rhotic accents usually pronounce the three words differently—and so do I. Although neither my friends nor I speak with a Jersey accent, this anomaly has stuck with us.
Here’s another: “cot” and “caught.” If they are indistinguishable, you’re in the same boat as about 40% of Americans and nearly all Canadians. According to linguists, you’re probably from the Midwest, New England or farther north. Most other Americans pronounce the two slightly differently. The cot-caught merger is associated with a large shift in vowel pronunciation that occurred around the Great Lakes—a transformation that gave us, among other things, the much-maligned folksiness of one Sarah Palin.
Okay, one more: how do you pronounce the ubiquitous suffix “–ing”? Many people drop the velar closure “ng” and say “–in.” Others, like my Pennsylvanian roommate, pronounce it “een,” stretching out the vowel. Sometimes it’s situational: you’re “chillin,” but other times you’re “relaxing.”
It can be stunning to see how different we are, even when we fall under a “monolithic” label like General American.
It’s just the same with those accents that are associated with very broadly painted geographic regions (“Southern”), ethnicities (“African-American”) or classes (“redneck”). To ascribe a certain linguistic destiny to swaths of people based on one aspect of their identity is foolish: we all know people who break the mold of stereotypes. Everyone’s accent is formed by multiple experiences and sources. And like other traits, it can be intimate and treasured.
When we enter a world in which our accent is unusual, though, how do we react? With exaggeration or with assimilation? When I was abroad in Australia, I swung wildly between the two. Sometimes I would find myself emphasizing my accent, amplifying my “R” pronunciation and stubbornly using American vocabulary; other days, I’d yearn to fit in, studying the bizarre intricacies of Australian vowel production. In New York City, a speech coach market has emerged for those desperate to part ways with their distinctive accent, complaining that their “tawking” colors their professional and social relationships.
So how is the great experimental melting pot of Duke’s campus affecting our peers’ performance of language?
When the General American dialect is taken as a homogeneous, normative identity, some react by emphasizing their “heterodox” accent. Others can’t hear the difference. Still others assimilate. Universities pride themselves on diversity—but in truth, to be associated with a regional linguistic idiom can be crippling because it forms a lens through which others perceive you, often to the exclusion of other aspects of your identity.
Those who fall under the General American normative umbrella are privileged in this country to be evaluated first on non-linguistic traits. Many, if not most, other speakers are not. This discrepancy is antithetical to a mission of diversity.
Maybe my examples of linguistic heterogeneity are just fun quizzes, but maybe they’re a little more, too. Perhaps even a small understanding of the diversity within a so-seen monolith of identity like General American gets us somewhere toward an appreciation of larger, non-standard deviations from the norm.
It’s interesting, after all, to see how some of the last vestiges of regional linguistic idioms—minor pronunciation differences among General American speakers—are humorous, whereas bigger dialectal differences can be personal and professional handicaps.
I do have an accent—we all do. I just hope that I’m far more interesting than my choice of soft drink. (Soda.)
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major studying the dynamics of language. This is his last column of the semester.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on November 18, 2010.
Language is powerful. As our primary medium of communication, it affects us in ways that even physical interactions cannot. Language allows us to bring the private into the public, permitting others to understand our thoughts and vice versa. Language is fundamental, utilitarian and beautiful.
Language can also be terrifying. It can be overtly abusive and aggressive, or it can reveal discriminatory thought through its unspoken assumptions. Hate speech is one of the most effective tools of intimidation, coercion and torture precisely because our language affects and is affected by our deepest emotional responses.
In the eyes of the law, hate speech is language that directly incites violence. But we all know that speech doesn’t have to be violent to be hateful. So in common use, we define hate speech more loosely: it disparages an individual or a group based on some characteristic or identity, such as religion or sexual orientation.
The legal definition of hate speech is an extreme, and it ignores the long, painful gradient leading up to it—language filled with subtle sexism, homophobia and racism. To define offensive speech only as violence-inducing victimization is to forget the miles of “soft bigotry” (as George W. Bush called it) that line much of what our culture says and does.
Some of us have personally dealt with hate speech, but many more of us deal with soft bigotry every day. Consider the lesbian student who feels uncomfortable with her peers’ hetero-normative assumptions, or the Jewish student reluctant to call out an anti-Semitic joke for what it is.
Or the hundreds of Duke women who, before the university rose in protest, allowed themselves to be called “sluts” and “bitches” because they either found the language harmless or they feared social consequences if they raised their voices.
In the wake of several highly publicized e-mails sent by fraternities to campus women, student groups began to discuss the campus cultural conditions that led to the e-mails and offer plans of action for future change. Maybe we have a deep cultural problem, and maybe we don’t. Maybe these working groups will begin to resolve our issues. I’m not sure.
But I do think we—here at Duke and outside as well—might have a problem with dialogue about bigoted speech. We have a problem with talking about talking.
Everyone has a responsibility to be careful with his or her words because language is so powerful. But we often find it difficult to separate what one says from who one is. Saying something racist or homophobic doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is a racist or a homophobe. To be sure, there is a decent correlation—chauvinists do tend to be chauvinistic. But boiling a stranger’s character down to a few misguided statements hardly does justice to the complexity of his or her experience and identity. And we all make mistakes.
When post-conflict discourse is dominated by an assault on who people are rather than what they said, the efficacy of an anti-bigotry argument is lost. People get turned off when they feel like their character, rather than their actions, is being questioned. An anti-hate message can easily be lost in transmission when it is delivered clumsily—and that can, in turn, breed more misunderstanding.
That being said, the fact that someone is not generally a hateful person doesn’t diminish the bigotry in his or her “off-hand, joking, harmless,” offensive speech. We can’t dismiss sexist language just because the person who said it “has a lot of female friends,” or “really respects Duke women.” It’s especially dangerous to dismiss bigoted speech when it comes from those who profess to care. These are the people who should be most invested in using careful language. The closer we get, the more we should care about others—that’s the foundation of any good relationship.
What conditions are we creating with our language? And what are the consequences?
Why do more than one-third of LGBT young adults attempt suicide? Why do Duke women leave this university with lower self-esteem than when they arrived? How many of these cases were driven by explicit hate speech, and how many were the result of soft bigotry?
Language doesn’t have to be the verbal equivalent of picking up a metal bat to cause pain. Averted eyes or indifference—or refusing to understand how some jokes can be upsetting—can sometimes be worse.
The consequences of hateful language won’t ever leave the news unless there is a dramatic shift in our collective psyche. I’m not entirely convinced this is possible. To hate is as human as it is to eat and breathe. We find it natural and easy to construct our identities in opposition to others. These in- and out-group associations, explicitly demarcated or not, determine much of how we interact with other people. And because language is another obvious marker of identity, our language use affects and is affected by these other identities.
The beauty of human cooperation, though, is that we are able to prevent the construction of our own identities from leading to the destruction of others’. We can hold back our aggression. We can demonstrate love and caring through our words.
Language is powerful. While we can’t necessarily count on our society to rise up and assume collective responsibility for what we say or do, we can take ownership of our own individual language and the consequences it engenders.
Our words are the mirror of our thoughts onto our world. What are we reflecting? And what sort of world are we constructing?
Let’s talk—about talking.
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining change in language. His column runs every other Thursday.
This column originally appeared in The (Duke) Chronicle on November 19, 2010.
Abbreviations are wonderful.
For the colonial British, abbreviations were utilitarian—they helped transform the South Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram into the much more manageable “Trivandrum.” For early English speakers, the type of abbreviation known as the contraction was convenient: it quickened speech by turning cumbersome phrases like “let us go” or “can not” into “let’s go” and “can’t.” And the world is much more efficient because we are fond of using abbreviations like acronyms (such as NASA, pronounced as a word), initialisms (such as the EU, pronounced as letters) and miscellaneous shortcuts (such as Tylenol, drawn from the chemical name N-acetyl-para-aminophenol).
Modern communicative tools like text messaging and social networking demand brevity, whether for speed or because of space constraints. Twitter limits us to 140 characters, barely three sentences. On Facebook, we compete to have the pithiest status in our network. Abbreviations help us meet these ends.
We often demand brevity in conversational speech, too, because our time is limited. Cultures stereotypically associated with more leisurely lifestyles—the American South, for example—are perceived to have slower accents. I grew up in a suburb of New York, so I have become accustomed to the quick, sharp speech common to New Jersey and Long Island residents. The breakneck speed of Mid-Atlantic life seems to require efficient interactions.
The shortcuts of our online world have begun to cross over into our face-to-face interactions. Once-utilitarian text abbreviations like “BRB,” “obvi,” “OMG” and “jeal” have become fashionable language accessories in the speech of many young people. These “abbrevs” have become in- and out-group markers, determinants of who is and isn’t cool. If you get it, you’re in. If you’re confused or don’t understand, you don’t belong—and you’re obvi jeal.
For others, the sarcastic use of abbreviations signifies membership in another group altogether: those who see speech shortcuts as foolish and un-hip.
But abbreviating our language, in text and in speech, often means that efficiency replaces subtlety. It’s hard to communicate complex thoughts in 140 characters or fewer. We are forced to distill our ideas into their bare parts. For some, this produces the best results, showcasing the smooth machinery of an efficient mind. For others, the elimination of nuance in speech eliminates nuance in thought, which can encourage dangerously simplistic thinking.
Two weekends ago at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Jon Stewart condemned the 24-hour cable news cycle for its reliance on abbreviated ideas. He slammed present-day pundits for boiling complex and subtle issues down to their simplest common denominator. And he implicitly rebuked Americans whose attention spans can’t now handle anything more taxing than a 30-second talking point.
Many people have begun to require brevity in their lives. How many of us can sit down and read a book for more than an hour at a time? How long can we make it into a conversation before impatiently checking our phones for text messages or e-mails? Because we are constantly stimulated by abbreviated sources—from our Gen Y friends to our half-minute media—we are encouraged to pursue and produce abbreviated experiences, too.
I’m worried that I find it difficult to concentrate for long periods of time. I’m afraid that as I get more “connected” to the world, my experiences will become shorter and less meaningful—efficient, yes, but not critical or thoughtful. I worry that I will exchange detail for speed. And I’m sure I’m not alone in my fear.
Perhaps it’s not an either-or situation, though. Language can sometimes be efficient and subtle. The Japanese haiku, for example, manages to condense soul-searching philosophy into just a few lines. Christian psalms, Hindu-Buddhist mantras, Muslim ayat and Jewish tfilot express deep religious sentiments in abbreviated forms, too.
Of course, we can’t always communicate to each other through haikus and prayers. But maybe we can learn from their example. Brevity for its own sake is silly. Lengthening only to avoid abbreviation is a waste of time. Each can be appropriate in the right context.
I’ll admit—the use of “abbrevs” in modern-day speech is best understood as an identity phenomenon rather than as a symptom of our tendency to abbreviate experiences. But our shortened attention span isn’t an issue of identity. Abbreviations are wonderful when they enhance understanding, not when they hinder it. Efficiency is worthwhile when it creates good products, not mediocre ones. I just hope that, despite everything, we can continue to see the difference.
“Abbreviation” / has too many syllables / for a nice haiku.
Sandeep is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining the dynamics of language. His column usually runs every other Thursday.
