polyglot conspiracy

Really, really mainstream:

Well, sort of - for me the expression “X [heart] Y” seems gendered, so that it connotes femaleness, but in a way similar to how lots of “netspeak”-y things in general connote femaleness because standard US language ideologies link emotive language/text with femaleness (i.e. “omg i’m soooooo excited lol!!!!!!!” couldn’t possibly come from a [straight] male, right??). But I read the headline as somehow belittling women’s potential affection/allegiance toward McCain by using [heart] when any number of other verbs would do - “like,” “love,” “lean toward,” “look to,” “support,” “vote for,” etc. - that don’t have the gendered (or maybe just fickle?) tone that [heart] seems to be carrying off here. Suffice it to say, I don’t think you’d see a headline such as “Democratic men [heart] Obama” or even “Democrats [heart] Obama.” Not in the NYT, anyway. (And nevermind the whole “angry Clinton women” thing; that’s been covered elsewhere….And no, Rich never mentions [heart] in the column and there is no obvious non-gendered reason why it was chosen to sit in the verb spot there. If you can find an obvious reason that I’m missing, please leave a comment.)

WordPress is driving me f’ing batty right now - I can’t get it to register the heart symbol; just another of the font-based issues that I run into everytime I or WP upgrades. I am really beginning to hate this platform….

A while ago - before the presidential primary races really heated up - I wrote something that intimated a feeling I was getting about media coverage (as one genre of public discussion) of the primary candidates. Namely, that the coverage (and other public discussion) was often sexist, and that certain (sometimes adamant) refusals of this fact were instantiations of larger refusals of the persistence of sexism in US society. As we’ve gotten to the point where Hillary Clinton is being called on to withdraw from the race and Barack Obama is presumed to be the Democratic nominee, I’ve been rediscovering political blogs and leftie news sources, the likes of which I haven’t really paid attention to since the 2004 election (which left me feeling so battered by the electoral process that, truly, although I ought to feel invigorated and hopeful this time around by the impressiveness of many of the Democratic candidate options, as well as the real possibility that we could get a changemaker in office, I somehow still feel pre-defeated. The first election I could vote in was Gore.v.Bush, and the second election was Kerry.v.Bush, and…well…when those two elections are the only ones that [Democratic] voters my age have to reflect back on, it’s a wonder that any of us show up to the polls at all. Seriously. Destroyed. Faith.).

Anyway, I’ve rediscovered the political blogosphere and leftie news sources because I’ve been seeking articulated understandings of how this sexism has played itself out in the race between Clinton and Obama. And I’ve been quite happy to find it articulated recently in several places, and I want to link to them here because they’re exciting: it’s exciting that people are talking about this, that people are pinpointing what it seems like are massive undercurrents of misogyny (often intersecting with racism) by pundits, journalists, bloggers, and plain-ole-people. It’s a relief to find this stuff, but it’s also disturbing, naturally. Also, let’s make a couple things clear right off the bat to fend off any ill-meaning meanie reactions to this post:

1. I have supported neither Obama nor Clinton in the primaries. I will support whoever gets the nomination when it comes time to vote against John McCain.

2. My acknowledgment here of sexist discourse throughout the campaign does not imply that I don’t acknowledge racist discourse throughout the campaign, or that I think sexism is somehow “worse” than racism. (An impossible belief, to be sure.)

So here’s some good reading on the subject:

-Shakesville has been keeping track of sexism with its Hillary Sexism Watch - see Part 90, with links to all prior posts. It also has been doing an Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black /Dude Watch, which is now at Part 43.

-Jessica Wakeman from Huffington Post: On Sexist Media Coverage of Hillary Clinton. Key quote:

Surprise, surprise, feeling protective of Hillary Clinton when media coverage manhandles her as ball-busting, overemotional or Anne Boleyn-grade manipulative is regarded as really not cool. And I don’t say this because I think I am a martyr or I enjoy feeling like one — I say it because I’ve had some frustrating conversations, mostly with men, who think one of two things:

1) They don’t see the coverage as sexist or offensive altogether, or

2) They do think it’s “a little” sexist but Hillary’s such a uber-rich, out-of-touch, shady Republicrat, anyway, that it’s just a sexist tint to a legitimate criticism of her smarmy ways.

-Betsy Reed from The Nation: Race to the Bottom. An important article that talks about the importance of feminist perspectives on the campaign, but at the same trouble with Hillary Clinton as a representative of or catalyst for feminism (including because of how she seems to treat/talk about race).

-Rebecca Traister from Salon: Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Includes interviews with women expressing palpable but often inarticulable feelings of misogynistic tendencies on the part of Obama supporters (and others). Key quote:

There are many unpleasant realities about Clinton: She voted for the war; she has taken hawkish stances in defense of Israel; she voted to declare Iran’s revolutionary guard “a terrorist organization”; she sponsored a flag-burning amendment; she has not run a great campaign, waiting until this week to fire Mark Penn; she is a Clinton. But while these are all qualities that might rightly inspire political dislike, or a withdrawal of support, they don’t often incite the kind of hissing fury with which her primary run has been met. Were it her husband -– a man who has exhibited many of these same flaws (and more!) -– in the same place, he might or might not be trailing Obama, but it is hard to picture the kind of seething, violent animosity being flung at him.

When sexism is acknowledged in this primary campaign, it has been attributed to either Chris Matthews or the conservative, Rush Limbaugh, Iron My Shirt brigade. Little open recognition has been given to the possibility that there might be some gender discomfort behind the army of liberally minded Obama enthusiasts. But progressive politics has not always been female-friendly politics; ’70s feminism was born partly in response to the inequities of the antiwar and civil rights movements. It’s certainly possible that the youthful Obama movement has its own brand of female trouble.

O’Brien said, “With straight white male progressive friends, I feel something that makes me viscerally angry and afraid — the viciousness of the rebuttals to the suggestion that [Obama's and Clinton's] policies are roughly equal or that Clinton’s have some benefits to them, the outright dismissal of any support of her, the impossibility of having a nuanced conversation … The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”

-Amanda Fortini from New York Magazine: Has Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Caused a Feminist Reawakening? I largely agree with the point that a lot of women who felt like we were in a “postfeminism” era probably now are realizing that we’re not, but see Betsy Reed’s column linked to above for troubling implications of such a “reawakening.”

Lately I have noticed the young people doing something that seems strange to me. (By “young people” I mean people my age and younger.)  They use “guys” almost categorically when referring to males as a group.  This wouldn’t be so weird, except that there’s no parallel term (for me) that refers to females, and so when they refer to both males and females, the references seem unequal, because they’ll use terms for females that have equivalents for males but they won’t use the equivalent terms for males. They’ll talk about “the girls” and “the guys,” but also “the women” and “the guys,” and I think I even heard once “the ladies” and “the guys”. To me, “girls” and “women” are used in different contexts (something about age or maturity; let’s not even touch how “ladies” is used), and “guys” should only work as the counterpart to “girls” if anything at all. And they never say “boys,” which I realize is due to “girls” cutting a much wider swath of applicability than “boys” - you can refer to girls of many different ages, but boys seems only to be under 18 (but why??). So they talk about college-aged “girls” but college-aged “guys,” and also college-aged “women” but still college-aged “guys.”

This is especially interesting when you consider that definitions of “guys” are gender-neutral (MW):

3 a: man, fellow b: person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex

Is plural “guys” gaining gender? Did Guys and Dolls start this?

A couple of weeks ago we did an informal poll of the undergrads in the class I’m teaching this semester, asking them a few questions about the term “feminist.”  Results were that a) a majority of them claimed they would not call themselves “feminists,” b) a bigger majority agreed that “feminist” has primarily negative connotations, c) a bigger majority claimed knowing between 0 and 10 peers who would call themselves “feminists” (with only a handful claiming to know lots of self-identified “feminists”).  This surprised me not one bit, because the word “feminist” has been getting dirtier and dirtier my whole life (I was born sometime during the late-2nd-wave and around the time the big backlash got underway, and it seems like it’s just been downhill from as far back as I can remember - which is to say probably around 7th grade when I started thinking about such things).  I tend to think it doesn’t mean very much in the end; surely most people these days  who reject the term “feminist” still sympathize, ultimately, with feminist projects. And by “most people” I mean most women, most young people, most open-minded and tolerant people, most men who respect women, etc - generally, anyone who is not an old conservative jerkface or his submissive conservative wife [oh, sure, this is a silly and definitely non-feminist thing to assume, but it helps get me through the day].

But the other day I began to be concerned when I realized that not only do a lot of my students not identify with “feminists,” and not only do they not think that “feminist” is a good word, but they don’t really seem to think that feminist issues are still issues anymore!  This was brought to my attention most poignantly during a lecture I gave in class, during which I was trying to make a point about how the media can use language to frame the way we think about people in the news, and how often their use of language is subtle and can reveal underlying assumptions about said newsworthy characters.  The example I used: the media’s firstname bias towards women, about which I have written before. The specific example I used: the fact that I can find 145 Google news hits for headlines containing the search terms “Hillary Obama -Clinton -Barack” (i.e. Hillary, Obama call for top Pak. lawyer’s release; Obama Hits Hillary’s Experience) but only 2 hits for “Barack Clinton -Hillary -Obama” (i.e. Common Backs Barack, Clinton Still Leads). Now I understand that Hillary Clinton’s campaign actually presents her as “Hillary,” and I understand that she’s not the only Clinton in politics. But I also understand that whereas Rudy Giuliani runs his campaign as “Rudy,” you still get headlines that talk about Hillary and Giuliani (i.e. Giuliani: Hillary Makes Kerry Look Like Amateur Flip-Flopper; Giuliani, Thompson, Romney Beat Hillary in Latest Mason-Dixon Poll). Which leads me to believe that overriding the candidates’ own approach to campaigning is a tendency to refer to women by their first names while referring to men by their last names. And in a political race that is, like it or not (see), going to reveal a lot to us about how the US views gender, talks about gender, and votes related to gender, this has the effect of highlighting Clinton’s womanness and all the things that can come with that.

But I could not convince my class of this; getting them to think of this in terms of actual differential gender-based treatment was like pulling teeth. And note that I’m not saying it’s necessarily intentional differential treatment: it is insidious. A couple of them seemed sympathetic, but almost every comment was about how Hillary Clinton herself chooses to be called by her first name, or how the fact of two political Clintons requires the use of her first name for clarification, so the media was just doing what the candidate would herself prefer. I thought I was getting somewhere when I put up the slide with headlines from Monica Lewinsky, wherein not just men but other women are referred to by their last names while Lewinsky is referred to as Monica (i.e. Lott asks Starr to find out if Monica-Clinton tapes exist; Tripp indicted in Monica taping; Jones’ top attorney says either Monica or Clinton is lying; Jones stuck her nose into Monica’s business). But to these, they just said “But Monica Lewinsky isn’t in a position of authority; those other people are.” Implication: reference by last name signals authority. Question to class: Where does that leave us in terms of Senators Hillary and Obama, then?

Linguabloggers have been taking up the idea of WordGirl lately, starting with Mr. Verb and then on to Mark Liberman at Lg.Log. The take on Mr. Verb is mostly positive, alerting us to the existence of this new PBS show - in which a girl superhero uses the power of her vocabulary to beat supervillains - and wondering about the possibilities therein.

But Mark’s take is very negative, and it’s based on two main points: a) WordGirl’s M.O. is to “correct” people’s vocabulary, messaging us that big words are “better” than little ones, and b) this character will set up a stereotype of girls as (condescending) big-word users, while boys will be left behind to their footballs. Point A is well-taken; as Mark says:

The quality of the jokes aside, it seems that WordGirl teaches vocabulary mainly by correcting other people’s word choices, or using (and condescending to explain) a rare and formal word when a commoner and less pretentious one would have worked just as well. This reinforces the idea that knowledge serves mainly to one-up or impress other people. It also reinforces the idea that intellectuals are snarky and obnoxious.

Though I think it’s problematic to assume that bigger words are always more “pretentious” or that smaller ones are less “pretentious,” I can agree that linguistic correctionism is not necessarily the best mode of teaching to be focusing on. Then again, lots of people *do* think that vocabulary is key to successful early education (and it’s not like people pulled this show out of the ether - people do specialize in children’s educational media), and though “bigger” doesn’t equal “better,” “bigger” does usually equal “more rare,” and having words as an object of conversation (rather than, say, violent acts) is a welcome addition to the superhero canon, IMO.

As for Point B, I would just like to point out a couple more comments to a thread that Mark also links to, from Suzette Hayden Elgin’s Ozarque LJ. Because basically, they sum up how I *feel* about the gender issue, being a woman who likes language and doesn’t so much identify with most other superheroes (but I’m not going to make a categorical assumption that this will be bad or good for boys or girls, because that’s going to vary by the school, the child, and the playground). Mark made this comment about the gender issue:

WordGirl is presented as the champion of English as a literary language. Her super-enemies are almost all adult males, including especially The Butcher, complete with deep voice, five-o’clock shadow, male pattern baldness, and stereotypical working-class accent. (The Butcher’s superpower apparently involves forcing opponents to eat too much meat, but that’s a topic for another post.) So I wonder: how long will it take, after the pilot airs at 4:30 this afternoon, before the first schoolboy with an interest in reading and writing is nicknamed “WordGirl” by his classmates? My bet is on the morning recess at school tomorrow, in those areas where the schools are already in session.

lizthefair responds with:

The last piece about boys who use big words being called “WordGirl” as a slam is also upsetting, because being called a superhero is usually a compliment–but wait, it’s also being called a girl, and that can’t be good

And sapience responds with:

This statement illustrates a more serious problem. If we want to narrow the educational gender gap, we shouldn’t do so by denying girls a heroine who draws upon a strength many of them will already identify with. Rather, we should make it acceptable for boys to identify with female protagonists.

This sums up my concern with assuming that WordGirl’s character - as a girl, as a smart kid, as a smart girl - is going to disadvantage either girls, smart girls, boys, or smart boys. Girls get a lot of mixed messages from the media and everything else in America. Very rarely is one of those messages that it’s awesome if they use their brains. Boys get mixed messages, too, of course, and one of them is that it’s not ok for them to identify with female (or feminine) societal models. WordGirl addresses the former problem; perhaps it will also encourage us to try to address the latter one.

omg omg omg *gag* is about all I can say about today’s Safire replacement column. (hattip/Mr. Verb; see also; see also)

This part is strange, though (check the emphases):

Speaking of mis-namers, I am sure the Spielbergs and the Kings of the world are used to the “Steven or Stephen?” flip of the spelling coin, and some of my closest friends have been known to lose one of my “i”s, but you’d think that a man trying to impress a woman would get her name right. Well, you would be wrong. After an intense flurry of e-mailing that involved the seductive vocabulary of maple farming — “splitting maul”! “peavey”! — and even more seductive pictures of said maple farmer, I decided that we had reached the point in our relationship where I really needed him to spell my name correctly, and I told him so in a gentle mama-bear-like way. Next thing I know I get a quick response: “oops, bad timing — I just started a new relationship”! O.K., maybe he did, or maybe he took offense at my comment about the grin of satisfaction slathered over his end-of-the-workday face in his latest photo attachment: “for all i know you’ve just put a family of four through a wood chipper!” (Dude, where’s your sense of humor? Did you not love “Fargo”?) But maybe he was one of those men who would sooner ask for directions than have their punctuation or grammar corrected. Can you spell “thin-barked”?

Waaaaait. He *capitalized* his 1sg. pronoun, she did *not* capitalize hers, and *she* decides that *he* is the one who needs his punctuation or grammar corrected? Was she intentinoally style-shifting to accommodate to what she thought his style was? Why? She goes on to claim that she’s no strict-Strunk-and-Whiter either, yet she’s “afflicted” by a deep concern for language which makes her cringe at some (rather unclear) set of misuses. But I don’t think she noticed this irony.

More seriously, this author’s sentiments are pretty common - though perhaps not as vitriolic - amongst my female friends. Many times has someone exchanged emails with a promising new potential someone, and they seemed ok, and they had fun on their first date, but boy, he can’t spell worth a lick, or he doesn’t know how to use punctuation, or he keeps using emoticons. This is something that they hold against the poor fellow, and he (often) doesn’t get another chance because of it. I don’t think written language used to be subject to so much outward personality/character judgment in the dating world; you may have written letters to one another, but I’d guess that that was mostly when you already knew the person, loved the person, or had an appreciation for their character. But it seems like now, not only do you have to be charming in person, but you have to be a certain kind of typing literate, and you have to be charming in print (if print is in any way involved in how you meet/organize/maintain relations with the person). What counts as “charming” or even “acceptable,” of course, has to differ by what dating site you’re using, what your real goals are in the process, and what your personal standards are otherwise, and how big a slice of the attraction pie email (or IM, or chat, or whatever) will be accounting for. Dissertation topic, anyone?

It seems that my readership has plummeted lately due to my lack of posting. Bah! Oh well. I don’t do it for the fame, you see. Anyway, if you’re reading this - thanks for sticking with me while I struggle with how often to post and what to post and wondering why I don’t feel like posting as much as I used to do. I would point out that partially, this is not my fault: I have been loathe to type as much lately because I’m starting to have some pretty strong symptoms of carpal tunnel, and until I can deal with it in a serious way, I’m cutting down on my not-absolutely-necessary time using the keyboard.

I just went on a vacation to Lake Michigan, specifically the town of Ludington, and a couple of funny things popped up. One, there is a store there called Argue Communications. It sells all manner of cell pones, cable-getting devices, and whatnot. But its name is Argue, and its business is communications. Imagine?

Two, there is a mechanic there called B & M Transmission. If you do not see the hilarity in this name, dear reader, then I fear that I cannot help you find it. Note that there are actually lots of B & Ms, all over the country. On a similar theme, on the drive I saw a billboard for pencils where the slogan was “Turning No. 2 into No. 1!” Genius. Also a billboard for PoopyCredit.com, which is really just a clever marketing ploy based on a ridiculously juvenile domain name that redirects you to the “real” (I’m not sure how real it is, actually) website. But this made me think: is “poopy” an adjective that people up here use to mean “bad” or “crappy”? I recall my dance teacher, when I was growing up, once saying of another woman, “She’s just so…poopy,” meaning that she was dumpy-looking (my dance teacher was not a nice person). For me, this isn’t a real word that gets used in my lexicon; it’s a novelty word that’s pulled out every now and again for a cheap laugh.

My travels this summer have also taken me to a modern dance festival in Philadelphia, where I was reminded of how modern dancers have a rather strictly bounded set of linguistic practices keeping the community on track. But it’s not a set that’s strictly unique: they borrow terminology/concepts from literary theory (e.g. “structure reveals content”), feminist/postcolonial theory (e.g. “this is a gendered piece,” “i am exploring the struggle against modernity”), philosophy/religion (e.g. “it’s the Other that’s being tempted, yet it’s the Other that represent salvation from temptation”), poetry (e.g. “i’m getting a deep sense of loss from this piece…can you tell us where that emerges from?”), and other highbrow genres of academese. I hadn’t been in an environment with that kind of dancers in a really long time, and I had forgotten just how…um…esoteric? it all sounds at times. All of the pieces have to be about something; no one’s interested just in dance technique; and the vocabulary you use to describe your work is just as important as the vocabulary you use in your movement (no really; they refer to sets of movements as “vocabularies”). I think this could make for a very interesting ethnographic and sociolinguistic/DA study sometime, not least of all including the appropriation of some of the terminology from other disciplines and how they get interpreted.

Since I’ve been back I’ve just been getting ready to go to California to spend July at Stanford, for the LSA Summer Institute. Meanwhile, the past few days have been really interesting for people engaged with internet research, meme spreadery, or social network/ing sites. A few days ago danah boyd posted an essay to her blog regarding class and race distinctions as revealed by/replicated on Myspace and Facebook. It’s a messy essay, a collection of thoughts, really, to which she fully admitted when she posted it - she made very clear that it wasn’t a finished paper, it was preliminarily articulated, and she was posting it in hopes of starting a discussion about the topic and getting some constructive feedback.

What’s fascinating is the way her essay - and lots of vitriolic responses to it - have been spreading around the internet like wildfire. It somehow got picked up by the BBC, the Guardian, Time’s tech news blog, Salon, the Star-Ledger, and many others. And, most of them have been representing the essay as an actual “study,” as if boyd had sent out a press release with the results of a systematic study - which she didn’t do (she claims she sent it to the Assn of Internet Researchers list and a few colleagues [who are no doubt prominent in the tech world, but still]), and which it wasn’t (she takes pains to make this clear, in the essay). It’s inspired a ton of negative responses, both on her blog and in comment threads to other links to the piece. They accuse her of being racist, they call her a “little girl,” and they criticize her for being sloppy. There are three points I think are particularly interesting about the discourse unfolding from the barrage of attention she’s gotten.

1. It got me a little nervous about ever blogging preliminary thoughts about ongoing research. Nothing like this would ever happen to me, probably, because she has connections in the tech world and the academic world that I don’t have; she’s already well-known to media sources and does in some senses keep public, thereby inviting publicity. Still, it’s something to think about: if I ever wanted to put up something relatively provocative, in hopes of starting a conversation and better understanding how my research fits in with the public, and even a single newsmedia outlet picked up on it, how would they represent it? And what might the repercussions be of their misrepresentations of it, which I have no control over?

2. Many of the negative comments being thrown at boyd make a point of criticizing her typographical practices, and using this as a way to show how young/unsophisticated/unintelligent she is! She doesn’t capitalize her name (legally), and this gives people who are prone to easy, meaningless criticism an easy weapon with which to attack her credibility. Check out some of the comments on her blog (like here and here), and places like this blog, which says:

According to a project by tech researcher danah boyd, who is so down with dotcoms that she legally ee cumminized [sic] her name, Facebook is for college preps and MySpace is for Latin Kings, or at least economically depressed, goth-wearing, gang-banging, extreme bass-playing meth addicts.

“ee cummingization”! i love it.

3. Lots of reactions point to a very ambivalent public attitude toward academics. I’ll just reprint here what I wrote on boyd’s blog, because I’m lazy and my wrists hurt :-(

what’s really interesting to me about how this is unfolding, though, is the fascinating “class” (or whatever you want to call it - it’s somehow *related* to class, at any rate) dynamics playing out in comments both here on your blog and elsewhere online. this has mostly to do with people’s attitudes toward academics, or towards college education. i obviously know nothing about any of the people who’ve been leaving negative comments, but i’ve noticed that lots of them are using your academic credentials *against* you.

there’s an ideology being articulated a couple of different ways here, either: (1) she is just another privileged academic who thinks they know everything, when really they know nothing about the real world; academics are useless and their “research” does no one any good. [see comments by Dara, Alex U-A, and even Nina above* - i'm not sure how to interpret her comment other than that you're a useful, provocative researcher in a sea of useless, complacent ones] OR (2) if she’s an academic, she should know better than to let the world see something that’s not up to academic standards, and it was her responsibility to have facts and statistics and proofreading in place before going public. [equals: we trust academics, but she let us down with her sloppiness...equals: academics are ones we look to to help us understand society...equals: nominally opposite sentiment of (1)]

and there you have it, the double-edged sword of being a researcher/academic/ivorytowerresident. it *sucks* to see this so clearly coming out, and it sucks that it’s part of such hateful commentary spinning your way. i mean, your own self-positioning (referring to “the academics” as if you’re outside of them) is perhaps something to think about here, too. the way you wrote this particular essay, i guess you have to claim your credentials to establish some legitimacy (”i’ve been doing systematic ethnography; i’m a phd candidate!”), but you also have to temporarily suspend the standards that come along with that (”but these are just anecdotes; this comes from observation; my terms aren’t theoretical!”). so it’s sticky. i wonder how many of the negative interpretations are related to this positioning, though, more than the content of the essay.

also, i’ve chosen not to capitalize just to piss off everyone who’s bitching about your name being uncapitalized, particularly those who don’t even spell your name correctly when chastising you for said uncapitalization ;-)

That last part was just for fun.

*refer to comment thread.

Because getting tagged to do memes makes me feel totally flattered and special, I’m going to respond to EFL Geek’s tag and rise to the occasion with: 5 Things My Readers Don’t Know About Me. This might be kind of difficult, since many of my readers are people who know me as an actual person, so I’ll try to dig up some obscure facts.

1. I spent most of my youth (ages 9-17) dancing in a dance company that occasionally danced in professional shows in Branson, MO. Among them was Dino’s Christmas Spectacular, in which I wore, among other things, an enormous sweltering teddy bear costume and pointe shoes. Here is me when I was, like, 10 or 11 or something:

Amazing. I know.

2. I was a cheerleader in 8th grade.

3. I hardly ever read Language Log anymore, partly due to my frustration with how rarely the posts are written by women (Heidi Harley recently joined the ranks, thankfully, but it’s still waaaaay heavily male). It makes me feel like linguistics is a boys’ club, and I don’t like that feeling one bit. I realize it’s a bit irrational to feel this way, that it’s not at all intentional on the part of Language Log Plaza, and that the burden is on some women to step up and write as frequently as Liberman, Pullum, Zwicky, etc. Still: secret anguish.

4. I am obsessed with the color orange. Within my sight are: orange spray water bottle (for shooing the cat away from my desk), orange toolbox, orange dishtowel, orange potholder, orange handbag, orange bandanna, orange winter coat, orange vintage coat, orange tennis shoes, orange scarf, orange hat (the latter two of which I knitted, back when I used to knit).

5. I was obsessed with panda bears until about 5 years ago. Collected them all the time: stuffed animals, posters, pencils, anything decorated with them. Evidence.

Well, wasn’t that fun? And now I’m going to tag…Full-Fledged Pidgin (obligatorily), No-Sword, Noncompositional, A Roguish Chrestomathy, and Emerging Communications. Fess up!

Sometimes I look at Craigslist personal ads. I could try to justify that to you in apologetic terms, which is what the normal person would perhaps do (”I’m not REALLY looking at them!” “It’s just interesting!” “I’m doing RESEARCH!” etc.). Whatever. The point is, the Ann Arbor Craigslist personals seem to be dominated by men seeking to be “sugar daddies” to young(er) women (and, to a lesser extent, girls seeking sugar daddies). I don’t remember ever seeing such a high proportion of this genre of ads for Boston or DC Craigslist.

Anyway, other than the ads that are obviously created by individuals, I noticed an ad by a company that will actually MATCH you with a sugar daddy, momma, or baby (btw? those terms are so creepy?). A sugardating service, if you will. Here’s its ad logo:

What does this have to do with words, wit, or whimsy? Well, I’m looking at the phrase “mutually beneficial” and marveling at the brilliant re-framing it does here. I’m imagining a sugar daddy talking to his boss, or a coworker at his Fortune 500 company:

Coworker: So, are you married?
SD: No.
Coworker: Dating?
SD: Not exactly. I’m in a mutually beneficial relationship.

First, it turns the whole thing into a business relationship - which, of course, such an arrangement is constructed like. In an oversimplified version: man gets sex and attention, woman gets money and attention, or vice versa. It lends legitimacy to this type of arrangement by giving it a non-slangy, official-sounding term. So it can now join the ranks of popular, publicly acceptable genres of relationships. [Note that this term may have been around a while for such an arrangement...I'm no historian on such matters. Also note that I'm not judging anyone for any such arrangements they might have. Free country, and all that.]

Second, aren’t all relationships supposedly “mutually beneficial”? If you’re in a romantic relationship, isn’t it usually because you’re both giving and getting good things - whether sex, love, resources, support, or etc.? This terminology compartmentalizes, essentializes, and commodifies all those aspects of relationships, such that the giving and taking of each is divided up and not done by the same person. It assumes that different but complementary things are wanted by each partner - and implies that such demarcated desire is unique to sugarfamily relationships.

Also? I think it’s funny that there’s a big fat “Join Free” spot on the logo. Like a sugar daddy needs to worry about that! I guess “Join free if you want to be a baby; fees apply for prospective mommies and daddies” was too long.

So I was catching up on my forwarded-across-the-ocean New Yorkers today, reading and enjoying last month’s article by Ian Frazier, “Utopia, the Bronx” about a Bronx housing co-op and its history, present, and future (unfortunately not available online - very inconvenient for my purposes here). Well-written article, kinda formal, kinda casual, typical NYer style, funny, not sure what “Cool is grace in secular form” has to do with anything, but okay, still interesting, etc.

Then something stylistically caught my eye, having to do with first and last name usage, although different from last time when I was ranting about gender-related practices. Even though the name in question is a woman’s, I don’t necessarily think that’s the reason Frazier uses her full name four times in two paragraphs. But what is the reason? I’ll take one for the team and type out the snippets in question, because luckily I am a fast typist, and you need context:

Today, the president of Co-op City’s board of directors is a short, energetic first-grade teacher named Leticia Morales. She holds an M.S. in bilingual education and has a daughter, two sons, and two granddaughters. She divides her time between job, family, and her duties as president (an unpaid position) of a co-op with an annual budget of a hundred and sixty-five million dollars. Her temperament is that of the ideal jury forewoman - calm, consensus-minded, sweet-voiced, fair. She just won reelection, and what she wants to do during the next year or two is grand. For complicated reasons involving Abe Kazan’s nephew and a grudge against Con Ed, Kazan built an entire power plant as part of the original Co-op City complex, and for even more complicated reasons it has never generated one watt of electrical power. Leticia Morales says that when the startup process is complete, in 2008, the power plant will be working, finally; she says that it will save the co-op millions a year in energy bills, and more when it begins to sell some of the power back to Con Ed.

Also, Metro North trains that run along the shore to places like Dariena nd Norwalk go right by Co-op City. Leticia Morales is in talks to persuade Metro North to stop there; she points out that her community has a larger population than many commuter towns. A station would need to be built. From it the trip would be about thirty minutes to midtown. Also, Co-op City has a lot of kids with nothing to do after school. Crime has gone down in the project since 2001, but there is still a crime problem. In December, policee and federal agents arrested fourteen young men for selling handguns and other weapons on Co-op City grounds. Leticia Morales would love to open a youth center in one of several locations she has in mind in or near Co-op City. And, as part of the co-op’s never-ending cycle of repairs, she also will begin replacing most of its windows, of which there are about a hundred and thirty-five thousand, along with about six thousand terrace doors.

“This is just a beautiful place to live,” she told me. “We have people from everywhere…”

After a few more sentences of that quote, Morales isn’t mentioned again in the article.

I understand using a full name again after you haven’t been talking about someone for a while, so you can go back to using last name only for the time being. People’s attention spans are short, and they probably need reminding. But this takes place in a very short span of text and where almost no other names are used. WHY use her full name in every single reference? Is it because hers is not a famous name, so he thinks we won’t remember it after its first use? (Note that there is no other Morales in the story.) Is she about to run for office and he wants to burn her name into our memories? IS it subconsciously because she’s a she?

Skimming the rest of the article for names, I found that he uses Al Shapiro twice in one paragraph, in two different places (like with Morales, it’s never just Shapiro). He often refers to Anne Hutchinson as simply Anne. He refers to Ken Migliorelli twice but Migliorelli once in a single paragraph. Robert Moses then Moses in consecutive clauses. Arthur Taub is repeatedly referred to by his full name. Louis Nizer is called Nizer in same paragraph; same with Alanson Skinner. Charlie Rosen and Abe Kazan are referred to often by both names but just as often by last name only, depending on when the last time we heard about them was. Lee Goodwin always both names but in references set paragraphs apart. Mario Cuomo is used only once and afterwards only Cuomo.

So the names that are repeatedly used in their entirety and in close proximity from reference to reference are Al Shapiro (retired Post Office facilities engineer), Arthur Taub (retired healthcare consultant for the United Federation of Teachers), and Leticia Morales (first-grade teacher). I really don’t see any commonality here; socioeconomically, other people in the article are equivalent to these subjects. Their names don’t share any ethnic-sounding hints, and though they are all Co-op residents (or were at some point), so were many other people discussed. They’re not famous, but neither is Ken Migliorelli. At any rate, the Morales example struck me as the most concentrated use of the full name (admittedly maybe because it’s a woman), and it had an impact on how I thought of or felt about the person I was reading about. Frankly, I conceived of her as a “nobody” trying to be a “somebody,” as someone who was supposed to be so unfamiliar to me that I needed a constant reminder of who she was, but who was also trying to make some kind of name for herself. Or the author was trying to make a name for her.

Perhaps it just draws the subject out more in the story, makes it seem like they are doing or saying more, rather than just being *in* the story. I don’t know. Compare this paragraph:

According to Lauren Squires, who sometimes blogs about language use, the conventions of reference in Ian Frazier’s article are rather strange. It is common for writers to use full names with the first reference to a person, and thereafter to refer to them by simply the last name. But Lauren Squires says that Ian Frazier uses both first and last names quite often, and in unpredictable patterns. She cites instances of names being repeated in toto within the same paragraph, which seems unnecessary for the audience to simply remember who the referent is. “His style of reference seems almost unintentional or haphazard, but it does make a difference in the way you read the actions of the characters in his story,” Lauren Squires says.

with this one:

According to Lauren Squires, who sometimes blogs about language use, the conventions of reference in Ian Frazier’s article are rather strange. It is common for writers to use full names with the first reference to a person, and thereafter to refer to them by simply the last name. But Squires says that Frazier uses both first and last names quite often, and in unpredictable patterns. She cites instances of names being repeated in toto within the same paragraph, which seems unnecessary for the audience to simply remember who the referent is. “His style of reference seems almost unintentional or haphazard, but it does make a difference in the way you read the actions of the characters in his story,” Squires says.

Different, yes? Yet I still can’t quite place my finger on how. Lauren Squires is confused.