This week in Viewpoints I wanted to focus on language, specifically how language can make a difference in our everyday lives on a casual, cultural, and political level.
This theme is much in-keeping with this week’s Engage the Times session which dealt with civility in public discourse. One reason, perhaps, that American politics is so rancorous is our language. English, for all its virtues, is still a gruff, Germanic tongue. Walt Whitman, for example, prized English as demonstrative of its native speakers’ “passion for rudeness and resistance.” That being said, perhaps it might help us in our aim a bit to soften English discourse by the age-old Anglo-American tradition of stealing them from other languages.
It’s best to steal words that you don’t already have a synonym for, for efficiency’s sake. We have “schadenfreude,” for example, a German word for “pleasure taken at another’s misfortune,” which has basically become part of the English lexicon. Why not pick up “firgun,” a Hebrew word (twice exiled and recovered from Yiddish) with the inverse meaning? The Tablet’s Irin Carmon, from a 2012 article, explains:
The Hebrew noun is firgun; mefargenet and mefargen are adjectives. It describes a generosity of spirit, an unselfish, empathetic joy that something good has happened, or might happen, to another person.
I think the Anglophone world could do with a bit more firguning, but that’s just my take.
But it’s not just the words we use, it’s how we use them. I came across a 2018 article from Atlas Obscura studying the phenomenon of “poet’s voice.” You ever been to a poetry reading? You know how most people, when they read poetry, drop into a faux-profound monotone, speaking in a painfully-slow lilting voice? That’s poet’s voice.
At the root of the problem of poet’s voice is the problem of conformity. Giamio summarizes it well when she writes:
It’s easy to make fun of Poet Voice. But its proliferation across the space of academic poetry may have more serious implications as well. In a 2014 essay, “Poet Voice and Flock Mentality,” the poet Lisa Marie Basile connects it to an overall lack of diversity in the field, and a fear of breaking the mold. The consistent use of it, she writes, “delivers two messages: I am educated, I am taught, I am part-of a group … I am afraid to tell my own story in my own voice.”
Part of being real with each other is talking real, especially in academic and formal settings where discussion really matters and can sway the opinions of politicians, technocratic officials, and the general public. We should guard against the temptation to let the “poet’s voice” phenomenon creep into every part of society.
Finally, as has been noted ad infinitum by everyone from God himself to your sociology professor, words, especially names, have political significance.
Jill Tucker, writing recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, details the San-Fran school board’s crusade to expunge the names of old-dead-no-good-very-evil-white-men from their public schools. The would-be renamers are out for blood on anyone who was, is, has ever been, or might have potentially even in their heads, been a racist. Is Roosevelt Middle School in S.F. named for Teddy or Franklin Delano? According to the Chronicle, all the school board knows is that they want the name changed, even in the midst of a pandemic that has kept schools closed. From the article:
Many San Francisco parents — as well as Mayor London Breed — argued the effort was ill-timed given the pandemic and the impact on children, especially students of color, and the fact that students are not even in the schools subject to renaming. Some criticized the board Tuesday for focusing on symbolism rather than the urgent reality facing struggling students, who are approaching a year in distance learning, with many struggling academically, socially and emotionally.
You mean this whole renaming controversy is all a political sideshow divorced from the real day-to-day issues real people have to face? Who would have guessed.
We have to get this country back open, if for no other reason than to keep smarmy school board officials from plotting to change the name of the local elementary school to Che Guevara Elementary.
Image Credit / Medium.com
