IBARW - Vocabulary is a tricky thing
Aug. 11th, 2007 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwIn honor of International Blog Against Racism Week, some thoughts on language.
I love words, but sometimes they trip you up.
One of the subtle kinds of racism, I think, is the kind that embeds itself in language and then disappears from the memory of at least some of the people speaking that language (usually the portion of people speaking that language who have more power are the ones who forget, the ones who are being picked on still remember). For example, a number of words that exist now with negative denotations were ones that originally described an ethnic group or class, and over time, the negative connotation applied to the group became the actual denotation of the word (e.g. Vandals, Thugs, Villains). Then there are words or phrases that are used by those in power to mock or put down those without power, usually along racial or ethnic lines.
I wasn't aware of this effect in language as a kid, and I read a lot of old novels. So I frequently used words without any awareness of their history or their modern connotations. Using "gay" exclusively for happy was fairly innocuous, but it might have been from Gone With The Wind that I picked up the cringe-worthy idea that it was somehow appropriate to call people "honey-chile" when I was annoyed with them. That lasted about until the first time I said it to someone black, and the oh-boy-did-I-deserve-that-lecture feeling has never faded from that memorable exchange. Of course, since I was born and grew up in Vermont (97.5% white as of the last census) I didn't have many conversations with people who weren't white as a kid, so that memorable exchange didn't happen until college. Things would probably be different now, with the advent of cable television and the internet, not to mention some changes in Vermont demographics, but when I was a small kid you could actually go, oh, months in some towns without seeing a single non-white resident. White parents would talk about the embarrassing moment when their kid of 3 or 4 or 5 saw their first non-white person and exclaimed something along the lines of "mommy, that person's skin is a different color!" I was still aware of between-group tensions, but they tended to be between Flatlanders (out-of-staters) and Vermonters, between different groups of European ancestry, and between Protestant Christians, Catholic Christians, and Jews.
In trying to be (more conscious? less racist? not PC exactly, because I don't really care about that) a more responsible person in my speech, there are some phrases I used as a kid that I don't use anymore now that I've thought about them. I should add that I don't think most kids my age would have used any of these phrases, because I picked them up from books. But I'm sure there are similar phrases people use now without thinking about them:
F'r'instance, I used to use the phrase "welsh on a bet" - it's a phrase I picked up from some novel somewhere, which means to fail to fulfill one's promises. Obviously, once I thought about it, that was some kind of anti-people-from-Wales thing. But oddly, I didn't think about it until I heard a different phrase - it was only a few years ago that I first heard someone use the phrase "jew someone down" meaning to strike an unfair bargain. Having grown up knowing that my father's family had a Jewish background that had caused them a fair amount of prejudice in 1950s era New York (despite being, y'know, not practicing Jews of any type, the ancestry was enough for them to face social and financial discrimination), well, hearing this phrase that used the word "jew" in this context was a new and horrible shock to me. And only after hearing it did I realize how offensive "welsh on a bet" must similarly be. Which I think speaks to how much we avoid knowing the effects of our language unless we feel those effects ourselves.
I used to use the word "gypped" as in, "boy, I feel gypped" or "someone gypped me out of ----". I think it was about in high school that I realized this word was actually referencing Gypsies, with a similar intent to the Jewish and Welsh insulting phrases mentioned above. So I did stop saying that. I have no idea where I originally thought the phrase came from, but I honestly had never connected it to gypsies for the longest time. I still use the word "gypsy" when referring to folklore and story characters, but I got yelled at for this by someone a few months back, and I'm still wrestling with it - he pointed out to me that the word gypsy is considered offensive by many Romany, which I knew, but added that it shouldn't be used at all. I'm still working on that one, because I'm not sure that gypsies in folklore are really quite the same as the Romany people, and I want to try to make some kind of distinction between the folklore group and the ethnic group in my speech.
There's been a whole lot of discussion by various African-American writers on the negative burden that concept-words like "black" and "dark" carry in the English language, which I think the Black Power movements of the seventies were partly fighting against - trying to push back against having the words that label you be words with a lot of negative connotation in other areas.
Referring back to the list earlier - Vandals of course are the people who attacked Rome. Villain is, I think, originally a French word for peasant or similar, though I could be remembering wrong on that one. Thug, I'm fairly sure, is a shortening of Thuggee, which was a name for a member of a group of people who violently resisted British colonial rule in India.
I guess my point is that our language is a minefield of discriminatory and racist terminology that digs its way in and settles down. It doesn't just live in nouns and phrases, but also in the school yard rhymes kids used to say at my grade school - things like "Chinese, Japanese, Slanty eyes and dirty knees" were actually blithely recited while playing games by kids who, I'm fairly sure, had never seen a single Chinese or Japanese person in their whole lives. They would use their fingers to move the edges of their eyes up and down while chanting, too. A close friend of mine from South Dakota says that he's heard kids there shouting "fight, fight, nigger and white, white don't win, we all jump in" while watching two white kids fight each other, among a crowd of all-white onlookers. There's something really terrifying to me about little kids rehearsing this kind of verbal racism, and the fact that they're using it on people of their own group rather than on members of the group that they're insulting doesn't make it not-scary or not-racist. I should add that I'm not that old (under 30) and these kids were contemporaries or younger - so we're talking about little kids twenty plus years after the official desegregation of public schools.
Other verbal insults are more subtle, like the etymology of the word thug. I do struggle with whether there's a time cut-off on this kind of etymology - does anyone still care if the word "thug" is used as an insult? Would a person from India remember it and be aware of it in a way that an American wouldn't? Either way, the history of the words are there, and it's hard and a bit embarrassing to force yourself to be aware of them, if you're not the one that they're directed against. Sometimes there are unexpected and ironic benefits though - I do take a bit of pleasure out of thinking that the African-American hip-hop stars who call themselves thugs are, probably unwittingly, allying themselves with Indian warriors from way back who were trying to throw off British rule.
The reason I'm so obsessed with the language thing is that I think the words we use for things affect how we think about them, which affects how we react to them. Also, language for me is an interesting way to look at conflicts between people. Power disparities are pretty directly represented in language, because generally the dominant group forces the less powerful groups to listen to negative language about themselves. (Examples from the British Isles literature I used to read a lot of as a kid taught me that you can Scotch a plan, Welsh on a bet, and have your Irish up, but there's no equivalent insulting thing that you British. Cause it was the British with the more power and they were the ones writing the phrases, I expect.) Probably no African-American person or Latin American or Asian or Jewish person now, no Spanish or Irish or [fill in the blank] person in U.S. history, can avoid being aware of the negative words that the dominant white [usually White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, at least in my original neck of the woods] culture has used against them. I'm pretty sure that there are negative and insulting words and phrases among all of these people and groups for the white majority, but I have the luxury of not being aware of those terms. As a white person, I never walk through my day thinking about all the cruel, mistrusting, or insulting words others might use in their speech which refer to me. That's a kind of privilege I can just take for granted - I don't have to worry (with the very remote connection to insults about Jewish people) about finding pain in the language that is used around me every day. And I think it's for me a really sad fact of racism and of cultural/ethnic prejudice in general that other people don't have that luxury.
I love words, but sometimes they trip you up.
One of the subtle kinds of racism, I think, is the kind that embeds itself in language and then disappears from the memory of at least some of the people speaking that language (usually the portion of people speaking that language who have more power are the ones who forget, the ones who are being picked on still remember). For example, a number of words that exist now with negative denotations were ones that originally described an ethnic group or class, and over time, the negative connotation applied to the group became the actual denotation of the word (e.g. Vandals, Thugs, Villains). Then there are words or phrases that are used by those in power to mock or put down those without power, usually along racial or ethnic lines.
I wasn't aware of this effect in language as a kid, and I read a lot of old novels. So I frequently used words without any awareness of their history or their modern connotations. Using "gay" exclusively for happy was fairly innocuous, but it might have been from Gone With The Wind that I picked up the cringe-worthy idea that it was somehow appropriate to call people "honey-chile" when I was annoyed with them. That lasted about until the first time I said it to someone black, and the oh-boy-did-I-deserve-that-lecture feeling has never faded from that memorable exchange. Of course, since I was born and grew up in Vermont (97.5% white as of the last census) I didn't have many conversations with people who weren't white as a kid, so that memorable exchange didn't happen until college. Things would probably be different now, with the advent of cable television and the internet, not to mention some changes in Vermont demographics, but when I was a small kid you could actually go, oh, months in some towns without seeing a single non-white resident. White parents would talk about the embarrassing moment when their kid of 3 or 4 or 5 saw their first non-white person and exclaimed something along the lines of "mommy, that person's skin is a different color!" I was still aware of between-group tensions, but they tended to be between Flatlanders (out-of-staters) and Vermonters, between different groups of European ancestry, and between Protestant Christians, Catholic Christians, and Jews.
In trying to be (more conscious? less racist? not PC exactly, because I don't really care about that) a more responsible person in my speech, there are some phrases I used as a kid that I don't use anymore now that I've thought about them. I should add that I don't think most kids my age would have used any of these phrases, because I picked them up from books. But I'm sure there are similar phrases people use now without thinking about them:
F'r'instance, I used to use the phrase "welsh on a bet" - it's a phrase I picked up from some novel somewhere, which means to fail to fulfill one's promises. Obviously, once I thought about it, that was some kind of anti-people-from-Wales thing. But oddly, I didn't think about it until I heard a different phrase - it was only a few years ago that I first heard someone use the phrase "jew someone down" meaning to strike an unfair bargain. Having grown up knowing that my father's family had a Jewish background that had caused them a fair amount of prejudice in 1950s era New York (despite being, y'know, not practicing Jews of any type, the ancestry was enough for them to face social and financial discrimination), well, hearing this phrase that used the word "jew" in this context was a new and horrible shock to me. And only after hearing it did I realize how offensive "welsh on a bet" must similarly be. Which I think speaks to how much we avoid knowing the effects of our language unless we feel those effects ourselves.
I used to use the word "gypped" as in, "boy, I feel gypped" or "someone gypped me out of ----". I think it was about in high school that I realized this word was actually referencing Gypsies, with a similar intent to the Jewish and Welsh insulting phrases mentioned above. So I did stop saying that. I have no idea where I originally thought the phrase came from, but I honestly had never connected it to gypsies for the longest time. I still use the word "gypsy" when referring to folklore and story characters, but I got yelled at for this by someone a few months back, and I'm still wrestling with it - he pointed out to me that the word gypsy is considered offensive by many Romany, which I knew, but added that it shouldn't be used at all. I'm still working on that one, because I'm not sure that gypsies in folklore are really quite the same as the Romany people, and I want to try to make some kind of distinction between the folklore group and the ethnic group in my speech.
There's been a whole lot of discussion by various African-American writers on the negative burden that concept-words like "black" and "dark" carry in the English language, which I think the Black Power movements of the seventies were partly fighting against - trying to push back against having the words that label you be words with a lot of negative connotation in other areas.
Referring back to the list earlier - Vandals of course are the people who attacked Rome. Villain is, I think, originally a French word for peasant or similar, though I could be remembering wrong on that one. Thug, I'm fairly sure, is a shortening of Thuggee, which was a name for a member of a group of people who violently resisted British colonial rule in India.
I guess my point is that our language is a minefield of discriminatory and racist terminology that digs its way in and settles down. It doesn't just live in nouns and phrases, but also in the school yard rhymes kids used to say at my grade school - things like "Chinese, Japanese, Slanty eyes and dirty knees" were actually blithely recited while playing games by kids who, I'm fairly sure, had never seen a single Chinese or Japanese person in their whole lives. They would use their fingers to move the edges of their eyes up and down while chanting, too. A close friend of mine from South Dakota says that he's heard kids there shouting "fight, fight, nigger and white, white don't win, we all jump in" while watching two white kids fight each other, among a crowd of all-white onlookers. There's something really terrifying to me about little kids rehearsing this kind of verbal racism, and the fact that they're using it on people of their own group rather than on members of the group that they're insulting doesn't make it not-scary or not-racist. I should add that I'm not that old (under 30) and these kids were contemporaries or younger - so we're talking about little kids twenty plus years after the official desegregation of public schools.
Other verbal insults are more subtle, like the etymology of the word thug. I do struggle with whether there's a time cut-off on this kind of etymology - does anyone still care if the word "thug" is used as an insult? Would a person from India remember it and be aware of it in a way that an American wouldn't? Either way, the history of the words are there, and it's hard and a bit embarrassing to force yourself to be aware of them, if you're not the one that they're directed against. Sometimes there are unexpected and ironic benefits though - I do take a bit of pleasure out of thinking that the African-American hip-hop stars who call themselves thugs are, probably unwittingly, allying themselves with Indian warriors from way back who were trying to throw off British rule.
The reason I'm so obsessed with the language thing is that I think the words we use for things affect how we think about them, which affects how we react to them. Also, language for me is an interesting way to look at conflicts between people. Power disparities are pretty directly represented in language, because generally the dominant group forces the less powerful groups to listen to negative language about themselves. (Examples from the British Isles literature I used to read a lot of as a kid taught me that you can Scotch a plan, Welsh on a bet, and have your Irish up, but there's no equivalent insulting thing that you British. Cause it was the British with the more power and they were the ones writing the phrases, I expect.) Probably no African-American person or Latin American or Asian or Jewish person now, no Spanish or Irish or [fill in the blank] person in U.S. history, can avoid being aware of the negative words that the dominant white [usually White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, at least in my original neck of the woods] culture has used against them. I'm pretty sure that there are negative and insulting words and phrases among all of these people and groups for the white majority, but I have the luxury of not being aware of those terms. As a white person, I never walk through my day thinking about all the cruel, mistrusting, or insulting words others might use in their speech which refer to me. That's a kind of privilege I can just take for granted - I don't have to worry (with the very remote connection to insults about Jewish people) about finding pain in the language that is used around me every day. And I think it's for me a really sad fact of racism and of cultural/ethnic prejudice in general that other people don't have that luxury.
