Belgium on the brink: Parliamentary elections could lead to split

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We're used to the issue of separatism here in Canada, with Quebec nationalists agitating for separation from the rest of Canada for decades now (despite two referendums with "No" outcomes), but the country dealing with it today is Belgium, which heads to the polls to elect all 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and 40 of 71 seats in the Senate.

The country faces a number of serious problems, including (as with the rest of Europe) the economy. As the BBC reports, "[d]uring the last three years the national debt has grown to unmanageable proportions." Just how bad is it? "The country's ratio of debt to gross domestic product is behind only Greece and Italy in the Eurozone."

And yet the election campaign has been dominated not so much by the economy but by language and culture, with the country's old divide between Flanders (the northern half the country with Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent) and Wallonia (the southern half of the country with Liege and Charleroi) threatening to tear Belgium into two distinct and sovereign states:

Belgium is holding parliamentary elections which could bring the country closer to a constitutional split.

The Flemish separatist party the New Flemish Alliance (NVA) is expected to do well in the vote.

Its leader Bart De Wever supports dividing the country in two, Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

However, a split bringing an end to Belgium would not happen immediately.

Belgian governments are required to be made up of a bi-lingual coalition, but this is the first federal election from which a party advocating the end of Belgium could emerge the outright winner.

And that could mean the end of Belgium as we know it.

Belgium is in effect two separate communities held together by a bi-lingual political system.

Much of public and political life in Belgium is dominated by bitter debates around language and the allocation of public resources.

Government aid to poorer Wallonia, home to four million French speakers, has caused resentment among Belgium's 6.5 million Flemish majority, correspondents say.

Until now separatist parties have been on the fringes of political debate.

But Mr De Wever, 39, has pushed his party into to the mainstream over the last three years while the other parties have been locked in a political stalemate.

It's a lovely country, and, to me, its bilingual and bicultural heritage is a strength, the whole being greater than the sum of the two parts (as Canada is much greater than the sum of its parts). And I find the move to break up diverse countries like Belgium along narrow parochial lines -- linguistic, cultural, ethnic, religious -- rather distressing. It may be necessary sometimes, as with the former Yugoslavia, and it may make sense sometimes, as with Czechoslovakia, but should the world essentially just be a collection of homogeneous states based on exclusive identity? I understand the sovereign aspirations of places like Flanders and Catalonia, for example, as well as Quebec, but it seems to me that their national identities can thrive within larger states like Belgium and, Spain, and Canada, not just on their own, where they are much more vulnerable to international forces, such as globalization and Americanization, that do not respect them at all.

Unfortunately, it's all too easy to focus on national identity instead of more pressing matters like the economy, and to use nationalism as a cure-all, with the Other (in this case, the Wallonians) scapegoated as the problem. Hopefully cooler heads and more mature voices will ultimately prevail in Belgium.

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Update:

Belgium's Flemish separatist party, the New Flemish Alliance (NVA), has won more than 20% of the vote in parliamentary elections, according to early unofficial results.

If confirmed, the NVA would have the largest share of the vote, bringing the country closer to a split.

The NVA wants to more fully divide the country between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

But the party would have to form a coalition with Wallonian parties.

Such a coalition might force NVA leader Bart De Wever to tone down his Flemish nationalist rhetoric. 

An imminent split is unlikely. And while the NVA "won" the election, it only won 20 percent of the vote, far from enough to break up the country on its own.

Needless to say, this is a situation that bears watching.

(The Times has more.)

Quote of the Day: John McWhorter on Sarah Palin (and her all-American toddler-speak)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This, it seems to me, is spot on:

Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition -- an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).

*****

What truly distinguishes Palin's speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance -- Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended "there," as in "We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there..." But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to "forge that peace." That peace? You mean that peace way over there -- as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She's far, far away from that peace.

*****

This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you've never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself -- meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.

*****

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral -- "You betcha," "Yes we can!" -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let's face it: she is.

Ouch. It doesn't exactly say much for American culture -- and the American people -- that it's essentially personified, linguistically, by Sarah Palin.

But something has to explain her ongoing popularity, at least on the right -- which, let's face it, is child-like (and not in a good way, and I don't mean to insult children) -- and this at least partly does.

She's one of you, my American friends. Like it or not.

Dallas police wrongly ticketed non-English-speaking drivers

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This must surely warm up the cold, bitter hearts of Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and the rest of the English-only nativist movement in the U.S.:

Dallas police ticketed 39 drivers in 3 years for not speaking English.

They will not be happy to learn, however, that Police Chief David Kunkle is not amused and has promised "to investigate all officers involved in the cases for dereliction of duty."

I was surprised and stunned that that would happen, particularly in the city of Dallas. In my world, you would never tell someone not to speak Spanish,

Kunkle said. Pending cases are being dismissed and fines are being reimbursed to those who were ticketed and paid them.

It doesn't seem there there was a department-wide effort to target non-English speakers. "The citations were issued in several different patrol divisions by at least six different officers." In some cases at least, ignorance of the law may have played a role:

In [one] case and perhaps the others, officials said, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed the charge as an option. But the law the computer referred to is a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle said his department does not enforce.

Still, Kunkle is right to investigate, and those ultimately responsible ought to be held accountable. Ignorance is no defence, after all, and along the way there were officials who should have known that what was being done was wrong.

Quote of the Day: Michele Bachmann on herself

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Her fundraising pitch:

Don't let them Palinize me!

Actually, she doesn't need any help. She may well be the craziest Republican in national politics.

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What exactly does "Palinize" mean? She explains:

To smear or mock someone using falsehoods, baseless accusations or unsubstantiated character assassinations for the purpose of blocking them from achieving a goal.

To exaggerate the truth or lie by omission.

To attack a person for his or her conservative values by focusing an inordinate amount of attention on a single example of that person falling short (or being perceived as falling short) of the values they espouse.

Right, sure, whatever... As Charles Lemos puts it at MyDD: "Sarah Palin is a beacon of sanity compared to Michele Bachmann. That such insanity and ignorance graces the halls of Congress is a sheer travesty."

I encourage all of you to incorporate "Palinize" and "Bachmannize" into your vocabulary. Just make sure to turn the definitions around:

-- To "Palinize" something is to spin it for the sake of personal political gain and to exaggerate one's sense of long-term victimization at the hands of some nefarious, if vaguely defined, elite.

-- To "Bachmannize" something is to distort the meaning of it so radically, within the context of paranoid right-wing ideology, as to render it largely incomprehensible.

Have fun. And remember that we've alread introduced "glennbeckery" and related words to the language.

Racism first: Pat Buchanan, the Republican Party, and the new (white nationalist) majority

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, it's quite amusing that (white nativist) Pat Buchanan and "white nationalist" Peter Brimelow spewed their bigotry and ignorance beneath a banner that misspelled the word "conference" -- it was spelled "conferenece," with an extra 'e' (for eugenics?) -- but what's rather more serious, if not genuinely disturbing, is that this sort of bigotry and ignorance still plays so well on the right and throughout much of America. Indeed, the point of the confereneece (I'll add in an extra 'e' for evil) was to revive racism in the Republican Party in hopes of winning over "working class white Democrats" and "building the new majority." (Of course, there's already more than enough racism both in the GOP and in Buchanan's right-wing nativist circles to feed off and build upon, so I'll assume it's a work-in-progress -- or, rather, a work-in-regress.)

As you might expect, one target of the white-first, English-only bigots was Sonia Sotomayor, whom both men ridiculed, as well as Obama, who supposed will require Americans to speak Spanish -- not that that's true, of course, but the truth hardly matters here, and what's the problem with bilingualism anyway? (Well, it's a huge, huge problem for the bigots, of course, because it threatens their English-only linguistic hegemony, and, what's more, Spanish is spoken by Mexicans, among others, whom they regard, as they regard all "colored" folk, as dirty and less than human.

But who am I to protest? This is the new majority! This is the future of the Republican Party!

If this is what the GOP wants, if this is what the GOP really is, then, sure, by all means, let it show us all its true colors. (So to speak.)

I'm sure Pitchfork Pat will lead his party to the promised land. It's just a matter of time.

Wise to the words

By Capt. Fogg

This being the last day of 2008, it's customary to bring out my consultant Dr. Syntax and air his views about how none of you speak English properly. Indeed there are a number of stupid neologisms, platitudes,clichés, malapropisms and other linguistic transgressions I'm sick of hearing and you should be too.

It seems however, that academia has scooped old Syntax and released a more official list of awful verbal offal yesterday. Michigan's Lake Superior State University has taken it upon itself, or at least the English Department has, to ban a number of recent common usages, and although my cranky friend is a bit offended at the lack of respect and recognition he feels he deserves, he's used to it and he quite agrees with most of their condemnations.

Carbon footprint has been spewed forth from journalistic smokestacks all year and it deserves to be at the top of the list for many reasons, not the least of which is the inherent misunderstanding of basic chemistry. It's the compounds of carbon fouling the air and carbon dioxide is no more carbon than water is hydrogen, nor does either substance lend itself to having footprints. Find a better term, says my friend Syntax, or you may find his footprint on your you know where.

What else has brought forth the wrath of Syntax this year? Green: yes it's easier to type than ecologically advantageous and easier to attach to every trivial thing, action or policy the creativity of Madison Avenue and other enthusiastic simpletons can dream up. A thermos bottle isn't particularly green, for instance, unless it's made by Stanley, and virtually all things advertised as such wouldn't make a bit of difference even if most of the world bought them -- unless being green in the face from disgust counts. Algae is green and we could do with less of it in our rivers and ponds. Organic? Crude oil and snake venom are organic. Don't look for them at Whole Foods.

Syntax, you'll note I'm not calling him "the good doctor" because that's vapid cliché number 147 on his list, remains thoroughly opposed to a number of hackneyed metaphors, so overused that they have often obliterated more accurate and legitimate words. The now permanent fatwa on the carrion metaphor impact has been joined by ass kicking and references to suction to indicate incompetence or disapproval. These stopped being creative or even mildly humorous before you were born. Stop it.

Perhaps it will be another 4 years before we have to arrest anyone for using stumping and campaign trail, but please use the time to think of more direct replacements for these bits of verbal road-kill.

Syntax has nearly beaten efforting and texting to death, as he does with "verbed" nouns in general, but nearly isn't enough, is it?

Euphemisms such as right-sizing don't disguise the fact that your company is firing your department and it just makes your boss more of a jerk then you knew he was.

Changing the sign on your Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian or Japanese restaurant to say "Asian cuisine" makes you sound like a moron and it's an insult to the ethnicities you're attempting to cover with some gluey "Asian sauce." There's no such category as Asian, Asiatic or Oriental food - or sauce, and yes all three words mean exactly the same thing. And while we're on the subject of food, what the hell is comfort food and what would discomfort food be?

Graphic doesn't mean scary, and issue isn't synonymous with problem or concern. A bowel movement is an issue -- constipation s a problem.

There's been nothing new in rocket science since Newton and as a metaphor for technical difficulty, you'd be better off talking about rocket technology. All you'd lose thereby is the association with the lemmings of language.

Warfighter. Did we really need that one and doesn't it serve to dehumanize a soldier? As the military ( right after the business school) is often at the forefront of promulgating misleading and opaque usage, I'm suspicious, although I will admit with some degree of guilty feelings that I've always liked Overkill.

So anyway, the old man is getting a bit tired of you and the thoughtless way you talk and of having to remind you of it every year. We both know you'll be eating double bacon cheeseburgers in front of the TV by next week regardless of all your resolutions and you'll still be using "fell swoop" and "control freak" as though you knew what you were saying, you reprobate you.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Humorous link: Obama's controversial use of grammar

By LindaBeth

As a college instructor who cringes every time I read students' writing, I had to share this Onion-like humor piece!

From TruthDig.

Headlines that make you go... huh?

By LindaBeth

Scary, Isn’t She?

That’s the September 11, 2008 headline of an article about Jaime Nared, the 12 year-old basketball phenom who, back in May, was curiously kicked off of a previously mixed-gender basketball team (the league citing old rules barring coed teams) after she clearly demonstrated she was “too good” to be on the team–she makes the boys look “bad.”

Scary? The article is about how good she is, what potentiaal she has, and how she struggles to find appropriate peers to play with and against. How about describe her as “amazing”? “Phenomenal”? “Incredible” Why “scary”?

Scary she’s so good…because she’s female? Scary that her talent and physical blessings (she’s 6'1") threaten a male-dominated sport, that women are rapidly becoming more visible in? How about scary that she seems expected to apologize for her talent, her drive, her interest, her skill, her motivation…

Scary that “female” and “exceptional athleticism” still are assumed to be contradictory terms.

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

Suicide-bombing headlines specify females, never males

By LindaBeth

I had this same criticism a month or so back, the last time I saw a newspaper headline about female bombers, but I didn’t write about it then. Today, in reading The New York Times, I read: "Female Suicide Bomber Kills 2 in Iraqi Province."

Now, it’s not that I don’t understand the significance of female suicide-bombers in particular. While this story doesn’t address it, past articles with similar headlines have at least mentioned:

Fifteen other women have carried out suicide bomb attacks in Diyala Province, according to General Rubaie. Islamic rules prevent men, including security officers conducting searches, from touching women. Compounding the predicament is a scarcity of female Iraqi police and soldiers who might otherwise fill the gap.

While I am somewhat annoyed when stories, such as today’s, mention a female bomber in the headline, but don’t discuss why that’s significant in the story, I take issue more with the persistent selective gender-naming. Male suicide bombers are reported in headlines as “suicide bombers”; female suicide bombers are “named” as such. I have blogged on this in the past in discussing ex-nomination, and Ashley guest blogging over at Feministe interestingly argues that women’s gender is specified when they perpetrate acts of violence to detract from the reality that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent acts. The repetition of women’s gender in such reports works to mask violence as a gender-neutral activity. My issue is at a more basic linguistic level. Previously I wrote:

In conversation (your own and others’), watch how people are described. Typically, we use “identity” descriptors only with reference to women, gay men, lesbians, people of color, non-Western ethnicities, (and also non-Christian religions)… in other words, the default category for a “person” is a white, hetero, male. A person is only someone “other” than that when specified.

This is what’s referred to as “ex-nomination” (coined by the semiotician Roland Bathes) -- being ‘unnamed’. What is unnamed is what is seen as a ‘natural’ commonsensical category. Those of us who are not white heterosexual men become those with “marked bodies”-bodies who must be named to be identified. In other words, people who are women, or black are designated as such (as if identifying them according to said label adds particular meaning to who they are as a person), while white hetero men are simply “people,” and are thus permitted to establish meaningful identities in ways not shaped by said societal identity labels.

These headlines bother me for that reason: that it perpetuates the assumption that an individual is a (white, hetero) male unless specified otherwise.

It’s true that we also specify male for characteristics that are deemed “female” (a.k.a. “male nurse”), which could in part account for its usage in headlines–because we assume suicide bombers to be male. But Western assumptions are no excuse for the persistent usage of gendered terms by journalists. Would it really be so hard to say “suicide bomber” in the headline and then to discuss the gender and its implications, if necessary, in the body of the story? Or since gender is in fact an issue, use male and female descriptors in the headlines? Otherwise, we reinforce the notion of male as default.

UPDATE 8/15: Funny that this is a trend I have been seeing, and as soon as I write about it, the NYT changes its pattern: see today's "Bomber Kills 18 on Shiite Pilgrimage in Iraq." The "bomber" is actually a female! Now that's a first!

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

Proactively efforting to impact the thought showers

By Capt. Fogg

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

-- George Orwell

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to award the Human Voices Doctor Syntax Award to Simon Milton:

Why do we have to have "coterminous, stakeholder engagement" when we could just "talk to people" instead?

asked the Chairman of The Local Government Association, an organization that represents local government officials in England and Wales. I love this guy.

Pretentious and impenetrable babble has metastasized into every English speaking part of the world like verbal melanoma; from business schools, PR firms, popular science TV shows and journalistic covens, and it's a rare writer or speaker who doesn't effort try to include as many copies of "empowerment, " "proactive" and "Impactful" in every sentence he excretes.

Why does anyone need a clumsy, worn out metaphor like "negatively impacted on" when hurt or harmed will do so much better? Of course, our institutionalized horror of appearing illiberal by using direct language is responsible for much of it. Careers have been made by those who marshal groups to speak for non-existent "communities" so as to ban words that aren't really offensive to anyone other than graduate students eager to cooperate with professors who need to publish.

Brainstorming, itself a crapulous and unfunny metaphor for talking amongst a group, seemed, or so we were given input told, to be offensive to epileptics even though there is no evidence of it negatively impacting on annoying anyone. Let's call it "thought showering" said one British City Council. Let's not. Let's just call it pretentious babble posing as enlightened vocabulary.

Let us please have a round of applause for Mr. Milton!

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

A quick note on Obama's apology

By LindaBeth

(update from yesterday's post)

As it turns out, Obama personally apologized to the reporter he called 'sweetie' yesterday a few hours after the encounter. From his voicemail:

"I'm calling to apologize on two fronts. One was you didn't get your question answered and I apologize. [...] Second apology is for using the word 'sweetie.' That's a bad habit of mine. I do it sometimes with all kinds of people. I mean no disrespect and so I am duly chastened on that front. Feel free to call me back. I expect that my press team will be happy to try to make it up to you whenever we are in Detroit next." (emphasis mine)

First, I really appreciate and respect that he admitted to being wrong. Though it's awfully pathetic that I'm actually impressed by this; unfortunately, this is the kind of incident that in our culture would typically elicit the "I'm sorry you're oversensitive and took it the wrong way" kind of apology. But it seems to me that Obama made a genuine apology and owning up to his "bad habit" using a type of language that perpetuate inequality. Unfortunately, though, this isn't the first time this "bad habit" has come up.

Second, I like his swift response. I think he had already apologized by the time I had even read about the incident. Which makes him seem more genuine to me--he knew he was wrong and took care it it in a timely manner. He didn't need to read the public response to his comment to 'realize' it.

Third, I have to say that he doesn't do it with "all kinds of people"...namely, he doesn't do it with grown, professional men. While I appreciate that he is trying to say he didn't mean it personally, it isn't quite accurate to say he says it for anybody. To say "all kinds of people" dismisses the specifically gendered use of the term, which while it may be used as a term of endearment for loved ones, is wholly condescending to use, especially for a professional woman. And as I said above, it's certainly not the first time Obama has used it to refer to women he doesn't know. And as it turns out, this woman never got her interview (insult to injury).

I like Obama. I was truly disappointed to hear him refer to a woman in this way. And I can't ethically loathe the media's sexism against Clinton without pointing out sexism if Obama does it (and especially with how much I blog about language). But I think his apology was genuine, that he understands he did wrong (rather than that it was merely "taken to wrong way"), and that he desires to do right by people. I just wish that he could have also realized that it wasn't a generic "bad habit". And especially with NARAL's recent endorsement, I do hope to see him recognize the need for our culture to take women seriously.

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me)

Hey, Obama: a female reporter is not a "sweetie"

By LindaBeth

Um, yeah... this is annoying.

(as I've written before)

I posted yesterday about the excellent HuffPo article about phallocentric masculinity in politics and one of the points was the feminization of Obama. Calling a professional reporter "sweetie"? Chalk one up for Obama's masculinity!

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Update: From WXYZ -- "Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has apologized to WXYZ reporter Peggy Agar for calling her "sweetie" during a campaign stop Wednesday in Sterling Heights." -- MJWS

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

Thesaurus.com says "female" is equivalent to "weaker"

By LindaBeth

Both feministing and Jezebel reported this week that a Thesaurus.com entry has shown up for the word "weaker" where the only two entries are "female" and "lady." The entry has been removed so you can view the screenshot here.

My guess is this was supposed to be some sort of a joke, since not only have those two synonyms been removed, but if you look up "weaker" in Thesaurus.com, there is no entry for it, period, only for "weak." From looking at the site, though, it doesn't seem to be user-generated, so if it was a joke, it was an "inside" one or from a hacker -- I hope.

Not only am I bringing this up because it is so blatantly sexist, not to mention completely unproductive, say for a student needing a real synonym, but because this connects a great deal to my previous post about gendered-language and the denigration of the female that is encapsulated by the term pussy, but also because language politics in terms of gender/sexuality has been popping up in the news. A couple weeks ago, weakness was aligned with femininity in the recent commentary on Obama's bowling performance, and in Christopher Hitchens' characterizing (gay male) Andrew Sullivan as acting like a "lesbian" in order to insult him.

This Thesaurus.com incident proves how deeply embedded these associations are in our culture -- whether it goes to show that woman is "officially" connected to the meaning of "weak" or that a hacker understood this cultural connection and attempted to embed it into institutional discourse.

The synonyms they provide for the "weaker" synonyms "female" and "lady" are seems to be taken from the actual entries for various woman-related terms. And as long as we're talking about language and thesaurus.com, lets do some word analyzing.

"female":

noun -- amazon, babe, beauty, broad, cutie, dame, doll, dowager, duchess, femme, filly, fox, gal, gentlewoman, girl, lady, madam, mama, matron, petticoat, pinup, seductress, she, siren, sis, skirt, temptress, tomato, wench; adjective -- changeable, child-bearing, delicate, effeminate, effete, fair, feminine, fertile, gentle, girlish, girly, graceful, ladylike, maidenly, matronly, modest, muliebral, oviparous, petticoat, pistil-bearing, pistillate, pure, refined, reproductive, sensitive, she-stuff, shy, soft, tender, twisty, virgin, vixenish, weak, womanish, womanlike

vs. "male":

noun -- ape, beefcake, boy, bruiser, buck, bull, chap, dude, father, fellow, gent*, gentleman, guy, he, he-man, hunk, jock, john, macho man, papa, stud, tiger, tom, wolf; adjective -- macho*, manful, manlike, manly, potent, virile

Notice anything? Perhaps an emphasis on sexual appeal in terms of being female and sexual action in terms of being male? Perhaps mostly terms of confidence, self-identity, and positivity for male while female terms are largely relational (not individual), object-like, or negative.

Looking closer at these listings for each...

• Most of the entries for female and male regarded adults. However, while "girl" is among the 12 listings for "female," "boy" is not listed among the 14 listings for "male." I suppose there's a significant difference between a boy and a male, whereas between a girl and a female, not so much.
• Curiously, "men's movement" and "misogynist" is part of "male" while women's movement is absent from the "female" listings.
• "Drag queen" is under the "female" listings (not male).
• "Matronly," and "daughter" are part of female, while "family jewels," "virile," and "male pattern baldness" are in the listings under "male" (though male pattern baldness is notably not part of the definition of male), rather than "fatherly" and "son."
• There is a separate entry for "gigalo" under the male listings, but not "prostitute" under female. Maybe that's because pinup, seductress, temptress and vixenish are all definitions of "female," and "call girl" is one of the first listings under the search for "girl."

So how about looking at "girl":

babe, baby doll, bird, blonde, bobby-soxer, boytoy, broad, butterfly, canary, chick, coed, cupcake, cutie, dame, damsel, daughter, deb, debutante, doll, female, filly, gal, jail bait, lady, lassie, mademoiselle, maid, maiden, minx, miss, missy, mouse, nymph, nymphet, piece, queen, schoolgirl, she, sis, skirt, spring chicken, teenybopper, tomato, tomboy, virgin, wench, witch, woman

vs. "boy":

buck, cadet, chap, child, chip, dude*, fellow, gamin, guy, half-pint*, junior, lad, little guy*, master, punk*, puppy*, runt*, schoolboy, shaveling, shaver*, small fry*, sonny*, sprout*, squirt*, stripling, tadpole*, whippersnapper*, youngster, youth

Looking at the girl/boy listings, of which there were 50+ of each...

• In the first few for "boy" were such listings as "boy wonder," "office boy," "mama's boy," "playboy" -- one for boy's employment, one for a non-boyish boy, one for a boy's intellectual genius, and one for a man's (active and selfish) sexuality.
• In the first few for "girl" we listings like "girl Friday," "bachelor girl," "call girl," "cover girl"--one for girl's employment, one for her marital status, and two for her (passive) sexuality.
• Note that tomboy (the arguably female equivalent of mama's boy) is part of the definition of girl whereas mama's boy it outside of the definition of boy itself. This here reveals how ingrained how threatening troubling gender roles is for hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity in a way that it isn't as much for girls... so long as they are also "reproductive" and "pinups."
• Several of the terms for girl referred to sexuality, while the terms for boy simply referred predominately to youth. Even further, the sexual terms are those of the ubiquitous male fantasy of girls' sexuality: virgin and nymph, whereas the sexual terms related to (adult) "female" tended to cluster around her dangerousness: temptress, seductress.
• The boy is primarily a young man, whereas "girl" seems to have a discursive function of its own, producing a sexualized and appearance-oriented image of young femininity that will be coupled with being wifely and motherly as an adult female.

You might be thinking, "It's just Thesaurus.com... what's the big deal?" Well, Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com are heavily used and are considered reputable sources. And words mean things. Language shapes thought, and what we are able to think. So long as we overload terms for female with passivity, sexualization, objectification, and motherhood, and male with activity, active sexuality and prowess, we will continue to think of men and women in these terms. Think about it -- what do we call a woman who's sexually active -- slut, loose, whore? What do we call a passive male sex object? Um, hunk... maybe? Or meaty? And of course juxtapose those terms with "delicate," "weak," and "sensitive," and maybe now we're seeing this isn't just an issue of a word or two.

And when "mama's boy" is an anomaly of "boy" while "tomboy" is part of the definition of "girl," we have some serious heteronormativity in our language. And when nymph and virgin, doll and cutie are the way we think of young girls rather than simply being not-yet women, some light is shed on our incredible social problem of girls' sexualization and the sexualization of the young and vulnerable (even if legal) in general. And why is there no term for an intelligent girl, like we have for "boy wonder"... just "cover girl"?

When we can't think without words, when we understand that words do not simply reflect our thought but actually shape it, we can begin to understand that they're not just words.

(*for more of the same, check out dictionary.com for "woman" and "man".)

Hunger for human connection

By Carol Gee

Genuine human interaction is something we seek out. Our species likes to connect with each other. We instinctively live together in homes, neighborhoods, tribes and nations. We naturally communicate with each other, even if we cannot understand the other's language.

If you can read this you are a human being. If you can read this [1] or [2], you could be a chimp. To read the rest of the post, you must learn the Word of the Day -- "poignant" -- from Yahoo! Thesaurus:

adjective

1. Exciting a deep, usually somber response: affecting, impressive, moving, stirring, touching.

The Internet provides wonderful opportunities to make virtual human connections with people all around the world, and Tom Friedman's idea that the world is flat is correct in this regard. Today's post is a little digest of poignancy collected from some blogosphere people with whom I have connected over the years:

• From Maud Newton, a wonderful literary blogger whom I've read for years, comes this link to poignant news -- "Marie Smith Jones, last native speaker of the Eyak language dies," and this about the future of languages, from Out of the Woods Now.


• From my virtual "neighbor" TxSharon of Bluedaze comes this very poignant helpful hint -- "How to get a human on the phone," with a link to gethuman 500 database.


• The writers at Firedognight have soul -- Suzanne mentioned "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera. It is among the most poignant pieces of music I know.


• Grant McCracken I have read for years. He is a talented anthropologist, who wrote this blogpost: "Lunch hour anthropology." It contains a link to an exhibit of photographs by Gus Powell, "Lunch Pictures," including several that are exquisitely poignant.
  

Virtual poignant experiences are not the same thing, obviously, as in-person touching encounters. We go to movies or the symphony or to a museum to be moved or stirred. But you can have the same experience if you will take the trouble to watch around you, as Grant describes in his lunch hour post. I am thinking of how touching it could be to really pay attention to the warm and tender ways moms or dads greet their toddlers as they pick them up from day care. Or you might watch a replay of the STS-122 shuttle crew saying goodbye yesterday to the little crew remaining at the International Space Station. Big brave male astronauts shed tears at the occasion, and it was perfectly appropriate to do so.

Today I have taken a vacation from ranting about FISA, and I am sure my regular readers will breathe a sigh of relief. I will return to ranting and bold headings tomorrow.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

This dust-up about Christmas

By Carol Gee

Absurd! There is a certain virtue to political correctness. But, in the case of avoiding the use of the word Christmas, there is no reason to adhere to such silliness. December 25 is a valid Christian holiday that marks the birthday (arbitrarily chosen date) of Jesus Christ. Let's explore the Christmas controversy. Or, as a college student titled his recent terrific editorial, "Merry Christmahanakwanzayule."

Where did the conflict originate? A Wikipedia chart on religious demography in the U.S. might account for some of it. In 1990, 88.3% of Americans self-identified themselves as Christian. In 2001 the percentage had dropped to 79.8%. The "other religions" percentages were 3.5% in 1990, and 5.2% in 2001. People who said "No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic" totaled 8.4% in 1990 and 15.0% in 2001. (The aggregate total is slightly over 100% because of the survey's method of not adjusting for refusal to answer in this U.S. Census survey). To quote:

# the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just 8% of the total in 1990 to over 14% in 2001;
# there has also been a substantial increase in the number of adults who refused to reply to the question about their religious preference, from about four million or 2% in 1990 to more than eleven million or over 5% in 2001.

"Religion in the United States," Wikipedia, reports that 20% of Americans are non-Christian, summarizing it this way:

Most Americans adhere to Christianity. According to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (discussed below), 80% of the U.S. is Christian and 15% do not adhere to a religion. Other religions comprise 5% of the U.S. population.

One of the central parts of the conflict emanates from a segment of conservative Christians that named the controversy "the war on Christmas." Media Matters carried a post recently, " 'Somewhere Jesus is weeping' over attacks on Bill O'Reilly," devoted to this whole brouhaha. This kind of stuff is where my opening Absurd! comes from. Prosper, an online "prosperity" magazine out of Sacramento, CA, carried a 2006 dialogue, "Out of their minds - Holiday v. Christmas," that is an excellent summary of the controversy. For a lucid elaboration of the issues it is a good read.

For my part, it seems reasonable to get back to some kind of balance. That would mean thinking about the reality that twenty percent of us will not be celebrating a holy birthday on December 25. Sensitivity to that does not mean ignoring the eighty percent who theoretically mark the day that way. Buth there is a deeper reality here. And that there are a whole lot of us in the theoretical cadre. We are not regular church-going Christians. Wikipedia reported,

On the other hand, nearly 40% of respondents who identified with a religion indicated that neither they themselves nor anyone else in their household belongs to a church or some other similar institution.

. . . The top three "gainers" in America's vast religious market place appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion. Looking at patterns of religious change from this perspective, the evidence points as much to the rejection of faith as to the seeking of faith among American adults. Indeed, among those who previously had no religion, just 5% report current identification with one or another of the major religions.

This dust-up over Christmas will pass. After Christmas articles will let us know how the retail world handled it. I hope we find evidence of a bit of sanity connected to the reality. What I find in the blogosphere conversation is a number of folks just want to get the holidays behind them. There is another good sized number that sends me greetings via comments or e-mails. And there is another number that totally ignore Christmas in their writings, and celebrate one of the variety of current holidays privately. Out of which of the theoretical groups you come is your personal preference. I greet you and salute you. And I am curious about who I am leaving out or insulting with the wrong phrase:

• Merry Christmas!
• Happy Kwanzaa!
• Happy Hanukkah!
• Have a good Eid al-Adha!
• Welcome to the Winter Solstice!
• Happy holidays!
  

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Tom Tancredo

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(Vote in our online poll. See right sidebar. The top six candidates are listed, but you can pick your candidate of choice in the drop-down box, Democrat or Republican.)

Most of the GOP presidential hopefuls participated in a debate on Spanish-language Univision on Sunday. They were tough on immigration even in front of a largely Hispanic audience, but, at the Times reported, some of them "took a softer tone," all part of "a difficult balancing act," a walk along a treacherous tightrope, "as they tried to offend neither the Hispanic audience nor the Republican base many of them have tried to appeal to by taking a hard line on illegal immigration."

In other words -- the generally immigration-friendly John McCain and the sometimes decent Mike Huckabee excepted -- they had the smarts explicitly to lie about their positions on immigration and implicitly to renounce the strong nativist impulse that dominates their party. (And also dominates this Republican field. As Frank Rich reminded us in his Sunday column, at the recent GOP YouTube debate, Romney and Giuliani "vied to spray the most spittle at illegal immigrants. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, the fringe candidate whose most recent ads accuse the invading hordes of 'pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives,' accurately accused his opponents of trying to 'out-Tancredo Tancredo.'")

This is the strong nativist impulse that resides with a vengeance in the person of Rep. Tom Tancredo, the long-shot GOP hopeful who refused to attend the debate. Why? Well, he himself explained why in The Miami Herald -- in an op-ed entitled "Why I won't do Spanish debate": "I declined the invitation to participate in the Spanish-language Republican presidential debate on Sunday because I do not want to endorse the further Balkanization of American political life."

Balkanization? It's hard to see how people speaking different languages -- and, clearly, English remains the dominant language; the U.S. is not officially a bilingual country, not even close -- causes a liberal democracy like the U.S. to resemble the ethnically and religiously volatile Balkans.

Toronto, where I live, is one of the most diverse cities in the world. English is by far the major language, but many languages are spoken throughout the city. And yet we are hardly Balkanized, each linguistic group hiding behind its linguistic ramparts and refusing to commune with any other. I would argue that English ought to be the language of government, as well as the main language of commerce and the arts, but the reality is that as a relatively open society we have many "new" Canadians from around the world for whom English is not their first language. They may be learning English, but they converse in their native tongue(s).

The reality of the U.S. is that millions and millions of Americans are similarly "new" to the country. It would be for their benefit to learn English, and to learn it well, but why should they not speak, say, Spanish or Chinese at home or in their communities? Newcomers to America are required, more or less, to adopt certain core American values as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but they are not required to renounced their native values or their native language(s).

And is that not what this debate was about? Putting aside the content of the debate, Republican views with which I strongly disagree, was it not an attempt to reach out to the Spanish-language/Hispanic community, to speak to them in their language (through translation), to include more Americans in the political process than would otherwise be included?

These are the realities of today's America. English is still the main language. It is not under assault. There is no threat -- and there is certainly no Balkanization. But there are many other languages being spoken. And Spanish is the major alternative to English.

Nativists like Tancredo, who represent a significant chunk of the Republican Party, cannot and will not accept this. They are, however, more honest than the politically savvy candidates who moderate their views on immigration to appeal to a Spanish-speaking audience even as they continue to appeal to nativist sentiment in the party's base.

Tancredo is crazy, and dangerous, and a bigot, but perhaps, just perhaps, he is more Republican than the shifty glad-handers who smiled it up on Univision this past Sunday.

We don't need another hero

By Capt. Fogg

The English language isn't what it used to be. It's not as much the expression of a culture but more and more a tool for manipulation. Take the word hero. It used to connote a doer of bold and noble deeds; someone favored by the divine, but as with most things these days, the requirements have been dumbed down and conferring the title of hero is a way to make the exploited seem, well, less exploited.

The guy who runs into a burning building to save someone else can fairly be called a hero but what about the guy who unwittingly holds the door for the guy who runs in to pillage the place before it all burns up? Is he a hero if he's killed so that others may steal during a fire that was set for the purpose? Most people wouldn't say so; they'd say he was a victim and the law would agree, but if we talk about soldiers and not firefighters, everyone is a hero now.

I was struck by an article in The Miami Herald this morning about Staff Sergeant Lillian Clamens, wife and mother of three, killed in Iraq by a missile. Lillian was a personnel clerk only three days away from coming home to her family. Her three children have already bought the costumes for the Halloween party planned to celebrate her return. Her husband, a logistics manager for the Army ROTC program seems stoic, or so the Herald plays the story. They're all heroes, you see and heroes don't cry and consequently neither should we. We should celebrate the heroism of another senseless death, another casualty of the Neo-con crusade to make the world free for exploitation by the rich and corporate; another destroyed family and three more orphans because of a colossally mismanaged power grab by a government that never sheds a tear unless it has to pay for some kid's medical insurance or old person's medicine.

Maybe it's OK to be stoic; to act as though it was important that men and women are dying, but it's not OK for us to pass by it all, to absolve ourselves by calling her a hero, to pretend her children aren't crying, because she's a hero, that we haven't lost one of our own forever, because she's a hero, because soldiers are warriors and warriors are heroes even if they die for someone else's ambitions, our arm chair patriotism and our apathy.

What have we done to ourselves if fathers and mothers, sons and daughters and husbands have to believe that our government hasn't got the blood of their families on their hands and in their wallets; what has become of a nation that it can't cry for someone's mother, someone's wife? What of a culture that has to hide contempt for what they know is wrong; hide grief for what they know is a tragedy behind the cult of Bush and the myth of the warrior hero?

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

"Childrens do learn." -- George W. Bush

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In case you missed it, there was another embarrassing gaffe yesterday from the linguistic mangler-in-chief:

Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: "Childrens do learn."

Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of his education policy, as he touted a new national report card on improved test scores.

*****

During his first presidential campaign, Bush -- who promised to be the "education president" -- once asked: "Is our children learning?"

On Wednesday, Bush seemed to answer his own question with the same kind of grammatical twist.

"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured," he said.

The White House opted to clean up Bush's diction in the official transcript.

Of course it did. Rewriting history -- literally, in this case -- is one of the things the White House does best. It takes a massive effort, one imagines, to turn truth into truthiness, all for the sake of a president who long ago was left way behind.

. . . Let me count the ways

By Carol Gee

The words used to describe leaders and to characterize what they do matter very much to our understanding of the news. My Bloglines feed served up this delicious essay this morning, written by a talented wordmaster. Read it and you will finally understand yesterday's White House news conference. Titled "Going Over The Edge With 'Precipitous'," it is by The Washington Post's Henry Allen.

In a strategic and linguistic coup, the president seemed to be saying that in our fight in Iraq we can forget about the shopworn old Vietnam menace called the quagmire. Now it's time to bravely face its equal and opposite menace, the precipice, as in the dread "precipitous withdrawal."

"Extremist groups would be emboldened by a precipitous American withdrawal," he said. And: "A precipitous withdrawal would embolden al-Qaeda."

. . . Anyway, our precipitous president is not a quagmire guy, so he doesn't do gradual anything. Instead of escalations, he does surges. He wants us to worry about precipitousness, not the quagmire: the fall, not the stall; the brink, not the sink; the steep, not the creep; the plunge, not the grunge; the edge, not the dredge.

. . . Pages of the Oxford English Dictionary warn of the threat signaled by this word: "headlong fall . . . perilous . . . thrown down . . . violent hurry . . . excessive suddenness . . . descent."

Sadly, the mainstream media's reporting has far too gradually become more descriptive of our current president (OCP). And it took a lot of digging to find today's examples of relatively adjective rich stories. Let me count the ways MSM news sources currently describe (OCP), our current president. So that I can avoid my usual name calling, I bracket [my own labels].

• Running Iraq war's my job - Defiant Prez sez funding troops Congress' role -- [defensiveness] New York Daily News (7/13/07)


• Defiant Bush tells Congress Iraq war can still be won -- "Bush struck a defiant tone Thursday. . ." [aggressiveness] -- Yahoo! News (7/13/07)


• Bush says no shift on Iraq, "Bush's tone was at times strident, at times beseeching, as he defended the U.S. role in a war. . . " [immaturity] - Reuters (7/13/07)


• Bush Distorts Qaeda Links, Critics Assert, ". . . President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense." [use of scare tactics] -- New York Times (7/12/07)


• Bush Quiets GOP revolt over Iraq [from a discussion during his news conference, in which the president conflated the facts] -- Los Angeles Times (7/13/07):
  
  

  Bush argued repeatedly that persistence is necessary in Iraq to prevent new Al Qaeda attacks in the United States. He did not distinguish between the threat posed by the network controlled by Osama bin Laden and that from an Iraq-based group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.
  
  . . . Bush's language in recent months has been less precise, and he has often appeared to suggest that Bin Laden's group is conducting attacks in Iraq. In recent days, Bush has gone a step further, twice asserting that the groups are one and the same.
  
  . . . Asked by a reporter whether he had evidence the groups operated together, the president retreated somewhat.



• Bush's Latest, Lame Libby Excuse, [inconsistency] -- Slate's John Dickerson (7/12/07):
  
  

  For the last two weeks the president and his aides have asserted that Bush was deep in contemplation over the details of the Libby case as he weighed whether to commute the sentence. But on the larger, four-year episode with national security implications, the inquisitive chief executive asserts he didn't ask a single question of those involved.

The careful use of words is an art that I greatly admire. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's classic love poem "How do I love thee?" is a masterpiece in its use of the English language. Writers' words matter, they endure, they have influence. It would have been better if, over the years, our national media could have been more routinely descriptive of the behaviors of OCP and the people in his administration. It could have saved us an awful lot of grief.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Gingrich and the Ghetto

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Over the weekend, as you may know by now, Newt Gingrich said this in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women:

The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.

Whatever the problems with this English-only view -- I do think that any political community, including one as vast as the U.S., needs a common language to facilitate communication, but it is completely ridiculous to suggest that learning other languages should be abolished (such linguistic isolationism is entirely counter-productive in a world that is growing ever smaller with the increasingly rapid and kinetic expansion of the forces of globalization, positive and negative alike) -- the particular problem with Gingrich's comment lies in his use of the word "ghetto". Just what did he mean by it?

Surely the language of the "ghetto" to which Gingrich was referring is Spanish, right? Canadians like myself may learn French alongside English, but the second language in the U.S. is, without question, Spanish.

Here Gingrich's evident bigotry turns comic. As Think Progress is reporting, on Monday Gingrich told Hannity and Colmes that he was not referring to Spanish at all. Rather:

Now, I’ll let you pick — frankly, ghetto, historically had referred as a Jewish reference originally. I did not mention Hispanics, and I certainly do not want anybody who speaks Spanish to think I’m in any way less than respectful of Spanish or any other language spoken by people who come to the United States.

Oh, I see. He said something that was quite clear, but now he's spinning himself silly. He may be running for president, after all. Can't alienate Hispanics, once, not so long ago, thought to be a key constituency for the GOP to target -- even the insular Bush speaks Spanish, although perhaps Newt thinks it was wrong of him to learn it?

Otherwise, though -- huh?

You can always count on Gingrich to hide behind revisionist history -- he's not a racist, he just writes books that celebrate the Confederacy; his presentation of the past has nothing whatsoever to do with the present -- but this is just weird. It may be that "ghetto" refers literally to a Jewish neighbourhood -- in 1516, Venice ordered that its resident Jews were required to live on the nearby island of Ghetto Nuovo, and from there the term spread -- but did Gingrich really mean that he was referring to Hebrew or Yiddish rather than Spanish?

Well, yes, that seems to what he said in his defence, but of course he was referring to Spanish. I suppose he could have used the term barrio, but that would have been too obvious. Besides, unless there's something I don't remember about my years in the U.S., I don't think either Hebrew or Yiddish is threatening the primacy of English in Gingrich's homeland. Perhaps he has in mind some final linguistic solution for America's Jews?

Regardless, what seems clear is that Gingrich thinks that any language other than English is the language of the metaphorically ghettoized Other, that is -- according to the retrograde view of linguistic identity propounded by the English-only movement -- un-American. The inhabitants of that "ghetto" may be Hispanic or Jewish or whatever, but, in Gingrich's narrow view, they are certainly not American -- not fully, not even close -- and they certainly won't share in America's "prosperity," whatever that even means.

Whatever else one can say about Gingrich, he certainly has the language of ignorance and bigotry down pat.