Something timely for the group to look at. Lakoff's a good linguist who's
done a lot of work in the sociology of language.
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"The Language War" by Robin Tolmach Lakoff
By Virginia Vitzthum
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/07/11/language/index.html
Nonfiction
The Language War
by Robin Tolmach Lakoff
University of California Press, 322 pages
"Political correctness" and hate speech; Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas;
speculation about the "real" Hillary Clinton; the O.J. Simpson trial;
ebonics; and the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr scandal: These national soap
operas all pass Robin Tolmach Lakoff's "Undue Attention Test," but
it's not because Americans are shallow and prurient. Rather, Lakoff
says in "The Language War," we studied these stories for clues about
our "insoluble difficulties with race and gender."
Lakoff is a professor of linguistics whose comparison of men's and
women's speech patterns was popularized in Deborah Tannen's bestseller
"You Just Don't Understand." In "The Language War," Lakoff takes it to
the people herself, writing more as a lefty pundit and media critic
than a linguist. She argues that both minorities and women are
battling the white men in power for "control of the narrative" and of
language itself. The stories that pass the Undue Attention Test, she
says, all involved a struggl e over "which group ... gets to make
meaning for us all -- to create and define our culture."
The evidence Lakoff presents that the battle for cultural control is a
contest over language is rarely real-world turf lost or gained.
Instead, she points to the defensive posturing by defenders of the
status quo, uncovering the fear of a black, female , gay planet
embedded in conservative rhetoric. But Lakoff herself falls into the
the same "gotcha" tone that she decries in what's been called the
"Argument Culture," the increasingly mean, contentious public
discourse born of the language war. For examp le, she opens her
skillful debunking of a George Will column with this: "A thorough
analysis of the sophistries of Will's argument would take us beyond
the millennium." Then she disses him for "sneering."
Lakoff's best in her own field: Linguistics offers a fresh take on
some played-out stories and reanimates those middle-aged warriors
feminism and anti-racism. Even sympathetic listeners tune out overused
terms like "patriarchy" and "the Other." Lakoff's use of linguistic
terminology and concepts revives the old struggles for equality, like
a Moby re-mix of a 60s anthem that's been beat en into background
noise by boomer radio. "In every language," Lakoff explains, "some
linguistic forms are said to be 'marked,' their correlates
'unmarked.'" Unmarked forms are generic, the standard; marked forms
are some variation on that standard. For e xample, in English, present
tense is unmarked, future and past are marked. Masculine is unmarked
(mankind, policeman, freshman); feminine is marked (actress, waitress,
coed). For the unmarked, dominant members of society, Lakoff argues,
"your attributes are invisible, as your role in making things the way
they are is not noticeable."
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