"The Language War" by Robin Tolmach Lakoff LO25070

From: Ray E. Harrell (mcore@IDT.NET)
Date: 07/14/00


Replying to LO25067 --

Timely yes and could you explain how this operates in a practical social
situation at the office? I've consigned this post to my LO folder as
being useful conceptually but would be interested in the way that you use
the information practically.

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
mcore@idt.net

"Working for a resident chamber opera center in every city of America of
100,000 or more"

systhinc@msn.com wrote:

> 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.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> "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."

-- 

"Ray E. Harrell" <mcore@idt.net>

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