21st Century Feminists Suck

Maybe, just maybe, in rights, but not in pay.

This thread is a dud.

Well you shouldn't have started the thread then.

ps I love feminists b/c I love my mom and sister

Nothing at all, Dan. I was making a point about the "women are equal to men" fallacy.

Feminazis to thread??

I'm not so sure this can be blamed on feminism anyhow. That example's more like naive Freudianism with a dollop of feminism as a garnish.

Did she ever get her Annie soundtrack back?

I wonder how many men would be fine with having their salaries reduced to match their female contemporaries if it meant that it was no longer socially acceptable for someone to punch them in the face in the course of a heated argument.

hstencil, what you've posted is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Of course we all know the world is not a perfect place, and we don't need to argue about it because we all agree that women = men in rights, even if it doesn't pan out that way in the "real world".

Aaaaaaanyway, does anyone else have some tales of academic idiocy?

Hmm, well I dunno, I haven't been punched in an argument since I was at least a teenager. Also, if you think it's not "socially acceptable" in some sense to hit a women, I'd like to reintroduce you to the term "domestic violence."

Hstencil: The fact that men hit women (and children) does not mean it's socially acceptable. Is murder socially acceptable? How about car theft? Crime happens, ergo it is socially acceptable.

(and I'm not being sarcastic, either! (yes, I shock even myself))

Andrew I don't think it's necessarily a given that everyone here thinks the same way, even on something that you and I might agree as a pretty basic given.

just a tidbit of info

I'm tired of Freud being appropriated as a punching bag by undereducated knee-jerk feminists (not necessarily by you Amateurist).

Actually, "gender studies" classes are often this lame. At Berkeley the real deal gender studies were in the rhetoric department.

>Spencer, I agree, that's why I added the word "naive" (not that Freud didn't write his share of loopy, totally-bogus nonsense). <

These are the type of people who would say Dr. Strangelove is a porno.

Not only "relatively easy to get away with," but also "incredibly common and not second-guessed by the perpetrator." I would assume that one of the reasons I've see anti-domestic violence ads in public transit are because some men might not know it's a crime. I.e. it's "acceptible" to them.

Were the Enron-style shenaningans socially acceptable?

I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't return Ken Lay's phone calls, but I haven't seen a society-wide change because of any of this. Aside from the market being down, but that happened before Enron anyway.

If so, why are they being prosecuted?

Uh, well has anyone even brought charges yet against Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers? Definitely those are two people involved in corporate scandals who are prolly not "socially acceptible" in the business world these days, but as of yet neither has been charged with anything.

< /sarcasm >

We've been around on this nabisco and you're fundamentally misreading Lakoff. His argument is more that "metaphors" (he'd probably prefer "representations of embodied experience" as a more nuanced term at this point) are the form of thought and generative root of language -- i.e. not that language shapes thought so much as metaphors are the basis thought AND language. Lakoff agrees with Vygotsky about pre-linguistic thought but not pre-social language for a start.

what's his position on love potions?

This is exactly the gist of what I recently read. For example, in 1984 the idea that the populace could be controlled via limiting language to a minimum of newspeak, thereby shaping their view of the world to how the party wanted them to see it. This is what I termed a hoary theory.

But I am not a linguist.

the situation may change unexpectedly

king tut, a murdered eyptian boy-pharoah viciously expunged from his own history let alone ours, is dug up in 1921 and creates a massive cultural hoo-hah: the curse of the tomb is that stuff long buried lives again

=> the word "tutankhamun" still carries all of its freight, and some of — on contact with the modern air — had tremendous potency: it helps forge the link between the bingo hall in essex road with the music of sun ra, for example: the syllable TUT, on many many 20th-century lips, forged that link (and others)

Lakoff doesn't argue that language "influences" thought so much as language is an expression of the thought process (as opposed to chomsky who thinks it is possible to view it as a self-contained meaning system) and that the thought process itself operates by "metaphors". I quote the word "metaphors" because it's a very inexact term -- what he's really doing there is looking for the biological roots of abstract thought in what he terms "embodied representation": the frontal cortex is actually a very dense layering of maps of the body -- he argues that at a basic level our conception of events requires "modeling" them in our heads though "story" systems already in place, which are built at root from the development and control of our motor and sense functions.

Also the directionality of it is in question, even in Lakoff's own stuff (whether he notices it or not) -- in some of the in-house stuff of his I've read, he talks about he puts time into how variations of metaphor and category across cultures can represent different ways of thinking. Unless he (or you) are making some claim that thought processes are passed along genetically, it can only be metaphor and the language used to express it that transmits a given culture's conceptual set from one generation to the next.

His level of argument is that, for example viewing direction in absolutes (east, west, etc.) rather than relatives (left, right, etc.) as some indigenous folx in Australia do will necessarily affect the other ways in which they construct thought processes.

The difference between unconscious-metaphors-shape-thought and metaphors-as-mode-of-thought is that the former implies making these metaphors conscious changes thought and even that we should strive to change these metaphors, while the latter makes no such claim.

The reason I'm so strident here is yr. presentation of Lakoff is fairly common and one reason that so many people are unjustly wary of him.

My argument, if I had one, would be a 'pragmatic' one: something like 'people tend to mean what they want to mean, and when they want to mean something else they'll do that'.

Hm - I'm not sure even Dick Rorty could stoop to theorizing as banally as that.

Possibly I am suggesting that 'meanings' are whatever are 'in use', not what is 'out there somewhere'. Possibly that implies that things can, in principle, come back into use at any time, though they may well not do so. 'It all depends' - that would be among the prime principles.

Anyway. I'm not sure how my wording there implies what you say it does, but as someone who has never actually studied linguistics I am willing to take your word that it's important. (Lakoff himself has thus far been fine with my summaries of that book.)

mainly certain academic types -- chomskyians still dominate the academy and the more his arguments are seen as making possible sweeping and dodgy claims (i.e. the orwell analogy above) the more what he & other non-chomskyian linguists are about can get dismissed as unserious.

lots of words contain contradictory meanings simultaneously: this isn't remotely a problem — the difft meanings merely emerge when the word is deployed in different contexts (this is a crappy and lame way of saying it: the 'spell' way is much more vivid and clearer)

pf's point — what if everyone forgets? how is it recoverable then? — seems strong enough, but the point is that the right language act (= the correct spell) can bring the meaning alive again

you *could* re-animate the elements of "nice" that link it closely with "wanton" and "dissolute", and make that usage "valid" ("valid" just means "does it work?"): in the right time and place you could do it with a single sentence on yr part (i give you "grebt"), though i think this is unusual (and what it actually means is that w.you sentence you cause countless others to repeat either yr spell — think of python fans saying "albatross" — or related variants)

old connotations may sleep, they don't begone-as-if-they-never-were

I have no bone to pick on this subject, though, as far as I can tell; and my 'forgetting' point was (meant to be) less central than my 'pragmatic' point.

Also what about the issue of cultural differentiation: isn't it precisely language that transfers those conceptual sets from one generation to the next? Your example of using cardinal directions, for instance ... well, it doesn't actually fit well with what I'm about to say. Aren't there examples of conceptual issues like that that get formed into rigid categories slowly -- where the conceptual stuff is eventually subsumed into language itself, meaning that acquiring the language involves picking up the conceptual sets as well? I've always interpreted this as part of what Lakoff is getting at (and maybe part of what Mark is saying here, too!). For instance, we talk a lot about distinctions that have been developed in issues of, say, race, or conceptualizing different types of "love," or things like that. A child acquiring the English language doesn't have to re-make these distinctions, because they're passed on not in some artificial practice but in distinct categories of language. These are social distinctions and not conceptual ones, I suppose, but I (and some possibly misreading reviewers) connect Lakoff's arguments with the idea of language as not just reinforcing such concepts but also actively transmitting them.

The point is that Lakoff doesn't deal with that stuff -- he recognizes that linguistics can only play a subordinate role to other disciplines in that sort of study and thus he avoids going there. He doesn't oppose it per se, but he also makes clear that his research need not have such implications -- of course I've yet to read his new one on philosophy so maybe I've just got a one sided view from having studied under him briefly.

I mean of course marketeers are going to play that stuff up too, because readers outside the discipline don't just want to know "Here are some interesting things" but "how can I use this?" except in many ways, they can't.

Is it taken as a given that no one in the linguistics world misinterprets him in the way you're saying simplified summaries tend to?

The problem I think is that there are distinct schools of linguistics -- chomskyian and less-so (and the less-so school is more dispersed but Lakoff is a recognized figure there). The less-so school is making inroads on questioning some long held comskyian assumptions, but it faces significant obstacles and I think that's more where these misreadings come in -- not from careful academic appraisals of these sorts of things, but off-the-cuff dismissals by exponants of a different school.

& I think Lakoff lends himself to these misreadings himself -- for example with his book "Moral Politics" on the structure of conservative thought. He's obviously thinking in a way conditioned by his academic work, but there's no actual connection to be drawn between his scientific work and a book like this. The implication of doing such a work in such a way can tend to undermine acceptance of his research sometimes, I think.

(I think another factor in interpreting Lakoff's less academic books is that they're, well, seriously far-reaching, with Moral Politics as the absolute pinnacle of that: a large proportion of this book's reviews say something like "well, this is certainly an interesting way of thinking about things, but I'm just not so sure it works that way..." Same for Metaphor We Live By, actually, in non-specialist review. But I'm not sure it's possible to comment on the basic concepts people use to view the world without people, umm, vigorously denying that their worldviews are definable enough to be discussed.)

Are professors in other disciplines inclined to dabble as far and wide?

Is there some imperative on *their* part to demonstrate why otherwise quite abtruse work is of vital meaning in the world -- a science variation of my take on artistic ethos?

(The good safety valve they have at present is computational linguistics, I think, or if not that the bridge between traditional and computational linguistics: the part where people start caring about German applicatives is when they want German texts translated into Finnic and then subjected to "semantically rich" databasing and searching.)

Why?

Because she was a woman and men were into threatening women with guns and bullets and therefore the word bullet should not be used because it intimidates women.

So just how in the hell are we to describe a "bulleted" list? A dotted list, perhaps? A listing with symbols before each separate item? It was horrid.

But the class was very interesting (once I got past the whole "men keep women down, therefore all men are evil" stuff that the prof. dished-out - she really disliked males). I was (and am) most taken with the ideas about how male and female writing differs, especially at younger ages (teenage girls talking in exclamations, teenage boys being aggressive in their writing, etc.) While I see much of this as being stereotypical, there is still some basic truth that males and females are taught to espress themseles differently. Anyway, it's made me more conscious of how I use language and what it says about me and other writers. (And I'm now investigating the gender-marked language of the post-operative transsexual community - really interesting, in my mind.)

haha -- s. trife to thread!!!!!!

Suzy, I kiss you (in a nonsexual, non-threatening manner).

nothing has ever happened less than the "gender studies class" described in OP

Ah, the stupendous, death-defying heights of early ILX.

great revive

ffs

I think you mean fp

this thread is depressing.

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, February 24, 2003 4:05 PM (seventeen years ago)

Anyway, OP's faux-anecdote brings to mind the atheist professor copypasta.

in the movie of this thread, the teacher is going to be played by Kevin Sorbo

I keep mistaking him for Brendan Fraser.

not sure why this was worth reviving

-what the EMT will probably say after I go into cardiac arrest