21st Century Feminists Suck

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