Soul Compromised

So, I went to check my e-mail, and something tickled my fancy. Namely, this headline:

"President Bush says he didn't compromise soul to be popular"

Which obviously led me to ask myself, "Then what did he compromise his soul for?" And that, my friends, is the problem with a badly written headline. Or, in this case, as the direct quote is "I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy", a rather inarticulate president. But I would think that the person putting together the news items could have cleaned the grammar up a little bit for the president. Like, "President Bush says popularity not worth compromising his soul for". I came up with that in about 5 seconds. It is sad that the people being paid for this didn't. Although, I must admit that ill-advised headlines are something I love to read and ponder. What deemed worthy of compromising his soul for will be one of those things I wonder about throughout the day tomorrow.

Awesomeness

This is great. It is a marriage manifesto. Says Tom Ackerson,

"I no longer recognize marriage. It's a new thing I'm trying.

Turns out it's fun.

Yesterday I called a woman's spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, 'He's my husband.'

'Oh,' I say, 'I no longer recognize marriage.'"

I like this idea of not recognizing marriage. And I love anyone who sincerely uses the words "flip floppy". I'm thinking of joining in, partially to raise awareness of how much it would suck to have people not recognize the state of your relationship and partially to be obnoxious. It is also partially why I want to start referring to bunches of people "you gals" or "you girls" instead of "you guys". I have to admit that for all of my issues with gendered language, "you guys" doesn't bother me in the way that it should. Neither does "that takes balls" or "man up". These are things that pepper my every day conversation; but I kind of want to mix it up. Start referring to bunches of men as "girls" (my mouth doesn't sound right saying "gals", but maybe that is just another thing I should work on), and saying "that takes overies", and telling a guy or girl who need to just screw up some courage to "woman up". Partially because even though it doesn't offend me on a visceral level, it is still negating women and is still making men both the only recognized sex and the only positive one. And partially just to make the people around me screw up their faces and try to recognize what's happened. And hell, maybe I'll actually offend someone with my girlie rephrasing. And then we'll have a grand ole convo.

Final Fours and "Women's" Final Fours

On Saturday, I went to a UConn Women's Basketball game, because I love college basketball and I love women's college basketball more than men's, and because I love UConn's women's team probably more than any other team. It was a blow out, as can happen when one women's team is ranked #1 and the other team is unranked. But that gave me time to look at the banners adorning the XL Center. 
Pretty, aren't they? What struck me, though, was the difference in the emblems of the Men's winning banners and the Women's winning banners. Here are the two competing emblems from 2004, the year both the UConn Men's basketball team and Women's basketball team won the NCAA National Championship:

The Men's banner just says "NCAA Final Four"; the Women's banner explicitly says "NCAA Women's Final Four". This goes directly to what Habladora was saying in her Gender and Profession: Lady Doctors and Male Nurses post. Men are considered the norm when it comes to basketball players. Therefore, the banner doesn't have to explicitly say "Men", because when someone says "basketball player", we generally think of a man. In certain cases, like lady doctors and male nurses, I generally think we should leave gender out of the discussion, because it is a signifier of something out of the ordinary. It doesn't help change who we picture as doctors or nurses; it just modifies the automatic picture that appears at the mention of "doctor" or "nurse". For something like a Final Four appearance, though, I think we should take a different tactic. 

It is a competition, and two separate ones. For that reason, I would like for both the men's Final Four emblem and the women's Final Four emblem to indicate gender. Because right now, it seems as though the ungendered Final Four is the "real" Final Four, and the women's Final Four is an afterthought or less of a concern. And that is true; outside of Connecticut and Tennessee, many women's college basketball teams struggle to gain an audience; and women's teams in general can still suffer at schools like UConn and Tennessee, schools that have one outstanding women's program but whose other programs don't obtain that excellence year after year. Although I'm into language and words and how language and words shape our world and our lives, I wouldn't go so far as to say that making the gendered distinctions among Final Fours will suddenly revolutionize women's sports and make them as recognized and popular and respected as men's sports. But I do think it will help, even just a little bit, even just mostly subconsciously. Because even though it is a little thing, the little things add up; and although the wording on a sports championship banner is a very little thing, it is a representation of the gendered aspect in sports and other professions.

George Orwell's Diaries

George Orwell's diaries have been turned into a blog, 70 years after they had been written. Awesomeness. It's going into the blogroll along the side, but I wanted to highlight it here because it is both an innovative use of blogging and because Orwell has become such a looming figure in our own perceptions of the way our world has been formed and the way politics works. It is extremely cool to see a man who cared so much about words having his words come alive, in a way, again.

I would also recommend reading the Newsweek article about him. It was both interesting and informative, and where I found out about the blog.

Profanity and Feminism

I'm not a fan of using profanity; I don't mind being around it, and it doesn't faze me in many circumstances to hear it. My mother can swear like a sailor, and one of my sister's favorite words from the age of 2 through a couple of years ago was "damn". But in general, I don't like swearing; this is because when I say "fuck" or a couple of other curse words, I sound stilted and fake. "Damn" rolls off the tongue, but even a mild one like "shit" tends to get stuck somewhere along the way up the vocal chords, making me sound more like a teenager trying to sound edgy and dangerous than someone who is legitimately and mundanely just shooting the breeze. That impression is one I would like to avoid, so I never get enough practice in the cursing in order to actually sound like it is a natural function of my vocabulary.

Demeaning someone through curses also doesn't work very well for me, for a different reason. Too much heavy hitting profanity geared toward diminishing men go back to the guy's mother. Yes, there is the 'dick' insult - and although I am not always successful, I do attempt to avoid that one on the basis that I don't want to be called the female equivalent - but generally, insults for men are more about their mothers than themselves. "Bastard" is less about the behavior of the guy in question than it is about his questionable conception, and is thus more about his mother's morality than his own shortcomings. "Son of a bitch" is fairly self-explanatory in terms of its own problematic nature. We generally aren't really calling the mother of the man we're swearing at a bitch, but that doesn't change the fact that the biggest insult for a guy is still not really about him but about the person who birthed him. Curses toward women are another thing entirely. I'm not a fan of the reappropriation of words. I read Bitch Magazine and am planning on subscribing, but I don't think that reclaiming the word "bitch" is the way to go. It may feel empowering to turn it around, Tina Fey style, and say, "You know what? Yes, I am a bitch". But at the end of the day, it is still a way to demean and diminish women, and it is still used by men as an insult and as a reason to not pay a woman any mind - or to hate her. "She's just a bitch". Same thing with "cunt". Reappropriating these words makes less sense when those in a society who traditionally used those words as insult continue to do so.

What also is damaging is women who will call each other these names out of this trend toward weakening the words' traditional meanings. One of the areas in which I actually disagree with Jessica Valenti is this one. In "Full Frontal Feminism", she writes, "We have to take the power out of sexual insults like 'whore' and 'slut'. There aren't many feminists my age who don't remember musician Kathleen Hanna - of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre fame - scrawling SLUT across her stomach as a way to reclaim the word". The word slut has been co-opted by society as a sign of voraciousness: 'coffee slut', 'TV slut' (I myself describe myself as a "spoiler whore" and a "trailer whore", which is very much in this same vein). Because of this, many use these words in jest or affectionately. But the sting is still not removed from the word, no matter how friendly we smile the word or how many stomachs we scribble it on. And that is because the word 'slut', even in its voracious use, even in its subversive text, still says something fundamentally about the way women's sexuality is perceived as opposed to men.

Men can be referred to as guy-slut or man-whore, but even in those cases it is perceived as a sign of sexual stamina and something to be if not proud of then at least not shamed about. Making words like these jokes and in all good fun seems to be more harmful than good, because now when someone is called a slut or a whore or a bitch or a cunt, there is no recourse of action. There is an ambiguity present where the word, used by the exact same person, can either mean that the labeled is not a slut - or still seen as too sexually promiscuous. The implication is still there; sexually active women are still given the message that they need to be careful, to not enjoy sex too much or with too many people because the same moral double standard still applies. It has crawled further under the woodwork because of the journey toward reappropriation, but women are still judged negatively for their sexual exploits - or perceived sexual exploits.

Because of this, taking the words, removing the sting, and making it a proud proclamation of sovereignty doesn't work from me. So I'm trying hard to stop calling guys dicks and bastards, and I'd like bitch and slut to stop being applied to women as well. I think we need to embrace and/or create gender and sexuality neutral insults. So far, 'asshole' seems like the best one. We've all got them, and we generally all have moments where we are one.

National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month. I'm totally going to try and do it! I'm a little excited, but at the same time it may end up - what with my new and far away job - taking precious time away from ze blog. But I think this is something that will be cool and different. Plus, I'm totally thinking mass transiting it to work and back every day, thus saving wear and tear on my auto (my poor, poor old and slightly squeaky auto) while also freeing up about 2 hours of travel time in which to write and read and get worked up about stuff to blog about.

So, to recap: National Novel Writing Month. Get involved!

Txtng, AKA "I Didn't Have My Phone On Me"

The New Yorker has a piece about texting, starting with the question, "Is texting bringing us closer to the end of life as we currently tolerate it?" I enjoy the "currently tolerate it" part of the question; it seems so much more pragmatic and realistic than "life as we know it" does. The short answer, found in Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (and I won't embarrass myself by saying how long it took me to figure out what the second half of that title was), is no. David Crystal, the author, concludes that texting - even the trillions of texts that have been generated, are "no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language". He also states that most texters know how to spell. That's wonderful, David Crystal, but it doesn't really explain the rapid influx of people feeling that it is perfectly acceptable to use text-speak to write formal papers. One of my favorite professors alerted her students to the unacceptable nature of papers written in that manner, both verbally and demonstrated in a handout, before papers were due. She was younger and hipper than my two other favored professors, who probably just failed the perpetrators with nary an explanation. Crystal also compares the art of texting to the writing of sonnets, as being able to say all one needs to in 160 characters sometimes requires finesse and flexibility. It is an interesting conceit, that one of the banes of my existence shares properties with one of the most respected (and my most loved) forms of poetry. The New Yorker also examines how texting helps propagate the English language; English seems to be almost made for texting, what with its shortness of words and lack of diacritical marks. And so, many peoples of the world who text do so in an amalgam of English and their native language. That observation is interesting; about as interesting as the fact that a quarter pounder with cheese is just Le Big Mac in France (which is to say, very interesting... ...at least for me).

It is the second half of the article that I really connect with, though. It is the part that speaks to how ubiquitous cell phones have become in our every day lives. Says the New Yorker:

There is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone. "I didn't have my phone": that just does not sound believable. Either you are lying or you are depressed or you have something to hide. If you receive a text, therefore, you are obliged instantaneously to reply to it, if only to confirm that you are not one of those people who can be without a phone.

I am often without my cell phone. Sometimes purposefully and sometimes accidentally, but my cell phone is often not on my person. My first voicemail message ever recorded said so, telling the caller who received the voicemail instead of me that my cell phone was not on me, or I was not with my cell phone - and there was a third option there. The third option was that I just didn't feel like picking up. I revel in that third option. It has nothing to do with who is calling me and everything to do with whether or not I want to talk at that particular moment. It has nothing to do with rudeness and everything to do with an autonomy that is provided by not being subject to a machine of plastic and diodes. The first two are most often why I do not pick up, but the third has made its appearances as well. In the past, I felt nothing at letting my cell phone ring; now, though, I face in some instances a perverse sense of guilt. It is partially due to my faux-Catholic, and all too literal liberal ways (liberal and Catholic guilt are both very real); some of it also seems to stem from an overwhelming paranoid thought that the person on the other end knows I'm sitting there, watching my phone ring. I get the same sense with instant messages I have no wish to respond immediately to - again, simply because I like being alone with my thoughts for some portion of the day. The New Yorker sums up why this inexplicable guilt (and paranoia) has found its way into my life:

This is a new decorum in communication: you can be sloppy and you can be blunt, but you have to be fast. To delay is to disrespect. In fact, delay is the only disrespect.

I'm normally blunt; sometimes I border on rude. Every so often (more often than not, actually), I cross the border into outright rudeness. But I often mean no disrespect. Not answering the cell phone when it rings, not responding to a text message right away, has become synonymous with the greatest snub one friend could offer another. In a world where being without method of communication every second of every day reflects on the very stability of your character, not having a cell phone becomes an offense to every person who has attempted contact in that time frame. You (I) should have your (my) cell phone on you (me), at all times. There are certain excuses for not answering, but being in a movie seems to be the only one readily accepted. And even there, my movie-going experience as of late has been disrupted by the existence of movie-texters - those assholes who can't even go two hours without 'talking' to someone else, who can't not multitask, who can't simply allow the movie to fill up their senses and their emotions. Calls and texts that come during the dinner hours are responded to with, "I'm having dinner right now, can I call/text you back?" In a world in which one's responsibility is to be always available, I wonder where I fit in. I turn off my cell phone while entering movies. I don't answer it, or even have it on me, while I'm eating dinner or watching my favorite television shows or watching a movie with my family. I answer it while I'm sleeping for the sole fact that I forget to turn the volume off and I have never reset the clock in my room after the last power outage.

For the last month, my cell phone wouldn't ring. That meant that unless I could see its little screen light up, I missed a lot of calls. Those were excused by the fact that my cell phone wouldn't ring. At times, it would become a comedy; one friend and I spent a long time playing phone tag. Sometimes it would border on tragedy, like when I was setting up a job interview and that woman and I kept missing each other. But while I love my new phone, and the fact that I will no longer be breaking the law because I have one with blue tooth capabilities and a blue tooth, that just means there is one more place I cannot conceivably be without answering the phone. And it means that I am once again bereft of excuses as to why I am not near my cell phone, and why my cell phone is not near me. The question The New Yorker asked was whether or not texting is bringing the end of life as we tolerate it; for all of their benefits (and there are many benefits), I wonder if cell phones have not already partially succeeded in that arena. The interconnectivity of life is a wonderful thing; as is having a phone on hand while stuck on the side of the road, and being able to find a friend who drove to a different parking lot than the agreed upon location, and being able to give directions to people as they are driving. But it has also changed how we view our relationships and how we view the stability of our friendships. It has made immediacy more important than substance or desire. As wonderful as cell phones are, I miss a world in which I could be out (or others could be out) and understandably not get a call. I miss a world in which the people in front of you were more important than the person whose call has just found you. And I miss a world in which a person could stand in the middle of an open field and feel completely - though not creepily - alone. Sometimes, being alone is a good.

Wow

Apparently, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has affected church membership among women. More and more women are abstaining from church and showing interest in female-friendly religions. I'm a bit puzzled, but okay.

And can I just say how much I hate this new craze of describing a plural of money as "monies"? The plural of money is "money". Just like the plural of deer is "deer", and not "deeries"; and the plural of moose is "moose" and not "moosies". I'm sure there are some other words where the singular and plural are the same. Look, unless the person in question only has a penny in his or her pocket, they are going to have a plural amount of money. It is just the way it is. "Monies" doesn't make anything clearer. It doesn't make the amount of money more explicit or right misconceptions. It is just an unnecessary word, and the sooner we relegate it to that "not often used" section that makes up most of the Oxford English Dictionary, the better.

Spelling Correctly is for Losers

British academic Ken Smith has a solution for that pesky problem of students' spelling woes: "accept as variant spelling those words our students commonly misspell". I am more than slightly aghast. In an age with internet dictionaries and spell check, there really should be no need for students to spell many words incorrectly. And on handwritten papers, I can't help but feel spelling "their" as "thier" is more a question of speed in a timed setting and laziness in an untimed setting than it is a question of a student not knowing the correct spelling of the word.

As many know, I am an absolutely horrible speller. I -at certain points in my life- have had to forego using the word I wanted, the absolute perfect word for the sentence I was constructing, because spell check had no idea what I was trying to get across. My spelling is so bad I break the spell check. I blame Catholic kindergarden; I blame Catholic kindergarden for a lot, but in this case I'm certain it really is responsible. One of the best things about college was the fact that my roomie and best friend is actually a very good speller, and so I could just annoy the crap out of her whenever I needed a specific word spelled. And I did that a lot. But in no way do I think that my problems would have been helped had my professors and teachers accepted things like "otrocheous" for "atrocious". In fact, I'm willing to bet that my spelling would have devolved further.

Words are tricky things. Phonetic spelling doesn't always work in the English language, partially because English is one of those languages that appropriates words from other languages, and partially because the English are a strange folk and apparently decided that adding in extra -and silent- letters was good for a laugh. You really can't hold much about a language against a people who have a town spelled "Leicester" and pronounce it "Lester". And maybe poor spelling isn't the mark of a nation falling into a pit of ruination, but I can't help but think that we should continue to complain about the state of the education system if teachers and professors are correcting the same mistakes every year. And I can't help but think that a coherent system of spelling is a great help. 

Anyone who has read the letters of people like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, people who wrote before American-English was standardized (and also when f's and s's were interchangeable), could tell you that deciphering what the author was saying -even if he spelled the word phonetically- is sometimes (oftentimes) a challenge. The meaning of the document loses some of its panache when you cannot cheerfully go along with a rhythm to your reading, but instead have to stop every few words. One of the beauties of having a native tongue is the ability to not have to constantly translate said tongue in order to achieve maximum understanding. Misspelled words trip us up, for good reason. And so I can't help but feel as if Ken Smith's suggestion is to accept mediocrity in the face of the more difficult and time consuming effort involved in figuring out where the break down comes in education and why students cannot -or will not- spell correctly. 

New Fun: Wordle

Look at my cool "artsy" creation!

And another one:

And one more:

Now, go make one for yourself at Wordle! Tons of fun and intensely addicting; what could be better?