This semester I have been receiving a lot of bizarrely polished essays from my students. They aren’t plagiarized or even straight-up usages of ChatGPT. I haven’t seen one grammatical mistake, not one spelling mistake, but these essays don’t read like they’ve merely been through spell-check and grammar-check. There are many oddly elaborate, yet somehow simultaneously formulaic word choices. For example, phrases like these:
“The diverse tapestry of linguistic diversity”
“profound implications”
“a catalyst for positive change”
“In essence…”
Or entire sentences like these:
“Let us be mindful of the role we play in shaping a more inclusive and equitable world.”
“While this ideology may masquerade as a beacon of clarity, it often acts as a restrictive force.”
“We not only advocate for diverse linguistic forms but also honor the deep cultural narratives they embody.”
What is going on here?
Taking a citizen sociolinguistic approach, I talked to several “authors” of such phrases and essays to try to answer that question. I tried to remain curious, not judgmental: What is their process? What tools are they using to help with their writing. And, why?
Several different strategies emerged in our conversations. Examples include, from most to least complicated:
Writing an essay in Chinese, then getting three translation options from GoogleTranslate, choosing the “more academic” seeming version, then running that paragraph-by-paragraph through Grammarly, selecting the “professional” setting.
Writing an essay in English, then using ChatGPT to review and edit, specifically directing it to adjust “phrasing” and “coherence.”
Writing an essay in English, then running each paragraph through Grammarly, using the “professional” option.
Most students avoided mentioning the highly stigmatized ChatGPT, and some even declared that they hate ChatGPT, but a couple did mention it as a useful tool for “brainstorming,” (if not for editing as mentioned by one).
Why use these tools? These strategies seem time-intensive, and the results highly variable: In the best case, a mediocre paper, in the worst, a practice punishable as academically dishonest. Students presented similar backstories to make sense of their AI practices. As both undergrads and graduate students, in the United States as well as China and Canada, students have been told by professors and teaching assistants to improve their writing, often receiving advice like the following:
“Your words are too simple.”
“Your writing is too personal.”
“You need more transitional phrases.”
“You need more professional words.”
Some professors even allow the use of AI tools, if the students acknowledge their use. So, the students have developed strategies that directly address the writing advice they’ve received: They run an essay through Grammarly, selecting the “professional” output setting, they choose a Google-translated option that seems to have fewer “simple” words, they make explicit requests for transitional phrases (see “In essence,” “Let us be mindful,” “We not only advocate…but also honor” above).
This seems legitimate, since, the students say, these essays still contain their own original ideas. But after one runs an essay through the AI wringer, ideas can be hard for a reader to detect anymore. Originality? Lost.
Despite my sincere efforts to remain a curious explorer and not judge these writing strategies through the lens of Aging Professor, I find them disturbing. A few analogies to the AI takeover of student writing began to simmer in my brain:
The first may be a bit obvious: Frankenstein’s Monster. We have created a monster (AI writing tools) that we can no longer control. When something written by a human individual goes through Grammarly and comes out radically different, that human individual loses their voice. And, if Grammarly has chosen vocabulary unfamiliar to that human individual, the original writer doesn’t know what they are saying anymore. If that human happens to be a university student, they no longer know how their writing might sound to a professor or teaching assistant—or whether their original ideas remain original. The essay becomes like Frankenstein’s monster, out of the hands of its author, doing things that author no longer has any control over. Ultimately, that monster turns on humanity and must be killed.
Another ominous analogy, less rooted in Victorian fiction: A Self-Driving Car. I’ve asked several people if they would be willing to completely cede control to a self-driving car, spending their mornings in the car reading the paper, preparing for class, talking with their kids, and letting the Artificial Intelligence handle the driving. Everybody has balked at that idea—some intuitively uneasy with giving so much control to a complex activity like an urban commute during rush hour, others citing YouTube videos that illustrate the kinds of disasters such negligence has already wreaked. Like AI writing assistance, a self-driving car simply doesn’t have a sense of the complex context of its activity—or the very sensitive nature of human beings. My dad also pointed out that “Driving is fun!” Why let an AI-tool do all the fun part? I hope some readers see writing this way as well. Writing is fun! Like driving, it potentially gives us a sense of freedom—we can say anything! But both AI driving and AI cyborgian writing, seem overly concerned with standardization, which inevitably eliminates both the fun and the humanity involved with either of these activities.
The mention of “fun” also brings me to my third analogy: The Drum Track. Many songs get along just fine with a non-human drum track. But take a listen to a song recorded with a human drummer, or go to a live concert. Listen to that drummer: Do they play the same pattern again and again? Or, do they surprise you with a jump on the established rhythm, or a withheld beat? How does this affect your experience of the song? While it may sometimes be fun and useful for musicians to use a drum machine to provide a driving beat, it’s nothing like the actions of a live drummer—even if that drummer makes mistakes now and then. Like creating music, writing involves establishing your own rhythm, your own voice, and that can’t be achieved with tools like Grammarly and ChatGPT, the writer’s equivalent of a monotonous drum track. Rather than turning to standardizing tools to shape an individual’s writing voice, one might instead focus on reading works by talented writers, engaging more fully with writing that does *not* read like a monotonous drum track. As students and professors, we should build our own writing (and writing advice) on those models we most admire, not the most pedestrian standardized versions pumped out by AI.
By now, my opinion may be all too painfully clear. The monster must be killed, or ultimately, it will kill us, or at least take a very large bite out of the humanity and joy of writing. Thus, my suggestion to students: Don’t use these tools! To Professors: Try to refrain from encouraging students to engage with them, even in a cyborgian compromise. Consider what you sacrifice in the long run, consider the purpose of education.
Readers may have alternative opinions, and more practical suggestions. Please share your comments below! Or have ChatGPT express an opinion—I’m curious to see what it might “say.”
Lately, the Internet has become an indispensable resource for teachers and professors as we surf through websites and social media looking for examples, links, lessons, or just something to break the ice, lighten the mood, and remind us all of our shared humanity while online.
While searching, we might also discover a secret that most avid Internet-surfers already know: The Internet can make online learning productive, fun, individualized, human-like, illuminating, and even important. To that end, I dedicate this post to just five online language games—five of the infinite ways the Internet invites us into moments of language wonderment. As you engage in these naturally occurring language games, you may think you’re “just” surfing the Internet, but, I guarantee, online learning will happen—to make that more obvious, I’ve titled each of these games with an important mini-lesson about language you will learn as you partake, and added some post-game reflections for online learning bonus points:
Game 1: Words Create Our World—The Caption Game
This is probably the most “classic” of all language games, created by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously coined the term “language game” to describe everything we do with words.
Examples: This picture was first used by Wittgenstein to show how language shapes our world. So, what is it?
If I tell you this is a “duck” you probably see the image one way. If I tell you it is a “rabbit,” then what do you see? A rabbit? Wittgenstein used this ambiguous image to illustrate how the words we use create the world we live in.
This ingenious demonstration of the power of words can be illuminated in many ways. Internet surfers can find similar examples (multiplying like rabbits) online. The famous “Rubin vase,” pictured below plays a similar game with viewers and language users:
Another well-known example, this image of a “young lady,” takes us into the realm of the uncanny. What—in addition to the young lady—do you see here?
Are you stumped? In both these examples, it might be easier to see the unnamed image if someone captioned it for you: In the “Rubin vase” image, do you see “two faces” in addition to the vase—once you read those words? In the “young lady” drawing, do you also see an “old woman with a wart on her nose”—if the picture is captioned that way?
I think these pictures are cool, but if they strike some readers as old, stuffy, and esoteric, consider this more up-to-date observation: We play the same language game any time we caption a photo for Instagram or Snapchat! To illustrate, this cat picture (or any cat picture), might be described in infinite possible ways:
I could caption this “Cat on a loveseat” or “Cat contemplating the meaning of life” and viewers may see this photo very differently depending on which of those descriptions accompanied it.
Play! Now that you’ve seen a few examples of how words create our world, go ahead (if you haven’t already!) and search around for more of these ambiguous images online. You might start by looking for “optical illusions.” See how the words you use to describe each picture can change what you see! Then try playing with some of your own photos on social media. How do you turn the image into a certain kind of event by captioning it one way or another? (“The Life of The Party”? “My Annoying Brother”? “Dinner with Friends”? “The Last Supper”?)
Reflections: Lately, in the age of COVID-19, using language to talk our reality into being has been a staple on Zoom or other video-conferencing media. If we call the now-familiar Zoom grid-of-faces a “Graduation,” that’s what it is! Call it “Happy Hour” or a “Celebration” and participants will see it as such. In this way, Wittgenstein (and now the Internet) shows us that language is not just a collection of words that describe things, but itself a collectively created “form of life.”
Game 2: Translation is Not a One-To-One Language Mapping—The Song Lyrics Google Translate Game
As The Caption Game above illustrates, words don’t have a one-to-one correspondence to reality. Nor, as this Song Lyrics Game will illustrate, do they have one-to-one correspondence to the “same” words in other languages. Just like a caption for a picture, a translation of a passage will also, always, involve some selection and interpretation. The interpretive nature of translation becomes most obvious when we try to learn a new language—and particularly when we try to fudge a little and use Google Translate instead.
Examples: Language teachers across the globe have tried to impress upon their students this simple fact: Google Translate is not the best shortcut to language learning. And, social media have provided us with some of the best “teachable moments” for this lesson. For years, the Youtube site “Translation fails” has been posting google translations of songs. By running English-language song lyrics through Google Translate, transforming them into many different languages, and then back into English, this YouTuber arrives at silly—and oddly illuminating—results. Her first smash hit was the Frozen lyric, “Let it Go!” After she ran this song through several languages on Google Translate and then back to English, the inspirational “Let it go!”refrain had transformed into the more defeatist, “Give up”:
Updating for new songs and styles, the same YouTuber has now come out with another viral success, based on Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” hit, in which the dark and gloomy incantation, “I’m the bad guy,” punctuated by the now-infamous, “Duh,” transforms to “I’m biscuits. Huh?”
Play! Now try it yourself. Take a verse from your favorite song and with the “help” of Google, translate it into a few different languages. Then translate it back to English. What do you get? Keep going until you get the funniest version, then entertain yourself by singing this out loud! Record it for your friends. You might even want to post it on YouTube! What sort of comments do you receive?
Reflection: Translating with Google to surprise yourself with the silliest possible lyrics can be a blast. It’s also a great illustration of how impossible it would be to line up the world’s languages word-to-word to create precisely the same description an object—or each other. Each language seems to do things a little differently. And given Wittgenstein’s observations about language as a “form of life,” this makes sense: Why would we expect words from different languages to line up one-to-one when words don’t line up one-to-one with anything else they are supposed to describe? It’s precisely this slippage that makes language a shared accomplishment—and not a code that a computer algorithm could understand or recreate.
Game 3: Appearances of Linguistic Accuracy can be Deceiving—The Magic Bilingual Idiom Game
As the Song Lyrics Game above illustrates, there is often some slippage between one language and the next—and between any word and whatever it is attempting to describe. As literary theorist Jacques Lacan would put it (but in French), there is an “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier”. There is no one-to-one alignment—either between language and things or between one language and another language. For that reason, if we translate through enough different languages, and then back to English, we can arrive at “I’m biscuits” from “I’m the bad guy.” But this slippage gets even more mind-bogglingly wonderful when Google Translate does arrive at a translation that looks right, but still doesn’t work! Revealing this invisible slippage, puts the “magic” in this Magic Bilingual Idiom Game, drawing attention to the often-overlooked aspects of linguistic knowledge that multilinguals hold.
Examples: One of the best types of idioms to entertain ourselves with on Google Translate might be those phrases for collections of things: Herds of horses, packs of dogs, clutches of owls, pods of dophins, etc. Often, different languages have different expressions for these.
What’s called a “school of fish” in English, for example, is called a “banco de peces” in Spanish. But what happens if we enter “banco de peces” in Google Translate?:
Of course. Banco=Bank, de=of, Peces=Fish. The individual words are translated “accurately” enough. But the resulting expression makes no sense. Bank of fish? How can we ever fix this error? It would be confusing to a monolingual English speaker if a monolingual Spanish speaker were to use the expression “bank of fish” for “school of fish”. And, it would be confusing to a monolingual Spanish speaker if a monolingual English speaker used “escuela de peces” (school of fish) for “banco de peces”. But if two bilinguals used these translations, they would likely know what each other were talking about. Their invisible multilingual knowledge would reveal itself!
Google recognizes that their translation app needs the wisdom carried within bilingual users to hone its functionality—this is a form of bilingual expertise that computers alone could never learn. Therefore, Google has built a feedback tool into their translation tool: Click on Google Translate’s dropdown menu and it will offer alternative translations and even a chance for you to “improve this translation.” You can select the best translation and it will be transformed on your screen, just like this:
If you care to contribute to the human improvement of Google Translate, calling on your own multilingual expertise, chime in, and Google Translate will get better.
But even if humans improve infinite entries in Google Translate this way, the app still will not work perfectly. Many expressions and their translations simply cannot be fully illuminated through a computer app. Consider, for example, the French expression, “cherchez la femme.” Like “bank of fish,” this sentence translates easily in a one-to-one, faux-accurate way, but it loses much of its resonance along the way. I learned the phrase, “cherchez la femme,” many years ago from a friend in Hollywood who had spent a few years in Paris dubbing movies for a living. He loved saying “cherchez la femme,” and I soon came to get a vague sexist feeling from it. When I asked what it meant, he would give a long, meandering explanation about “noir” movies and how any mystery can be explained by finding the woman at the bottom of it. Knowing no French at the time, I just learned the phrase as a chunk that sounded something like “shayrshayl’phahm” and came to associate it with heartbreakingly sexy French women and intrigue.
Only many years later did I look the phrase up on Google Translate, which conveniently gave me the word-for-word translation, “look for the woman”:
And, the simple, “look for the woman,” translated right back into “cherchez la femme”:
On the day I learned that “shayrshayl’phahm” simply translated to “look for the woman,” (and vice versa) I was a little disappointed. It seemed so mundane. But, it was also inaccurate. The simple, faux accuracy of word-to-word correspondence conceals the different forms of life these expressions create in English or French. That’s precisely the magic of the Magic Bilingual Idiom Game: It reveals all the important aspects of living through multiple languages that the faux accuracy of one-to-one translation conceals. Consider how important precisely this knowledge would be in the context of The Caption Game (above)! Captioning a photo with “Look for the woman” would lead to a very different viewing experience than would “Cherchez la femme”!
Play! Now it’s your turn to try out your own multilingual knowledge. Think of an idiom you know in one language—then, using Google, translate that into another language you know, then translate it back. How does that work for you? Often, you may get the exact same expression. But how do you know whether it has the same meaning? In this game, you will need to call on your own invisible multilingual knowledge (and possibly that of your multilingual friends) to check the layers of meaning and precisely how or if Google Translate fails you.
Whenever you sense something amiss, try to fix Google Translate a little and click on their dropdown menu to “improve this translation.” Of course, with expressions like “cherchez la femme” this might be more difficult. Fortunately, not all human knowledge can be reduced to a Google algorithm! Take note when this happens, revel in your own multifaceted language expertise, and share the good news with a friend.
Reflections: Expressions like “cherchez la femme” render Google Translate almost pointless—but they also serendipitously illuminate the magic of language and the power of multilingualism. Because Google attempts to translate even socioculturally complicated expressions in a one-to-one way, a person needs to know multiple languages and the forms of life they invoke to be able to know when Google Translate leads them astray. For this reason, Google translate is always soliciting feedback from its users. And, over the years, it gets better! Now, it translates many idioms without using a one-to-one correspondence because it has been drawing on the everyday expertise real multilingual people have volunteered—and which you may have already contributed to by playing this game!
Game 4: Subverting Genre Expectations is Funny—The Fake Amazon Reviews Game
Mistranslated song lyrics (like those we’ve played with in the Song Lyrics Game) come off as funny or absurd because they subvert our expectations for the genre: When we expect a dark incantation like “I’m the bad guy” and get “I’m biscuits” instead—we just have to smile. A similar happy twist occurs now and then with the Amazon product review genre. Even though we may doubt the veracity of many of these reviews, we tend to read them in hopes that most contributors sincerely report the facts: If this is a good product or an awful one, reviews will say so. Precisely this practical expectation for the honest and earnest review on Amazon makes fake reviews a brilliant departure.
Examples: You may already be familiar with one of the biggest magnets for fake reviews, the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, pictured here:
The reviews of the banana slicer have far more feedback than reviews of any other product on Amazon I’ve seen. Over 58,000 readers came across the review below and “found this helpful”!
After all, who hasn’t for decades “been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana”?
The sociolinguist Camilla Vasquez has written extensively about satirical online reviews like these, and just recently she alerted me to another comic product review for a popular commodity in our age of quarantine: Yeast. This very enlightening review rose to the top:
Play! Now, try to find another “fake” review! What language game is it playing instead of sincerely reviewing a product? Poking fun at that product? Practicing PUNmanship? Venting about another topic? After combing through these and having a few good laughs, pick a product you want to review and try your hand at the “fake review” genre. Go ahead and post it and see how the world responds!
Reflection: For me, fake reviews are life-and-language-affirming. They affirm that people care about enjoying language and a few laughs with fellow humans more than diligently buying and reviewing whatever product crosses their screen. Sometimes the act of sharing one’s sense of humor with the world provides people with more satisfaction than simply consuming that world!
Game 5: We Live in a World of Others’ Words—The Word Wonderment Game
If you’ve been playing all the games above, you may by now be feeling flush with the power you wield with your words—the power to create a world, but also to genre-shift and tear it down! You may also feel humbled by the shape-shifting quality of those same words and our inability to pin down their meanings. Words are indeed powerful, but they also belong to no one person. And no dictionary or reference tool or app like Google Translate can provide a word’s decisive meaning. As the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has written (but in Russian), “We live in a world of others’ words.” The Word Wonderment Game is about exploring how our words take on new meanings when others take them out into the world and all its diverse forms of life. The Internet is made for this type of exploration.
Examples: You can start the Word Wonderment Game with any word or phrase you’ve heard lately that captured your fancy. It may be something new you overheard from teens (“soft girls”) or college kids (“natty light”), a new word for the age of COVID-19 (“face covering”) or a local word you’ve overheard and think you understand by never really fully “got” (“jawn”?). You might even see an intriguing word chalked up on a sign at your local bodega. “Hoagie” for example, is often used in Philadelphia as if everyone knows what it means—and as this picture shows, Philadelphians are venturing out to pick up freshly made hoagies even during quarantine:
But what if you were new to Philadelphia and you didn’t know this word? Or what if you’ve lived here forever but simply want to explore how other people use this word? Via the Internet you can take a shortcut through the world of others’ words. Start with a google search:
Already, Google’s dropdown menu suggests we’ve entered a world in which people associate hoagies with comfort (“haven”) and immediate gratification (“near me”). The list of links proffered next offers solid indications that Philadelphia is hoagie-central. Next, urbandictionary.com provides a selection of strong opinions, and the “top definition” offers more information about the history of the word itself:
A life-like quote in the second entry mentions that you can get hoagies at “da Papi store”:
And this entry authoritatively mentions an exception: “meatball” is the one filling that requires “sub” or even “sandwich” and not “hoagie” as the sandwich word:
These entries and the dialogue included, may set you wondering: Do I even know how to say the word “hoagie”? To explore, head to YouTube, with a new prompt: How to say “Hoagie”. You’ll get a long a boring tutorial—but you’ll also find many other videos in which “hoagie” is under discussion.
After this, you might find yourself reading about “The Great Hoagie Debate”, and even filling out an online poll about it (I admit it. I voted “yes”):
As you churn through these different perspectives on hoagies, you’ll likely also encounter more words you’ve never known before. Wawa, hero, meatball sub, da Papi store, and so on. You’ll also start feeling like some people in Philadelphia really care about hoagies. A lot. It’s not just another word for sandwich. The word “hoagie,” like any other word, is no one person’s alone to define or wield—but one shape-shifting word among many in a world of others’ words.
Play! You may be spending more cross-generational time in conversation these days. This means you may hear new words you don’t often (or ever) use yourself—but that people you know may care about a lot. Ask about those words! What do they mean to the speaker? In what situations would they use them? Inevitably, you will be running across unfamiliar words everyday (“namean?”). Or familiar words that have taken on new meanings (“face covering”). Follow up on those words! What “forms of life” do they invoke? Who uses them? What do they tell us about society? Surf the Internet to find all the nooks and crannies these words inhabit and the ways their meaning changes across contexts. “Slippage” between words and meaning doesn’t only occur when we’re using google translate. Even the word “hoagie” has an indeterminate meaning. So be sure to look into all the different ways our world is made up of others’ words.
Reflection:TheWord Wonderment Game revels in the fact that any time we speak, we are participating in a world of others’ words—and others’ perspectives. As you learn about different words and about the forms of life that surround words you thought you knew, you’ll likely run into controversies. You may find yourself feeling strongly about the use of certain words. You may feel that certain words should not be used. Why not? Our strong feelings about words can lead to important conversations about our differences. Through these conversations about language, we can also collaboratively build new meanings together, so that we live in a shared world.
Now, next time you’re on zoom, teaching a class, or celebrating the end of the week, “share your screen”! You may be able to play some of these language games with others and spark more talk about language—in the process, you’ll be collaboratively shaping the world we’re inhabiting, both online and off.
Please share your reflections on any of these games below. If you want more language games, let me know! There are many more that I cut from this short list. What other language games do you play on the internet? Please share!
The human elbow is getting a lot of attention these days, as we collectively fight the global spread of COVID-19.
But what does that word “elbow” refer to? Am I the only one who has spent most of my life using “elbow” to refer exclusively to the pointed part that sticks out when we bend our arm? I don’t think so. Ask any person on the street to point to their elbow and I bet you they’ll point to that pointy part. And yet…
Cough into your elbow
The part of our anatomy where we are supposed to be coughing these days (if we don’t have a tissue) has been confusingly called the “elbow.” This suggests (and this suggestion is born out in ubiquitous public service announcement illustrations) that the “elbow” is the part of our arm that gets enclosed when we bend our arm.
This contradicts everything I have envisioned about elbows for my entire life.
Bump elbows in greeting
On the other hand (or the other side of the elbow), we are also supposed to “bump elbows” instead of shaking hands or hugging—apparently a time-tested greeting that has been called on during epidemics in the past, and has now been resurrected for COVID-19. This is reassuring to me—I can visualize bumping elbows—the pointy part of our arms. Wikipedia provides this crystal-clear illustration of elbows touching in “a stylish bump in 2008”:
But it would be really hard to cough into that pointy part of our elbow. So why are people calling the inside of our elbow the “elbow.”
Maybe we just don’t have a word for it, and it’s just too clumsy to say “the inside of your elbow”. Is it called the “elbow pit”? I googled that and found others had been wondering the same thing: The search bar auto-filled with “Elbow pit what to call it?”
But Wikipedia tells us there is a specific word for that part of our body: the cubital fossa or… elbow pit.
This wikipedia definition of “elbow pit” (aka cubital fossa) as anterior to the elbow was bolstered as my search continued. As I was googling “elbow pit,” the search bar also offered up another top search suggestion: “elbow pit tattoo.” This is what they look like—they are not on a person’s elbow. They are nestled in the elbow pit (where we should also cough):
But for some reason, the public service message is not “Cough into your elbow pit.” Why not? Why have people insisted on calling this simply the “elbow”?
Well, the analogy to a smelly armpit may just be too much for genteel Americans to handle. I mentioned this term, “elbow pit,” to my 12-year-old daughter and she said simply, “Ew. I find that very disturbing.”
Others seem to have also picked up on the disturbing aspects of the phrase, “elbow pit,” as represented, of course, on Urbandictionary.com, where elbow pit is defined. The top definition seems modest and descriptive:
But the third definition goes directly to the problem of armpit associations:
Ew, indeed! The commonsense resistance to a bodily analogy like “elbow pit” is borne out further on Reddit, where at least one thread suggests referring to the elbow pit as, instead, “elbow vagina.”
So, maybe a more expansive working definition of “elbow,” to include the “elbow pit,” has merit. It seems that people who design these public service campaigns would rather be a little imprecise than end up in the “elbow pit” zone of associations. Plain old “elbow” is simpler and conveniently euphemismistic, nipping any of the “elbow pit” or “elbow vagina” undertones in the bud.
Maybe it’s okay, sometimes, to be a little imprecise in our language if the precise language just leads us down a scary path? People might be more likely to cough into something called “elbow” (inaccurately) than to cough into the more accurately named “elbow pit.”
And what if we are talking to kids—those prime germ-spreaders? We don’t want to call it the elbow pit and immediately hear a class of 25 saying “EEEEEEEWWWWWWWW!” Definitely bad PR for good practices.
Cough pocket
Well, sometimes we just need to think a little longer (or ask a citizen sociolinguist!) to come up with the most effective phraseology. Fortunately, this Seattle pre-school teacher, Ms. Laurie Goff, seems to have nailed it! She calls it the “cough pocket,” and tweeted a handy video demonstrating exactly what coughing into that cough pocket will look like:
Her accompanying explanation is friendly and convincing: “That’s a cough pocket. It’s on your body! It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s always with you!” Now this video (and not a collection of germs from all her preschoolers!) is going viral, spreading the word about where to cough–arguably more effectively than any inaccurate, euphemistic use of “elbow,” or accurate, but icky, “elbow pit” ever could.
So to the question, how are we supposed to cough into our elbow? Ms. Goff provides an answer: Use your cough pocket!
What are your experiences with the words “elbow,” “elbow pit,” and “cough pocket” (and of course, the “elbow bump”)? Please comment below!
Lately, Joe Biden’s language has been under the articulateness microscope. When there are substantive policies to be debated, why do we hold up articulateness for critique in political discussions? Biden seems competent enough, and experienced. Does it really matter if he is articulate? Short answer: It depends on what people say about it.
So, let’s take a look: How are people talking about Biden’s speech?
Joe Biden’s manner of speaking has been called “choppy,” “rambling,” “halting,” and there are plenty examples to illustrate this as noted in this October 2019 New York Times article:
“People are being killed in western, in eastern Afghan — excuse me, in eastern, uh, Ukraine,”
“I would eliminate the capital gains tax — I would raise the capital gains tax”
“So there’s a, there’s — my time up?”
Still, Biden’s popularity has in part been fueled by this choppy, rambling, and halting style, as evidenced by these Iowans quoted in the same article:
“I love it. It appeals to the common people, working class, Americans, everybody!”
“I know he falls over some of his words, we all do.”
“Oh, big deal! He speaks from his heart.”
So, is he speaking poorly? Or is he brilliantly connecting with the common people? As discussed in a previous post, in certain situations inarticulateness can be a form of competence. Until recently, Biden’s choppy and halting delivery—with the occasional profane word thrown in—has worked well for him, projecting a down-to-earth image. But, the claim that his disfluencies appeal to “the common people, working class, Americans, everybody” may be an overstatement. Even those common people and working-class Americans are starting to get worried about Biden’s disfluencies. When the New York Times spoke to union leaders in Western Pennsylvania, those hard-working Americans insisted that their priority was to support a candidate who would maintain coal jobs. Biden was their guy—but they had concerns. Not because he was wavering on his stance on coal and fracking, the issues that most concerned them, but because he didn’t seem very articulate. One of them summed up:
“You know it scares me. I love Joe Biden, but lately he’s not as articulate. What’s Trump gonna do?”
For these union leaders, being inarticulate has become Joe Biden’s biggest vulnerability. If Biden couldn’t get the Democratic nomination, some of them were considering voting for Trump and, as union leaders, advising their union members to do the same.
According to some accounts, Biden has been verbally awkward for decades, and for a long time Biden’s gaffes and hesitations, and even his profanity have made him likable. But the union leaders had a different take for 2020: Right now we don’t need a friendly guy. We need someone who can challenge Trump. As the concerned union leader quoted above asked, if we put a hesitating, pausing, mis-speaking Biden on stage with Trump, “What’s Trump gonna do?” (Implied answer: Rip him to shreds). In the context of that discussion, it seems Joe Biden has pushed the limits of competent deployment of “inarticulateness.” If he can’t more seamlessly make his case, he simply won’t be able to stand up to Trump.
Others have discussed this as a problem of age. He’s just too old to keep up—and his inarticulateness is the primary evidence of this. This argument is made clearly by a New Hampshire voter quoted in this Vox article:
“I don’t think he can take on Trump for that reason. I don’t think Biden is quick enough and sharp enough to take him on. His story is incredible, but he’s just too old.”
Biden’s inarticulateness is increasingly being talked about not as a sign of relatability and political competence, but as a sign of age, incompetence, and inability to beat Trump. How did that happen? Did he really start becoming more inarticulate? Is his brain degenerating?
His brain may be degenerating, but let’s be frank: That’s not what matters in this election.
Consider another politician famous for his folksy speech and mannerisms: Ronald Reagan. He was elected twice. Despite an increasingly simple speaking style and decreasing vocabulary during his time in office, citizens deemed his style relatable. In Reagan’s case, much of his repetition and reliance on stock lines may have been caused by a brain stumbling through the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease. Still he was a successful candidate, winning two terms and then ongoing status as a beloved former President. He was even dubbed, “The Great Communicator.” Why didn’t people focus on his inarticulateness–his slowing of speech, his waning vocabulary (now shown to be empirically measurable)? Because the people discussing his speech didn’t talk about it as a problem.
At one time, that folksy interpretation of Reagan’s speech style was enjoyed by Biden too. But now the word articulate has come to haunt Biden’s campaign. As the very different cases of Biden and Reagan suggest, how we perceive someone’s inarticulateness is more a product of a context and everyday conversation than of that individual’s brain–even if the examples of halting speech and bumbling frustration coming from that individual are as real as the recordings replayed again and again on national television. It’s not the speech itself that’s giving Joe trouble, but the way people talk about it. So, back to our original question: Let’s say Joe Biden is inarticulate. Does it matter? Not on its own. But all those people out there discussing Biden’s speaking problems—and the journalists reporting their remarks—are making it matter more and more each day.
Being “articulate” (or not) probably does matter for the success of a presidential candidate. But how we talk about it is what makes it matter.
The beginning of January brings a new year, and, for anyone involved in the University, a new semester. And, with that, after the relaxed, snack-filled and beverage-saturated days of the holidays, many a lament about the return to a more frantic pace and the need to ramp up for new students. My colleagues and I are spending the first week or two of January putting our syllabi together, readying ourselves for that first day, when we meet relative strangers and are responsible for connecting with them deeply and building a community of inquiry together.
In preparation for that anticipated first day of class, most of us will be updating our syllabi not only with new material—the latest journal articles in Cinema Studies or Sociolinguistics or History of X—but also with new language to talk about that material. Let’s face it (boomer) without a little updating in how we talk about history, sociology, linguistics, education, and ourselves, there may be no lesson at all. We may be stopped in our tracks on that first day of class in what I call a “citizen sociolinguistic arrest.”
What is a citizen sociolinguistic arrest? It’s very much like an ordinary citizen’s arrest—one citizen calling another out for violating the law—only in the case of a sociolinguistic arrest, the citizen calls out the other for a violation of their language. You have probably witnessed or even participated in at least one citizen sociolinguistic arrest over the holidays. Maybe your sister referred to her niece as a “freshman” in college, and she was reminded that “we call them first years now.” Or your grandmother referred to participants in the Hong Kong protests as “Orientals” and someone gently explained that English-speaking people generally now use the term “Asian” instead.
But the holidays are over now and we’re working on our syllabi. After leaving our family gatherings, some may be thinking: Can’t we move on and just do our work? No. These citizen sociolinguistic arrests are likely to happen in our classes this semester too. Professors may begin that first session with introductions. And these may include mention of preferred pronouns. Even if we don’t mention our own, or include a note about our own pronouns in the syllabus, we may be seen as making a choice deliberately not to honor non-binary or non-cis gendered individuals. As soon as one student introduces themselves with their own preferred pronouns, the choice may become a topic of conversation.
Now readers may be thinking: Fine, we can talk about pronouns on the first day. But what about the content of the course—can we teach within our areas of expertise without being arrested for the way we talk about our specialty? No. There are plenty of opportunities to critique content-specific language there too, and lately, I’ve heard some fascinating content specific accounts of citizen sociolinguistic arrests.
In a photography class, for example, one professor, preparing his lectures on Diane Arbus, realized that his descriptions of Arbus’ photos needed updating. Last year students had citizen sociolinguistically arrested him for his use of the word “transvestite” to describe Arbus’ well-known photographic subjects. Society has changed regarding trans, non-cis people and our language has along with it. Should we still use the word “transvestite” since it is the one Arbus used? That’s an open question. Or is it? In my own introductory ethnography class, we routinely read Hortense Powdermaker’s account of race relations in Mississippi. Should we use “negro” now, because it was the word she was using in her time? In that case, the question seems less open. But the discussion can be important.
Time clearly changes our relationship to these words, and some of us take longer to catch up. Growing up in different parts of the world also affects the way we use the language to describe our specialties: Another friend of mine, a history professor, realized that the term “world power” could also lead to a citizen sociolinguistic arrest: Referring to Portugal as being one of the great “world powers” at one time, led to a long discussion of many Westerner’s myopic sense of the word “world.”
Each of these citizen sociolinguistic arrests—those that happen with our friends and relatives over the holidays and those that happen in our classrooms and on our syllabi—have the potential to spark important conversations about language, and, inevitably, about why we choose one word or another, and how our different personal histories led us to these choices of words.
There will never be permanently “correct” ways of talking about any of these issues. We will always be subject to critique, and when being critiqued, humility and open-mindedness usually serve us well. These discussions of language—across generations, specialties, gender, and many other communities, can be fascinating. Everyone can learn from them. And as we do so together, we can build that coveted community of inquiry and genuine curiosity within our classroom. So, just as we always need to update our syllabi, we might also need to update the way we talk about it–but then let’s keep the conversation going!
Have you been the subject of these sorts of citizen sociolinguistic arrests in your classrooms, your family dinner table, or elsewhere? Please share in the comments below and let’s keep talking…
I am willing to bet a Wawa Hoagie that you (or your “close friend”) have a strong opinion about some aspect of language. By simply googling a bit, browsing through urban dictionary, or candidly recalling a conversation you’ve had recently, some opinions like these might surface:
If you live in the USA, you should speak English.
The way people from Philadelphia speak is completely different from the way people from New York speak.
The Welsh language is amazing.
The street spelled “Passyunk” should be pronounced “Peah- Shunk.”
“Jimmies” NOT “sprinkles.”
People SHOULD NOT use “literally” in a figurative way
“Ain’t” is not a word/ “Ain’t is a word.”
Everyone SHOULD learn another language.
Irregardless is a pretentious way of saying regardless!!!
People have their opinions.
Despite my career as an “Applied Linguist,” I don’t feel that my job is to have strong opinions about language. Nor do I feel it is my professional role to resolve differences of opinion that inevitably arise about language, or to “debunk” certain opinions out of line with research-based studies. I am fascinated by other peoples’ opinions! And, I do care about people and what those opinions say–good and bad–about our society. Why are opinions about language so strong? What compels people to spend so much time and energy opining about, for example, the pretentiousness of “irregardless,” the dictionary-status of the word “ain’t”, the “ugliest” regional accent, or the proper way to speak “English” and when and where it should be used?
Even the most accomplished linguist cannot resolve these debates—at least not in their role as linguist. Why not? Isn’t scientific research the best way to seek truth, to push the world forward, and to promote progress and change for the better? Don’t linguists have the data that could resolve language debates? Yes and no.
While linguistics is sometimes categorized as a “science,” it differs in at least one important way from more prototypical scientific fields. Human language use (unlike our bio-chemical composition) is affected by opinions humans have about it. My cells are organized in a certain way that, as far as I know, will not be affected by what my opinion is about them. My own mother will always be my biological mother no matter what I think of her. But the way I speak—whether I call my mother “Mom,” “Ma,” “Mother,” or “Gretchen,” for example—is inevitably affected by my own opinions, my mother’s opinions, and the opinions of people around me, who hear me use those terms of address.
So, if peoples’ opinions about language affect how we talk and our opinions of other people’s talk, we probably can learn something about society by investigating those opinions more carefully—but what exactly can we learn? Let’s think that through.
First, take a basic opinion: English only!
As discussed in a previous post, statements about when and where English should be spoken might pose as reasonable requests for communicative clarity—but when looked at more carefully in context, they can also be a form of anti-immigrant racism, linguistic border patrol masquerading as reasonable opinions on language.
Language opinions also patrol less high-stakes borders. Consider, for example, the opinion that “the Philly accent is not the New York accent.” There are precise linguistic methods for measuring such a claim. However, stating this as an opinion may be more about establishing an identity as a Philadelphian than the phonological distinctions between a statistically significant sample of New Yorkers and Philadelphians—the opinion itself acts as a form of linguistic border patrol. And again, language itself may be a stand-in for other identity features that matter more.
Sometimes, the linguistic border patrol sets up finer-grained distinctions, not about race, immigration status, or location: Consider the opinion, “Irregardless is not a word.” Whether or not this is a “word” matters far less to the person stating this opinion than the picture this word paints of the user. This “defininition” on Urban Dictionary provides a useful synopsis of what using “irregardless” might mean about someone:
The important border being guarded here seems to be between “educated” and “uneducated.”
Another entry provides this useful clip from the movie “Mean Girls” to precisely illustrate a different type of person (one of the uncritical followers of the high school’s lead mean girl) who might use the word “irregardless”:
Views on languages, language varieties, and words like “irregardless,” (often fleshed out with supportive examples and illustrations) may start as “mere opinions” from “lay people” about language—but as they become conversations including more and more people (as tends to happen on the Internet), they also build knowledge about language. This knowledge isn’t validated through scientifically measurable accuracy of these descriptions—instead, this is a socially constructed accuracy. Language types called “English,” “Philly,” “New York,” or “Educated” become understood as these labeled entities because these opinions and conversations build portraits of language users as social types. The categories these citizen sociolinguists set up can act as self-fulfilling prophecies—building communities, setting up distinctions, or breaking them down.
What can we learn from this? We may not learn much about language at all—at least not the kind of learning you might expect from linguistics class or French101. But we can still learn something important. We can learn –through concrete discussions about language—how citizens shape distinctions between themselves and others, form local identities, create unique new identities, bond with and reject one another, and create and destroy social value. Once we glimpse these processes (through the work of citizen sociolinguists) we might not know more about language as an object, but we do have more awareness of how language builds meaning for everybody using it.
Have you come into contact with any strong opinions about language? What can you learn from those opinions? What social work do you think those opinions do? Please comment below.
Did you LEARN how to speak English or ACQUIRE that ability? What about Spanish? Or Arabic? This is a distinction that many in the language teaching world like to think about.
Some tend to think that first languages (“mother tongues”) are acquired through participation in family and society, while additional languages require explicit instruction, and are thus learned. Nobody taught us how to conjugate verbs as we acquired our first language—but this seems to be a big focus of learning additional languages in high school.
But even granting that you acquired a lot as a baby, don’t you consciously continue to learn a lot about your own “mother tongue” as you get older? Consider all the subtle forms of language we continue to learn/acquire long after we seem to have mastered at least one “mother tongue.” Some of that later-in-life language we acquire without much thought, but other language, we probably spend some conscious effort learning.
Take, for example, ordering a hoagie (sandwich) at Wawa. If you are not from greater Philadelphia, you may not even know what I’m talking about. For many, this type of language knowledge has been acquired through such subtle cumulative processes of socialization that people don’t know how to articulate it. And, it may feel awkward to ask someone directly how to order a hoagie at Wawa. So, it seems better to just muddle along in the hopes that finally you’ll get it (acquire it).
But sometimes we just don’t have the time, the connections, or the guts to acquire certain types of language knowledge through incremental interactional trial-and-error.
That’s where Citizen Sociolinguists come in.
This act of articulating subtle, socioculturally acquired knowledge—so that outsiders can learn it— is PRECISELY what Citizen Sociolinguists do. You want to know how to order a sandwich at Wawa? Citizen Sociolinguists have produced You Tube videos on it:
Not even sure what “Wawa” means? You don’t have to wait through years of socialization to acquire that knowledge, you can simply google it. If you look on Urban Dictionary, you can get a relatively straight definition:
Etc…
And, if you browse through other definitions, you will also get a taste for the ironic reverence many Philadelphian’s feel for the convenience store:
You can also browse a bit and find some good stories of people who did not follow protocol at Wawa, like this Twitter post featuring a gaffe by Sean Hannity (woe is he):
Citizen Sociolinguists then, are the language teachers you always wish you had—the ones who teach you what is NOT in the book, but what is crucial to learn to get along. The ones who answer the questions you were afraid to ask—because it seems like you are supposed to already “just know.”
This explicit learning provides a good starting point—by directing language learners (all of us) what to look for. Once I get some explicit instruction on, say, “how to order a sandwich at Wawa” or, for that matter, “how to greet someone on the street in Philadelphia,” I don’t need to follow those explicit steps, but I may begin to notice how true-to-life this depiction is—or how people vary from it—and how my own individual variation may fit in.
Citizen Sociolinguists provide us the secrets all good teachers do—combatting a fear of total ignorance that might otherwise paralyze a learner—so that we can forge ahead on our own learning path.
By the way, many contemporary applied linguists and language teachers avoid both the terms “learning” and “acquisition” in favor of “language development”—a combination of these processes. This also seems to apply to the type of growth that happens when we engage with Citizen Sociolinguists.
How have you used the Internet and the knowledge of Citizen Sociolinguists to learn a new language, or to learn new aspects of a language you’ve been struggling to understand? Has this explicit training opened new forms of participation for you? Please leave your comments below!
If so, you know it can be a tedious process–listening to a recording and then typing out utterances word for word. Word. For. Word.
But transcription is not as easy—nor necessarily as boring—as it sounds. It involves translating spoken language into written words and like any other translation project, this requires some interpretation and finesse. For example, when a speaker says what sounds like “I’m gonna leave now.” Should that be written as “I’m going to leave now”? or “I’m gonna leave now”? If an adult English Teacher says it would you be more likely to write “going to”? If a 10-year-old in the class says it, would you be more likely to write “gonna”? How do age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, institutional role, and any other aspect of the situation figure into that interpretation?
The sociolinguistic, Mary Bucholtz, in her article, “The Politics of Transcription,” has pointed out that even established researchers often make transcription decisions in ways that indicate underlying biases. When someone uses a certain spelling for one demographic or social role and a different spelling for another, Bucholtz calls this “eye-dialect.”
So, the tedious act of transcription becomes political, and the stakes can be high: A courtroom transcript, for example, that represents a defendant’s speech in stigmatized eye-dialect, could leave a record that unfairly influences a jury’s perception of that individual. Bucholtz urges transcribers to be mindful of the choices they make when they transcribe—accounting for how their representations create identities for speakers.
Last week, however, when talking about “The Politics of Transcription” in my graduate class on Classroom Discourse Analysis, one of the students pointed out that many individuals—especially teens-these-days—use something like “eye-dialect” to purposefully add nuance to their text messages, Facebook and Instagram posts, snap-chat stories, or any social media that mimics “conversation.”
In these kinds of self-transcriptions, people usually call on eye-dialect to deliberately construct identities for themselves. In this way, they are creating citizen transcriptions of themselves, calling on their own knowledge of local social value connected to transcribed forms of talk. Citizen self-transcribers crafting a text message, just like reflective researchers transcribing language “data”, can be painstakingly mindful of the identity they present when they translate a spoken-like message into a social media message.
Here is an example of my own speaking-to-my-son self which I found in our text message history:
In my mind, this message, including its eye dialect, captures my kind yet concerned loving self. The spelling of “Pleez” conveys my sheepishly earnest need for my teenage son to keep me in the late night loop.
Probably the best guard against bias among social scientists or courtroom transcribers is to treat all speaking the same way and be as uniform as possible. But when we everyday individuals transcribe our own voices into text messages, we participate in an unstandardized, yet high-stakes world of eye dialect. My own Emoji smiley-face, heart, and old-lady face probably also convey some middle-aged white lady dialect. But that’s okay. That’s who I am. And, I’m the one who transcribed it.
Those same features of transcription that can seem to unfairly bias social science research or stigmatize a defendant in the courtroom, become powerful communicative resources for the citizen self-transcriber. And, the citizen self-transcriber might have a more sophisticated command of bias than your average social science researcher—because they know that there is not a “correct” way of doing it, only better and worse ways of communicating one’s identity in each unique socially mediated context.
What type of eye-dialect do you deliberately use in your text messages or social media self-transcriptions? How do you use it to craft identities for yourself? How do you read other messages and interpret “eye-dialect” there? Do you ever write messages that used your own “speshul” brand of spelling? Please comment and share your ideas and examples below!
Jane Frazee (a renowned music educator who also is my stepmother) has spent most of her life teaching and writing about music and music teachers (see her latest here). She constantly thinks about questions of music and children. And when I talk to her about Citizen Sociolinguistics, she keeps thinking about music and children. I’ll tell her about the “Accent Challenge” or “Language Pies” or high school students’ fascination for “slang,” and she says, “that’s a lot like what we are trying to do with music!”
What’s the connection?
One of the questions Jane has been thinking about has to do with music notation. Why do we teach children to read music notes when their natural sense of rhythm and melody is always initially much more sophisticated than anything they can read on paper? Children who are jump-roping, hand-clapping, rapping, singing, patty-caking, Miss Mary Mack Mack Macking during recess, are looking at quarter notes and eighth notes in the music classroom and saying, in unison, “Ta Ta Tee Tee Ta.” Most children love music! But Music Class can seem disconnected from other experiences kids have making music. And as kids get older, into their teens, they want to be playing their own instruments, in bands with friends, or socializing around music in other ways that don’t seem to connect to more formal music instruction.
So, why are we teaching “Music” when they already know it?
And, here’s the connection to Citizen Sociolinguistics: Why do we teach children—and young adults—“Language Arts” as if they don’t already know how to use language?
How can music and language teachers capture the knowledge and joy their students have for music and language without stifling it?
Many kids in music class –at least in the Ta Ta Tee Tee Ta style music class— have no idea they could make connections to what they may have been doing five minutes ago, singing with friends, before they walked into class. In part, this is because the sophisticated musical things that kids do together without any teacher around –the moves they easily make rhythmically and melodically as they syncopate hand claps, lyrics, or jump-rope steps–take a long long time to learn formally and to put on paper. Jane’s work explores how to give children the tools, gradually, to represent and build on those rhythmic and melodic inclinations in notes, on a score.
From a Citizen Sociolinguistics perspective we can do something similar. We’ve got the tools to explore what students know about language. But students need permission to “count” what they are already doing as important knowledge about how language works. When we talk about language from a Citizen Sociolinguistics perspective in English class, students reveal things that have never come up before: “My mom sounds so formal whenever she is on the phone!” “My mom uses a Chinese accent when ordering dim sum in English.” (Moms come up a lot.) “My teachers have no idea how emojis work!” “What would you call the store Five Below in Spanish? Cinco Abajo or still just Five Below?” “What are “salty looks”?” Like kids playing with music and rhythm on the playground, these kids continually play with language, exploring different accents, languages, meanings, phrases, and creating new words and ways of speaking daily.
But if kids already know and love music, know and love language, what are teachers supposed to do? Should we just give up and let them do their thing? Is there no point to teaching music and language arts? As music teachers and music lovers, as language teachers and language fanatics, music speakers and language singers, lifelong students and teachers, Jane and I would agree: No! We don’t stop teaching, but we don’t discount the richest foundation for what we teach: the music and language kids already make everyday.
We build connections: That music you love on the playground? That counts as music in class too! That language you’ve noticed in that rap song that sounds amazingly cool? That counts as “Language Arts”! Now let’s start thinking about how those daily discoveries you make about language relate to music notation, to English literature. In music, this is called “improvisation” “song-writing,” or “composition.” In English, “creative writing” or –hey- “composition.” These are the most sophisticated skills musicians and language users can get –and teachers can help them get there.
For me, Citizen Sociolinguistics provides a framework to gather everyday language knowledge and legitimize its role in the language arts classroom so that students’ language awareness and creativity grows. For Jane, her half-century of experience with music teaching and teachers has given her a massive repertoire of music projects that build on students’ knowledge of music and connect it to the techniques of improvisation and composition.
Sure, there are musicians out there who never took music class, who never learned to read notes. There are brilliant story-tellers who never wrote down a word of their stories. As Jane and I agreed yesterday, “More is more–Not either/or” (and hey! that makes a nice poem, or song!). So lets develop ways to make the connections that make the most of language and music in and out of class.
How do you make connections from language to language arts? From music to music lessons? From music to language and back? What do you think music notation and the written word have done to build language and music awareness? What are some of the ways we can concretely build these connections—in classrooms and out? Please comment below!
Most literally, crossposting is the practice of posting the same message on two or more of your social media accounts.
For a while, this was happening to me by accident when, unbeknownst to me, my Twitter account was linked to my Facebook account. It was dumb—and delightful at the same time.
Dumb—because suddenly all my nerdy language tweets, focused on an audience of students and colleagues were now posted to my family and friends from across the myriad phases of my life.
But also delightful! Suddenly unlikely friends from high school started tagging me on language related posts on Facebook, or sending me breaking news about the Word of the Year, or drawing on my expertise (“What is dabbin’?”).
Eventually, I figured out how to unlink the two, and I unlinked them, probably saving the majority of my Facebook friends from a lot of spam.
Through this accidental experiment, the value of crossposting came through to me. Not only did I discover Facebook friends who cared about language like I did—I also became more careful about the kinds of language posts I was making on Twitter. Would my mother be offended by this post? As long I was crossposting to Facebook and Twitter, that question always had to be in the back of my mind.
But this got me thinking about communication and social boundaries more generally. Crossposting—and its ramifications—as a metaphor for communication seems worth considering. What happens when you “crosspost” across the various social groups you are part of? Being completely oblivious of the participants and audience in each of these groups seems socially naïve—at best. And, this seems to be what happened at Yale last month, when professor Erika Christakis notoriously posted, to a college house e-mail listserve, the idea that Halloween is a chance to be “a little bit obnoxious,” countering the campus-wide e-mail suggesting students be sensitive about Halloween costumes (and, for example, avoid blackface). Bringing up the value of obnoxious Halloween costumes might be a nice debate on one of prof. Christakis’ “social media platforms”—say dinner with like-minded colleagues—but, as it turns out, it may be a dumb thing to crosspost to hundreds of Yale freshmen.
These days, social media may be making us more aware of the ramifications of crossposting in real life. People who use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., tend to mindfully tailor their messages to whomever they imagine is listening/reading/over-hearing on one of those apps.
Highschool students I work with, for example, know a lot about mindfully crossposting. As a way of exploring language in their lives, we have had them represent the various sectors of their lives as pie charts (see previous post on language diversity pies) and talk about the language they use differently in each of those sections. Many students list a dozen or more sections in their pie, making fine-grained distinctions, for example, between language used with one’s own parents, other adults, and one’s girlfriend’s parents. They include “slang” in some sections and not in others. Sometimes they include named languages in certain sections, including separate spots for “Chinese,” “Chinglish” and “English.” They seem intuitively aware that certain ways of speaking work well in some slices of their daily language pie, but that it would be very dumb to speak that way in others.
But, this does not mean students don’t engage in some forms of delightful “crossposting.” These same high school students have also mentioned that, sometimes, the most fun people are the ones who don’t keep their language rigidly aligned with a certain slice of their language pie–instead, mixing slang with formality, French with English, or purposely mispronouncing certain words.
Still, students also admit, part of the joy of this kind of language crossposting is the inherent risk involved. The danger of overstepping remains—crossposting might be dumb or delightful. It might be offensive and even incite mass protest (as in the unfortunate case at Yale). It might be hilarious and spark new ways of thinking (think Key and Peele style humor). In either case, “crossposting” reveals the borders we cross repeatedly in our everyday lives. When we start crossing those borders, we are taking risks. But they may be worth it.
Apparently, the Christakis professors are now encouraging Yale students to join them in further discussion. And, already, the general public has been made more aware of a variety of student voices on Yale’s campus. Let’s hope this leads to more crossposting across social groups there and even some new discoveries about each other. I would hate for it to lead to “delinking” our social circles permanently.
What social media do you crosspost too? How selective are you about what you post to which platform? In which sections of your life have you done more radical crossposting? What have been the effects? Please comment below!
Lately, Joe Biden’s language has been under the articulateness microscope. When there are substantive policies to be debated, why do we hold up articulateness for critique in political discussions? Biden seems competent enough, and experienced. Does it really matter if he is articulate? Short answer: It depends on what people say about it.
Have you ever had to transcribe oral speech?
Jane Frazee (a renowned music educator who also is my stepmother) has spent most of her life teaching and writing about music and music teachers (see her latest 
notation. Why do we teach children to read music notes when their natural sense of rhythm and melody is always initially much more sophisticated than anything they can read on paper? Children who are jump-roping, hand-clapping, rapping, singing, patty-caking, Miss Mary Mack Mack Macking during recess, are looking at quarter notes and eighth notes in the music classroom and saying, in unison, “Ta Ta Tee Tee Ta.” Most children love music! But Music Class can seem disconnected from other experiences kids have making music. And as kids get older, into their teens, they want to be playing their own instruments, in bands with friends, or socializing around music in other ways that don’t seem to connect to more formal music instruction.
Have you ever tried crossposting?
more generally. Crossposting—and its ramifications—as a metaphor for communication seems worth considering. What happens when you “crosspost” across the various social groups you are part of? Being completely oblivious of the participants and audience in each of these groups seems socially naïve—at best. And, this seems to be what happened at Yale last month, when professor Erika Christakis notoriously posted, to a college house e-mail listserve, the idea that Halloween is a chance to be “a little bit obnoxious,” countering the campus-wide e-mail suggesting students be sensitive about Halloween costumes (and, for example, avoid blackface). Bringing up the value of obnoxious Halloween costumes might be a nice debate on one of prof. Christakis’ “social media platforms”—say dinner with like-minded colleagues—but, as it turns out, it may be a dumb thing to crosspost to hundreds of Yale freshmen.
Citizen Sociolinguistics 