Re: watch your language! (or don't)

Subject: Re: watch your language! (or don't)
From: "diotima" <diotima -at- myway -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 20:33:04 -0400 (EDT)



--- On Thu 05/05, Martin Bosworth < martinhbosworth -at- gmail -dot- com > wrote:

>The written word is unique from the spoken, in that whatever accents

or personal touches are what we make.



yes



>When speaking, you're prey to the cultural acclimations you grew up with, and it's much harder to get rid of those. So don't.



ok by me. but try this. i like to think of a kind of language agility. why couldn't one move with the contexts, moving in and out of various language games, using language like one might use clothes, accessories, or any other means of self-expression? why not be-bop in one context while blue-grassing in another? why not hip-hop on the bus and twang with the venders at the farmers' market*?



when technical communicators play pool with friends at the local pub, do they talk like technical communicators in that context too? (god help us!) does languaging comme ça corrupt one's ability to write effective technical communication? do people who use The One Grammatically Correct Way all the time find that the road to heaven is paved just a little more widely for them? (guess one has to wait to find out, but i'm thinkin' no!)



english is my native language, and i've been learning spanish and french over the past few years, in addition to a smattering of other languages. i've noticed a very interesting thing that i wonder if anyone else can relate to. i've had a number of french friends, some of whom had only rudimentary english, or good english that was thickly accented. over time, i started to realize that whenever i spoke to french people in english, i'd unconsciously start speaking english as if i were a french person speaking english! i was unconsciously adopting their accent, their patterns, their word choices, their syntax. i would find myself making the same mistakes that they tend to make, but i just let it pass. and why not? they could see, if only subconsciously, that i was moving over into their world, communicating with them in their frame of reference.



could it be that sometimes it's more important to communicate than to be grammatically correct? gasp!



one time i was on my way to dinner with a french friend who was visiting the states for a few months. she had almost no english. there were a number of street people in the (urban) neighborhood of the restaurant. while we were walking from the car to the restaurant, one street person was singing, another was speaking some kind of gibberish. my friend turns to me and says, "many mans crazy here." i about died! i loved that! later, when my french improved, i was able to see exactly what she was doing. she was simply translating word for word from her native language into english. way cool.



going back to the incident from which i started this whole discussion, when i revisit the scene to consider exactly what took place, here is what i find. i started to say something, and just at that moment another thought came to me. my mouth was already engaged in one thing but my mind was thinking another thing. a simple collision of thought and utterance, and meanwhile the dreaded Horrifyingly-Grammatically-Incorrect-Phrase was halfway out my mouth. my internal editor screamed, stop! you can't say that!! watch me, i told her, and shoved her aside. i'll call on you when i need you, until then, deal. et voila, the phrase was out in the light of day in all its spine-curling glory. all that happened in real time, of course. so, no, i didn't grow up saying things like, me and jody gonna talk pretty one day. (but i do like the sound of that!)



i remember another incident like that one with graver consequences. when i was a child, something disappointing happened while i was with my parents. i started to say "shoot!" but then i thought i would say "shucks!" there was a collision, and guess what came out of my mouth. "sh*t!" for that i was sent to my room without dinner. bummer. it *so* wasn't my fault!



ok, so i think i've said my piece on this subject. i won't belabor it any more. i'll leave you with an excerpt from gloria anzaldua that resonates with me and then a footnote on "farmers' market."



cheers,

diotima





To live in the Borderlands means to

put chile in the borscht

eat whole wheat tortillas

speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;

be stopped by la migra at the border check points...

(-- g. anzaldua)





* i wondered if it was farmer's, farmers', or farmers, so i did some googling and found plenty of instances of each spelling. certainly a case can be made for each, but i was surprised to see some sites using at least 2 of the different spellings interchangeably within the same article. then i found an instance of it on a pbs site and thought i'd check it out. to my great amusement, i found a farmers' market publicity image that solves the problem quite brilliantly! go here and scroll down just a bit : http://www.kqed.org/topics/home/cooking/farmers-markets-sf.jsp



isn't that hilarious? too bad i don't have a bunch-of-grapes key on my computer!



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