Words Over-Easy

In balance of my silence, I want to examine the different ways in which I use language, and the particular effects its different uses have on me. I realized that we all engage in a variety of rhetoric, depending on our moment-to-moment situations. There is a rhetoric for conversation with friends, generally less formal and hinging off of an implied context of mutual understanding than say would be academic rhetoric, in which we would employ an elevated use of vocabulary and make context explicit in words for utmost clarity and proof of intelligence. Speech with friends includes more play and wit of words, can make great leaps from topic to topic, and even come back full circle after multiple interruptions and interjections. There is a sort of loose, free-form weaving of ideas that encourages the meandering of thoughts, the effusiveness of emotions. When we speak in an academic setting, we imitate the language, the vocabulary, trajectories of thought, and meanings of those that we read, who we deem to be of certain authority. There is a rhetoric for parents, which could include some degree of censorship or filtering, a rhetoric for lovers, draped in terms of endearment and often a rawness of emotion encapsulated in words exchanged (words delicate and highly flammable). It is possible we even have a rhetoric that we reserve only for our own inner ear.

My work rhetoric as a waitress at the breakfast joint Slim Goodies is full of repetition. After many hours waiting tables, I feel as if I have slipped into auto-pilot, thoughtlessly running through a handful of phrases that apply to most communicative needs. Like a mockingbird that sings as if on loop, I become an automated recording of myself, and hear myself speaking as if from afar. While I can surely snap out of my floating reverie of detachment to my immediacy if something on the outside engages me, such as a customer who actually desires to interact with me as the person and not just me as a figurehead representing the means to a full belly, I am mostly insulated in my inner world of thoughts with content far removed from my speech. I thus experienced it entirely possible to be speaking and thinking worlds apart, especially through the use of habitual rhetoric that does not require much focus or effort.

I realized too in this setting that we not only draw from distinct wells of language depending on situation, but our voices, the very sounds we make, too change. We speak a different plane of sound to affect or appeal to different listeners, inflecting and texturing, sweetening or deepening to the ears of particular listeners. When I serve customers, my voice becomes higher in pitch, my accent rounded and my rhythm chipper, my language polite but decidedly informal (this was a definite change from the rhetoric I had been required to use at my previous job, an upscale tapas restaurant). After some time at Slim Goodies, I caught myself saying “ya’ll” very often, and didn’t remember ever having used it regularly before. While the choice was most likely not conscious, I reflected that I probably had adapted my accent to be more accepted by locals, and “more southern” for tourists looking for that local color and flare that affirms they are having a “true New Orleans experience.” I highly encourage this exploration of the ways in which we conform (consciously or not) to the uses of different rhetoric in different circumstance. One might even try switching to an out-of-context rhetoric and see how odd it feels. Speak to a baby as you would to your Environmental Theory professor. Or perhaps this is a good idea.

Welcome fellow dwellers of language!

The time has come to enter into yet another phase of my thesis experiment. In choosing this medium of a blog, I wished the form of the project to reflect the nature of its content. Those who study linguistics are aware that languages change shape over time--words are added and lost, shortcuts fortified in search of the quickest route to meaning, social and cultural dynamics serve as sieve to favor certain expressions that are period-relevant, as well as favor possible meanings of words highlighted by their positive and negative associations of that time ("Oil" means something very specific in 2011). Language changes especially in exposure to other culture's languages, a process likely accelerated and intensified by increasingly globalized communications made possible by the internet. (Note: "Add to dictionary" option as Spell-Check gives "globalized" the red flag). In an age of demand for instant gratification, the speed of language exchanges must be even quicker, even more efficient and effortless. A professor wrote "LOL" on one of my papers. Shakespeare would be trampled for tarrying.

Language is not static. And so, I wish to be neither this thesis about language. My practice of silence and other means to acute observation to study how language connects us to the world indicates that language is as ever-changing as the world(s) it signifie(s), and that the way to its ephemeral truths is to encounter it subjectively. I can only listen so much, read so much, and live so much language to stumble across so many questions that lead me to possible discoveries. Language does not exist for an individual, but between individuals. Language is an ecological interaction. For these reasons it is time for the blog to go public. I have laid the grounds (?) and planted the questions, but now what this project needs more than anything is to grow into its own organism. And evolve.

And so. This is an invitation for fellow dwellers of language to participate in an examination of their residence in the world of words. Please feel free to stalk silence, or stay in speech, or embark in any language-related experiment of your own, whatever way is most revealing to you. Be as concrete or as theoretical as you wish to be, as long as what you wish to share may be a spark for another. Or not. Dead ends can be interesting too.

Feed the blog! I thank you!

Language Frames Ecological Relations

One of the essential questions that I wished to explore in this thesis is that of how language shapes our ecological realities. In Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild, he asserts that the rhetoric used to define Nature or the Wild determines how a relationship is thenceforth carried out. To begin to tend to the wounds of the planet and patch our damaged marriage, we must first opt for a new way of referring to it (and I would even venture to say addressing it). In Turner's words:

"Since a theory is merely a description of the world, a new set of agreements about the West [environmentalism] requires some new descriptions of the world and our proper place in it ...The fight is over intellectual, not physical, resources. Environmentalists fight to reduce the authority of certain descriptions--e.g., 'private property'-- and to extend the authority of other descriptions--e.g., 'ecosystem' "(p. 54).

Turner especially hones in on how "economic language (and its extensions in law) exhaustively describes our world and, hence, becomes our world" (p. 58). Examples of this observation is how forests and ore become "natural resources", cows become "livestock" (pay close attention: live-stock), land becomes "property", wildlife becomes something to be "managed", etc. If we change our language, perhaps we will feel differently about the ways in which we interact with our ecological counterparts, perhaps even change those ways.

My ears attentive for more evidence of this phenomenon, I picked up on the following exchange at my friends' house, where they are starting a small urban farm, in regard to the ladies of the coop. I noticed the slight differences in the way the questions were phrased by different members of the house reflected subtle attitudinal differences towards their feathered friends:

"Are we getting any eggs?"

vs.

"Are the chickens giving any eggs?"

vs.

"Are the chickens laying?"

The first sees the chickens for their pure utility, and "we" are the important center around which the question revolves. The chickens themselves are not even mentioned, only their purpose (eggs) in relation to us. In the second, the (us) is still implied in the "giving", but the chickens are honored in being the subject of the question and acknowledged in their bestowing of eggs. The language of the third is perhaps the most respectful in that "we" are not in the sentence but rather the chickens as autonomous subjects fulfilling their natural cycles, which "we" only happen to benefit from.

If there is anything I have learned in my times of silence, it is how loose we can be with our tongues, how oft we speak without realizing the true implications of the arrangements of our words. Let us extend to those who provide our plates with food the courtesy of making them the subjects of our speech.