Entangled in decisions about how to talk
All at once, we’re finding popular use of certain words slip back and forth over the line of acceptability and incorrectness. Words like….gay.
Only Diogenes could deliver this essay.
The website bears the aptly unwieldy name Think before you speak. Don’t say “That’s so gay.” A project of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, the campaign employs posters, print ads and videos with the aim of curbing an element of teen slang that gay ideologues find particularly vexing.
For the uninitiated, it may be well to explain that saying “That’s so gay” does not condemn the object of disparagement as characteristic or suggestive of homosexuality. The fascinating point, on the contrary, is that the word gay in this slang has become a general term of disapproval, semantically indistinguishable from “wrong.” As Prof. Wittgenstein said, usage is meaning.
This is illustrated with admirable if unintentional clarity by the instructional videos provided at the site. One of them shows a pair of young cashiers named Emma and Julia discussing their plans for the night. The following dialogue takes place:
Julia: “So, are you going out tonight?”
Emma: “I can’t. My parents say I have to be home right after work.”
Julia: “That’s so gay.”At this point an indignant customer interrupts to rebuke them: “That is so Emma and Julia!” and the voiceover draws the moral: “Imagine if who YOU are were used as an insult.”
Okay, hold it. I must admit here I’ve heard teens and young adults….say, on college campuses…..use that line (“that’s so gay”) often enough I knew that no matter how with it I’ve stayed over the years with language and slang and changing cultural connotations, I missed that one altogether. ‘That’s so gay’? One thing I detected from its context, was that it didn’t remotely mean ‘homosexual’. It just meant something someone came up with and other young people worked it into their lexicon, and they got it. It meant something like stupidly out of touch or uncool or something that doesn’t translate, actually.
So now about this campaign…
They’ve bull’s-eyed the wrong target. English provides plenty of words that are meant to demean homosexuals, but gay is not one of them. On the contrary, gay is the term homosexual pedants insist the rest of us use in referring to homosexuals. “An insult,” as analytic philosopher Michael Levin writes, “is a word or a gesture used with the intention of causing affront through the mutual recognition of that intention.” Yet there is no mutual recognition here, as is obvious from the fact that the whole thrust of the Think Before You Speak campaign is to instruct the speaker about an intention he didn’t have. Nota bene: Julia didn’t intend to disparage gays, she intended to disparage the decision of Emma’s parents. And Julia’s use of the adjective gay did not condemn that decision as fey or twee or camp but simply as wrong, as contemptible in itself. And that’s the linguistically interesting point.
Diogenes is uniquely qualified for this lesson.
A nut with a left-handed thread is bad for a bolt with a right-handed thread. Try to put them together and, as the Aussies say, you bugger it up — and even Aussies with no moral qualms about buggery will say it. As Levin explains, while our judgments may be conscious and personally formed, our tools for expressing them are acquired from without:
“When we become entangled in decisions about how to talk, we lose contact with the reality our thought is supposed to be about. Like playing the piano, language is largely a system of acquired habits, and fluent speech accompanied by constant conscious decisions about which words to utter is as difficult as fluent pianism accompanied by constant conscious decisions about which keys to hit.”
Hence the self-defeating futility of the Think Before You Speak campaign. They’re asking the young to replace an unwitting 21st century reference to warped sexuality with an unwitting 8th century reference to warped sexuality.
Improve your chances of getting this by reading the whole thing.
