When who you are is relevant to what you think about accents

 A tweet from last week about London children's accents sparked a bit of twitter fuss and made me think about how the identity of the opinion-holder matters as much as the identity of the person the opinion is about. 

I think we can all agree that 'punching down' is bad, namely criticising or mocking someone in a position of less power than you. This would be like a very senior academic calling out a junior scholar in front of a room full of people at a conference, for instance - it's not cool. The opposite scenario may be confrontational, but the power dynamics mean that it probably isn't bullying in the second instance. Similarly, social groups have different levels of power or authority and so comedians' jokes can fall flat if they appear to be punching down: if you want to make jokes about poor people they'd better be couched in a lot of understanding and solidarity, whereas jokes about rich people are pretty fair game. 

The tweet was as follows: 

My sister has just started work teaching primary school kids in North London and has informed me that everybody at the school has such strong accents they don't say "Thoughtful", they just say "Fortfuw" and I don't know how she gets through the day without laughing at them.

— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 25, 2020

OK, so we have young children as the subject, so relative powerlessness, and working class children at that (we can tell from their accents), so a double whammy. Is this awful and mean? You'd think so, wouldn't you. Accent discrimination is a real insidious and nasty thing, a form of classism that often masks other prejudices and tends to be presented as concern or commentary on how people choose to live their lives. So this apparent mockery of these kids who do what linguists call th-fronting (pronouncing 'thought' and 'fort' the same) and l-vocalisation (pronouncing 'l' like a 'w') drew a bit of criticism from my linguist babes who are always on the lookout for injustice and sticking up for people who need a bit of help (trust me, there's a lot of Bad Opinions about language on the internet). 

The guy who tweeted it is Australian, and lives and works in Australia, and for me that puts a whole nother spin on things. Suddenly this isn't just some guy mocking the kids for speaking in an accent he thinks is 'wrong', it's delight in an utterly unfamiliar accent which probably sounds totally adorable if you don't hear it spoken around you or associate it with Eastenders. Maybe it has connotations of Victorian chimney sweeps and street urchins as in Oliver! and it seems anachronistic to find that it's just the everyday language of his sister's class. While it probably doesn't help with the overall ideal of removing the stigma of these features of London English, it also doesn't feel the same as people on the internet suggesting that the children should learn to 'speak properly' so that people take them more seriously. 

I don't want to use the word, so I'll just mention it instead

A while back I was in a meeting, and a colleague was talking about a group of people in her department. These people were troublesome, constantly pushing back against the work she was trying to do, and sort of ganging up against her. She spoke about this one particular person, and said this: 

I don't want to use the word 'ringleader'... 

This is a classic way of being rude about someone. You say you don't want to use a word X to describe them, and then there's a huge implied (or explicit) 'but', and we all know you mean X even if what you've actually said is a minimised or toned-down version of X (for example, 'I don't want to use the word 'ringleader' but they are a bit bossy'). It wouldn't stand up in court, it's so well-known a way of calling someone X. We laughed, in fact, when my colleague did this. 

A variant is 'I don't like to use the word X', which has the subtly different meaning that you regret having to use the word, but it does in fact apply to this person. You can accompany this one with a sad shake of your head, as it's such a shame that you've been forced to use such an unpleasant description of the person. 

The title of this post is a reference to the use/mention distinction, where in my example the person isn't strictly speaking using the word; they just mention it, but they still achieve some communicative effect with it. There are other ways of mentioning words that are more neutral, like if I'm blogging about a word, but... this is not one of them. 

Kerry the marry

Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I drink Starbucks only when I stop at a service station and there isn't another coffee place because, for reasons explored in another post, their coffee is not catered to my tastes). 

Here's their Christmas advert: 

The slogan is 'carry the merry', meaning that you're carrying around a drink full of Christmas spirit. Someone posted on twitter the other day that they bet linguists were all excited about it and I was thinking that it's a *bit* interesting that the adjective merry is the object of the verb, but not that exciting surely? and then days later I realised that this is an example of the merry-marry-Mary merger. 

This is a sound pattern that's incredibly well described and studied so we don't need to go into it here, but suffice to say that for most North American speakers, those three words sound identical (there are regional patterns where only two of them do, or none, or it varies). In the UK, other English-speaking countries, and in the parts of the US without this merger (e.g. Philadelphia), the three words are pronounced differently, as they are for me. (I think this generalisation is true; there may be other varieties with the merger or part of it but I'm not a specialist in this area.) 

It affects words with a vowel coming before an /r/ so carry is also affected, and the slogan would rhyme for many Americans. For their customers without this particular merger, it's assonance instead. 

I think that the fact that I didn't even notice it despite someone saying it was linguistically interesting shows just how much this goes below the radar. When someone has a different accent from you, you accommodate really easily and hear vowels especially as being 'the same' as your own. It sounds a bit odd if you try to imitate their vowel sounds so we just accept that these very different sounds are 'the same' in some way and in many cases can't even hear that they're different. There was a bit in Vocal Fries last year where host Carrie Gillon describes a time when she asked her professor to say her name correctly because he was pronouncing it with a British-type vowel, and she said 'say it as if it's spelt Kerry'. This really surprised me because although I can hear how (my) Kerry vowel is closer* to (her) Carrie vowel than (my) Carrie vowel is, I distinctly hear her name as Carrie and not Kerry, probably in part because I've seen it written down. (This type of confusing sentence is also why lexical sets were invented.) 

*If you're interested, it sounds closer because it literally is closer: they're produced in a more similar area of the mouth, at the front, with the difference just in the height of the tongue, whereas the British** Carrie vowel is produced with the tongue further back in the mouth. 

**These things are different again in Scotland which has a different set of vowel rules, so some of what I say about the UK applies here but not all of it. 

I declare this blog post to be interesting

Donald Trump lost the US election last week to Joe Biden. You might have missed it, it's not like it was literally all anyone was talking about all week. We even stopped talking about coronavirus for a bit. One of the things that characterised his unhinged campaign was an insistence on the election being fraudulent, and also that he had definitely got more votes. Because of the way the system works over there, states are 'called' for one or the other candidate once it's past reasonable doubt about who will win (e.g. the number of votes still to count isn't enough to change the current outcome). This means that anyone could call a state early, and they might be right, because it's 50/50, but they might also be wrong because they're just guessing, so you want to look at the basis on which they're calling it. 

Trump tweeted this, and Twitter immediately marked it as false or misleading: 

We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact,.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020

You can see he uses the word hereby in his claim for Michigan, which adds an air of authority and legality to the claim, although no actual legality of course. 

Hereby is a word meaning 'as a result of this utterance', so if you say I hereby declare this play park open, then you have opened the play park by uttering those words. You can also, if invested with the right authority, hereby forbid barbecues in this area before 6pm. This is what's known as a 'performative' speech act, because by uttering the thing, you are performing that act: claiming, declaring, promising, naming, and so on. Hereby is useful for legal documents, because it also means 'as a result of this document', so it means something like 'by signing this document you agree to this rule', and also that if the document is later overturned, so too is the thing that was hereby excluded/forbidden/claimed. 

In everyday speech it's actually less useful because the verb does most of the work, and the legality or validity is provided by the situation. If you don't have the right authority, you can of course still declare it, forbid it, whatever, but it doesn't have legal standing. So if you stand in your neighbour's garden and hereby declare that this is your property, it doesn't magically become your property. However, you have still declared it, and you would have even if you hadn't said hereby. There is no difference between 1 and 2 except for some posturing, and perhaps an implication that you're just now claiming it in (1), whereas in (2) perhaps there is some prior claim on it that you're bringing up now (it was promised to you by the host earlier on, perhaps). Your claim being upheld is dependent on the agreement of your friends. Similarly, there's no difference between (3) and (4), and the validity of your declaration is dependent only on you being some local dignity who's been asked to officially open the shopping centre; it isn't open if you just pass by a half-built complex and shout this at your friend. 

1. I hereby claim this last slice of pizza. 
2. I claim this last slice of pizza.
3. I hereby declare this shopping centre open. 
4. I declare this shopping centre open.

In a sentence like the one in my post's title, where I declare something subjective, then the validity is dependent on people agreeing with me. This is why statements like this are better if they declare something objective, but are also used to give additional (sometimes false) weight to opinions or baseless claims. My post might be dull as anything, or only some people might agree, but me declaring it to be interesting sounds like I have some authority to make a factual statement about it. 

So Trump claims Georgia and North Carolina just as much as he does Michigan, even though he doesn't say hereby for those ones, and the speech act is the same. The legality or validity of it is dependent not on his claiming them, but on the number of votes counted. At the time of writing, the former two are still not called by Associated Press, and of course his claim for Michigan came with a big censored 'if' clause about voter fraud, so no doubt he will be pursuing that one. 

Panic! in the pandemic

I had my first social distancing argument on Saturday. As I was queuing to pay for kippers at my local farm shop, a woman who apparently had no concept of personal space, never mind pandemic space, was right up behind me. I took a step forward, and she closed the gap again. Then I asked her to keep her distance (politely, I thought), and she sneered at me, shook her head, and told me not to panic. Panic! 

Panic, which I just now learnt is named after the god Pan, who'd shout when he woke from his naps and make the sheep scatter in fright, is a sudden fear provoking anxiety so strong it causes a fight-or-flight response. If you've ever had a panic attack, you'll know how strong a physical experience it is. Even if we're not using the medical or scientific definition, but a looser sense, it's still a pretty physical thing involving running about, not thinking straight, irrational decisions, things like that. 

Panic is not politely asking people to follow the guidelines we've been told to follow in order to stem a pandemic. (Pandemic is not named after Pan, sadly.) It's not a sustained, reasoned, relatively calm course of action. Yes, those of us keeping distance from others may be feeling anxiety, but it's not the sudden desire to flee and shortness of breath and racing heartbeat of panic. 

I've heard this word used a lot about people's rational (to me) responses to the pandemic, though, generally from right-wing or anti-lockdown or anti-mask commenters. They are the ones who think the virus isn't that bad, and that we should just go on as normal, perhaps 'protecting the vulnerable'. If you have this view, then a more appropriate word than 'panic' would be 'over-reaction'. 

Using the word 'panic' is just like when you're having an argument with someone and they say 'you're being hysterical', whereupon the correct response is to shriek 'I'm NOT being hysterical' and storm out slamming the door behind you. It makes you seem unreliable and undermines your actions, making them seem ridiculous or unreasonable. It's a dirty, underhand tactic but it works well. 

And yes, when the woman said that to me, I replied 'I'm NOT panicking' and stormed out.