Geekery V: They are missing even more.

In many Indo-European languages [1], all nouns, even those representing inanimate objects like pieces of furniture, even words like "person" that could refer to both males and females, can be described as masculine, feminine, or neuter. A group of linguists recently did an experiment to determine if speakers are influenced by grammatical gender.

They took groups of native German and Spanish speakers and asked them to describe sets of objects. Interestingly, when the Germans were asked to describe a key, for which they have a masculine word, they tended to use adjectives like "hard", "metallic", "jagged", and "useful". The Spanish-speakers, who have a feminine word for the same object, tended to describe it as "tiny", "shiny", or "delicate". This is quite clearly a reflection of lingual links to gender schemas.

Speakers of these languages cannot run from the genderdized connections their distant ancestors made when, for example, they gave most abstract nouns an aura of femininity.

[1] Including Romance languages descended from Latin, the mother of hard-wired sexism.

Geekery IV: We are missing pronouns.

Have you ever struggled with calling a beloved animal or a human baby "it", even though you don't know the gender to provide a "he" or "she"? Do you often use "they" in situations where an English teacher (or I) would be likely to correct you to "he or she"? This may seem trivial; your friends will undoubtedly still catch your meaning if you say, "If someone slacks off on a group project, they should get the low grade." But there is significant evidence to suggest that gender in language may affect the way we think and relate to cultural concepts of gender. In many situations, we literally don't have the words to speak about people without giving their genders.

In a 1978 experiment, Moulton, Robinson, and Elias tested college students to see if they were influenced by the gender of pronouns: 'College students were asked to make up a story about a fictional character who fit the following theme: 'In a large coeducational institution, the average student will feel isolated in introductory courses.' 1/3 of the students received the pronoun "his" in the blank, 1/3 "his or her", and 1/3 "their". ("Their" is of course technically incorrect, and "his" was considered grammatically correct until recent decades.)

The results? Predictably, there was a strong tendency for female students to write about females and male students to write about males. As a whole, however, only 35% of the "his" students wrote about females, compared to 46% for "they" and 56% for "his or her". Clearly, the gender of the pronoun influenced the writers. This experiment has been repeated and expanded to include different age ranges and different activities and yielded similar, and sometimes even more pronounced, results. [1]

As English speakers, most of our nouns are common gender. For example, if you use the word "sheep," that sheep could be male or female, or you might later refer to it as an "it". Likewise, the word "firefighter" does not refer specifically to a man or a woman (although our gender-typing minds would probably think of a man first).

However, our pronouns aren't so incorporating. We have "he" (masculine), "she" (feminine), and "it" (neuter), but no corresponding word that doesn't denote gender. "You", "they", and "we" do not, but the first two cannot serve the first person, and "we" and "they" cannot be singular. Therefore, we pretend babies and animals are sexless, and we fill our writing with awkward "he or she" phrases, or else ignore these fixes and become barbarians and sexists.


1. Check out Janet Shibley Hyde, 1984. Third graders are more likely to say that the sentence, "When a kid plays football, she likes to play with friends," than the same sentence with a he in it, even though both are grammatically correct.

Haiku

I wasn't fond of the last poem I posted here, and many of my posts are too long, so here is another, shorter one I've written:


A platefull of words:
Stringy meat and slimy beans
Garnished with thank-yous.

Bears Wrestling

I chose the piece Bears Wrestling, a 1940 granite sculpture by Mathew Aqigaaq. It was presented in this exhibit of American art with no explaination or information except the name of the artist, the date, and the medium. However, when put in perspective of the portrayal of Native American art, it represents an interesting transformation in Inuit society.

In "traditional" Inuit culture, or culture before the influence of Europeans, this sculpture most likely would not have been ma. Inuits carved and decorated wood, stone, and ivory tools and crafted small objects that served religious or narrative purposes, but there are not pre-colonial examples of such heavy and time-consuming project as stone sculptures created purely for impractical aesthetic value. Art for art's sake did not have a comfortable place in a culture so impacted by scarcity of resources and nomadic lifestyle. In fact, some Inuit languages do not have a word analgous to our word "art".

At some point after the arrival of Europeans, though, Native American arts across the continents began to be influenced by the economy of the colonists. Native Americans began producing some objects for barter or purchase by Europeans rather than use by other Native Americans. These objects did not need to make sense with their maker's culture. Today this is extremely apparent in souvenir stands. There is a set of Indian cultural characteristics non-Indians will buy, and so we find tepees, turquoise jewelry, Sioux headdresses, and West-Coast totems all for sale by the same Seneca citizens.

In the John Smith reading, I was struck by the complete lack of interest in Indian culture--according to the footnotes, he didn't even bother to get half the names right, and seemed to prescribe undifferentiated religious articles to all he met. The legacy of complete disregard for accuracy and understanding of Native American culture can certainly be traced back to the attitude of the first settlers.

Mathew Aqigaaq is an artist of Inuit descent who creates fairly large stone figures, something his ancestors of 500 years simply wouldn't have done. It can be argued that some aspect of Inuit culture has been unfairly stuffed down into the snow by European economic pressures (do your own research on Canadian exploitation--"You should all carve totem poles, they'll sell better."), but Bears Wrestling clearly has quite a bit on plastic wampum made in China. Larger stone sculpture is a genre that naturally follows from traditional Inuit carving practices existing in a less physically harsh and demanding environment. It has resulted in something that is clearly art and posseses a regionally unique style that I personally find attractive.

Cold Gods

Two years ago on spring break I felt a sort of grinding madness that lead to frequent evening walks. It was early enough in the year that half past seven was black. I would walk under the streetlights by subdivisions, usually quickly, usually not dressed warmly enough, and as I went I would make disjointed connections between arbitrary common objects and whichever characteristics surfaced in my boiling brain. A single golden leaf clinging to a bare tree was a shivering coin, and I praised it (aloud) for its steadfastness. A crushed pine-cone on the sidewalk shadow appeared to me in the shape of a black heart. These walks would all end exactly halfway on the bridge over the Yahara; I never crossed it, only stood there to stare at the black and moving water.

The river was always my purpose, my undeclared destination. I judged the value of the walk on how long I could spend standing there at the edge, clinging to the metal rail that burned my un-gloved hands, yielding my open eyes to the wind that had not yet lost its teeth. And I stared downward at the shapes of the water constantly replacing itself and thought, blood is so thick and red and warm and human, water is so clear, cool, eternal, If we had water in our veins we would be cold gods.

I thought it in these words, and I recalled these words today while probing a dream I had last night. It was the kind of dream that becomes a nightmare only after you wake up and examine its atrocities. In this dream there were two or three or five beings that resembled men and women in appearance, but they were not people, certainly not human. I knew this first as one inexplicably knows universal truths in dreams, but I also saw it.

They placed less value on life than a small egocentric child places on the beetle he or she pulls apart in playful curiosity. They carelessly killed a man because they were not wildly impressed by his work, then discussed it idly, not bothering to face his nearby corpse. One of them skinned a cat alive; I saw the pink muscles still in the form, still twitching in the second before I looked away. The thing was holding the white and bloody fur in one hand, and eating it, tearing soft, wet swatches of it away in its teeth.

Perhaps most disturbingly, until I woke up, I was emotionally detached. I disapproved of these creatures and despised their acts, but possessed inadequately the empathy that was absent from their blank, bright eyes.

They were terrible and superior; I took it for a fact that they transcended me. In their indifference they seemed divine embodiments of amoral nature. They saw the universe as it might see itself : wildly and unaffectedly.

It is so strange that this which gives us the most undeniable awe is what we cannot allow in ourselves, and strange that its polar opposite of unlimited benevolent awareness is hallowed by its side.

Singing America

I can't sing America
A land so close it's out of focus
Always a dream,
Always someone else's,
The edge of a blanket partly before my eyes.
I can never hear what is underneath the myriad muffling folds,
Only feel what is pocketed in mine.
I've sung soprano, tenor, alto (not quite bass)
I thought I was a composer?
I've sung so many parts
I should be able to sing my own.

Eminent Emerson

"There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."



I chose this disgustingly long quotation partly because I don't fully understand what he means, and partly because it closes the passage I thought was the sickest. In the preceding passage there are pithier statements: "A man is to carry himself as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he"; "The doctrine of hatred must be preached...." statements which I found despicable and arrogant.

Although I must agree on a superficial level that personal strength and confidence are good things, even necessary to "genius" as he claims, my humanistic sentiment cannot accept his nihilistic attitude towards everything that is not from himself. I'm sorry, but giving to charity is good, it's the best we can do. And abolitionists aren't bad people. I hope I'm not misreading the essay completely, I'm sure I must have some misinterpretations, but I still disliked the gerneral tone. He even goes so far to say that the truth is subjective, and that what HE percieves is fact.

The part I don't understand is the what his "class of persons" is. Presumably, by extention, what ANYONE percieves is fact, but he never really bothers to go there, and doesn't let the rest of humanity play by his rules. He claims consanguinity with all other men, but then sets them at an inferior level.