#p2sb

[hammerkeyboard]

Thanks to Mr Donald Trump, a new phrase has become commonplace lingo around the world: locker room talk.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

Thanks to Mr Donald Trump, a new phrase has become commonplace lingo around the world: locker room talk.

It was the defence espoused by the Republican candidate for the American presidency earlier this month, following the release of an unbearably lewd Access Hollywood tape, which featured him explicitly boasting about sexually assaulting women.

Last week, his 38-year-old son, Mr Donald Trump Jr, added salt to injury by calling locker room talk a "fact of life".

"I think we all probably know guys who have had conversations with guys who go a little bit in that direction," Mr Trump Jr mansplained on a radio show. "That's a fact of life."

Now let's for a moment (very generously) give both Trumps the benefit of the doubt - that what Trump senior was saying were just words and that he might not have acted on his lecherous thoughts.

The question then becomes, are words ever just words?

Perhaps it is because I am a journalist and a voracious consumer of words that I find this argument completely indefensible. But even if you do not craft prose as an occupation, it is hard to deny the power and weight that words hold.

The lexicon we use forms the building blocks that construct our reality - it is the reason and source of implicit biases we create in our lives. Deflecting it as "just talk", as Mr Trump and his son have done, can make potentially harmful language seem harmless.

The inherent problem is that many people do consider the idea of locker room talk a fact of life - part of an unspoken alpha code.

When the women are out of earshot, it suddenly becomes acceptable to take off the shackles of politically correct speak and veer into lewd bro-banter.

Words create worlds. And words spoken - whether in hushed whispers to a single other person or over a loudspeaker to thousands - carry the same weight.

What we say influences the way we think. And our minds then influence our actions.

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Calling females as "guys" (collective term)

Professor Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at the University of Oxford, said : “If women want to be addressed as ‘guys’, I’m not going to tell them they’re betraying the feminist cause. (Particularly if the alternative is being addressed as ‘babes’ and ‘dolls’.) In language, as in life, you do your best with whatever you’ve got.” She has written a blogpost on this subject, in which she compares ‘guys’ to ‘dudes’, which is “also ‘cool’ in the sense of anti-establishment, rebellious, non-conformist”. She is against banning words, a “blunt instrument”. She rejects the suggestion that many women adopt “guys” because they are “flattered to be treated as honorary men”, as suggested by some linguists. “The question feminists should be asking ... isn’t why they’re talking like men (they aren’t), it’s why they can only express cool solidarity with other women by using prototypically male address terms. Aren’t there any female terms that would serve their purpose just as well?” If we get too po-faced about language, we lose its playfulness. “Yeah, man” as a colloquial exclamation now seems innocuously gender neutral. One of the most popular ways for gay men to address each other currently is “hey gurl hey” - a cheeky subversion of gender norms. For many, myself included, it’s a way to counter the narrow-mindedness, delusion and hypocrisy of gay men who insist only “straight acting” men are appealing, pigeonholing themselves as “masc for masc”, stigmatising femininity as undesirable – all while secretly twerking to Your Disco Needs You. Jessica Valenti wrote last week about the campaign to rid our lexicon of mistresses. And the #banbossy campaign saw celebrities like Beyoncé asking to lose the sexist term.

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Institutional discourse - sexuality, media

In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead opting to stir up xenophobia over Turkish immigrants and publicising an offer of “free pearl and white sapphire earrings”. This is erasure of LGBT people – pure and simple – after their community was horrifically targeted.

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https://linguisticus.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/man-made-language-language-and-reality-by-dale-spender-1980/ http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/e6-20b-09-01.pdf

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Jargon

a kind of shorthand. It can be useful for people as a shortcut to communicating complex concepts. But it’s intrinsically limited: it only works when all parties involved know the code – to communicate an idea to a broad, non-specialist audience, it doesn’t matter how good you are at embroidering your prose with evocative imagery and clever analogies, the jargon simply must go. Reasons for use of jargon: - gives an air of understanding that is just about convincing enough to maintain power - politicians deliberately use jargon to diffuse our ire and frustrations. They pitch their speeches and briefings at a level most of us will never understand in order to limit public scrutiny. Their reasoning is thus: if we can’t understand what they’re talking about then how can we possibly begin to question them? - Advertisers do the same thing when they use pseudoscience to market their products. They say things like “the pentapeptides in our anti-ageing cream are the active ingredient” or “our makeup remover contains micellar water to give you a fresher look”. Although this is complete drivel, the advertisers know that many of us are happy to accept the claims as fact because we don’t have the capacity to challenge them. All of this is worrying because it represents a genuine threat to democracy. If we can’t fully comprehend the decisions that are made for us and about us by government then how we can we possibly revolt or react in an effective way? Yes, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves more on the big issues, but I also think it’s important that politicians and journalists meet us halfway. Quote: old Einsteinian cliche: “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

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Diction - cancer and wartime rhetoric

language used around cancer seems to revolve around wartime rhetoric: battle, fight, warrior, beat. While I recognise that these violent words may help others on their journey with cancer, as someone who is never going to "win her battle" with this disease, I find them uncomfortable and frustrating to hear. However, I do understand why this military language has penetrated the media, charities and everyday life. It is meant to evoke positivity at an unimaginably difficult time in someone's life. But I think it can have the opposite effect and we need to challenge it and to break away from how we have been conditioned to think and speak about a disease that will affect one third of us at some point. instead of reaching for the traditional battle language, [life] is about living as well as possible, coping, acceptance, gentle positivity, setting short-term, achievable goals, and drawing on support from those closest to you

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Singlish words in OED

These words include “char siu”, which the OED has defined as “In Cantonese cookery, roast pork marinated in a sweet and savoury sauce, typically served sliced into thin strips. Also used in char siu bun, char siu pork, char siew rice”; hawker centre, a term first used in 1966 to denote “a food market at which individual vendors sell cooked food from small stalls, with a shared seating area for customers); and killer litter, defined as “objects thrown or falling from high-rise buildings, endangering people below”, which was first coined in 1984.

The OED noted that while some of the words are also used in Malaysia and the rest of Southeast Asia, there were some formations in English that are used only in Singapore, like "sabo" ("to harm, inconvenience, or make trouble for (a person); to trick, play a prank on").

The dictionary also shed light on the etymology of the words, noting that the exclamation "wah" ("used to express admiration, encouragement, delight, surprise") is of multiple origins, partly a borrowing from Hindi as well as Chinese.