babble

Yes, this is going to be another one of those posts where i ramble on about something for a while and eventually get to the point around page three. But bear with me on this one, ‘kay?

I have a long-standing fascination with languages. I grew up in a multilingual household - my dad is fluent in English and Italian, and he knows enough French and German to get by. My stepmum is fluent in English, French and Italian, and has occasion to study Japanese and Russian. I started learning French in 6th grade, and studied language all throughout high school - one year of German, three years of French. I’ve never been able to get the feel of German, but i’ve had more than a few native French speakers compliment me on my French accent.

One year, for my (16th? i can’t recall the year) birthday, i asked for Chinese lessons. No, really. It was only a three-week course, but i still retain everything i learned there. Not much, but i can count to ten (with only one counting modifier, ge), and say “thank you” and “i don’t know”. The words for “table” and “window” are tossed in there somewhere. My Chinese instructor actually asked me who had put me up to this - he thought i was fluent in Chinese and that one of his friends had sent me there to pull a prank on him. He said my accent was too good for someone who’d never spoken it before.

When i was working in tandem with an au pair from Sweden (for a mom who worked ~60 hours a week, where an au pair can only work 35 hours a week), i tried to study a bit of that. The day that i found out Icelandic was basically Old Norse? I went nuts, my friends. Absolutely nuts.

Ahh, but Russian is the language that gets the blood thumping for me. In high school i was obsessed with codes. I took all of my class notes in a code i’d developed so well that i could write it in cursive. When i got bored with the creation process of that code, i went on to learn Cyrillic. I stopped that one because i couldn’t find any resources for cursive Cyrillic at the time - and because there were some letters i just couldn’t get the hang of writing (the De, for example). I’ve taken it up again, recently. I do want to learn Russian, but first i need to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.

My stepmum and i have long shared a fascination with the way things don’t always translate very well - especially idioms. When she was studying Russian, she learned that the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” is a perfect example of this. Translate it into Russian, and then back into English… and it comes back as “blind and insane”. Makes sense, nyet? And yet it’s totally not what one might have intended to convey.

Should you find yourself at a dinner party in France, satisfactorily fed and being offered another course, do be careful to never say “non, merci, je suis plein” (”no, thanks, i’m full”). For starters, saying non is adequate to indicate you don’t want any more; the merci is acting as a contradiction. If you did want more, you could say merci and it would be as good as a “yes”. So “non, merci” comes across as indecisive - no, yes. (Ignore that bit, seems i was misinformed. Oops. Heh.)

There’s also the eensy problem that the last half of that sentence (”je suis plein“) just informed your host(ess) that you are pregnant. Because in French, saying that you are “full” is an idiomatic way of saying you are full with child. “Would you like some more paté?” “No, i’m pregnant.” Way to break the ice, there.

Given that idioms tend to also be regional within a given language, why is it we English speakers can be so certain that our own turns of phrase will always be understood? If i ask to borrow a “rubber”, what am i asking you for: erasers, galoshes, or condoms? Woe to an old British acquaintance of mine who learned this sort of thing the hard way in San Francisco, where she unwittingly asked if it was okay to “light a fag”… “fag” being slang for “cigarette” on her side of the pond.

I could go on for years with more examples, but perhaps i’ll spare you and get to the point.

These sorts of cultural idioms and idiomatic phrases aren’t limited just by region. Common language does not equate common ground. Yes, you and i may technically speak the same language - if we are to use so broad a brush as the entirety of the English language. However, in the case of slang or idiom within a microculture… well, it gets complicated.

Microculture is an interesting word, and an interesting concept. This is where i’m going to start quoting Ben, because this is a particular fascination of his (whereas i consider myself a mere dabbler in this particular topic). So for the rest of this post, wherever you see quotes, it’s Ben i’m quoting.

The premise of this idea is very simple: if a social form has any of the earmarks of a distinct culture, it may be classified as such and the methods, jargon, etc that we use for understanding cultural identity and interaction may be applied, no matter how small this group may be.

Ben and i have our own microculture, our own shared lingo and terminology. When i look at him and say “go team!”, he knows that’s another way of saying “i love you, and what’s more, i love us.” My old roommate can look at me and say “lacquer” - and we will both instantly collapse into giggles.

Consider this proposition: where there is a cliché, there is a culture. Clichés are idiomatic expression, collections of words that impart a meaning beyond their literal import. We find examples of this not only in broad cultural groups but in small ones as well. There is no circle of friends too small to have an inside joke, no family without phrases that evoke event and history, no interest group without a degree of internal language. We generally consider these arrangements of meaning as jargon, shorthand, an efficient means of expression, and they do serve that purpose. More, through the manner in which those phrases are constructed, related, and retired, they indicate trends of concept and language, a rough set of “rules” by which linguistic forms are invented as needed.

Big stuff there: where there’s a cliché, there’s a culture. Given that there are no shortage of clichés regarding fat and fat people (and even fat acceptance), i think it’s certainly safe to say that we have our own culture. Taking that into account and going a step further, we have our own language.

Or rather, we should, and we think we do.

I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: self/body/fat acceptance is a process - and we are all on different parts of that process. I’m going to be a horribly naughty person and say that yes, some people are further along the path than others.

Some people have found out about the fatosphere from news articles, some have found it through links in feminist blogs, some have found it through links in ED-related blogs, some have found it from links on anti-FA sites, some have randomly stumbled onto it while googling diet tips. The list goes on, but however we got here, sometimes it seems that we’re all using words and phrases that are shorthand that make sense within the context to which we’re most accustomed - not the microculture in which we are now taking part.

While the FA movement has been around for a while, the fatosphere itself is still relatively young. Even as it grows, new people come in with their own contexts and backgrounds. In order for us to get through our rough patches of miscommunications and misunderstandings, we have to have the self-awareness to acknowledge that we sometimes are not actually speaking the same language… and the patience to work out the details. If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves in an ever-expanding (as more people join the conversation) cycle of growth and stagnation.

Not only does this sort of thing interfere with the ways we communicate amongst ourselves, it interferes even more with the way we are viewed from the outside. Doubly so: if we can’t reliably talk amongst ourselves without language or phrase-based misunderstandings, how can we expect people to understand what it is we’re trying to say?

Get a liberal and a conservative debating a point of political contention. The Liberal is speaking Liberalese and English, the Conservative is speaking Conservatese and English. The Liberal is using the Liberal rules to indicate when he is speaking L-ese or English, The Con is using Con rules to indicate when he is speaking Con-ese or English. Neither of them know when the other is speaking L-ese/Con-ese, the languages they don’t share, or English, the language they do, because they don’t share the same rules for interpreting and informing the other that a language swap has occurred.

Now, assume they’re both Mets fans and get them talking about baseball. They may still starkly disagree, but they are far more likely to understand each other.

The solution implied is to find a way to get them to talk about politics in the LANGUAGE of baseball instead of the Lib-ese/Con-ese, English mess described above.

How can we convince culture in general that our “out of sight, out of mind” is not actually “blind and insane”, if we can’t even get that across within our own microculture? Maybe we should use baseball terminology - at least then we’d have a well-defined context to work with.