Multicultural Meanderings

McWhorter: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

Always interesting, particularly his discussion of American Descendants of Slavery as legitimate distinction among African Americans (but not linked to anti-immigration activists):

In my last newsletter, I argued that it is unsuitably awkward for the word “plagiarism” to be applied both to the stealing of others’ ideas and the copying, perhaps accidentally, of boilerplate text without citing its source. To the extent that most would consider the former an egregious transgression and the latter more of a lazy misstep, English would benefit from using a different term for it.

It also bears mentioning that the way we use and process the word “plagiarism” teaches a couple of lessons about language and society more broadly. For one, the word can be taken as a reality check against a prominent idea concerning language. Put simply: Yes, specific vocabularies can channel the way that we think, but only to a limited extent.

The idea that language influences thought is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of its titular proponents, Benjamin Lee Whorf, noted for example that in the Hopi language, the word for the water that you drink is different from the word for water in nature, such as in a lake. To him, this difference suggested that the Hopi process reality differently from English speakers, and that more broadly:

Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

Psychologists have since shown repeatedly that differences in how languages’ vocabularies label experience do condition very small differences in thought patterns. In Russian, for instance, there is not one word for blue, but two: one for darker blue and one for lighter blue. An experiment has shown that this does make Russians, when presented with a gradation from dark to light blue, a tiny bit more sensitive to the transition point between the two. Having explicit labels for the two shades alerts one a tad more precisely to the difference between them.

But again, these are very small differences in perception. No experiment has demonstrated that differences in language affect our minds so profoundly as to result in significantly different world views. It is culture — i.e., reality — that does that, not the specifics of how narrowly or broadly a word happens to apply.

Our prior discussion of the word “plagiarism” demonstrates this. Just as English having a single word for dark blue and light blue does not prevent us from telling the difference in color between a navy blazer and a robin’s egg, the fact that “plagiarism” covers both idea theft and careless cutting and pasting does not mean that we can’t tell the difference between the two. In fact, we process it quite readily, and our disagreements over that distinction drove much of the debate over plagiarism by the former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Nonetheless, the past few years have seen an uptick in suggestions that we use new terms to refer to things and, especially, people, the intent being to refashion how we perceive them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, an extensive set of suggestions is making the rounds among volunteers. One such suggestion is that volunteers say that people “have” a disability rather than that they “suffer” from it. A similar recommendation on a similar list (since taken down) from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center emphasized person-first language to such a degree that one would have to refer to earthquake victims as people who have experienced an earthquake. In both cases, the idea is to avoid essentializing people as sufferers or victims.

The problem with terminology like this is that because the correspondence between words and reality is only ever approximate, these novel ways of speaking would not affect our understanding of the world. To say that someone “has” a disability hardly distracts us from the fact that the person, inherently, suffers because of it — this is baked into the very concept of disability whether we utter the verb or not. Similarly, saying that someone experienced an earthquake will never change our perception that a person whose home was reduced to rubble is a victim. (Never mind that it is unclear what the benefit would be if it actually did.)

Our discussion of “plagiarism” is also useful, however, in that it demonstrates that there are times when clarity makes the addition of a new word or phrase to our vocabulary useful. For example, there was a time just a few decades back when there were no established terms for “sexual harassment” or “date rape.” People typically understood “rape” and “sexual assault” to be violent attacks by strangers. What we now call date rape was often dismissed by society as “not the real thing.”

The idea was embedded in our language as well as our culture. Any fan of old plays and movies has seen women depicted as warning each other with a click of the tongue about men who are “all hands” or the like. One of the cringiest Broadway songs I know of is in the 1951 Phil Silvers vehicle “Top Banana,” when a woman sings a song, “I Fought Every Step of the Way,” about what we now know as date rape, but brushes it off as something she simply had to endure. It’s far better that we now have clear labels for what happened to that character. (In a cruel irony, the actress who sang the song, Rose Marie, saw it and her other numbers cut from the film version after she refused the producer’s advances.) The subsequent adoption of the terms “date rape” and “sexual harassment” obviously hasn’t made such acts go away. But it has facilitated their discussion, condemnation and prosecution.

A similar example is raised by the acronym ADOS, for American Descendants of Slavery. The movement bearing this name advocates making a distinction between Black people with ancestry within the United States and Black people with ancestry in the Caribbean and Africa but not the United States. Their proposition is that if the government should ever grant reparations for slavery, they should go only to ADOS, rather than to all Americans of African genetic descent. Although I am unenthusiastic about reparations as a concept, I agree with this game plan if they are ever granted, and feel that a new, non-acronym term distinguishing the native-descended subset could be useful — certainly better than on-the-fly hacks like “Black people from here,” “real Black people” and the like.

I should note that some of the ADOS idea’s most fervent supporters have fostered outright divisiveness between the two subsets of Black Americans and have been linked to anti-immigration activists. I cannot walk alongside them. However, if this divisive strain fades and what remains is an explicit term for Black Americans descended from slavery, it will be useful to any number of discussions. I dispute claims that all Black Americans must march under the same label because skin color means experiencing racism regardless of whether one’s roots are in Ghana or Gary, Ind. Racism is an unnecessarily gloomy and unconstructive keystone for a racial self-conception, especially in the 21st century.

The messiness of the term “plagiarism” that we discussed last week, then, shows us that to speak is to be ever aware not only of Webster’s-style definitions, but of the buzzing richness of context. And it also shows that at times it still can be useful to bolster that context by adding additional, helpful labels to our existing stockpile. There is, as always, a world in every word.

Source: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality