Girl Talk

On the day of the all-important Michigan primary, I should be obsessing over the last ditch effort by Sanctimonious Rick to tumble Mechanical Mitt, both proffering their utter disregard for women as the reason they should be elected. I should be fuming over His Ranine Highness Newt declaring himself Emperor of all fossil fuels, claiming he will lower the gas price to $2.50 per gallon when he is elected.

Instead, I find myself intrigued by a recent New York Times article by Douglas Quenqua on the linguistic importance of the words of young women.  Quenqua's piece solved a mystery for me: it told me why I cringe at the language habits of girls--worrying that they undermine their credibility and mine--while also finding utterly compelling the inventiveness, freedom, and sassiness that go along with creating a language style all one's own. 

My sister and I were lovers of language from an early age--possibly due to the fact that our Italian grandparents spoke a beautiful version English that, at the time, was called "broken," lapsing at time into their mother tongue, a Northern Italian, Piemontese dialect.  My bilingual father's linguistically complex insults, delivered with the vigor of a slam poet surely also played a role. My sister and I created imaginary friends with elaborate names and insane accents; she and I and my best friend Julie established the E club--everyone in the club acquired a new name that ended in E.  What fun that was.

Quenqua's article points out at the micro level what the Republican primary is making evident at the macro level: women can't get no respect, no matter what we do. From the article: “'If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,' said Carmen Fought,  a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. 'The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.'”  I ask: with a name like Dr. Carmen Fought, how could you not rule the world?

Here we are, decades "after" feminism, after Title IX, after the Lillie Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (oh, right, that was just signed in 2009).  Women have been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men since 1982 and more master’s degrees than men since 1981. They earned more than half of all post-secondary degrees in 2008, according to the AFL-CIO. And the things that women do with their speech and their voices are considered stupid and insecure, just because they are women.

If our culture is so in need of opportunities for ridicule, couldn't we just heap that opprobrium on some more deserving targets? You know who I'm talking about...the privileged, self-serving, ruling class (men and women) who mangle the English language to "rebrand" ideas to suit their agendas. (And I am not referring only to politicians here--although there are many who qualify).

My first nomination: Frank Luntz, the strategist and pollster who worked for Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Frog Prince Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. He taught Bush how to obfuscate the consensus among most climate researchers regarding global warming. I'd like to begin my campaign there--what would you call a person who refuses to address real problems because doing so doesn't rack up profits for them and who manipulate language to make it impossible to communicate clearly, inventively and poetically (which might open up our imaginative, problem-solving capacities and even create some common ground). Would you call someone like that insecure, emotional or even stupid?