The Power of Language
February 9, 2009I have been doing a lot of readings for my classes lately and it has been making me think a lot about the power of our words. Two of the more powerful readings that got me started thinking this way are “Dude You’re A Fag”:Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse by CJ Pascoe and “Names Will Never Hurt Me” by Manju Varma-Joshi, Cynthia Baker, and Connie Tanaka. In one article the way the terms “fag” and “gay” are used is discussed, and in the other it looks more at the way racial terms are used and the effect that they have on the person that they are directed at. I think what struck me the most about these two articles is that in most cases we have see individuals who are not even aware of how powerful the terms that they are using are.
Language is the tool that we use to communicate with other and I think that we often take for granted the strength of our communication and how much our language is changing all the time, and not always for the best. The prime example of this is the term “gay.” It has gone from meaning happy or excited, to referring to a specific group of people, to being used as a way to express that something is stupid.
There has been a lot of attention to this idea in the media lately as well and you can see these ideas in the following videos:
These videos were sponsered by a website called Think before you speak. This is a great website for demonstrating how we have changed the meaning of words in our society and could be a good place to allow students to explore.
Another thing i thought about when I was reading this articles was that the language used in the articles left something to be desired. The way that most academic articles are written makes it very hard for the average individual to read. The language used in some of the articles makes the information in them less accessible to everyone, and I wonder why? Is it neccessary? Do academic articles need to take vocabulary to that level in order to be considered worthwhile?
This is one of the powers and benefits of blogging…having others dissect and critique academic work in their own words. Obviously this runs the risk of misinterpretation but that continues to be a challenge for all information.
Jen – that is completely true! I think the more studying I do and the more reading I do, the more I realize the power of language. In our ed psyc. class, we are working very hard on using the “people first” language – as a individual is always a person before they are a disability. I think it is very easy to insult people, even when you do not mean to. A simple choice in wrong words is blow up in your face!
When you ask if language always needs to be taken to that consideration, I do think it has to be… My little sister also was common for saying “retarded” or “gay” when she was frustrated… I sat her down and asked her if she knew what those words really meant! She is in grade 12 but didn’t actually think of by saying that you are actually insulting a group of people.
As teachers, we are going to have to be very careful of what we say and how we say it. I learnt this within the first couple weeks of my internship when I accidently said “dang” in front of my class when I dropped a glass cup. This kids automatically thought of “damn” when the word “dang” was said – and hence, Miss.H was swearing in the classroom!… Not a good situation.
Dionne – I actually planned on blogging on that exact thing tonight, and with it posting the results from my survey that we did a couple weeks ago. It always surprises me that such a simply concept is overlooked in our education and how even at a university level we still see the examples of potentially harmful language being presented to us by our peers and profs.