Language nuggets: boomer

If you are an English Language student, you are probably being reminded all the time that English is a vibrant, living, constantly evolving force that is always being discussed and debated. And that’s not just your English teacher loving their work and getting tripped out on linguistics: it’s true, dammit.

Stories about language are featured every day in various news outlets and – unlike in my early days of teaching this course – you don’t need to keep yellowing cuttings from newspapers in a folder, you can go on teh interwebz and save them for future reference or just share them via social media with other language nerds.

Sometimes though, the sheer volume of language stories is a bit much to cope with. “Where does it all fit in to what I’m studying?”, “What does this even mean?” and “Why is that pigeon staring at me?” might all be questions you ask yourself as you scan the stories. And I’d like to help you with two of those questions in the next few posts on EngLangBlog. 

What I’m hoping to do is take a few recent news stories about language and see what uses we can put them to. Some of them are just interesting stories about words, some are darker and more politically tinged (Don’t blame me: we’re living in dark times.) and others shed a bit of light on new ways of thinking about an aspect of the course. I used to do this quite a lot on the blog, back in the days before Twitter but gradually social media took over and became the more effective way of sharing such stories, but sometimes at the expense of a slightly more detailed and developed coverage of the story. 

Anyway, here's the first one, and others will (I hope…I plan, anyway…) follow in the next few posts.

Boomer

While the English language is a rich and resourceful tool for expressing humanity’s many and complex needs and wants, it’s also great for slagging off people and calling them names. And ‘boomer’ is one of the latest terms to gain prominence. 

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, ‘boomer’ is short for ‘baby boomer’: “a person born in a time when there is a marked increase in population; the word is especially used to describe people born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1964. It has been in use since the early 1960s”. 

So, it’s not a new word at all, but one that has been around for a while. If that’s the case, why is it now being used and argued about? Well, it’s the way it’s being used now by younger people (anyone not born between 1946 and 1964), be they millennials, Generation X or Gen Z-ers, to cast Baby Boomers as out-of-touch, easily duped, technologically-naïve, climate destroying, Trump/Brexit-voting, over-privileged idiots that seems to be the clincher. And its appearance in a kind of reflexive, stock retort of "OK Boomer" from young to old seems to have been the catalyst for its recent upsurge. You can read more on the OK Boomer meme here.

Rather like ‘gammon’ a year or two back, ‘boomer’ has become a disputed term. And rather like ‘gammon’, some have argued that using it is JUST AS BAD AS DOING A RACISM!!!

In fact, one tweet – ridiculously - likened it to the n-word. The comparison would be laughable had it not been offered so seriously (apparently, according to another source, by a man who had previous for using racial slurs that got him into trouble as a radio presenter). Dictionary.com thought it was a stupid tweet, anyway.

What does ‘boomer’ offer for discussion in the A level? I’d argue that it fits into two of the main areas of the course quite neatly, the first being ‘meanings and representations’. As part of your study of texts you’ll look at what words mean and how they are used, so thinking about the intention behind using certain terms is really important, and thinking about what words mean to different people runs alongside this. There’s nothing necessarily bad about the word ‘boomer’ – it’s been used as a fairly neutral label for well over 50 years with no overt ill-will apparent in many of its uses – so perhaps it’s the sense that now it’s being used by one group against another (or more accurately, I suppose, most other groups – including my own Generation X-ers – against a particular age group) that makes it seem worse now. Perhaps time has changed its meaning. 

We’re living in a time, you might argue, that could have been very different had the boomers behaved differently and shown some awareness of the impact of their actions on their children and the rest of the planet. Cheap air travel, booming (LOL) property prices meaning that very few young people can afford to buy their own homes and fetishizing gas-guzzling cars all seem to be a feature of the baby boomer generation. So why shouldn’t we blame them? 

Well, let’s have a think why there was a boom that they were part of. The Second World War ended in 1945 so the baby boomers were spawned in the aftermath of a truly global catastrophe that sent millions of people to their graves in a way that just hadn’t been seen before. Having just come out of that, isn’t there perhaps a slight excuse for wanting to live a different life to your parents’ generation? It doesn’t really excuse what many of them went on to do, but you might see a context for their actions. 

And of course, the other thing is that all these labels are completely crass generalisations. As we all know, not everyone born in the same year is going to exhibit the same personality traits or behaviours. We are all individuals with different forces motivating us and different factors influencing us. And that’s where this is relevant to another part of the course: language diversity, and more specifically how language represents different groups. Using any label to categorise a group is bound to be problematic, but we do it all the time. What we need to be careful about is how these labels represent those being labelled.

One of the dynamics you might have studied when looking at how language represents social groups is how much relative power there is between labeller and labelled. Historically - and perhaps a little simplistically for the space we have here -  the power dynamic between white and black, man and woman, straight and gay has been skewed towards the former of each pair (white, male and/or straight). This has often meant that the terms used to label the latter (black, female and/or gay) have been decided by the more powerful groups and have carried more power when used against the less powerful groups. If you take a look at the n-word and other racial terms, and 'slut' and 'faggot' as examples, they have often been powerful terms of abuse, not because of any inherent power in the word but the distance from which it's dropped.

When I used to teach this part of the course I used to compare it to someone chucking a stone from a tower block. It's going to hurt whoever it hits, but the higher you are when you chuck it, the more it's going to hurt. And that's why these terms have become so taboo, as we've seen the power balance shift and those who have previously been labelled gain more power in society and more say in the terms used around and about them.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think that 'gammon' and 'boomer' are nothing like the racist, sexist and homophobic terms that they are sometimes compared to. If anything, the sting created from using these words against generally much more powerful and privileged groups, is the sting of surprise. They're shocked - shocked, I tell you - at being the victim of such cruel words when they've been the ones dishing out the abuse for decades previously.

Not all of them, obviously, #NotAllBoomers...

Gay abandon

What do words actually mean? When we want to work out what a word means, we tend to turn to a dictionary, but even in there we might find that multiple meanings are offered. And that's because semantic change - a gradual (or in some cases, very rapid) shift of meaning - occurs over time.

In a really interesting book called Words in Time, Geoffrey Hughes looks at how language change is linked to social change, and examines how words that we use now used to mean something very different a long time ago.

For example, in a section on what he calls the "moralization of status-words" he identifies a time in the Middle English period when "words such as noble and villain change from being terms denoting rank to terms which are evaluative of moral conduct". On the good side, we get noble, gentle, frank, free and liberal, but on the bad side, he goes on to explain, "words which originally denoted inferior social status become terms of disapproval", so we get villain, knave, blackguard, wretch, slave and churl.

Of course, what has driven these words to change is a link between someone's social rank in a hierarchical society and perceptions of those people as being good or bad because of their rank. In essence, if you were working class and poor, you tended to be seen as a lower, less moral kind of person, so the words used to label you tended to shift down the scale of meaning from neutral to pejorative as time went on, while the opposite was true for the richer and higher status people. Quite why an accident of birth should make you a good or a bad person is not clear, but as we know, judgements are easy to make and it's often simpler to denigrate people beneath you on the social ladder than those above who you might one day aspire to be part of.

That's why - to this very day - you will never hear me utter a bad word about David Cameron, George Osborne or those trust-fund Wurzels*, Mumford and Sons.

Not all meaning changes are linked to gradual processes of social change and shifts in attitudes; sometimes they are more rapid. The flipping of ill, sick, bad and wicked are all examples of where a more drastic change has occurred, with a deliberate effort to turn a word into its opposite. I'm old enough to remember genuine confusion on the faces of elderly relatives when they heard something good described as 'sick'. Nowadays, even your mum is demonstrating 'wicked tekkers' when she juggles an i-Phone in one hand and a glass of fizzy wine in the other.

But what about words which are contested? Some words have changed over time to pick up extremely negative connotations: words like hussy and slut, queer and gay. While gay has had quite a long association with sexual appetite, its widespread use as a term to describe (and put down) men who love other men is perhaps more recent, reaching a peak in the 1980s and 90s. Gay then moved on to be a catch-all term of abuse. Trousers were gay (maybe because they looked slightly feminine in style, or perhaps too tight). Chairs were gay (perhaps a bit wonky to sit on or defective in some way). I even set homeworks that were described by my classes as gay.

But is gay homophobic? In other words, can (as Ricky Gervais rather weakly argued with the term mong) the word gay now be seen as having moved so far away from its association with sexuality and negative judgements about others' sexual identities, that it's just another word? Stonewall, the gay rights charity, don't think so and their campaign to address homophobic name-calling and bullying aims to "get the meaning straight".

Brendan O'Neill, a man with a history of provocative articles to his name and a tendency to attack Political Correctness whenever he can, doesn't think so. He argues in today's Daily Telegraph that "gay now means rubbish"  and, echoing Stonewall's previous campaign, adds "Get over it".

Is it as simple as either side suggest? Language change doesn't happen at once. Most processes take a while to sink in. They tend to follow a pattern that we often see as a wave (as in C.J.Bailey's wave theory of 1973) with changes spreading out from one core group to wider society as time goes on, like ripples create by a stone thrown into a pond. This means that:
a) it takes time for a new meaning to spread to a group of people at the edge of the pond (perhaps older people who have a meaning that they grew up with - The Flintstones and having a "gay old time" perhaps)
and
b) by the time a change has spread to the edges, the frequency of the use might have dropped off in the centre and a new meaning started to emerge

Interestingly, as Justyna Robinson identifies in her paper on cognitive linguistics and semantic change, Awesome insights into semantic variation, "conceptual links" often exist between the successive senses of a word, so in this case, the semantic shift from gay as "Bright or lively-looking, esp. in colour; brilliant, showy" (OED 1225) has a clear link to "light-hearted, carefree; manifesting, characterized by, or disposed to joy and mirth; exuberantly cheerful, merry; sportive." (OED 1400) and "Originally of persons and later also more widely: dedicated to social pleasures; dissolute, promiscuous; frivolous, hedonistic. Also (esp. in to go gay ): uninhibited; wild, crazy; flamboyant." (OED 1597).

It doesn't take much of a conceptual leap to then get to gay as being involved in the selling of sex (OED 1795 -) and "(a) Of a person: homosexual; (b) (of a place, milieu, way of life, etc.) of or relating to homosexuals" (OED 1922-) before we reach gay as lame or crap via association with a stigmatised group in society.

While Brendan O'Neill claims we should so get over how gay has changed to mean something he views as largely inoffensive, I'd argue that it doesn't just mean one thing at all; it actually means many different things at the same time and that in a pluralistic society we need to be careful to think about how words might carry different meanings for different people.

So, where do you stand on this? Is gay now free of its abusive and homophobic connotations to most people? Is Stonewall just being too sensitive about offending people? Or is there a good argument for suggesting that gay is loaded with negative associations and not yet ready for rehabilitation as a general term of disapproval?

(*copyright Charlie Brooker)

HT to Clarissa for link to Pink News article.

Over two and a half million 'faggots'

We've started to look at language and representation in AS Language recently, so this link might be of interest to you. It uses Twitter to track the use of potentially homophobic language items, such as dyke and faggot.

It's pretty shocking that so many casually abusive words are chucked around so frequently, but is it the whole story?  As we've been looking at with racist and sexist terms, part of the consideration we need to give to some of these words is the context they're used in. For example, slut might mean one thing when shouted across a street or posted by some sleazy internet troll, but might mean something completely different when used in banter with another female.

We've already seen that the n-word (or nigga) mean different things to different people in different contexts, so is a blunt tool like counting the number of times a word is used really going to reveal much abut homophobic attitudes? It's a start, at least, so might then allow a more detailed analysis of the contexts and meanings in each case.

There's more about the real-time Twitter feed here, where you can really look at each tweet as it appears, and yes, most of them are from teenage boys abusing each other or talking rubbish. The questions then might be, does it matter? Is anyone really offended by it? Why is it seen as acceptable for these words to be chucked around with such gay (sorry) abandon by some of these people? Does it reflect a deeply ingrained anti-gay attitude, or just a casual attitude to what words mean and how they can harm?

Some of these questions are addressed here on the No Homophobes site, and it makes for a provocative and interesting read.

Hit the pause button

There's nothing I like for breakfast more than a big banana.
Can you pass me the bag of nuts?
I think I'll have the sausage, please.

What connects all of these seemingly innocuous food-related comments? Well, if you're an NBA basketball player, you'd probably want to insert (oo-er) the word pause after each. Why? To avoid sounding like you're gay, obviously. So, "I'm right behind you", "I've got your back" and "That driver was right up my arse" would all qualify as potentially smutty innuendoes requiring the pause treatment. Because to be gay in the macho world of professional sports is to be bad. Hell, it's even worse than being a girl!

Pause - according to Urban Dictionary - is used "to negate the sexual connotation of a comment" and has been recently appearing in spoken language and social networking (often Twitter) comments, perhaps following the patterns of usage of its slightly older brother no homo, which has been around since (apparently) the early 90s in hip hop slang and beyond.

The attempts by some men to police their own language use and avoid the potential embarrassment of letting slip a comment that might be perceived as gay are both interesting and slightly pathetic. Sociolinguists often look in detail at the language markers that help us define our identity and note - like Deborah Cameron does in her Myth of Mars and Venus - that we often use language as  much to define who we are not as who we are. So, in other words, the use of pause or no homo, could be a deliberate attempt to distance some men from gay men (or the stereotypical language styles associated with gay men). But why not just avoid saying things that are... like "gay"...in the first place? Well, that would be missing the point, because the whole point of using pause seems to be to draw attention to your words and encourage salacious connotations to be drawn from them before distancing yourself from the implications of the interpretation. Or something like that...

What's pathetic about it shouldn't be too hard to see. Do gay men really mince around discussing the relative merits of big bananas or succulent sausages? Probably not (unless you're Julian Clary). The whole use of pause might be seen as harmless fun, self-conscious mockery even, but at the same time it's peddling a view that gay men talk in a certain way which is easily identified and ridiculed, and that they are sex-obsessed, double-entendre-fixated "others". Some may be - surely that's up to them - but it's a lazy stereotype to assume it applies to all gay men.

So, is pause homophobic? Possibly. Is it dangerous? I'm not sure. There have got to be worse forms of linguistic homophobia than this - name-calling, abuse - but it probably says more about the speaker's attitudes to homosexuality than it does about gay men themselves.

Jay Smooth's brilliant video clip says it all so much better than me except he argues that pause came before no homo and is now (in his words) "played out", old, boring. 

Edited on 18.05.11 to add some more smutty innuendoes and a genius bit of hip hop linguistics

Hate Mail

Stephen Gately was gay. And now he is dead. Therefore he must have died of being gay. Such is the deranged subtext of Jan Moir's Daily Mail opinion piece, which has apparently become the single most complained about newspaper article in the Press Complaints Commission's history.

In her column, originally entitled Why there was nothing "natural" about Stephen Gately's death, but later amended by a worried Daily Mail to A strange, lonely and troubling death..., Moir says:

Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered. And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.

She later goes on to claim that Gately's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships", trying to link Gately's untimely death and Kevin McGee's suicide to a wider discourse about gay relationships being unnatural, phony and not equivalent to heterosexual relationships.

Whatever your views on homosexuality (and just to be clear, I believe that gay relationships should be treated in exactly the same way as heterosexual ones, and gay people afforded the same rights and respect as every other human being) it's pretty clear that in the way Moir has used language here she is consciously trying to associate Gately with some imagined seedy, hedonistic lifestyle while at the same time knowing literally nothing about the exact circumstances of his death. It just amounts to prurient and tasteless speculation, especially considering that the poor guy's body was not even cold in the grave when the article was published.

The Guardian's Charlie Brooker responded quickly to the Moir article in his customary style, describing it as "a gratuitous piece of gay-bashing" and adding:

It has been 20 minutes since I've read her now-notorious column, and I'm still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It's like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

Elsewhere, thousands of online responses, the vast majority critical of Moir, were posted to the Mail's website, and many others complained to the PCC.

The recent killing of a gay man in Central London, for which three young people have been charged, should show that the distance between hateful words and hateful deeds is not that far. Words matter. Language matters. And I think there's a strong case for arguing that those who use hateful language ultimately bear some responsibility for what happens when words turn to deeds.

Pikeys and lesbos

Two words are currently in the news amid claims that they are problematic or offensive. Apparently, the islanders of Lesbos are up in arms about their island's name being used as a label for women who love other women, and are campaigning for the word to be returned to them. Read here for more on this Sapphic madness.

Elsewhere, ITV are being investigated for the use of the word pikey in a Grand Prix broadcast. So what is a pikey and why is it a bad word? The OED defines it as "a vagrant, a tramp, a traveller, a gypsy" and it's probably this last point that makes it more sensitive as a term of abuse as it could be used to label a specific ethnic group: Romany gypsies.

Like many other words, pikey probably isn't intentionally used by most people in such a way, but then I remember not so long ago "gyppo" was often used by people of my generation to describe anyone who looked remotely unkempt, scruffy or shifty-looking. I've heard it chanted at opposing football team players who have sported unfashionable haircuts, and a reliable source from West Ham (our very own Mr Rice) tells me that "anyone slightly east European looking" might find themselves at the harsh end of "pikey" or "gyppo" chants.

But is it just another harmless word, or should we be concerned about the potentially prejudiced social attitudes it might reflect? Linguist Tony Thorne is quoted in the BBC Magazine article as saying

This is the language of social discrimination and it's quite shocking that this
language is now being bandied about. It started with 'chav' and then the 'posh'
stuff about David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

I'm swayed by the social prejudice argument when it comes to groups who have traditionally had less power in society (gay people, travellers, ethnic minorities ), but I can't see what's wrong with attacking those who've got more power than most of us - privileged and arrogant public figures such as Bojo and Cameron - I mean if you can't have a go at the posh who can you have a go at? So, "political correctness gone mad" or due concern for dangerous language?

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates
ENGA2 (new spec) - Investigating Representations