On the one hand, this is kind of brilliant. It kind of reminds me of all those clever poets and bards from the middle ages who got around the rule against criticizing royalty by inventing characters who were just-similar-enough to their real kings and queens - or the way that Arrested Development mocks Google (one of our overlords) by calling it things like "search" and "something."
And they have chosen a word that is a) so similar-sounding to the original insult that there is little doubt that the intended target won’t “get” the meaning and b) already commonly used in my classroom. (This, by the way, is for two reasons: the obvious reason that I teach writing, and the more unique one that my students and I have something of an ongoing battle-slash-inside-joke where they constantly accuse me of asking rhetorical questions when I believe I am asking actual ones [which could make a whole post in itself, possibly with the same title].) So, as long as they don’t slip up, they have plausible deniability. If anyone tried to call them out, they could just reach for a dictionary (okay, dictionary app) and smugly read out the definition. "Rhetorical: relating to or concerning the art of rhetoric."
(The authority of the Internet is final and unimpeachable to these kids; it’s their Bible, the Literal Word of God That Settles All Debates.)
But the whole thing also puts me in a bit of a pickle as a teacher. I know what “rhetorical” means in this context. And they know that I know - it's not a dog whistle. (Just to be clear, my problem with the epithet “retarded” is not that it is hurtful to the student at whom it is directed, since that student is pretty much always “in on the joke”; it’s that it perpetuates a stigma against the intellectually disabled.)
And yet, anything that I could do to stop the practice would probably just make it worse (I could imagine them rebelling by either starting to use “rhetorical” to describe literally everything, or switching to a new code word, quite possibly my own name) - and would make me look absolutely ridiculous to anyone on the outside. Can you imagine the articles that would be written if some parent got upset enough to contact the press? I’d be painted as the enemy of free speech. A poster-child for “political correctness run amok." Some hippie, leftist, vegan, trophy-distributing, multi-gendered communist with a peanut allergy.
Because when you zoom out to the larger context of the English language, the word “rhetorical” is a totally innocent one. It has acquired a new meaning through the way it is being used within this particular speech community of eighth-graders at one school in a small town in New Hampshire.
I think this anecdote illustrates two important points about language. First, this is what happens when you try to restrict speech by fiat. The euphemism treadmill gets fired up and new words slide in to replace the old, as smoothly and neatly as if by ctrl-F, ctrl-R. (Unless you're Michael Scott and you leave one, revealing "Dwigt.") Look at all the other ways kids have gotten around the prohibition of the word “retarded.” When I was in elementary school, it was “sped” (or sometimes just “special” in a certain tone of voice.) These days, what I usually hear is "autistic." In any case, nothing has actually changed except for the word. The stigma is still present.
But I’d argue that this is equally true of any attempt to change the language people use, regardless of whether that comes from an authority figure or social pressure. Language is a function of worldview - a “symptom,” if you will, of the way we conceptualize things - but we often conflate the two. We assume that someone who uses “she” to refer to a transgender woman does so because he perceives her as a woman. But it could also be the case that he is just yielding to the social pressure to use everyone’s preferred pronouns. (I still think this is a respectful thing to do; I’m not going Jordan Peterson on you here. The point is that getting people to change their language alone doesn’t actually accomplish much.)
All year, I have been trying to get my students to stop talking about how to “fix” their writing and instead discuss how to “improve” it. (I'd say "fix" is a subset of "improve.") I have even written the word "fix" it on my board in a circle with a line through it as a visual reminder. Now, my real goal is that my students come to understand the writing process differently, but I'm not so naive as to think that this will happen just because they swap out one word for another. I mean, half the time it’s this: “Mr. Hebert, what do I need to fix -- uh, I mean improve.”
And, hey, it may even be counterproductive for me to focus on the word they use. Because at least if I left the language alone, then I would have a clear sign that a student was conceptualizing his or her writing in a process-oriented way if he or she dropped an “i-bomb.” Now, all it signifies that this student is saying what I want to hear.
By the way, this was the third such circle on my board; “fix” joined “finished” (which I three-quarters-jokingly refer to as “the f-word”) and “done” (“the d-word.”). Of course, after these initial bans were issued back in September, it led to a proliferation of the word “completed” (which I felt like I couldn’t quite get away with calling “the c-word” because of, you know, the real “c-word”) - which I guess is another illustration of my point.
I also think this is a good demonstration of the way language really works. The meanings of words shift and evolve constantly. And they do so in particular speech communities (or "interpretive communities" to Stanley Fish, who I find very persuasive on linguistics) and particular contexts. It would be absurd to claim that “rhetorical” is an offensive term now. The only thing we are justified is saying is that it has now acquired an offensive meaning when used in a particular way by a particular group of people in a particular place.
Way back when “Facebook pages” were still a thing, in 2009 or so, I “became a fan” of a page entitled: “If gay isn’t a synonym for stupid, then it doesn’t mean homosexual either.” This isn’t as bad as it could be. I was getting there. At the second panel of the exploding-head meme, I guess. (The first panel would probably be that Hillary Duff commercial where she pops out of a clothing rack and tells two “don’t say gay” and then asks (rhetorically, in two ways), "What if I were to call things 'girl-wearing-a-skirt-as-a-top" as if that makes any sense.) I understood that the meaning of words could evolve over time, but I still assumed that evolution was linear and sequential: once a word gained a new meaning, it became its own autonomous being, like Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The new meaning of “gay” had no connection to the old one. They were just homophones, as far as I was concerned.
I figured it was the exact opposite of what had happened to “faggot." No one (in America, at least) hears that word and actually thinks of a bundle of sticks. That is only a disingenuous excuse offered by the dictionary-thumpers. (Although I do remember a South Park episode where the kids had established a speech community in which “faggot” only meant someone who rode a motorcycle and had literally no sense that it also meant a gay person.)
I guess my mistake was putting too much faith in my own intention as a user of the word, and not enough stake in the way the word would be heard by others. Sometime in my college career (okay, who am I kidding, it was the spring semester of my freshman year, the first few months of 2011) I took a linguistics class and learned about polysemy: the phenomenon where a word can have multiple meanings that are tied together because of a historical connection, a past-oneness. (I suppose traditional birth, mother and child, works here as a metaphor.) And I remember asking what I still think was a pretty smart question: “Can you have something start out as polysemy and turn into just a pair of homophones over time?” Yes, you can. Third phase of the exploding-head meme.
(Of course, even homophones can evoke each other’s meanings in certain contexts - intentionally in puns or other forms of wordplay, and unintentionally when a listener misinterprets the word. My favorite example of this is the first part of The Sound and the Fury (yeah, yeah, I know) where no one can figure out why Benjy, the mentally-rhetorical Compson brother, is getting so upset, and it turns out because the golfers nearby keep yelling “Caddie!” and it’s reminding him of his sister, Caddy. Now, there’s clearly no relationship between the word “caddie” and the name, but to Benjy’s simplistic mind, the sound has only one meaning.)
Now, the fourth stage, the one where the head has really exploded, is realizing that polysemy and homophony can exist at the same time in different contexts and/or communities. And that is where I think we are at with “gay” today: sometimes it only means homosexual, sometimes it only means stupid, sometimes it means a blend of the two, and then every once in a while (usually only at Christmas or productions of West Side Story) it really does mean bright and cheerful and happy.
Meaning is usage. I think of the phrase “all lives matter.” Taken at face value, there is absolutely nothing objectionable about those words, and trying to make the argument that they are offensive often feels an awful lot like trying to explain to an eighth-grader why he shouldn’t call his friend “rhetorical.” But what’s significant is the context in which they appeared, their history. They were a response to the statement “black lives matter.” And moreover, I believe that is the context in which they are still used most of the time. (Although I did see a “social justice board” in a nearby town yesterday, which bore the message “All lives matter - black, brown, white, tan, and gray.” Yeah, I’m a bit thrown off by gray, too, but this is northern New Hampshire, so I’m mostly just glad they didn’t write “red” or “yellow.”)
Picture a family at a restaurant. They’ve been waiting a while for a table and are starting to get restless and impatient. One of the kids whines, “I’m hungry.” And one of the parents snaps, “We’re all hungry.” The meaning of that second utterance is to dismiss the first, to render it unimportant. So too with “all lives matter.” We cannot pretend that the meaning is something intrinsic to the phrase itself (and if we want to get really postmodern and Fishy with this, we could talk about how it is only because we are members of a certain speech community that we can make sense of words like “lives” and “matter.") The meaning of the utterance is not something that we find by dissecting it, breaking it down into its component parts and then putting it back together. No, meaning is a holistic feature of the language. Remove the context, you remove the meaning.
So what do I do about “rhetorical?” Not too much. My go-to line whenever I hear something I find problematic in my class is, “Please don’t use that word like that.” And so far, no one has pressed me too much on “like what?” But at least now I have a decent answer.
 |
| I'm pretty sure the only reason we never had a scandal where a conservative commentator called Obama "niggardly" is because it goes against the whole "big-spending liberal" thing. |
But the whole thing also puts me in a bit of a pickle as a teacher. I know what “rhetorical” means in this context. And they know that I know - it's not a dog whistle. (Just to be clear, my problem with the epithet “retarded” is not that it is hurtful to the student at whom it is directed, since that student is pretty much always “in on the joke”; it’s that it perpetuates a stigma against the intellectually disabled.)
And yet, anything that I could do to stop the practice would probably just make it worse (I could imagine them rebelling by either starting to use “rhetorical” to describe literally everything, or switching to a new code word, quite possibly my own name) - and would make me look absolutely ridiculous to anyone on the outside. Can you imagine the articles that would be written if some parent got upset enough to contact the press? I’d be painted as the enemy of free speech. A poster-child for “political correctness run amok." Some hippie, leftist, vegan, trophy-distributing, multi-gendered communist with a peanut allergy.
Because when you zoom out to the larger context of the English language, the word “rhetorical” is a totally innocent one. It has acquired a new meaning through the way it is being used within this particular speech community of eighth-graders at one school in a small town in New Hampshire.
I think this anecdote illustrates two important points about language. First, this is what happens when you try to restrict speech by fiat. The euphemism treadmill gets fired up and new words slide in to replace the old, as smoothly and neatly as if by ctrl-F, ctrl-R. (Unless you're Michael Scott and you leave one, revealing "Dwigt.") Look at all the other ways kids have gotten around the prohibition of the word “retarded.” When I was in elementary school, it was “sped” (or sometimes just “special” in a certain tone of voice.) These days, what I usually hear is "autistic." In any case, nothing has actually changed except for the word. The stigma is still present.
 |
| My response pretty much every time Jordan Peterson opens his mouth. |
But I’d argue that this is equally true of any attempt to change the language people use, regardless of whether that comes from an authority figure or social pressure. Language is a function of worldview - a “symptom,” if you will, of the way we conceptualize things - but we often conflate the two. We assume that someone who uses “she” to refer to a transgender woman does so because he perceives her as a woman. But it could also be the case that he is just yielding to the social pressure to use everyone’s preferred pronouns. (I still think this is a respectful thing to do; I’m not going Jordan Peterson on you here. The point is that getting people to change their language alone doesn’t actually accomplish much.)
All year, I have been trying to get my students to stop talking about how to “fix” their writing and instead discuss how to “improve” it. (I'd say "fix" is a subset of "improve.") I have even written the word "fix" it on my board in a circle with a line through it as a visual reminder. Now, my real goal is that my students come to understand the writing process differently, but I'm not so naive as to think that this will happen just because they swap out one word for another. I mean, half the time it’s this: “Mr. Hebert, what do I need to fix -- uh, I mean improve.”
And, hey, it may even be counterproductive for me to focus on the word they use. Because at least if I left the language alone, then I would have a clear sign that a student was conceptualizing his or her writing in a process-oriented way if he or she dropped an “i-bomb.” Now, all it signifies that this student is saying what I want to hear.
By the way, this was the third such circle on my board; “fix” joined “finished” (which I three-quarters-jokingly refer to as “the f-word”) and “done” (“the d-word.”). Of course, after these initial bans were issued back in September, it led to a proliferation of the word “completed” (which I felt like I couldn’t quite get away with calling “the c-word” because of, you know, the real “c-word”) - which I guess is another illustration of my point.
*
I also think this is a good demonstration of the way language really works. The meanings of words shift and evolve constantly. And they do so in particular speech communities (or "interpretive communities" to Stanley Fish, who I find very persuasive on linguistics) and particular contexts. It would be absurd to claim that “rhetorical” is an offensive term now. The only thing we are justified is saying is that it has now acquired an offensive meaning when used in a particular way by a particular group of people in a particular place.
Way back when “Facebook pages” were still a thing, in 2009 or so, I “became a fan” of a page entitled: “If gay isn’t a synonym for stupid, then it doesn’t mean homosexual either.” This isn’t as bad as it could be. I was getting there. At the second panel of the exploding-head meme, I guess. (The first panel would probably be that Hillary Duff commercial where she pops out of a clothing rack and tells two “don’t say gay” and then asks (rhetorically, in two ways), "What if I were to call things 'girl-wearing-a-skirt-as-a-top" as if that makes any sense.) I understood that the meaning of words could evolve over time, but I still assumed that evolution was linear and sequential: once a word gained a new meaning, it became its own autonomous being, like Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The new meaning of “gay” had no connection to the old one. They were just homophones, as far as I was concerned.
 |
| Pictured: Athena springing from the head of Zeus. |
I figured it was the exact opposite of what had happened to “faggot." No one (in America, at least) hears that word and actually thinks of a bundle of sticks. That is only a disingenuous excuse offered by the dictionary-thumpers. (Although I do remember a South Park episode where the kids had established a speech community in which “faggot” only meant someone who rode a motorcycle and had literally no sense that it also meant a gay person.)
I guess my mistake was putting too much faith in my own intention as a user of the word, and not enough stake in the way the word would be heard by others. Sometime in my college career (okay, who am I kidding, it was the spring semester of my freshman year, the first few months of 2011) I took a linguistics class and learned about polysemy: the phenomenon where a word can have multiple meanings that are tied together because of a historical connection, a past-oneness. (I suppose traditional birth, mother and child, works here as a metaphor.) And I remember asking what I still think was a pretty smart question: “Can you have something start out as polysemy and turn into just a pair of homophones over time?” Yes, you can. Third phase of the exploding-head meme.
(Of course, even homophones can evoke each other’s meanings in certain contexts - intentionally in puns or other forms of wordplay, and unintentionally when a listener misinterprets the word. My favorite example of this is the first part of The Sound and the Fury (yeah, yeah, I know) where no one can figure out why Benjy, the mentally-rhetorical Compson brother, is getting so upset, and it turns out because the golfers nearby keep yelling “Caddie!” and it’s reminding him of his sister, Caddy. Now, there’s clearly no relationship between the word “caddie” and the name, but to Benjy’s simplistic mind, the sound has only one meaning.)
 |
| Definitely the coolest S&F cover I've seen. Also, apparently James Franco made a movie of this a couple years ago, because of course he did. |
*
Meaning is usage. I think of the phrase “all lives matter.” Taken at face value, there is absolutely nothing objectionable about those words, and trying to make the argument that they are offensive often feels an awful lot like trying to explain to an eighth-grader why he shouldn’t call his friend “rhetorical.” But what’s significant is the context in which they appeared, their history. They were a response to the statement “black lives matter.” And moreover, I believe that is the context in which they are still used most of the time. (Although I did see a “social justice board” in a nearby town yesterday, which bore the message “All lives matter - black, brown, white, tan, and gray.” Yeah, I’m a bit thrown off by gray, too, but this is northern New Hampshire, so I’m mostly just glad they didn’t write “red” or “yellow.”)
Picture a family at a restaurant. They’ve been waiting a while for a table and are starting to get restless and impatient. One of the kids whines, “I’m hungry.” And one of the parents snaps, “We’re all hungry.” The meaning of that second utterance is to dismiss the first, to render it unimportant. So too with “all lives matter.” We cannot pretend that the meaning is something intrinsic to the phrase itself (and if we want to get really postmodern and Fishy with this, we could talk about how it is only because we are members of a certain speech community that we can make sense of words like “lives” and “matter.") The meaning of the utterance is not something that we find by dissecting it, breaking it down into its component parts and then putting it back together. No, meaning is a holistic feature of the language. Remove the context, you remove the meaning.
So what do I do about “rhetorical?” Not too much. My go-to line whenever I hear something I find problematic in my class is, “Please don’t use that word like that.” And so far, no one has pressed me too much on “like what?” But at least now I have a decent answer.
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