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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

language

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Unwelcome by design

Deserted desert: light sands under an orange, yellow, and pastel sky. No people.
Photo credit: David Law

Sometimes it’s easy to know when you aren’t wanted.

What gives that away might not be specific words said.

The giveaway might instead be the arrangement of words, the justification of exclusive policies, or the perpetuation of vague criteria like “company fit” that keep the same old kinds of people in and the same old kinds of people out.

A poem by Marwa H. Helal illustrates this in the most arresting way.

Appropriately, it’s titled “Poem to be read from right to left.”

‘poem to be read from right to left’ is written in a form created by the poet called The Arabic.

The Arabic is a form that includes an Arabic letter with an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left as the Arabic language is, and vehemently rejects you if you try to read it left to right. To vehemently reject, in this case, means to transfer the feeling of every time the poet has heard an English as Only Language speaker patronizingly utter in some variation the following phrase: ‘Oh, [so-and-so] is English as a Second Language…’ As if it was a kind of weakness, nah.” —Marwa H. Helal

The Winter Tangerine site includes the poem’s text and audio. Enjoy.

Via Kaveh Akbar.

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The portal of language

Still from Paramount's Arrival (via IMDB). Lead actors in foreground-right; in background, alien symbolic logograms.
Photo credit: Paramount Pictures via IMDB

I’m a few chapters into the recent film Arrival. (I intend to finish watching over the next two weeks so if you’ve seen it and are going to see me, please: no spoilers!)

The story begins with Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics college professor who’s in class the day that 12 giant pods from an extraterrestrial civilization touch down at random points around the world. The US military recruits Banks to interpret communications from the visitors, and so she joins technicians and scientists in the US and in other countries to engage the aliens, parse their responses,and figure out what they’re doing on Earth.

Early on in the story, Dr. Banks and her scientist colleague Ian Donnelly banter about Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, two linguists whose work is often collapsed into the phrase “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.”

This so-called hypothesis is a network of 20th Century neurolinguistic theories codified and even strawmanned after Sapir’s and Whorf’s death. They didn’t formulate it together, and researchers disagree on whether they formulated at all, but the hypothesis named after them includes the ideas that language shapes or even determines cognition, and linguistic differences between groups (especially cultures) represent cognitive differences between them.

In the original researchers’ words:

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.” —Benjamin Whorf

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group.” —Edward Sapir

These ideas have attracted counterarguments and criticisms since the 1930s and 1940s when Sapir and Whorf published and the skeptics have ground to stand on.

It must not be entirely impossible for people to communicate across language groups or conceptual differences. Though we may struggle when we try, we do actually do it, and we do it every day.

None of us perceives colors in the same way, but we can still have transcendent moments with others about an vivid rainbow.

Twenty-eight Adventists describing the denomination’s 28 “fundamental beliefs” would offer as many distinct interpretations of these beliefs as people in the room. Despite these variations, we’d still share the category “Adventist,” as well as some common practices inspired by our tradition.

What Arrival does is represent language as a portal into thought. Inky circles with tails and flecks represent complex meanings and not a mere transcription of sound. Its characters interpret this graphic language and the creatures who use it, and suggest that my cultures’ language, symbols, and structure have sculpted me too.

These matters apply to much more than formal language group. They apply to culture, which is why multicultural communities are often so rich in both creativity and conflict. They also apply to professional and disciplinary communities: contemporary business and military writers now encourage workers to form cross-function teams and teams-of-teams to ensure that they don’t silo either information or organizational meanings.

It’s so easy to take much about the communication process for granted, including how our primary languages lock us into specific ways of thinking and articulating. What more I might learn about people, about life, or even about myself, from studying graphic languages and other symbol systems unlike my native tongue?

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Get Lit: Pro-Literacy Poetry

“The greatest lessons you will ever teach us will not come from your syllabus.
The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember…

“There are things missing from our history books.
But we were taught that it was better to be silent than to make Them uncomfortable.” —The Get Lit Players, “Somewhere In America”

Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen slam book censorship and ridiculous limits on student reading. All three are members of the Get Lit Players, high school students who work with a South Californian organization that addresses illiteracy, inequality, and injustice through informal education, literature workshops, and poetry competitions nationwide.

As of December 2014, the Queen Latifah Show is off the air and can no longer promote poetry like this. There aren’t just things missing from our history books: there worlds of experience and thought missing from our media as well.


h/t: Jennifer Jacobson

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Why Communicating Can Be So Hard

Steven Pinker is a Harvard psychologist who has spent the last few years studying language and morality. You may recognize his curly grey locks from his 2007 TED talk on the international violence rate: “The surprising decline of violence.”

In a new column posted to the Chronicle of Higher Education this week—just in time to drive traffic to his latest book—Pinker turns to academic writing. Why, he asks, is scholarly writing so dense, what are the philosophies that encourage complexity, opaqueness, directness, and clarity, and how does the academic profession discourage its members from learning “good writing”?

Pinker doesn’t quite justify his philosophy of “good writing” in the Chronicle article; maybe he does in the book. Instead, he argues for good writing’s practical impact: good writing is “good” when it helps readers to understand: when it is direct and descriptive rather than self-conscious, full of hedges and vague qualifiers, or self-referential.

Pinker also explains why experts may be great at thinking and combining ideas but weak at writing those thoughts for others to read and learn from:

[Book Cover] The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century - Steven Pinker

Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed “chunks.” As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks. —Steven Pinker, “Why Academic Writing Stinks,” The Chronicle

The second expertise effect Pinker mentions is functional fixedness (his term is “functional fixity”). Functional fixedness is the tunnel vision created by over-identifying with what we use a tool or concept for and so not seeing its other possible uses: seeing a hammer only as a tool for pounding nails, not as a possible doorstop, or weapon, or ice-breaker, or…

Combined, chunking and functional fixedness create the challenge of communicating across knowledge and experience gaps that I tried to explain in my recent post about incommensurability. Experts and lay people are “worlds apart” because knowledge separates them at the level of thought as well as socially and by worldview.

Progress can start with being aware of the gap and understanding that it’s a fact of cognition, not a malicious expert plot to hide what They/We know from the People. Pinker’s assumption is that this communication gap can in fact be bridged—and that’s good news for all of us who’ve learned a little bit about anything (i.e. gone to grad school!) yet struggled to explain it to those who haven’t already learned what we have. It’s also great news for all of us beginning to learn about complex issues from faith and sexuality or the tangled threads of rhetoric and science in climate change.

Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, is already a top-seller on Amazon after only a few days after its official release. Consider yourself a “thinking person” regardless of whether you agree with his ideas, and get yourself a copy.

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Worlds Apart: The Incommensurability Problem

When I was about 7 years old, my brother had a series of children’s songs on cassette tape. One of the songs included this chorus:

Danke schön, mein Herr!
Danke schön, danke schön!
Thank you, my King—
For life is so wunderschön!

The problem? I didn’t yet speak German. So what I heard instead was this:

Donkey shave my hair!
Donkey shave, donkey shave!
Thank you my King—
For life is so wonder shave!

I knew, even then, that what I was hearing didn’t make a lick of sense. But since it’s what I heard, it’s what I sang. I sang it loudly and with appropriate harmonic flourishes, and I sounded great!

Sometimes, we're worlds apart. (Photo used under license.)
Sometimes, we’re worlds apart. (Photo used under license.)

I didn’t begin learning German for about four or five years later, so it wasn’t until I moved on to secondary school that I realized what the lyrics truly had been.

Until I could hear the lyrics in the tongue they were composed and originally sung in, I had an incommensurability problem.

Worse still: until I learned the language of the song, and used that learning to listen again, I didn’t really know where my problem lay or how to fix it.

That’s so like life.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” —Thomas Kuhn

When two worlds intersect, if they do not share a common “language”—what the philosophers call a common measure—they will struggle to understand each other. Each will tend to interpret the other in terms of her own base of knowledge and assumption. Their values will be distinct, perhaps coincidentally compatible, but more likely contrasting or competing outright.

Marginalized social groups manage this problem of distinct linguistic, knowledge, and assumption systems in an interesting way. Exposed to common and dominant languages as well as those that carry our communities’ messages, strategies, and insights, we often become “multilingual.” Codeswitching is not necessarily something we do for fun; it’s more commonly something we do to survive.

By necessity, we’re conversant with the languages, systems of meaning, and expected patterns of behavior dominant in the wider culture as well as those that apply in our own safer and more familiar places. But that knowledge is rarely reciprocal.

I was born to Jamaican immigrant parents in England toward the end of an era when teaching children other European languages was a class-based luxury rather than a social or professional basic. The educational system didn’t yet rank Asian, Mesopotamian, African, or other regional language groups as high-value languages to learn. Our elders were also more likely to diminish our cultures’ patois and dialects than encourage us to adopt and respect them alongside Standard Written English and Received Pronunciation.

All of the countries I’ve lived since then in have promoted English over other languages—even Jamaica, which gives the Anglo tongue greater respect than it does its own patois. For the most part, English (really Englishes) has (have) always had more cultural capital in these societies, and it’s connected me to greater educational and social opportunities than any other linguistic-cultural system could have. I was destined to be an anglophone and receive the local and international benefits that English-speaking brings with it. Only in the Jamaican food market or on the street among my age-mates has my English-First brain ever felt like a liability.

My parents, both from subsistence country farming families and both striving to rise up through the service and caring professions, rarely spoke patois at home. Because they never addressed my siblings or me with it except when excited or upset, patois is part of my emotional register: it conveys stories and frustration and humor and survival, concepts and perceptions that don’t translate well out of context, whole worlds that the Queen’s English not only doesn’t permit entry to but also actively undermines understanding of.

But I can’t sustain conversations in that language. I feel it in my blood, in the tightening of my muscles, in the pulsing of my heart. I’ve inherited it as a stranger, and I can’t mirror my parents when they switch back into that world. We are separated by culture and experience and languages, even as we’re connected by genes and love and name.

The hardest thing about grad school wasn’t the 60-70 hour weeks I worked without flinching, the opacity of Habermas, or the cyclical infections of imposter syndrome. The hardest thing was seeing incommensurability step out of my philosophy of science readings and assume a defeated posture in my conversations with my parents whenever they asked me how my course was going and when I’d be done.

Just about all I could say was “I’m doing well” and “I’m tired.” Just about all they could say was “Keep it up, I’m proud of you” (Dad) and “Remember I always tell you to stop and smell the roses” (Mum). Beyond my sharing an article or video once in a while or tracking down texts for my mother’s history classes, that was as much as our language-worlds intersected. We learned—or at least I did—from the resistance and fear of fundamentalism meeting pluralism. I learned not to poke Mama Bear with a stick.

I quickly became fluent in the languages I was learning, languages and ways of seeing that helped me to understand and interpret myself and the worlds I was entering. But that fluency came at cost.

Sometimes, the languages we’re most familiar with actively undermine our perception and understanding of others. I haven’t yet found a way to bridge the distances between my worlds and my parents’. It makes sense that the abstract solution is “Learn more languages and use them!” Simple solution. Straightforward. Not so fluid in the flesh.

And I don’t yet know what the answers are. Not with the Church and its many minorities. Not with the ethnic groups who don’t live with near each other and live as if in different universes. Not with children like me and families like mine.

But maybe this is the research question of my life: We are connected—that’s not negotiable. So how will we live together? If we can’t learn one another’s languages, and only some of us can learn new languages, new symbols, new stories, how will we share our lives?

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Confusing Clear English

A Fresh View of George Orwell (Salon)

The essential promise of Politics and the English Language was that “if you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” Does this ring true in 2013? From the US State Department’s carefully-worded missives to the tightly-constructed soundbites of Whitehall Britain’s counterpart to the White House, our contemporary political discourse is replete with evidence that it is perfectly possible to obfuscate by plain speaking, and journalism is right in the thick of it. — Houman Barekat

If I could radically improve three things about public education, both through formal schooling and in informal learning, improving our collective analytic, communication, and creative intelligence would be my triad. These are forms of literacy that make civic participation comprehensible and feasible, but we’re undermining our public sphere by treating them as optional extras.

Addressing common concerns and sharing common spaces aren’t simply about knowing the components of the current order or how the system is supposed to work. They aren’t about the facts alone. They’re also based on shared meaning, and shared meaning emerges from conscious relationship.

We’re all in relationship as co-passengers on our respective continents, but being co-located isn’t enough to build community or to ensure that we understand each other enough to work together. In societies divided by class, culture, and interests, shared meaning has become a chimerical vision that we appeal to in order to induce others to comply with us rather than the thing it is: a process of discourse, negotiation, and learning that moves us forward together.

Simply said: I see no possibility of flourishing collectively without it.