Etiqueta: Language and fiction

  • The imminent danger of metaphor p3

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    IN INHERITANCE

    Meanwhile, any married woman who has no children of her own will be pitifully pitied behind her back. Or mocked for looking after kids who are not really «hers». Or for looking after her cat/ cats as someone who will die ‘alone’. You might argue you never have but I bet you snort to anyone’s life whose idea of happiness doesn’t match yours. I’ve done…

    Maybe that’s why the current movement to call the absent father a «sperm donor» or the woman an «egg donor»; seems superficial and terrifies language purists. These language purists are apparently not aware society changes too quickly to keep the language the way it used to be.

    WHERE IS THE METAPHOR WITHIN THIS NONSENSE ABOUT LANGUAGE AND HOW IS IT RELATED TO WRITING FICTION?

    Robert McKee, the guy who teaches how to write movie scripts, says the words are mere tools to create good stories with which to persuade people. Through images (movies have images).

    Jane Aitchinson introduces us to the metaphor, by the use of words and whilst it can be deemed obvious (since she is a linguist and not a script writer); it comes to us that words bring out images of their own that will end up being translated into movie scenes.

    I only need to name Switzerland and you will imagine cows as well as glorious and majestic peaks. But if I add tax paradise, then it ain’t as squeaky clean. It includes a few gangsters wearing white collars and using Mont Blanc pens.

    Both, Aitchinson and McKee, reckon metaphors as powerful persuasive images. They change our reaction to events. And they need to grow roots into collective mindsets. They don’t work equally in China as they do in Ireland.

    They have their own life force. Such as the word ‘ neo liberal’ is an insult in my country. It deems evil entrepreneurs ready to take everything away from the poor. No matter how much of a responsible company they do own or how many new companies they help to start1. No matter how much they are part of the money religion we all profess.

    That’s how that pair of American linguists were right. Metaphors are local. They shape imagined realities by persuading us the world is this and not that way.

    Every language is a different world. As a writer you need command of the language. Not to make of it something beautiful [additional problem]. To persuade. To enchant. To create metaphors. To listen and be able to pick up the metaphors that could work in most places. To go up the ladder is better than down… Isn’t it?

    Have fun making up your own metaphors. Pasto kalo.

    1. Seriously ↩︎

  • The imminent danger of metaphor p2

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    Are the worlds as different because of their languages’ alternate realities?

    UNPROVEN YET TRUE?

    It might be and it might not be that reality is shaped by language (nonetheless the gravity works in all of them, despite the name). Nor Sapir or Whorf were able to prove it.

    However, at least in Spanish, there’s this business of citizens and citizeness… To speak of ciudadanos and ciudadanas, when the word citizens/ciudadanos covers under its umbrella both male and female citizens… Right?

    What’s the political pursue of such a language desecretation then? Yes, the idea irritates a bunch of people but is it worth analysis?

    Let’s imagine for a moment that what happens in English does in Spanish as well. The use of the generic engineer, doctor, physician, lawyer and driver is deceitful, sly and manipulative to the point we rarely imagine a woman upon hearing these words. How many of these words did you imagine as women when reading? I can bet. None. Jane Aitchinson mentions the scientific study in her lectures. She doesn’t specify how it was tested tough.

    NEUTRAL?

    What comes out of this supposedly neutral space where the male noun doesn’t evoke an equality paradise in which women as well as men do pilot airplanes?

    Back then, when I wrote the Spanish entry, I wouldn’t have been able to follow the lead to the explanation. What comes out of it is an imagined reality in which women are politely hushed. Taken into account just for the sake of appearance. Imagined realities come from language. Thus.

    IN INHERITANCE

    Besides the non neutral gender suggested by nouns, there’s a second quality inherent to language: inheritance.

    A mother is someone married to the father (note the submission). She gave birth and looks after the offspring.

    Maybe nothing at all but also, a collection of stereotypes! Mothers can’t be single (which is why the rush to have a wedding). Mothers can’t adopt and they can’t, certainly, leave their kids in the hands of someone else… So they should stay home and never work.
    I know. The definitions are changing. But the way they change is dependant on tiny revolutions and, in the meanwhile, bring prejudice into scene. » Why should the guy fall in love with a woman with kids and waste his youth on someone else’s kids».

    No one would notice Joseph, Mary’s husband, became a mere p.p1. ( padre putativo or putative parent) in Jesus life to save us from seeing the problem. For the guy won’t be given the ‘father’ status in spite of the love and time given. That’s reserved to the ‘chap’ who organized it all from above.

    TO BE CONTINUED

    1. Some say that p.p. is the origin of the mock ‘Pepe’ in Spanish. ↩︎

  • The imminent danger of metaphor p1

    person holding burning paper in dark room
    Photo by Eugene Shelestov on Pexels.com

    Jean Aitchinson did a great job explaining me, maybe you [ if you did go to listen to the podcast], and a lot of wireless listeners; how we underestimate language.

    COVID 19 AND THE MANY WORDS ADDED TO LANGUAGE

    Without our knowledge, simply the COVID 19 has increased the number of words we use further away from Shakespeare or Cervantes. They wouldn’t have used virus or… Pandemic.

    Tough daily life doesn’t require as many as a poetic ode to imply we’re going to the loo, any number. So we underestimate language by rating a raggaeton song’s listeners1 to be unschooled just cause the song uses 30 words max.

    WITTGENSTEIN, CONCEPT, KNOWLEDGE AND METAPHOR

    Some time Tyrion Lannister said to John Snow: words don’t matter, they don’t mean anything. And I’m not quoting for I’m not to look up page and book where that was said. My point. Words don’t matter… Until we meet up with a philosopher.

    Wittgenstein2 would say they do. Once I listened to a fellow Japanese classmate ( UNAM philosophy student) to say he understood better Japanese than English since the concept is a derivate of word [ he mentioned the name of the philosopher who said so but I had forgotten it until I sat down to write this — probably I’ll forget it again once this is written]. For us to be able to KNOW something, the word to name it has to exist. You can’t seriously think «chair» unless you know its name. Which is kind of funny since we end up feeling mute if we don’t remember the name of the thing.

    As a result, we might head into overestimate words

    LANGUAGE AND POWER
    Language is powerful. It had this spider web side in which we can get ourselves tangled. Spinned IN without noticing.
    Underestimating it, we forget about persuasion by worrying about how nefarious and atrocious it ends being in this or that use. Banda music…
    We writers work with miss or oppa3 persuasion all the time…

    How other way were we to convince people, purple dinosaurs can spit fire? Reading Terry Prattchet is enough to understand WHY dragons are impossible. Fire does need fuel. It needs oxygen and it needs a high temperature. If you have a high temperature in an enclosed space, like a dragon’s belly, the thing explodes. What creature bigger than a bacteria is resilient enough to survive such temperatures? Maybe a snail.


    LANGUAGE AND REALITY

    <<Linguistic freedom was seriously put in doubt 85 years ago, first by Edward Sapir and afterwards by Benjamin Lee Whorf, both of them American linguists. Their ideas are known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sapir said: «Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society… The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached… «>>

    Is what Jean Aitchinson explains on the lecture following to the one I posted previously and which I will leave behind with a question: Do Chinese live in Mars just because their language is very different from English or Spanish?
    Pasto kalo.

    1. From the name of the virus — Coronavirus and its a lot less common symptoms like— apnea, fatigue, pulmonary obstruction, cutaneous eruption… Plus derivates such as: willingly quarantine, mortality, asymptomatic, K19 grade, sanitary measures, thrombosis, gen, risk group. That’s 13 new words! 13 new words for an average individual. ↩︎
    2. Nein. Impossible. I barely speak the everyday Spanish language to get myself into the dark cramps of birthing philosophy in spite of stopping to think from time to time. Mostly in how I want to say common things. ↩︎
    3. Some like girls, others; we look at the long male legs of telephone poles and before you even think ‘Aha asexual doesn’t exist!’, let me say this: I like looking. However, I don’t feel the slightest urge to touch. I’m fine JUST staring at pretty things. Some asexuals and aromantics won’t even think human bodies as worth enough the glance. We’re all different and still find similarities between us. ↩︎