This is an essay deserving a very long slow clap. I'm a fiction editor (dev and line, copy and reluctantly proofreading.) and author. I'm also a descriptive linguist. (Prescriptivism can fuck itself into non-existence.)
To borrow from cryptography, what we're transmitting is a signal with speech, yeh? K. Did Alice receive Bob's signal and understand it? Yeh? WELL DONE, ok, now fuck the rest.
There's one reason to learn proper grammar outside of the context of white supremacy, and it's so you can operate under the hegemony of the system and also know which rules are "conventionally" acceptable to break in an artistic framework. The shock to most people is the correct answer to that is "all of them you pedantic pickle holster" Past that, grammar, syntax, linguistics, (under white supremacy) only functions to show that wow, so you know how to use a fucking semicolon; good for you. (I sleep with a copy of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage 5th ed. under my pillow, and the first thing I tell an editorial client who wants to publish fiction, exhibits core competencies in milk cricket English, and understands narrative is, "OK, so now toss like, fully half of what you know out the window.")
Jesus I'm tired of this, thank you for writing it out properly and elegantly. If I wrote this I'm just another pedantic linguistic descriptivist pale white half Slav community college dropout. The colonisation I see but yes, I've not anywhere to comment aside from what I've said in your comments sections before. I only know its actual origins because my mother, like myself, is lower class, often poor, and rode public transportation in a city both integrated heavily and split right down the middle (Google: St. Louis Missouri, Delmar Divide if you don't know how literal I'm being, please, it's sad) on race lines AND class lines. (White person driving car in St. Louis = white person. White person riding the bus in St. Louis = filthy poor, criminal, or as close to not being white as you can get while still being as pale as an incandescent lightbulb. What's wild is my mom, who is decidedly small and white, was called a racial epithet traditionally only used by white people as supremacists, for riding the bus?!) (OK, that was a wildly divergent path of commentary but needless to say race and class relations in STL are more complex than most cities in the US and I've been through all of them at one point or another.) (Note: she first heard the term woke on the bus in the late '90s, so near thirty years ago.)
I'd also hoped I could find it but there was at one point on a listserv (my age is showing) there was an entire 100+ entry long LIST of jokes about which languages and how English was in a trenchcoat doing various things to other languages, etc. The original list seems lost to time (Or I suck at the wayback machine) but a quick list of examples would be something like: (Thanks ChatGPT, I won't even pretend I wrote these, but they're fairly in tone with what was on the list, albeit quite less exacting since the original list was written by linguists.)
"English is just German, French, and Latin in a trench coat beating up Anxient Greek for its lunch money."
"English is just three drunk languages in a trench coat shouting at each other and hoping someone understands."
"English is just Old Norse, Latin, and French in a trench coat doing a bad impression of a Germanic language."
"English is just Saxon, Viking, and Norman French in a trench coat fighting over word order."
"English is just Latin and German in a trench coat sneaking into a Greek etymology party."
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat trying to sneak into the Romance languages club."
"English is just French and German in a trench coat pretending they can handle Greek's vocabulary."
"English is just Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dr. Seuss in a trench coat writing whatever they want."
"English is just three languages in a trench coat stealing spelling rules from a dumpster."
"English is just Latin in a trench coat trying to remember what it was supposed to sound like."
"English is just French, Latin, and Norse in a trench coat mugging Greek for science terms."
"English is just Dutch, Old Norse, and French in a trench coat arguing about how to spell 'through.'"
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat pretending it remembers its own grammar rules."
"English is just a collection of bad linguistic decisions in a trench coat insisting it's normal."
"English is just Old English in a trench coat trying to hide its midlife crisis with French vocabulary."
"English is just three etymologies in a trench coat and none of them are cooperating."
"English is just Germanic roots in a trench coat pretending it's fluent in Latin."
"English is just three random languages in a trench coat explaining why 'ough' has five pronunciations."
Or, more to the point:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll (b. 1961), "The King's English", rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990
Having said whatever I just said I would like to say I hate linguistic prescriptivism as anything but a tool to exploit for whatever reason you need. All the rules are made up anyway, most of them are bullshit, and someone explain to me why more than thirty fucking languages call pineapples "ananas" and some white fuck came along to Mexico (the only place pineapples in spite of their current globally grown acreage are native to) saw one growing from a bush, pointed it out, and said "TIS A PINE-APPLE!"
The rules are made up. Nary one of them makes fuckin' sense. Limiting your reading based on arbitrary rules created by the white gentry to keep you out of their club is fucking stupid, something about the power elite. OH, and don't get me started on cognitive load. My fellow beings in imaginary Christ, have ye not heard of any of five thousand authors, not even all white and male, thank GOD, whose work AIMS to overload you cognitively. (To that end, one of my modes of fictional expression is MEANT TO CREATE PANIC ATTACKS, and according to many readers is very effective at doing so.)
I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require. And I get paid a tidy sum to EDIT FICTION (and I do it for fun on Substack free once a week.) I'm. I cannot explain the BILE this subject brings up in me. ABSOLUTE BILE. (I've not had tea since before the 7th, honestly I'm maybe losing my fucking shit over it. My kitchen looks like a scene from Dead Space, or some sort of crusty abandoned space station filled with IKEA furni lit by fluorescent motion sensor lights slapped to every surface)
This essay, in other words, is perfect. Thank you.
Apologies for my comment's length, if I were more sane at the moment, it would be shorter, or not, I don't know.
this reminds me of something I read ages ago based on an experiment. It theorised something along the lines of: if you jumble around the letters inside a word but keep the first and last letters the same, as long as the word is no longer than 5/6 letters, your brain can still to process it relatively quickly.
So I could write, "wlel taht's qitue carzy!" and not only is it legible to most people, most people would read it just as quickly as if everything was spelt correctly.
"I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require."
this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the "it gives me a headache" declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language. There is so much pretending. If the grammatical rules aren't adhered to then you're taught to be dismissive or punitive or derisive, or pretend you didn't understand, or pretend its more difficult than it is, or pretend that you are in physical pain. It is all a performance, or if it isn't, then its an indoctrination that is obscuring the highest truth, that ultimately, if you've understood what I've said, what's there left to talk about?
That is qiute czray (This is really base cog neurosci, you're on the mark. The order of letters doesn't matter if you know English, just the placement of the first and last. There's a ton of memes and jokes that use this effect too.)
"this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the 'it gives me a headache' declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language." EXACTLY! OK, so, we have László Krasznahorkai, sure he's Hungarian, but his last novel (award winning, for the record) Herscht 07769, is 500 pages, and one sentence. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for a novel that had no conventional punctuation or dialog tags, and only like, 5 commas total. This argument is spurious from every fucking angle.
My theory is that it's simple indoctrination along with the fact of it being, and the quotation marks here are large, cartoonish, and comical "PrOpEr EnGLiSh", is not only an acquired skill that takes time to learn and master (I'm 39 and I edit fiction, I've been writing since I had the tactile dexterity to hold an instrument to do so, and I still reference Fowler's modern usage, I've been a paid editor 10 years... Let's consider that.) AND it's a gatekeeper to the OFFICIAL LEAGUE OF ELITIST MILK CRICKETRY. Indoctrination or if you're a writer of fiction (or I'd argue non-fiction, the mode of which is now usually the personal essay, which fits neatly under the category of creative non-fiction for various reasons. Which is why Weinberger is a genius, which is why you're so fucking good among others) a complete lack of understanding of the finer points of language and how it is used to make art. (This is leaving out formalist experimentalism. Someone most famously wrote a near 500 page book without using the letter "e" now OK, that's just showing off. And it's legible!)
If it's mostly performative then fuck, get a better hobby. It's like these right coded "authors" (again, very unserious sarcastic quote marks) complaining about fucking the Big Five in New York and how they can't get published when they're writing IN THE STYLE THAT CERVANTES WAS SKEWERING WHEN HE WROTE DON QUIXOTE (Shit you not, I've seen them on the platform.) Or, they're appealing to the idea of some halcyon ere of literacy and fiction that they consider to be the platonic ideal. (DeepLeftAnalysis... God I hope none of his fans hate read you, they're insufferable, tried to make a QUANTITATIVE, though to his credit even he admitted possibly flawed, argument that the height of the English language for style, fiction et al. was Shakespeare. Which, no offense to the Bard, he did just make up words when he needed them (He's attributed with coining or popularising around 1,700 words... English isn't a liar's language, it is THE liars language, and our grammar is fucked up by global standards but I'll not even touch on that.) Including one I'm fond of in swagger.
For me, what's left to talk about, with you in specific, is just the reinforcement of agreement. For everyone else, I have no idea, remove the phone pole from their asses I guess.
And the guy who was talking about lowering the cognitive load of the reader?! MY GOD. HOLY FUCK. HAVE YOU EVER READ A CELLULAR MICROBIOLOGY TEXTBOOK? Have you read a single scientific research paper? Because you're as white as my fucking nicotine gum but as dim as a dying LED bulb flickering helpless set to low, in the middle of the night. If my cognitive load is not at least somewhat challenged or stressed by a text, wether it be by ideas or otherwise, I'm likely less interested in it.
If you're being a scold to people writing lowercase essays, the most brilliant woman I ever knew never used capitals and rarely used punctuation outside of scientific academia (which broke her) she would be 39 this year if she hadn't drank the dumbest bitch juice and hanged herself in May, 2023, and she was writing all lowercase essays LONG BEFORE THEY ENTERED ANY LARGER DISCOURSE. (Why is this a thing people care about? Facebook has been a haven for the lowercase screed, essay, rant, what have you for a decade. Oh, is it the platform? Oh, is everyone suddenly discovering they have domain mastery over English grammar, linguistics, syntax, etc. Or do you still use spellcheck to see which words do and don't follow the i after e rule? Because I beleive that his is a common way to decieve yourself.)
One final mid-coffee example. My editing service and my Substack are both named, Burnt Tongue. No, this is not because as many (specifically since I'm on his comment responding to him, in an Oscar Kilo I agree fashion) people know, I DO NOT SHUT UP. Burnt tongue, or burnt voice, is a concept named from Chuck Palahniuk as taught by Tom Spanbauer in his Dangerous Writing Workshop (which rest his soul, his work is done, produced MANY popular and cult American novelists) after he decamped from New York back to Portland from surviving Gordon Lish's FAMOUSLY BRUTAL WORKSHOP (which by metrics probably produced the most notable crop of published authors of any workshop EVER in spite of Lish's notorious savagery, narcissism, and blatant and unabashed tendency to fuck his students, of whom who survived the workshop I will now give a small list, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Tom Spanbauer, Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Bourdain, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Mary Robinson, Barry Hannah... This list is by no means exhaustive.) Burnt Tongue, is a minimalist stylistic tool, whereby you use syaing something wrong, such as a typo, or having a character in first person POV blatantly misstating something, a malapropism, etc. as a tool to point to something larger, create a pause, or even bring up another larger or more interesting point from earlier in the text, or otherwise. It is quite an interesting tool. Notably the entire PLOT of Palahniuk's thesis novel Adjustment Day, 2018, Doubleday (which is also amazing satire imo) HINGES ON ONE INSTANCE OF BURNT TONGUE. I'm quite proud I can say that and not give anything about the novel away, but the novel is amazing satire and Inigo, I can tell you now, you would either absolutely hate it, or not, but you would have something to say about it worth reading I'm sure, and I'm very interested either way in what your take on it would be. The plot being that the aggrieved low class Whites kill the government and intelligentsia, the nation splits in thruple, a Straight White Christian Monarchy, a literal and unmaligned if I remember correctly, which I'm only remembering so well because I recently read your piece on it, Black Utopia that subverts the "magical negro" trope in an interesting way (Palahniuk is many things, gay, white, but ignorant of sociology and race issues he is not), and a west coast state for all those who full under the rainbow umbrella. Anyway, that's the short of a very dense novel.
As a trained high school English teacher, I find it disgusting how many people there are on this platform who consider themselves language police. I had to enforce normative modern English standards in the classroom, but it was always with the understanding that “this is what we do in the classroom, do whatever you like outside.”
I’d love for all the prétendant English teachers on Substack to read some printed English language from over a hundred years ago.
One of my favourite ways that someone has said fuck you to the language police:
great essay. for me, one of the absolute joys of writing is playing with language and format and breaking all the rules i was taught at school. i hate gatekeeping in all its forms and telling folks they have to conform to certain rules to be ‘worthy’ of being read is another way of saying “you don’t belong here.” we all belong here.
Bruh, that question "why should we treat something sacred just because it doesn't belong to us" made me cringe SO HARD. Haven't even finished this yet, but I just had to say, you're doing great work engaging these nikkas. I don't have the bandwidth nor the skill to interface with ignorance as gracefully as you do, but its inspiring, really. You're a revolutionary calling me out of my skin to really talk directly to people's conventions of thought. thanks :)
(1) Here in California, the people that appropriated "woke" are the new age hippies (to describe themselves); haven't heard it in use in the lgbqti+ community.
(2) I don't use TikTok, but there's some data that shows that the company is lax in showing children/teens child porn, and they are knowingly targeting teens with poor emotional regulation to keep them on the app longer. Of course, that's not a Tiktok problem alone, I'm sure Meta's three apps function similarly. I'm glad it's a comfort to the kids that need it, but I fear it's a bit more like the first time doing heroin is a comfort than it is a warm fuzzy blanket.
(3) As someone for whom English is a second language, I have a certain amount of self-consciousness around proper grammar. As I was not allowed (so to speak) to use slang or to ever slip up. I commend writers of color in the Western world and/or writing in English for breaking that rule.
I know we've interacted in notes, but I loved this essay (and my brain is too tired is to say more about it) just as I enjoyed our notes interactions, so finally subscribed.
you nailed it every time, and this one is Xtra special, thankyou for sharing once again. Sent many excerpts to friends, every paragraph is a powerful entity in itself, and together it is even better.
god, this was a stunning read! your writing always has me spellbound, and as a lowercase frequenter, this was everything and more <3 literally read (basked in) this piece over the course of three days, three different times!!
Love this piece, tysm much for writing it! I esp love how you talk about the dual threat of white contempt and white admiration. Like Woke was a term that was adopted by white folks, first through white admiration (wypipo have a hard time admiring something and just letting it be. They always got to center themselves in the thing and f it up in the process) and then through white contempt.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Black things that white ppl and white institutions don’t admire/have contempt for/are untranslatable to them. There’s this viral clip of this white hip hop producer talking about how much he hates R&B/Soul music. After seeing it, part of me was like, Okay, Good. Because you would probably harm R&B in your admiration just as much as in your contempt. Idk I’m rambling now lol, but fr tho great piece!
this has to be one of my favorite of your pieces yet, following the argumentation was like watching a movie you know can only end one way, and yet being taken for a ride all the same. will be running off to read it to anyone in the house that will listen to me.
Soooo necessary and articulate. One of my fav one’s by you so far. May we instigate many more uncomfortable conversations highlighting our lived experiences 🌺 ✨ This is exactly what this platform needs right now.
Man, there's so much here. This is not only a challenge to the concept of existing literary rules and "ownership" of language, but to my own perception of works based on the learned emphasis placed on those rules.
English seems particularly beholden to these judgements of who can appropriate what, and can set or change its rules. This despite the fact that it's filled with exceptions that are acceptable because its established rulers say so.
Take ain't for example. As a child, I heard you shouldn't use it, and it wasn't a word because you couldn't find it in a dictionary. It was primarily seen as a word for "uneducated" minorities. As more and more in the dominant demo began using it, it eventually appeared in the dictionary, complete with a caveat that it's not deemed an acceptable contraction. From there it eventually was acceptable in informal settings. The only change was who began to use it more over time, not its use or meaning.
The gatekeepers of English apparently believe a practice isn't acceptable when it originates from the disempowered, unless enough descendants of the empowered decide it's worthy of their own use. Then, all bets are off and it can be coopted or corrupted at will. Same for rules around written structure.
As for the upper/lower case argument and "proper" writing, I fault the way English is taught. The very instruction you're given about its rules implies any departure isn't stylistic, exploratory or experimental, just wrong. I've got to admit having to overcome a judgemental aversion to lower case works at first glance, but that's a factor of how I've been trained to think about right and wrong in writing. Once the words are given a chance to speak, I've often found more than I initially would've believed. I wonder if we looked at words the same way we do other art, like paint or sculpture, where no one presentation is "right" but all are valid forays in expression, if more of us would give space for exploration.
Also, apologies. I wrote all that and I can't say for sure I've added anything you haven't already expressed. I just couldn't find another way to say how much I appreciated the considerations in this piece.
no apologies necessary. "ain't" is definitely an interesting example of how words/terms from marginalised communities find their way into legitimacy *despite* the rigid laws of "proper usage" over time. thanks for reading!
Also, people are apparently incredibly ignorant in your comments and on behalf of humanity as a whole (who I have no right to speak for but don't care either way. My hubris is always my eventual undoing) I would like to apologize because fuck, I read some of those links through. I'm sorry people are how they are.
Maybe I’m missing something, but the new usage has very understandable roots outside of some extraction from its initial usage, being that the new use of “woke” comes from an adjacent abstraction going back to at least 2016 when the discussion of “woke” ideologies became a big cultural talking point in conservative circles (youtube especially), and “woke” is effectively the same as being conscious to something (which isn’t a very far leap to make in the first place), so its being parodied as a form of esoteric gnostic knowledge that eventually leads to a truer freedom, away from the chains we currently keep ourselves shackled in, which is directly what the gnostic view of the world is: a prison (white supremacy) constructed by the demiurge (white hegemony) that we must escape (deconstruct and replace).
But I don’t think most people would even go that far in analysis. Most conservative will just see woke and know “ah, those are the blue haired Commifornians”, and will use it to stick it to them at a low level, not even thinking of the black community at all. Now if that is your point (i.e., black issues are swept under the rug), that’s a fair assessment, but also very difficult to give a “this happened, therefore this” sort of analysis that most people will ask for. I understand that is the point of the theoretical framework, but again, the framework itself has the same internal logical structure as gnosticism (which is how people will have it explained to them), so you’re already somewhat undermined on that front by coming off as eisegetic rather than exegetic analysis (this last part may not make sense, I don’t know).
"Most conservatives will just see woke and know, "ah, those are the blue haired Commifornians" – this rendering of "woke" is only possible because the word entered into the white lexicon through LGBTQ leftists who appropriated it from the Black community so your supposition that “woke” is effectively the same as being conscious to something which isn’t a very far leap to make in the first place" trivialises a very important step of the process I called "cultural colonisation". Your comment suggests that I've perhaps done a poor job of articulating the concrete steps of "woke's" extraction from the Black community and in not doing so, have left it open to misinterpretation.
I think your theory that "most conservatives" who want to stick it to queer-adjacent leftists and aren't thinking about Black people is wrong.
That is, I believe that conservatives have an intuitive understanding that "woke" is a "Black word" so when they use it pejoratively they know they're being disrespectful to both the white-left and the "BLM George Floyd protestors". It comes from the same place as grammatical purists who believe Black people are stupid and mock Black speech by throwing "be" in random places while having no idea that the "habitual be" has its own set of quite complex rules. They know they're being disrespectful but they don't think they're being racist. The pejorative use of "woke" functions in the exact same way.
I would say the issue with saying its cultural colonization is saying that then you must show intent to undermine the word itself and show how it’s not a natural evolution, but I’m not sure how you would be able to argue intent without looking conspiratorial, because from an outside perspective, everything is going to look 2 or 3 abstractions away from the concrete steps you might use. I have the feeling it would turn into a “can’t you see the connected dots” type of argument for anyone who isn’t working under the same assumptions, because only those “woke” to the hidden structure can see it. That’s why I stated it’s taken like a form of gnosticism and why conservatives speak on it as if it’s a religious movement.
I guess my own personal problem with your argument above about conservatives knowing that its a black word, from a broader sense, is that if you’re saying the word has already been appropriated by white culture in its current usage, then the initial meaning and usage of the word has already been abstracted away from its black roots and replaced with the equivalent white cultural element for it to be digestible (which I which I stated to be the current usage, and what I believe is what you’re stating was done as intentional overwriting), and therefore what conservatives are parodying is the white people who use it, not the black people that it originated from; the initial black usage is a layer of abstraction back. So it’s not clear to me through your current analogy to the treatment of the habitual “be”, since as I understand it, one is a critique of a nonstandard grammatical structure (even though its valid in its usage) and the other seems to be parody of people who claim “wokeness”. I’m not saying what you’re arguing is necessarily wrong, but the analogy you’re using doesn’t seem to be the right one for what you’re arguing.
"I would say the issue with saying its cultural colonization is saying that then you must show intent to undermine the word itself"
I'm going to be frank, I don't agree that I "must show intent". It suggests I need to prove something that is layered with plausible deniability–which is the kind of the exact point of my essay. The pejorativisation of the word shows intent enough. The flowchart I've presented: Black word > appropriated by white leftists > pejorativised by white conservatives – is a chronological timeline of events, whereas you seem to perceiving it more as a concretised set of transactions, or "intentional overwriting" or "replacement", and I don't know if its intentional on your part or accidental, but none of those ways you've explained it back to me are how I've used or categorised it, because "replacement" and "overwriting" imply absolute events. Perhaps that is where confusion is entering.
If I'm understanding you right, you'd like me to prove that conservatives are intentional mocking Black people and not just parodying white leftist's appropriation of the term. But, it doesn't matter to me either way.
Whether I'm right and they have an ambient understanding that "woke" was a Black term (and I related it to grammatical purists in this way because they understand that "habitual be" is part of Black speech, they just don't get the rules to where. Similarly, I believe conservatives vaguely understand that if "woke" is being used outside of "past tense of wake", it is something that Black people would say, ergo they get to mock BOTH white leftists and Black people in one fell swoop) or whether they have no knowledge of the Black origin at all, is irrelevant to me. "The new usage has very understandable roots outside of some extraction from its initial usage" was an appropriative event, the fact it wasn't "a far leap" in meaning is not what makes it unnatural, the extraction is what makes it unnatural, and that leap that has facilitated the pejorative use by conservatives. It is all part of an ecosystem of disrespect towards Blackness.
At the risk of appearing rude, Zachary – I appreciate your engagement but I don't know how many, if any, of the links in my piece you've checked out but I've been arguing about this for like, a long time, and its not that I'm unwelcoming of debate, I've just had so many back and forths like this that I'm kind of just tired of the minutae of them so I'll likely be bowing out from now!
I don’t think I’m trying to argue against you, it’s more just show how conservative people would approach the argument itself through its own internal logic. The extraction is where they are going to ask if it was intentional or not; they want to know if it’s first degree or second murder because that retroactively changes the analysis of the whole thing, and that’s where they will get hung up on the sequence of things and then default to finding more “reasonable” conclusions.
It’s not rude to not engage though. It’s your post and your time. I’ll admit, this is the first post I’ve read, so rehashing old points can become very tiring, so no worries. Take care!
This is an essay deserving a very long slow clap. I'm a fiction editor (dev and line, copy and reluctantly proofreading.) and author. I'm also a descriptive linguist. (Prescriptivism can fuck itself into non-existence.)
To borrow from cryptography, what we're transmitting is a signal with speech, yeh? K. Did Alice receive Bob's signal and understand it? Yeh? WELL DONE, ok, now fuck the rest.
There's one reason to learn proper grammar outside of the context of white supremacy, and it's so you can operate under the hegemony of the system and also know which rules are "conventionally" acceptable to break in an artistic framework. The shock to most people is the correct answer to that is "all of them you pedantic pickle holster" Past that, grammar, syntax, linguistics, (under white supremacy) only functions to show that wow, so you know how to use a fucking semicolon; good for you. (I sleep with a copy of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage 5th ed. under my pillow, and the first thing I tell an editorial client who wants to publish fiction, exhibits core competencies in milk cricket English, and understands narrative is, "OK, so now toss like, fully half of what you know out the window.")
Jesus I'm tired of this, thank you for writing it out properly and elegantly. If I wrote this I'm just another pedantic linguistic descriptivist pale white half Slav community college dropout. The colonisation I see but yes, I've not anywhere to comment aside from what I've said in your comments sections before. I only know its actual origins because my mother, like myself, is lower class, often poor, and rode public transportation in a city both integrated heavily and split right down the middle (Google: St. Louis Missouri, Delmar Divide if you don't know how literal I'm being, please, it's sad) on race lines AND class lines. (White person driving car in St. Louis = white person. White person riding the bus in St. Louis = filthy poor, criminal, or as close to not being white as you can get while still being as pale as an incandescent lightbulb. What's wild is my mom, who is decidedly small and white, was called a racial epithet traditionally only used by white people as supremacists, for riding the bus?!) (OK, that was a wildly divergent path of commentary but needless to say race and class relations in STL are more complex than most cities in the US and I've been through all of them at one point or another.) (Note: she first heard the term woke on the bus in the late '90s, so near thirty years ago.)
I'd also hoped I could find it but there was at one point on a listserv (my age is showing) there was an entire 100+ entry long LIST of jokes about which languages and how English was in a trenchcoat doing various things to other languages, etc. The original list seems lost to time (Or I suck at the wayback machine) but a quick list of examples would be something like: (Thanks ChatGPT, I won't even pretend I wrote these, but they're fairly in tone with what was on the list, albeit quite less exacting since the original list was written by linguists.)
"English is just German, French, and Latin in a trench coat beating up Anxient Greek for its lunch money."
"English is just three drunk languages in a trench coat shouting at each other and hoping someone understands."
"English is just Old Norse, Latin, and French in a trench coat doing a bad impression of a Germanic language."
"English is just Saxon, Viking, and Norman French in a trench coat fighting over word order."
"English is just Latin and German in a trench coat sneaking into a Greek etymology party."
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat trying to sneak into the Romance languages club."
"English is just French and German in a trench coat pretending they can handle Greek's vocabulary."
"English is just Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dr. Seuss in a trench coat writing whatever they want."
"English is just three languages in a trench coat stealing spelling rules from a dumpster."
"English is just Latin in a trench coat trying to remember what it was supposed to sound like."
"English is just French, Latin, and Norse in a trench coat mugging Greek for science terms."
"English is just Dutch, Old Norse, and French in a trench coat arguing about how to spell 'through.'"
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat pretending it remembers its own grammar rules."
"English is just a collection of bad linguistic decisions in a trench coat insisting it's normal."
"English is just Old English in a trench coat trying to hide its midlife crisis with French vocabulary."
"English is just three etymologies in a trench coat and none of them are cooperating."
"English is just Germanic roots in a trench coat pretending it's fluent in Latin."
"English is just three random languages in a trench coat explaining why 'ough' has five pronunciations."
Or, more to the point:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll (b. 1961), "The King's English", rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990
Having said whatever I just said I would like to say I hate linguistic prescriptivism as anything but a tool to exploit for whatever reason you need. All the rules are made up anyway, most of them are bullshit, and someone explain to me why more than thirty fucking languages call pineapples "ananas" and some white fuck came along to Mexico (the only place pineapples in spite of their current globally grown acreage are native to) saw one growing from a bush, pointed it out, and said "TIS A PINE-APPLE!"
The rules are made up. Nary one of them makes fuckin' sense. Limiting your reading based on arbitrary rules created by the white gentry to keep you out of their club is fucking stupid, something about the power elite. OH, and don't get me started on cognitive load. My fellow beings in imaginary Christ, have ye not heard of any of five thousand authors, not even all white and male, thank GOD, whose work AIMS to overload you cognitively. (To that end, one of my modes of fictional expression is MEANT TO CREATE PANIC ATTACKS, and according to many readers is very effective at doing so.)
I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require. And I get paid a tidy sum to EDIT FICTION (and I do it for fun on Substack free once a week.) I'm. I cannot explain the BILE this subject brings up in me. ABSOLUTE BILE. (I've not had tea since before the 7th, honestly I'm maybe losing my fucking shit over it. My kitchen looks like a scene from Dead Space, or some sort of crusty abandoned space station filled with IKEA furni lit by fluorescent motion sensor lights slapped to every surface)
This essay, in other words, is perfect. Thank you.
Apologies for my comment's length, if I were more sane at the moment, it would be shorter, or not, I don't know.
this reminds me of something I read ages ago based on an experiment. It theorised something along the lines of: if you jumble around the letters inside a word but keep the first and last letters the same, as long as the word is no longer than 5/6 letters, your brain can still to process it relatively quickly.
So I could write, "wlel taht's qitue carzy!" and not only is it legible to most people, most people would read it just as quickly as if everything was spelt correctly.
"I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require."
this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the "it gives me a headache" declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language. There is so much pretending. If the grammatical rules aren't adhered to then you're taught to be dismissive or punitive or derisive, or pretend you didn't understand, or pretend its more difficult than it is, or pretend that you are in physical pain. It is all a performance, or if it isn't, then its an indoctrination that is obscuring the highest truth, that ultimately, if you've understood what I've said, what's there left to talk about?
That is qiute czray (This is really base cog neurosci, you're on the mark. The order of letters doesn't matter if you know English, just the placement of the first and last. There's a ton of memes and jokes that use this effect too.)
"this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the 'it gives me a headache' declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language." EXACTLY! OK, so, we have László Krasznahorkai, sure he's Hungarian, but his last novel (award winning, for the record) Herscht 07769, is 500 pages, and one sentence. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for a novel that had no conventional punctuation or dialog tags, and only like, 5 commas total. This argument is spurious from every fucking angle.
My theory is that it's simple indoctrination along with the fact of it being, and the quotation marks here are large, cartoonish, and comical "PrOpEr EnGLiSh", is not only an acquired skill that takes time to learn and master (I'm 39 and I edit fiction, I've been writing since I had the tactile dexterity to hold an instrument to do so, and I still reference Fowler's modern usage, I've been a paid editor 10 years... Let's consider that.) AND it's a gatekeeper to the OFFICIAL LEAGUE OF ELITIST MILK CRICKETRY. Indoctrination or if you're a writer of fiction (or I'd argue non-fiction, the mode of which is now usually the personal essay, which fits neatly under the category of creative non-fiction for various reasons. Which is why Weinberger is a genius, which is why you're so fucking good among others) a complete lack of understanding of the finer points of language and how it is used to make art. (This is leaving out formalist experimentalism. Someone most famously wrote a near 500 page book without using the letter "e" now OK, that's just showing off. And it's legible!)
If it's mostly performative then fuck, get a better hobby. It's like these right coded "authors" (again, very unserious sarcastic quote marks) complaining about fucking the Big Five in New York and how they can't get published when they're writing IN THE STYLE THAT CERVANTES WAS SKEWERING WHEN HE WROTE DON QUIXOTE (Shit you not, I've seen them on the platform.) Or, they're appealing to the idea of some halcyon ere of literacy and fiction that they consider to be the platonic ideal. (DeepLeftAnalysis... God I hope none of his fans hate read you, they're insufferable, tried to make a QUANTITATIVE, though to his credit even he admitted possibly flawed, argument that the height of the English language for style, fiction et al. was Shakespeare. Which, no offense to the Bard, he did just make up words when he needed them (He's attributed with coining or popularising around 1,700 words... English isn't a liar's language, it is THE liars language, and our grammar is fucked up by global standards but I'll not even touch on that.) Including one I'm fond of in swagger.
For me, what's left to talk about, with you in specific, is just the reinforcement of agreement. For everyone else, I have no idea, remove the phone pole from their asses I guess.
And the guy who was talking about lowering the cognitive load of the reader?! MY GOD. HOLY FUCK. HAVE YOU EVER READ A CELLULAR MICROBIOLOGY TEXTBOOK? Have you read a single scientific research paper? Because you're as white as my fucking nicotine gum but as dim as a dying LED bulb flickering helpless set to low, in the middle of the night. If my cognitive load is not at least somewhat challenged or stressed by a text, wether it be by ideas or otherwise, I'm likely less interested in it.
If you're being a scold to people writing lowercase essays, the most brilliant woman I ever knew never used capitals and rarely used punctuation outside of scientific academia (which broke her) she would be 39 this year if she hadn't drank the dumbest bitch juice and hanged herself in May, 2023, and she was writing all lowercase essays LONG BEFORE THEY ENTERED ANY LARGER DISCOURSE. (Why is this a thing people care about? Facebook has been a haven for the lowercase screed, essay, rant, what have you for a decade. Oh, is it the platform? Oh, is everyone suddenly discovering they have domain mastery over English grammar, linguistics, syntax, etc. Or do you still use spellcheck to see which words do and don't follow the i after e rule? Because I beleive that his is a common way to decieve yourself.)
One final mid-coffee example. My editing service and my Substack are both named, Burnt Tongue. No, this is not because as many (specifically since I'm on his comment responding to him, in an Oscar Kilo I agree fashion) people know, I DO NOT SHUT UP. Burnt tongue, or burnt voice, is a concept named from Chuck Palahniuk as taught by Tom Spanbauer in his Dangerous Writing Workshop (which rest his soul, his work is done, produced MANY popular and cult American novelists) after he decamped from New York back to Portland from surviving Gordon Lish's FAMOUSLY BRUTAL WORKSHOP (which by metrics probably produced the most notable crop of published authors of any workshop EVER in spite of Lish's notorious savagery, narcissism, and blatant and unabashed tendency to fuck his students, of whom who survived the workshop I will now give a small list, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Tom Spanbauer, Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Bourdain, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Mary Robinson, Barry Hannah... This list is by no means exhaustive.) Burnt Tongue, is a minimalist stylistic tool, whereby you use syaing something wrong, such as a typo, or having a character in first person POV blatantly misstating something, a malapropism, etc. as a tool to point to something larger, create a pause, or even bring up another larger or more interesting point from earlier in the text, or otherwise. It is quite an interesting tool. Notably the entire PLOT of Palahniuk's thesis novel Adjustment Day, 2018, Doubleday (which is also amazing satire imo) HINGES ON ONE INSTANCE OF BURNT TONGUE. I'm quite proud I can say that and not give anything about the novel away, but the novel is amazing satire and Inigo, I can tell you now, you would either absolutely hate it, or not, but you would have something to say about it worth reading I'm sure, and I'm very interested either way in what your take on it would be. The plot being that the aggrieved low class Whites kill the government and intelligentsia, the nation splits in thruple, a Straight White Christian Monarchy, a literal and unmaligned if I remember correctly, which I'm only remembering so well because I recently read your piece on it, Black Utopia that subverts the "magical negro" trope in an interesting way (Palahniuk is many things, gay, white, but ignorant of sociology and race issues he is not), and a west coast state for all those who full under the rainbow umbrella. Anyway, that's the short of a very dense novel.
Anyway, yes, exactly.
This is brilliant. Thank you.
As a trained high school English teacher, I find it disgusting how many people there are on this platform who consider themselves language police. I had to enforce normative modern English standards in the classroom, but it was always with the understanding that “this is what we do in the classroom, do whatever you like outside.”
I’d love for all the prétendant English teachers on Substack to read some printed English language from over a hundred years ago.
One of my favourite ways that someone has said fuck you to the language police:
https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/six-oclock-news
Six O’Clock News
BY TOM LEONARD
this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.
awesome insight and poem, thanks for sharing brother.
great essay. for me, one of the absolute joys of writing is playing with language and format and breaking all the rules i was taught at school. i hate gatekeeping in all its forms and telling folks they have to conform to certain rules to be ‘worthy’ of being read is another way of saying “you don’t belong here.” we all belong here.
i too hate gatekeeping in all its forms! there’s much to play with in the linguistic realm.
Bruh, that question "why should we treat something sacred just because it doesn't belong to us" made me cringe SO HARD. Haven't even finished this yet, but I just had to say, you're doing great work engaging these nikkas. I don't have the bandwidth nor the skill to interface with ignorance as gracefully as you do, but its inspiring, really. You're a revolutionary calling me out of my skin to really talk directly to people's conventions of thought. thanks :)
it was a mad thing to say. we share a planet with some truly, selfish souls. glad i could provide you with some thought, appreciate you, bro
A bunch of thoughts as I read this:
(1) Here in California, the people that appropriated "woke" are the new age hippies (to describe themselves); haven't heard it in use in the lgbqti+ community.
(2) I don't use TikTok, but there's some data that shows that the company is lax in showing children/teens child porn, and they are knowingly targeting teens with poor emotional regulation to keep them on the app longer. Of course, that's not a Tiktok problem alone, I'm sure Meta's three apps function similarly. I'm glad it's a comfort to the kids that need it, but I fear it's a bit more like the first time doing heroin is a comfort than it is a warm fuzzy blanket.
(3) As someone for whom English is a second language, I have a certain amount of self-consciousness around proper grammar. As I was not allowed (so to speak) to use slang or to ever slip up. I commend writers of color in the Western world and/or writing in English for breaking that rule.
I know we've interacted in notes, but I loved this essay (and my brain is too tired is to say more about it) just as I enjoyed our notes interactions, so finally subscribed.
R u jesus on the X???
you nailed it every time, and this one is Xtra special, thankyou for sharing once again. Sent many excerpts to friends, every paragraph is a powerful entity in itself, and together it is even better.
Long slow claps shared with Emil. <3
hahah thank you very much! 🫶🏾
god, this was a stunning read! your writing always has me spellbound, and as a lowercase frequenter, this was everything and more <3 literally read (basked in) this piece over the course of three days, three different times!!
i’m so happy it resonated with you darling thank you so much 🫶🏾
Love this piece, tysm much for writing it! I esp love how you talk about the dual threat of white contempt and white admiration. Like Woke was a term that was adopted by white folks, first through white admiration (wypipo have a hard time admiring something and just letting it be. They always got to center themselves in the thing and f it up in the process) and then through white contempt.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Black things that white ppl and white institutions don’t admire/have contempt for/are untranslatable to them. There’s this viral clip of this white hip hop producer talking about how much he hates R&B/Soul music. After seeing it, part of me was like, Okay, Good. Because you would probably harm R&B in your admiration just as much as in your contempt. Idk I’m rambling now lol, but fr tho great piece!
Interesting
this has to be one of my favorite of your pieces yet, following the argumentation was like watching a movie you know can only end one way, and yet being taken for a ride all the same. will be running off to read it to anyone in the house that will listen to me.
I will probably have to read this essay 3 times. It is packed full of gems. Thank you for setting this all out, and shining so many lights here.
i'm happy, thanks for reading!
Soooo necessary and articulate. One of my fav one’s by you so far. May we instigate many more uncomfortable conversations highlighting our lived experiences 🌺 ✨ This is exactly what this platform needs right now.
thank you so much, darling! for your help and your words 🫶🏾
happy 2 support u ♥️
Man, there's so much here. This is not only a challenge to the concept of existing literary rules and "ownership" of language, but to my own perception of works based on the learned emphasis placed on those rules.
English seems particularly beholden to these judgements of who can appropriate what, and can set or change its rules. This despite the fact that it's filled with exceptions that are acceptable because its established rulers say so.
Take ain't for example. As a child, I heard you shouldn't use it, and it wasn't a word because you couldn't find it in a dictionary. It was primarily seen as a word for "uneducated" minorities. As more and more in the dominant demo began using it, it eventually appeared in the dictionary, complete with a caveat that it's not deemed an acceptable contraction. From there it eventually was acceptable in informal settings. The only change was who began to use it more over time, not its use or meaning.
The gatekeepers of English apparently believe a practice isn't acceptable when it originates from the disempowered, unless enough descendants of the empowered decide it's worthy of their own use. Then, all bets are off and it can be coopted or corrupted at will. Same for rules around written structure.
As for the upper/lower case argument and "proper" writing, I fault the way English is taught. The very instruction you're given about its rules implies any departure isn't stylistic, exploratory or experimental, just wrong. I've got to admit having to overcome a judgemental aversion to lower case works at first glance, but that's a factor of how I've been trained to think about right and wrong in writing. Once the words are given a chance to speak, I've often found more than I initially would've believed. I wonder if we looked at words the same way we do other art, like paint or sculpture, where no one presentation is "right" but all are valid forays in expression, if more of us would give space for exploration.
Also, apologies. I wrote all that and I can't say for sure I've added anything you haven't already expressed. I just couldn't find another way to say how much I appreciated the considerations in this piece.
no apologies necessary. "ain't" is definitely an interesting example of how words/terms from marginalised communities find their way into legitimacy *despite* the rigid laws of "proper usage" over time. thanks for reading!
Also, people are apparently incredibly ignorant in your comments and on behalf of humanity as a whole (who I have no right to speak for but don't care either way. My hubris is always my eventual undoing) I would like to apologize because fuck, I read some of those links through. I'm sorry people are how they are.
Ohhh wish we’d had a chance to discuss some of this stuff the other day - so interesting, and beautifully argued.
oh man lol, I feel like there was so much we didn't get to talk about honestly! thank you for reading 🫶🏾
Maybe I’m missing something, but the new usage has very understandable roots outside of some extraction from its initial usage, being that the new use of “woke” comes from an adjacent abstraction going back to at least 2016 when the discussion of “woke” ideologies became a big cultural talking point in conservative circles (youtube especially), and “woke” is effectively the same as being conscious to something (which isn’t a very far leap to make in the first place), so its being parodied as a form of esoteric gnostic knowledge that eventually leads to a truer freedom, away from the chains we currently keep ourselves shackled in, which is directly what the gnostic view of the world is: a prison (white supremacy) constructed by the demiurge (white hegemony) that we must escape (deconstruct and replace).
But I don’t think most people would even go that far in analysis. Most conservative will just see woke and know “ah, those are the blue haired Commifornians”, and will use it to stick it to them at a low level, not even thinking of the black community at all. Now if that is your point (i.e., black issues are swept under the rug), that’s a fair assessment, but also very difficult to give a “this happened, therefore this” sort of analysis that most people will ask for. I understand that is the point of the theoretical framework, but again, the framework itself has the same internal logical structure as gnosticism (which is how people will have it explained to them), so you’re already somewhat undermined on that front by coming off as eisegetic rather than exegetic analysis (this last part may not make sense, I don’t know).
"Most conservatives will just see woke and know, "ah, those are the blue haired Commifornians" – this rendering of "woke" is only possible because the word entered into the white lexicon through LGBTQ leftists who appropriated it from the Black community so your supposition that “woke” is effectively the same as being conscious to something which isn’t a very far leap to make in the first place" trivialises a very important step of the process I called "cultural colonisation". Your comment suggests that I've perhaps done a poor job of articulating the concrete steps of "woke's" extraction from the Black community and in not doing so, have left it open to misinterpretation.
I think your theory that "most conservatives" who want to stick it to queer-adjacent leftists and aren't thinking about Black people is wrong.
That is, I believe that conservatives have an intuitive understanding that "woke" is a "Black word" so when they use it pejoratively they know they're being disrespectful to both the white-left and the "BLM George Floyd protestors". It comes from the same place as grammatical purists who believe Black people are stupid and mock Black speech by throwing "be" in random places while having no idea that the "habitual be" has its own set of quite complex rules. They know they're being disrespectful but they don't think they're being racist. The pejorative use of "woke" functions in the exact same way.
I would say the issue with saying its cultural colonization is saying that then you must show intent to undermine the word itself and show how it’s not a natural evolution, but I’m not sure how you would be able to argue intent without looking conspiratorial, because from an outside perspective, everything is going to look 2 or 3 abstractions away from the concrete steps you might use. I have the feeling it would turn into a “can’t you see the connected dots” type of argument for anyone who isn’t working under the same assumptions, because only those “woke” to the hidden structure can see it. That’s why I stated it’s taken like a form of gnosticism and why conservatives speak on it as if it’s a religious movement.
I guess my own personal problem with your argument above about conservatives knowing that its a black word, from a broader sense, is that if you’re saying the word has already been appropriated by white culture in its current usage, then the initial meaning and usage of the word has already been abstracted away from its black roots and replaced with the equivalent white cultural element for it to be digestible (which I which I stated to be the current usage, and what I believe is what you’re stating was done as intentional overwriting), and therefore what conservatives are parodying is the white people who use it, not the black people that it originated from; the initial black usage is a layer of abstraction back. So it’s not clear to me through your current analogy to the treatment of the habitual “be”, since as I understand it, one is a critique of a nonstandard grammatical structure (even though its valid in its usage) and the other seems to be parody of people who claim “wokeness”. I’m not saying what you’re arguing is necessarily wrong, but the analogy you’re using doesn’t seem to be the right one for what you’re arguing.
That said, I have no actual idea.
"I would say the issue with saying its cultural colonization is saying that then you must show intent to undermine the word itself"
I'm going to be frank, I don't agree that I "must show intent". It suggests I need to prove something that is layered with plausible deniability–which is the kind of the exact point of my essay. The pejorativisation of the word shows intent enough. The flowchart I've presented: Black word > appropriated by white leftists > pejorativised by white conservatives – is a chronological timeline of events, whereas you seem to perceiving it more as a concretised set of transactions, or "intentional overwriting" or "replacement", and I don't know if its intentional on your part or accidental, but none of those ways you've explained it back to me are how I've used or categorised it, because "replacement" and "overwriting" imply absolute events. Perhaps that is where confusion is entering.
If I'm understanding you right, you'd like me to prove that conservatives are intentional mocking Black people and not just parodying white leftist's appropriation of the term. But, it doesn't matter to me either way.
Whether I'm right and they have an ambient understanding that "woke" was a Black term (and I related it to grammatical purists in this way because they understand that "habitual be" is part of Black speech, they just don't get the rules to where. Similarly, I believe conservatives vaguely understand that if "woke" is being used outside of "past tense of wake", it is something that Black people would say, ergo they get to mock BOTH white leftists and Black people in one fell swoop) or whether they have no knowledge of the Black origin at all, is irrelevant to me. "The new usage has very understandable roots outside of some extraction from its initial usage" was an appropriative event, the fact it wasn't "a far leap" in meaning is not what makes it unnatural, the extraction is what makes it unnatural, and that leap that has facilitated the pejorative use by conservatives. It is all part of an ecosystem of disrespect towards Blackness.
At the risk of appearing rude, Zachary – I appreciate your engagement but I don't know how many, if any, of the links in my piece you've checked out but I've been arguing about this for like, a long time, and its not that I'm unwelcoming of debate, I've just had so many back and forths like this that I'm kind of just tired of the minutae of them so I'll likely be bowing out from now!
I don’t think I’m trying to argue against you, it’s more just show how conservative people would approach the argument itself through its own internal logic. The extraction is where they are going to ask if it was intentional or not; they want to know if it’s first degree or second murder because that retroactively changes the analysis of the whole thing, and that’s where they will get hung up on the sequence of things and then default to finding more “reasonable” conclusions.
It’s not rude to not engage though. It’s your post and your time. I’ll admit, this is the first post I’ve read, so rehashing old points can become very tiring, so no worries. Take care!