You will find this week’s reading in the TCC library data bases. Please do not use an internet search; you will need to be comfortable with data bases to do well in this class.
Follow these steps:
On the TCC Welcome page, click on TCC Library.
Scroll down to Find Library Resources.
In the box labeled Super Search, type “Words on Trial.” (Be sure to use quotation marks.)
Scroll down the list until you find “Words on Trial: Department of Linguistics,” by Jack Hitt.
(Some of the articles we read this quarter have errors in spacing or capitalization, and they sometimes confuse dashes with hyphens. These are artifacts of the digitization process, not errors by the authors or their editors. When you analyze the writing, ignore them.)
The writing process outlined in the next few paragraphs is the one you should follow for all assignments in this class. Please remember that even though you are posting your essays in a discussion forum, they should be written as formal college essays.
Your essay this week is on what “Words on Trial” tells us about language. This means that you have to extrapolate from Jack Hitt’s examples and analysis to broader issues about language. After your first or second time through, ask yourself what you know now that you didn’t know before you read the article. The answer to your question is probably a first draft of your thesis statement.
We are developing skills in critical reading and critical thinking. Critical reading means asking questions of the writer. The best questions begin with who, what, why, where, when, or how. These are really the key to critical thinking in general, and you will find that a good question often leads to more questions. For example, when you have an answer to what Hitt taught me about language, you will want to know why he wants us to know, or how he convinced us, or when or where this new knowledge can be useful, or what other things about language you can now guess about.
After you have a thesis, re-read the article for examples that support it, quote or paraphrase them in your supporting paragraphs, and analyze them in detail to show exactly how they do in fact support the thesis. In this context, analysis means that you focus on a few specific words or phrases and you explain exactly how they support your thesis. A quotation or paraphrase by itself will rarely be sufficient to convince your reader.
After you have developed a first draft of your thesis and several supporting paragraphs, go back and delete any introduction that you have already written. Replace it with a few sentences that begin with the title, author, and source, and that then give specific, useful context. Avoid truisms like “From the beginning of time people have used language” or “Language is very important” or “Language is how we convey information.” These are lazy, boring, and a waste of space that should be used to say something that will help your reader grasp your thesis.
Set your finished draft aside for a day or two. Then go back and read it carefully, applying the process of critical reading to your own writing. Ask yourself how each sentence contributes to supporting your thesis and how it makes your emphasis clear and your transitions easy to follow. Now is the time to trim wordiness by using a variety of sentence structures.
Once you have revised your essay, put it aside for at least a few hours and then proofread it to catch and correct errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and diction.
Submit your essay by copying and pasting it into the Reply box. Please do not submit attachments or files of any kind.
If you have submitted your essay before the deadline, you will have time to look through other students’ submissions and make an extra-credit comment on one of them. If not, not.
A good essay for this assignment will run about five-hundred words, but I do not simply count words. I am looking for a concise, well-supported essay. If that takes four-hundred words or six-hundred words, don’t worry about it.
The goals of this assignment are for you to apply critical reading and thinking skills to this article, to learn something about language, to write a coherent, correct, engaging essay, and to see what others have learned and how they have written about it.
Under the Modules tab you find some helpful lessons. I have not “assigned” them because at this point I don’t know which ones you need. If, for example, you are unsure about writing a thesis, you will find a lesson on it there. Among them you will find one on how writing is graded in this class.
The Modules are lessons that I teach over days or even a week or more in the classroom. Don’t expect to master them on one reading. They require study and practice. Don’t hesitate to ask me about anything in them that is unclear — that’s how teaching and learning work.
Here are some comments on “Words on Trial” and on language in general that you will find helpful. A good essay will reflect what you have learned from these comments as well as from the article. In particular, there will be some new vocabulary that can become part of your critical reading and thinking toolbox.
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In recent years, many people have started to refer to new language norms as “political correctness.” In fact, however, we have always been subject to social expectations — or rules — about what we can say and how we can say it. And those expectations have always been controversial.
Fifty years ago, when I was a college student, a professor would never use the word “fuck” in a classroom, nor would a student. Children didn’t use it in front of their parents, nor parents in front of their children. On the other hand, the N-word was all over the place. I’m proud to say that I didn’t use it, and neither did my family, but it still came up in movies, books, and interviews broadcast on the major networks — never bleeped. It was considered somewhat impolite, but it wasn’t toxic. It was a bad word even then, but nothing like as bad as it is now.
What happened? If you have been reading the previous paragraph critically, you’re asking, “considered merely ‘somewhat impolite’ by whom?” The simplest answer is “old people.” And if you’re still reading critically, you’re asking “what ‘old people?’.” The simplest answer is, “older white people.”
The older white people who objected strenuously to the word “fuck” got old enough to lose their power to enforce their language preferences. Young people, with their own language preferences, got old enough and powerful enough to enforce their language preferences. Now you’re asking “what ‘young people?’.” The answer is, “young people of all races.”
Fifty years ago, people of color had very little direct influence on the language of the broader culture. Not only did the old white people lose their power in the social sphere, but people of color gained power — or, if “power” is too loaded, try “influence.” The situation hasn’t changed as much as it should and as much as it will, but we are far, far from the time when people who felt slighted, maligned, and offended by the N-word had to keep quiet about it. Now they can raise their voices in objection.
These changes happen not only with so-called “bad” words, but with all sorts of bits and pieces of language. For example, I remember that the old people of sixty years ago objected to the word “contact” as a verb, as in “Contact me as soon as you can.” I suspect that not a single person in this class ever dreamed that such usage could be objectionable to anyone.
Another example: It is still hard for me (in writing, at least) to refer to an individual as “they.” By the old rules of formal grammar, it was incorrect to say, “That professor must think they are some kind of grammar god.” The correct pronoun was “he.” (However, just as everyone always has, I do it in casual speaking all the time.) What happened was that new generations questioned the assumption that the male is some kind of default, as if women or non-gender binary don’t exist except when specified.
So the change in language is one reflection of a change in society. Sometimes language just changes, seemingly randomly, but often, as in some of these examples, it registers a shift in influence, a change in who has power. No surprise, then, that people who used to hold power over others become resentful when they see those others begin to have their own way. They may even come up with a derisive, dismissive phrase like “politically correct” to convey their disdain — forgetting that their own language was politically correct in its day.
Follow the changes in language and you will often discover changes in society — changes in history. That’s part of what this week’s article is about. History itself changes with changing perspectives and values. Of course some things really happened and others didn’t. But at every moment, the people in power interpret history to justify their place. They’re not necessarily lying — although sometimes they are! They’re simply looking at the past and emphasizing the things that fit into the story of their own success, and de-emphasizing or even ignoring the things that don’t. The next generation will do it too, only with different emphasis. And so will the generation after that.
Here’s an example of how history changes: Years ago there was a project to restore George Washington’s estate for public viewing, and a controversy arose over whether to include the old slave quarters as part of the new tourist attraction. It was largely a generational controversy. Some people, particularly older, white people, had never thought of George Washington as a slave owner and, in any case, they didn’t see it as a very important part of who he was and of his place in history. Younger people saw slavery as intrinsic to our nation’s history and to Washington’s place in it.
(I am guilty of some over-simplification here.. It isn’t always older people versus younger people. But with language, especially, the changes do tend to come from the new generation and to be condemned by the older generation, until the older generation is too old, too out of power, for anyone to pay any attention to their preferences.)
A word that reveals your background, age, or geographical origin is a shibboleth. The term comes from a story in the Hebrew Bible in which two tribes who speak almost the same language have had a war. One group pronounces the word with a hard “s,” sibboleth, while the other pronounced it with “sh,” shibboleth. The victors discover that the quickest way to tell who is on their side by making them say the word; then they kill those who pronounce it incorrectly. They slaughtered many thousands.
If you’re reading critically, you may have wondered why I referred to “the Hebrew Bible” instead of “the Old Testament.” The answer is that I teach a course on the literature of the Bible, and scholars (quite reasonably) prefer the term Hebrew Bible because it acknowledges that it was written, preserved, and studied by the Hebrews for hundreds — for some books, thousands — of years before Christians wrote the New Testament and had to create a new designation for the Bible that already existed. They wanted to include the Hebrew Bible, but they had to distinguish it from the Gospels and other later writings. For the purposes of Christian study and worship, it became “the Old Testament.”
When I’m at church I use the term “Old Testament” because it is appropriate in that setting. This is an example of how we shift our speech to fit the situation we’re in. It doesn’t make us hypocrites or purveyors of “political correctness.” It merely shows that we are sensitive to the language community we happen to be in at the moment.
By the way, for the purposes of this class we will distinguish between the words vocabulary, lexicon, and diction. The word vocabulary refers to all the words you know. Lexicon refers to all the words in the language. Diction means the words you choose to use in a specific situation. These are important distinctions.
As a writer, you are sensitive to your audience and the situation, and you choose the appropriate words. Your diction is the words you select from your vocabulary to meet the needs and understanding of your reader. That’s why a large vocabulary empowers you to say more things to more people more effectively. Already today you have learned shibboleth and lexicon, along with specialized uses of vocabulary and diction.
