Yo son, you's got the language, kid

When I first looked at The Language War I thought to myself, “Oh god, please not another one of these godforsaken rhetorical texts. Mahoney, why do you curse this class? Should I be spiteful? Spite I will. Spitey McGee here!” Well, that didn’t happen. Sorry, did I go too far? It happens. Thankfully enough, though, the book wasn’t like the other foreign text we read. (Ramage) Although Robin Lakoff does provide us with this lengthy account, it defers from Rhetoric: A User’s Guide with it’s much simpler way of explaining things. Thanks Robin. ( See above )

In the introduction, Lakoff goes on to offer us a number of questions of which I will account for here.

“How do stories we tell and hear, privately
and publicly, give us our understanding of ourselves and the society we
inhabit?” (pg. 7)

As she goes on to say, we must, as a whole, begin to analyze linguistic data so that we may be able to understand what effect it has on social, economic and political reality. So much of our common language influences the way others act and react that it should almost be a forgone certainty that we study the effects of this.

• How does modern slang influence our society?
• What about the apology, or the unconscious, un-apology?
• How do we begin to study these seemingly simple tools of language?
  

Well, I’ll talk about one of the examples Lakoff presents. On page 28 Lakoff talks about the extended interpretation apology.

• This means that there is ambigous language which presents either a positive or negative connotation, which the individual has to interpret.

"If I say, 'You’re a real genius,’ the literal interpretation is
the positive one, you’re smart; the ironic, that is, the nonliteral one, is
negative, you’re an idiot. On the other hand, I can’t normally say, ‘You’re a
real idiot,’ meaning ironically that you’re smart."

This example made me laugh a jolly old second or two—mostly because my friends and I use this logic all the time. Instead of politely telling someone, ‘hey, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing you could have said,’ we have to belittle him, offering our best use of sarcasm to make him feel completely unwelcome. It’s a product of environment, I’m assuming. This theory of the extended interpretation apology most likely has been around for the past decade, because people grew tired of saying the same tired response to the same pathetic person over and over again. Most likely, that pathetic person realized his ineptitude rather quickly and either

• a) shut up forever; or
• b) became a little more aware of what he said in public.

It works out in the long run. A little further on in the reading, at page 58, I came across a section that talked about the rhetorical roles of

Republicans

and

Democrats.

The discussion centered around the battle between the two parties and how they could potentially one-up each other. What struck me as déjà vu, was when Democrats retailiated in a Frank Luntz type approach. As a way of gaining an upper hand on the Republicans, the Democrats would invoke the term “extremist” instead of “liberal” when talking about the Republicans. “In the epithet wars that were the 1996 Congressional and Presidential campaigns, “extremist” proved to be a more dangerous label than “liberal.”

Again, I laughed when I read this section. I thought, “By golly, was Frank Luntz at the bottom of this, or do others find pleasure at creating havoc with response-driven language?” It showed what lengths parties would go to gain an upper hand—by using all of their rhetorical powers, they would finally defeat the other!

Finally, I just want to point out pg. 78, where Lakoff says this,

“I am tempted to suggest that one function of prescriptivism, amply attested here, is that worrying about how people talk avoids the necessity
of paying attention to what they say—which could be a real problem. "

This was in response to the example in the text which was about the man in the elevator who was berated by three unknown occupants who, probably by there need for constant one-upmanship, corrected his grammar. This bothered me a lot. What’s the deal with grammar? Do we always have to keep our guard up around everyone?

• OOPS, SORRY I USED THE WRONG TENSE—SHOOT ME NOW.

Seriously, not everyone has a stick up their butt all the time.

To those that do, I recommend this: Watch Save the Last Dance. Watch this scene:

• Derek: “Yo Sara, ya wan me to hep ya out wit some moves?”
• Sara: “Why yes, that would be quite swell, my newly found chum.”

*They proceed to go into a seemingly empty high school where Sara gets the stick out her ass and learns the ways of hip-hop and grunting.*

*End Scene*

That will help. It isn't always about the way something says or writes something, but rather, it's about the message that one tries to get across.

Alright, well I must say, this book was a great read considering the previous text we had to deal with. But, without the prior knowledge about Ramage and his rhetorical ways, I’m not sure if it would have had the same impact that it did. In that respect, I thank you Ramage and Mrs. Lakoff.