Fighting Words!: A Critical Approach to Linguistic Transgression [1 ed.] 1032130547, 9781032130545

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Endorsements
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue – On Never Looking Away
1 Rethinking Language: Foundations for Critique
If Not Existence, Then What?
Implications of Language-as-Verb
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
2 Languaging Transgression: "Grabbing Pussy" and "Locker Room Talk"
Describing Transgressive Languaging
Linguistic Signs
Beyond Words
X-Phemism
Structured Languaging
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
3 Languaging Meaning: "Rolling Coal" and "Having Balls"
Unintended Transgression
Languaging Meaning
Meaning and Languagers
Languaging Culture
Languaging Communities and Communities of Languaging
Languaging Context
Indexing and Enregisterment
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
4 Languaging Worldview: Ideology and Mythology
Beliefs and Languaging
Languaging Rules
Mythology and Ideology
Languaging and Race
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
5 Languaging Authority and Power: Karens in the Wild
Karens (as well as Darrens, Beckys and Warrens)
Authority and Power
Doing Language and Doing Power
Censorship and Self-Censorship
Facework and Verbal Hygiene
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
6 Languaging Consequence: Linguistic Performativity and Hate Speech
Insults and Hate Speech
Languaging in Real Time
Speech Act Theory
Interpolation and Hailing
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
7 Languaging Cancellation: The Ecology of Discourse and Hegemony
Cancel Culture
Discourse Two Ways
Discursive Power and Hegemony
Critical Discourse Studies
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
8 Languaging Rebellion: When Pussy Grabs Back
Transgression at the Top of the Charts
Linguistic Rebellion
Transgression as Liberation
Tying It Together
Discussion Questions
Further Reading
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

FIGHTING WORDS!

Fighting Words! is a critical exploration of all kinds of “bad language” and how that language shapes, reinforces, or subverts identity, ideology, and power. Eric Louis Russell expertly investigates facets of taboo language, drawing on diverse interdisciplinary material to define key concepts and using them to examine the complex dynamics behind a wide range of examples from popular culture, from Donald Trump’s controversies to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP. What emerges from this analysis is the intersectionality of how language is performed and how it contributes to the shaping of identity and simultaneously shapes and is shaped by social attitudes, cultural assumptions, and systems of power with regard to race, sexuality, and gender. With fascinating “A Closer Look” boxes and a rich array of pedagogical features, this is the perfect text for advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related fields. Eric Louis Russell is Professor of French  & Italian at the University of California at Davis, with affiliations in the Linguistics Department and the Program in Gender, Sexualities  & Women’s Studies. He is the author of Alpha Masculinity: Hegemony in Language and Discourse and The Discursive Ecology of Homophobia: Unraveling Anti-LGBTQ Speech on the European Far Right.

In a single accessible, readable, and relevant volume infused with wry humor and keen insights, Fighting Words! offers readers an indispensable primer on topics ranging from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics to political correctness and cancel culture. Beginning with a focus on “bad” language, the volume invites the reader to question, reexamine, and reimagine the very construct of what language is, imploring us to consider language as a verb: to language. To help his readers question the language that permeates the contemporary sociopolitical space, Russell skillfully embeds his analysis of transgressive languaging acts in engaging, relevant contexts: the Trump years, overheard conversations, rap music, and the ubiquitous “Karens” who dominate social media. Via these rich and provocative examples, Russell encourages the reader to examine these linguistic transgressions more thoughtfully and critically. Discussion questions and suggestions for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter, providing not simply “food for thought” but rather provocative and insightful stimuli for difficult conversations. Fighting Words! is essential reading for a divided nation of people struggling, but often failing, to understand each other. —Thomas Jesús Garza, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

FIGHTING WORDS! A Critical Approach to Linguistic Transgression

Eric Louis Russell

Cover image: © Getty Images | drante First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Eric Louis Russell The right of Eric Louis Russell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-13054-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-13053-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22742-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427 Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Prologue – On Never Looking Away 1

Rethinking Language: Foundations for Critique

viii ix 1

If Not Existence, Then What? 4 Implications of Language-as-Verb 6 Tying It Together 7 Discussion Questions 9 Further Reading 9 2

Languaging Transgression: “Grabbing Pussy” and “Locker Room Talk”

11

Describing Transgressive Languaging 13 Linguistic Signs 16 Beyond Words 21 X-Phemism 23 Structured Languaging 25 Tying It Together 28 Discussion Questions 30 Further Reading 31 3

Languaging Meaning: “Rolling Coal” and “Having Balls” Unintended Transgression 34 Languaging Meaning 35

33

vi

Contents

Meaning and Languagers 40 Languaging Culture 42 Languaging Communities and Communities of Languaging 47 Languaging Context 50 Indexing and Enregisterment 53 Tying It Together 55 Discussion Questions 57 Further Reading 58 4

Languaging Worldview: Ideology and Mythology

60

Beliefs and Languaging 61 Languaging Rules 63 Mythology and Ideology 65 Languaging and Race 70 Tying It Together 73 Discussion Questions 77 Further Reading 78 5

Languaging Authority and Power: Karens in the Wild

80

Karens (as well as Darrens, Beckys and Warrens) 81 Authority and Power 83 Doing Language and Doing Power 86 Censorship and Self-Censorship 89 Facework and Verbal Hygiene 92 Tying It Together 95 Discussion Questions 99 Further Reading 100 6

Languaging Consequence: Linguistic Performativity and Hate Speech Insults and Hate Speech 102 Languaging in Real Time 106 Speech Act Theory 109 Interpolation and Hailing 114 Tying It Together 117 Discussion Questions 120 Further Reading 121

101

Contents

7

Languaging Cancellation: The Ecology of Discourse and Hegemony

vii

122

Cancel Culture 123 Discourse Two Ways 127 Discursive Power and Hegemony 131 Critical Discourse Studies 134 Tying It Together 136 Discussion Questions 140 Further Reading 140 8

Languaging Rebellion: When Pussy Grabs Back

142

Transgression at the Top of the Charts 143 Linguistic Rebellion 144 Transgression as Liberation 150 Tying It Together 152 Discussion Questions 157 Further Reading 157 Works Cited Index

159 175

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would not have seen the light of day were it not for several people who deserve a heartfelt shout-out. Foremost are my editor at Routledge, Amy Laurens, and assistant Bex Hume, as well as Ze’ev Sudry, who first approached me with a (what appeared at the time) crazy invitation to take up this project. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge colleagues at the University of California, Davis (Departments of French & Italian and Linguistics), and at the Università degli Studi di Trieste (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici): thank you e grazie mille for listening to my ideas, for providing your own thoughts and for your support. Students in two decades of HUM 15 have been a source of inspiration and much needed challenges, keeping me on my toes and making me question my own preconceived notions. A huge thanks to my wonderful teaching assistants over the years, especially Chloe Brotherton and Mirna Reyna. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my friends, family and, especially, husband Sam: there are no fucking words to express my gratitude.

PROLOGUE – ON NEVER LOOKING AWAY

A decade and a half ago, the University of California, like other public institutions of higher learning, found itself in the grip of an existential crisis, one that reshaped the humanities and human sciences and indirectly led to the writing of these pages. An overheated housing market had crashed, sending government finances into a tailspin and provoking a sharp economic decline, all of which squeezed campus budgets to an extent not seen in decades. This was a watershed moment for many disciplines and fields, especially those like languages, whose position has long been precarious in the neoliberalized, ever more STEM-centred world of US higher education.1 With the goal of, in the words of an erstwhile dean, “paying our way” (see Chapter 2 for more on euphemisms), I  and my colleagues were encouraged to develop large-enrolment classes, conduits for putting butts in seats and placating administrative bean counters, even if student learning was to suffer. “Fuck me,” I recall thinking, almost certainly using this or a similar expression, “there’s no fucking way that many students could ever give even half a fuck about what I do.” My area of scholarly expertise being largely theoretical, I was at a loss to respond to the dean’s imperative. Bitching about this mandate with friends and colleagues – and again undoubtedly using a fair dash of profanity while also raising a few eyebrows (I was younger and very much too sure of myself in those years) – it occurred to me that the very form of my reaction, in all its blundering, non-academic vulgarity, might make for a compelling undergraduate course. At least, I found the prospect inspiring. Call it swearing, cursing or cussing, I really fucking love doing language in this way. I  always have relished the shape and weight of socalled bad language, from my co-primary English and German, to French

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and Dutch (languages of my academic formation), to Italian (encompassing much of my present scholarly and personal life) and even to Spanish and Slovenian (in which I  continually struggle to gain a toehold). In all spaces I have inhabited, at times for years, at times for brief sojourns, I have relished deploying different mechanisms of being vulgar or crass, observing how people insult each other and how these insults are received, and attending to expressions injected into moments of humour, frustration or pain. (My go-to in English is an off-the-cuff fuckballs, in French puuuutain, drawing out the first syllable, in Dutch a stern but dull verdomme, and in Italian the omnipresent cazzo.2) What is not to love about the richness that raw communicative moments demonstrate about linguistic and cultural settings, let alone the people who inhabit them? And what is not fascinating about the aperture that these acts give into the inner working of different communities, our own included? As the preceding should make clear, this is not just the stuff of distant, removed-from-daily life academia. I  am a participant in these moments, spaces and contexts; I am a member of these communities; and I am affected by what happens in these semiotic spaces, as much as I affect them in turn. I confess to using so-called bad language on a daily basis, often as I wake up (who among us hasn’t faced the first moments of a Monday with the thought, articulated or not, “goddamnit, here the fuck we go again!”). I  continue these practices throughout the day, responding to the little things (dense traffic or forgotten items on a grocery list, which merit at minimum an “oh for fuckssake”) and to far more important ones (abrasive colleagues or the state of current politics, often worthy of something much stronger, such as “fuckmenightly”). My languaging isn’t limited to so-called swears, either: I am fascinated by offensive humour, even as I am frequently repelled by it; I am riveted by profanity and blasphemy, even if I confess to having little of the faith requisite to truly experience these concepts; and I cannot help but perk up when I hear insults being thrown about, even when I, a friend or members of my communities are the object of hate and animus (being an openly gay, unabashedly progressive, European-American academic in the early twenty-first century means such moments are far from exceptional). It is not necessarily the shock or provocation of such ways of interacting that appeal to me – although I would be dishonest in saying that isn’t part of it – it is the efficiency, power and impact of such naked practices, the richness and variability of their form and structure, and the embodied results that they produce. Languaging in such a high-impact manner – and few semiotic modalities are more impactful than those that are “not supposed to be done” – is akin to swinging a communicative hammer: it might not always be pretty and make a bit of a mess, but it works and leaves little room for confusion. In other words, it gets shit done.

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Thus, it was perhaps inevitable that I began to seriously consider the question, “Why the fuck should I not construct class around this fucking shit?” Why not approach so-called bad language with the same methods and stances that I and other linguists use in our more traditional teaching assignments? Why not use this practice to guide students toward better questions concerning that which they are told shouldn’t be done in the first place, spurring critical thinking habits and intellectual postures? It seemed like a fucking great idea then, and it sure as fuck still does now. Studying This Shit

This shit – swearing, cursing, insults, offensive jokes, crass speech and all else that we are told time and again is somehow decadent, defective, unworthy or insidious – is not a trivial or marginal matter. This shit is, in fact, everywhere: it is part and parcel of our human experience, love or loathe it, run from or toward it, embrace or ignore it. Hardly a day goes by that most of us don’t utter something that we have been told we ought not to, and we regularly do language in a manner we have learned is best avoided, even if such communication is directed only to ourselves (after all, we also think through language). And it’s hardly just ourselves or our close contacts who do this – we constantly hear of one or another famous person uttering words not meant for public consumption, provoking forced apologies and even prompt resignations. With the omnipresence of social media and new means of instantaneous communication, it doesn’t take an astute observer to see that so-called bad language and the people who do it are never far to hand, nor are the consequences for such linguistic action lacking. And yet, we spend very little time and energy attending to any of these actions and the contexts in which they occur, save perhaps to offer admonition and pretend that this is marginal or can be marginalized. This is a true shame, as such shit is as much the stuff of our human existence as is the economics of wealth and poverty or the biology of cancer and sexually transmitted disease, subjects of serious and dedicated study at any university worthy of such a moniker. “Why the fuck shouldn’t this shit be studied,” I reasoned, as the shape and form of a dedicated course began to evolve, “especially since it’s fucking everywhere and everyone is so fucking up in arms about it all.” I reasoned that, if my colleagues in other departments can offer classes on a wide variety of topics deemed sensitive or controversial, ranging from the history of genocide to the mechanisms of environmental poisoning, I could offer a course that looks at communicative moments that engender shock, offense and anger. So began my adventure as a scholar-teacher of bad language. I first waded into these pedagogical waters timidly, confining discussion to a handful of

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lectures in a course entitled Language and Identity. (Fun fact: the course is still offered under this title, as our campus registrar has understandably balked at the unofficial course title “Fuck This Shit,” although I do include it prominently on syllabi and in the curricular portal). Over the next several years, it evolved into a dedicated course that looks solidly and squarely at this shit, tackling new and newly controversial shit far beyond swearing or expletives. Year after year, students have responded positively to the offering – a fact that has, no doubt, pleased various administrators (the same ones who have also either not cared to look more deeply at the class and its content or who have simply turned their heads, satisfied with enrolments and a lack of scandal . . . fingers crossed!). And this is not just an administrative success but also a pedagogical one – at least, I hope – mostly thanks to the undergraduates who make up the course community. Students may be young and are often inexperienced, but they are hardly stupid. When it comes to linguistic life, they are quite far from naïve. In fact, they are curious and even eager to examine experiences that have long been relegated to the shadows, especially when this is something about which they have been made ashamed or embarrassed. My own trajectory has been exciting, humbling, frustrating and instructive. The class participants – students who are typically in the early years of undergraduate study, very often in their first term – are ever changing, which has meant that the object of our work together has evolved continuously, even surprisingly. Although I  provide structure and scaffolding, they teach me as much, if not more than I am able to teach them as it concerns contemporary languaging practices and perspectives. This has not always been smooth sailing, by any means: there have been many moments that challenged me – as an intellectual, as an instructor and as a human being. Discussions of forms referring to genitalia and masturbation have made me turn crimson with embarrassment; a unit examining offensive humour left me with a profound sense of discomfort, especially when it became clear that so-called rape jokes had supplanted antecedent forms of sexist humour (this was in the early 2010s, before the #MeToo movement come into its current salience); and issues of racism and xenophobia, particularly in the Trumpist era, have required a great deal of empathy and patience, not to mention pulse-checking from all sides. Time and again, year after year, class after class, I return to the fundamental ethical consideration of this work; I have attempted to do the same in the pages that follow. As I try to make it clear to students, I do not believe that it is intellectually honest or ethical to ignore uncomfortable realities, particularly those that are part and parcel of our daily lives, and especially when this material is highly impactful. We may wish that no one were insulted because of race, gender, sexuality or another identity characteristic; we may hope for a world in which humour is not a weapon wielded by the powerful

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to further ensmall the powerless; and we may try to avoid speaking, writing or tweeting in ways that are considered crass and uncivilized in order to present a positive social persona. These aspirations are normal and may even reflect many of our better selves. However, any attempt to control languaging and languagers ultimately amounts to a Sisyphean enterprise: no matter how hard we toil, pushing the boulder of “bad language” up a hill, we will inevitably find that gravity has pushed it back down upon us time and again. (I would suggest that our efforts are doomed to failure because, in this analogy, we are both the mountain and the rock, both Sisyphus and Zeus, both creator and created – more on this in the chapters that follow.) Which leads me to ask again, perhaps to the point of pedantry, why the fuck shouldn’t we study this shit? I believe that we should and that we must. We must do this systematically, calling upon theoretical and applied work in various fields – linguistics and sociolinguistics, of course, but also discourse analysis, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology and much more. We must do this bravely, refusing to shy away from uncomfortable truths or indelicate realities. And we must do this from a critical perspective, maintaining a careful balance between interrogation and open-mindedness, scepticism and wonder. We must do this because those who do language also cause injury and harm through their actions, just as they shock and offend with their actions, and because we judge such people, just as we are judged ourselves. Perhaps more than all else, we should do this because we are capable of this type of inquiry – and capable of carrying it out thoughtfully and openly. This is, in effect, my invitation: to step into the careful, critical and uncomfortable studying of the shit. And, for fuckssake, to do it well. What This Book Is (and What It Is Not)

Before reviewing the different components of this book and what it is intended to be, it is important to clarify what it is not. First and foremost, this is not another book about swearing, vulgarity or even more generally about so-called bad words, regardless of how they might be labelled. Of course, profanity and vulgarity are a part of what is examined in the following pages, if only because it would be impossible to attend to such a topic otherwise (although the astute reader should already be prepared to call the very notion of word into question, a topic taken up more in Chapter 2). It is not that such matters are uninteresting or trivial but that there have already been many insightful and interesting works looking at bad words, many of which are listed at the close of this prologue. Rather than the nebulous concept of bad language, this book examines transgressive languaging and transgressive languagers, moments of

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boundary crossing and the human actors who author them (see Chapter 1 for clarity on these unconventional terms). These are actions that shape not only what we think of others but how we understand ourselves and our place in communities both narrow and broad. Transgression involves who said or wrote or tweeted or posted what; it also involves the people hearing or reading or retweeting or reposting in response. And the nature of transgression arises not merely or even primarily from isolated individuals, emerging instead from a sociolinguistic and discursive ecosystem (Russell, 2019). These considerations and their inclusion in the description, interpretation and analysis of transgressive linguistic events visibilize that which is often invisible: concepts such as authority and who grants, accepts and/or contests it; ideas such as power and who holds it, how they attain and deploy it, as well as those who dispute it; and theories concerning the systems of structured relation, notably those emerging from or cogent to the Frankfurt School and its primary catalysts, such as Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno, all of whom sought to peel back the layers of social reality and apprehend the structures and dynamics underlying them, this with (admittedly fraught) emancipatory goals. In effect, the concept of transgressive languaging is always about more than what it appears on the surface and studying it carefully offers a means to better understand the hidden forces operating across communities and cultures. To return to the example that frames this prologue, swearing is certainly one type of transgressive linguistic activity. When I write sentences such as “Why the fuck shouldn’t we study this shit?” I am crossing a border that separates two arenas of action: one that might allow me to language in ways considered fit for private consumption, for instance among close friends at a bar, and one that requires me to adhere to strict norms of collective linguistic behaviour, in this instance cogent to academic writing and publishing. People like me, guardians of all that is erudite and sacred about academia and its trappings, are not supposed to publicly language in this way. The transgression inherent to such an act is not simply a matter of the words I choose. It also arises from a host of other factors that are not readily apparent but whose import is far deeper. These include questions of authority and hygiene, power and hegemony, ideology and mythology: all are bound up in this example. Crossing the boundary separating “acceptable in private” from “unacceptable in public” testifies to my own attempt to claim power, notably the power to challenge and provoke the readership of these pages, as well as the power of my editors and publishers (who will no doubt have had much to say about this prologue!) to control how far across such a boundary I may wander with impunity. These and many other transgressions are the focus of this book. The foundational interrogation of the following pages is thus not only one of

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taboo or of labelling, not simply one of defining boundaries and describing how these are crossed, but one that interrogates the very notion of boundary and of crossing, one that calls into question the forces that establish and enforce boundaries and the inheritances that lead us to understand one or another act and actor as transgressive, not to mention the extent of any transgression. This concerns all that makes up a linguistic community, from its members to the powers that unite and divide them, from the knowledge that allows them to perform and accomplish things with languaging to the ways in which others interpret and react to such moments. In short, it is about humanity in a fundamentally human way, as all humans are languagers and the vast majority of human interaction involves some sort of languaging. And these languagings are also very, very frequently transgressive. This book is intended to serve as both a reference and a guide for students and scholars at various levels of study, ranging from advanced undergraduates to professional researchers, and is hopefully of interest to a wider, curious audience beyond academia. It brings together antecedent scholarship, some of which is not usually applied to linguistic transgression, and is divided into eight chapters, each of which centres on a specific theme, illustrated by a real-life example. Chapter 1 serves as the foundation of the book, advancing several concepts and terminological conventions that frame discussion throughout, most notably the refutation of language-as-thing and the assertion of language-as-verb. Chapter 2 introduces key ideas and vocabulary involved in transgressive languaging and enlanguagement, using former president Trump’s assertions (namely, that he could “grab women by the pussy”) as descriptive and interpretive examples. Chapter 3 moves to the question of meaning and its social construction, examining a hot mic moment and asking how languagers make and remake different aspects of their reality. Chapter 4 takes on questions of linguistic mythology and ideology, considering how languagers contend with, promote and rebel against Academic English. Chapter 5 tackles issues of authority and power, offering a closer look at so-called Karens and their linguistic activity, as well as community reaction to this. Chapter 6 turns to performativity and speech act theory, building on the ways in which languaging and enlanguagement are framed in Chapter 1 by re-examining several instances in which the n-word was deployed and issues relevant to hate speech or linguistically manifested animus. Chapter 7 turns to the notion of discourse and hegemony as realized through languaging, interrogating examples of so-called cancel culture. In closing, Chapter 8 takes up acts of linguistic rebellion, including rehabilitation and resignification, reverting to many of the formal foci of Chapter 2 through an examination of Cardi B’s hit song “Wet Ass Pussy.” Each chapter begins with a story taken from recent years, real-life moments used to focus readers while serving as a basis for the application

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of pertinent concepts and terms. Of course, these are not the only examples that might be evoked in reference to the themes and ideas under discussion, and each chapter includes several additional illustrative points that are intended to frame debate, whether in a formal classroom or in other, less traditional settings, as well as a series of questions for subsequent discussion. Also included are suggestions for further reading. As will be obvious from the very beginning, the division between different chapters and their ordering are, for the most part, a matter of authorial choice. With the exception of Chapter 1, which challenges many of the ingrained ways of talking about language and linguistic activity, and Chapter 2, which should prove useful to readers who are less familiar with linguistics, all others are relatively interchangeable and can be read in any order. Author Positionality

It will be obvious to any reader that this book does not pretend to be comprehensive in its scope or treatment of linguistic transgression, a task that would prove impossible for even the most talented author. Much of this limitation is self-imposed, deriving from the choice to focus on English linguistic and North American cultural themes and data. Other notable biases include the selection of thematic foci and the real-life examples used to illustrate them. In other words, there is already a tremendous amount of interpretation that precedes all description and analysis in these pages, if only through the narrowing of intellectual lenses. For this reason, I feel it is best to depart from the seemingly objective rhetoric and posturing and openly acknowledge who I  am, my own experience, and how these facts have shaped this book. Nearly all examples and source material in this book emerge from Anglophone, US cultural contexts, to the exclusion of others. This highly narrowed focus should not be understood to imply that there is something unique or magnanimous about this backdrop – or that other linguacultures have nothing to offer by way of compelling examples – but arises from two practical motivations. Firstly, this book is being written by a scholar who has spent the vast majority of his professional life in the above-mentioned settings, although I  must also confess that many of the examples are not part of my repertoire. I do, however, believe that it is important to use for illustrations examples for which I  have intuitions and lived experience, as well as ones that are accessible and legible to the greatest number of readers. As I have argued in Russell (2019, 2021, 2024) and in Knisely and Russell (2024), the type of careful, critical scholarship that is exemplified and modelled in the following pages can only be done from an emic perspective, implicating a view from within and denying any mythological objectivity.

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Secondly, and acknowledging that this is the result of myriad forces that are hardly equanimous – and might even be qualified as oppressively neocolonial – US cultural and linguistic practices are one of, if not the point of reference in an ever more interconnected world (see critique in Ives, 2009). For good or for bad (and let me be clear: I believe the scales tilt undeniably in the latter direction), the United States is the source of much globalized and globalizing discourse, including that pertinent to transgression. To see examples of this powerful force one need only look at the ways in which popular acts of disruption, such as the #MeToo movement and wokeness, have spread from this sociolinguistic and sociocultural base to nearly all corners of the globe. Thus, while the example descriptions, interpretations and analyses might come from this backdrop, they stand to be at least somewhat legible to others – and hopefully the intellectual, critical work applied here can serve as a template for the study of transgressions in many more linguacultural contexts. Finally, a brief mention truly must be made of the examples that were selected themselves. They are all cases of transgression that are disconcerting, sometimes to me personally. I have wrestled a great deal with questions about which of the many – far too many – examples of linguistic transgressions in the news might best serve the objectives of this work, without being overly difficult for readers to contend with or inadvertently propagating the types of animus, privilege and violence that are critically examined. I hope that these illustrations and the discussions that flow from them, shocking or banal as they might appear to different readers, will inspire more questions than answers, and that any conclusions offered will be understood as both unstable and destabilizing, especially for those (like me and, I suspect, most readers) who enjoy the privileges of academic life. A Final Word of (and Before) Beginning

“Never look away,” beckons the English title of Werk ohne Autor,3 a loosely historic film recounting the trajectory of post-war German artist Gerhard Richter (2018, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and produced by Buena Vista International). Through a shifting, challenging opus, Richter dared look solidly at the some of the most uncomfortable civic and cultural realities of the twentieth century, including many that affected him personally. The film, loosely based on his life, beckons its audience toward the recognition of discomfort and unease in the face of that which, despite all attempts at denial or dissimulation, transpired and transpires among humans. Viewers of both Richter’s art and von Donnersmarck’s film are put in a position where they cannot fully look away, if only because they are henceforth participants in the very object that they might have otherwise

xviii Prologue – On Never Looking Away

abjected. In a similar vein, when it comes to language and to that which transpires in and through linguistic activity, I assert that we should never look away, even and especially in moments of extreme discomfort, but strive to look ever deeper and closer. With that in mind, I invite readers of these pages to adopt a similar posture, one that never looks away, but always stands in critical examination. This is a posture of curiosity and empathy, courage and concern, criticism and introspection in the face of languaging facts and facets that are usually not part of polite society and civil exchange. It is all the more important to maintain this in the face of linguistic moments that provoke anger, resentment, fear and any number of additional unpleasant feelings. I invite you all to reconsider linguistic transgressions and transgressive languaging acts, questioning them more and more deeply, with greater care and insight. To build a wall around the uncomfortable moments of our linguistic existences only gives rise to more entrenched power dynamics and imbalances, as it nourishes those who would rather not have their actions or reactions called into question, instead allowing them to persist in the unexamined belief that this is the only or best or inevitable way of being and doing. To develop a critical posture vis-à-vis languaging and languagers is nothing short of – to put it in a register that leaves little doubt as to how this book will proceed – fucking with that which the privileged (call it patriarchy, hegemony, the man or something else) would rather leave un-fucked-with. This fucking with is not just a question of academic flair or an intellectual exercise but a liberating act, one that is designed to break down boundaries and augur participation (see Halberstam, 2021, 2022; Knisely & Russell, 2024; Russell, 2021). And it is done not simply because it is enjoyable or amusing but because, to quote one of the lectures I regularly give to undergraduate students, “we fuck with the patriarchy, because the patriarchy isn’t going to fuck itself.” Further Reading

There are dozens of works available focusing on taboo or bad language, most often focusing on words. One of the most accessible of these is Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted, which does a tremendous job of describing such language and does so in a way that avoids superfluous academic posturing. Similarly, John McWhorter’s Nine Nasty Words provides a comprehensible foundation for any who are interested in taboo language. Tony McEnery’s Swearing in English offers compelling examples from the past and attends to their resonance in the present, and Benjamin Bergen’s inciteful primer What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves is a brilliant book that makes neuro- and psycholinguistic

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fundamentals legible to readers at nearly any level of experience. For those who require an introduction to the fields of linguistics and sociolinguistics, Randall Eggert’s This Book is Taboo will prove useful and enlightening. At the same time, for those curious about swearing in languages other than English, additional sources are not hard to find, although these are often (and quite rightly) published in their respective languages, rendering them less accessible to many. An excellent point of departure for Anglophone readers is Magnus Ljung’s Swearing: A Cross-Cultural Linguistic Study; for those simply curious about how to get by in other contexts, Jay Sacher’s highly approachable How to Swear Around the World is a terrific introduction to many linguacultural contexts, also including helpful phonetic hints and even a few illustrations. For a more academically grounded view of humour, taboo and otherwise, Attardo’s The Linguistics of Humor offers a solid foundation. Notes 1 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is frequently evoked as a catch-all for those disciplines that are understood to truly matter in public discourse, putatively because they “produce” (note the agentive denotative content of this verb) future neoliberal citizens who are employable, having demonstrable “skills,” thus reifying the vocational turn of higher education in the United States (and not only). STEM coexists in a difficult tension with the humanities, which are often considered luxuries as they put forth less-quantifiable “products” of knowledge (see McComas & Burgin, 2020). 2 This already suggests a great deal about linguacultural differences, especially if each form’s literal meaning is considered: French (translatable as “whore”), Dutch (“goddam”) and Italian (“dick”). I suspect it also says something about me that I don’t really default to taboo language in German. 3 The original title, directly translatable as “Work without an Author,” does not quite capture the spirit of its English title.

1 RETHINKING LANGUAGE Foundations for Critique

Key Concepts

• Language-as-noun • Language-as-verb • Languaging, languagers, enlanguagement This is a book about language, so it may come as a surprise to begin with a relatively controversial assertion: language does not exist.1 Let me be more specific: human language does not exist.2 Individual languages, from Albanian to Zulu, do not exist. Dialects, sociolects, registers, accents and all of the other titles given to the systems of structured communication, from Ebonics to street slang to Spanglish to the French of the Académie Française, do not exist. These have never existed in any manner normally ascribed to other substantives, and they never will. Any reader who has made it this far without automatically discounting the preceding is probably aware that these assertions are intended as provocation. Good; a bit of goading is merited and even needed for any critical approach to the subject at hand. Besides, the discipline of linguistics could use a healthy jolt out of its blinkered pretence of objectivity. For too long, those of us in academic fields from theoretical to applied, from language pedagogy to neurolinguistics, have reflexively but not reflectively referred to the objects of intellectual work using metaphors that envision these DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-1

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as speciated beings, living entities, anthropomorphized personae or even genetic lineages. We conceive of languages as if they could be separated from their human authors, using nominal forms and verbal semantics that give them agency and transitivity, for example, English doesn’t express grammatical gender, the Slovenian genitive shows possession. We also talk and write about them as if they actively retain qualities and forms, for example, Cantonese has nine tones, French nouns are canonically marked by binary gender. And we treat them as if they were ontologically speciated, with inherited traits and phylogenetic markings, for example, Modern Russian descends from Old East Slavonic, Creoles inherit their lexicons from the languages of European colonizers (see, e.g., Harris, 1981, 2002, 2009). Of course, such habits are expedient and augur professional productivity; besides, we all perhaps know on some level that this cannot possibly be true. However, the now-ingrained habit of referring to languages as existent things, particularly things that do, hold, express and possess, comes at a cost: the frequent decentring, if not outright omission, of humans and human collectives from the description, interpretation and analysis of linguistic matters. We speak about language as if it could be separated from humans, those messy, frequently opaque, even more frequently contradictory creatures. Indeed, entire departments have been built and disciplines have been codified around the existence of language-as-thing, pushing out humanity as if it were some sort of confused and confusing, best-ignored distraction. And yet, humanity is and must always be the very core of all that we do, because without humans, any concept of language is null and void. Consider the following thought experiment: for some reason, humans suddenly disappear, leaving all else on planet earth untouched, including its non-human inhabitants and materiality. Without plunging too far into the depths of existential philosophy, a few things might reasonably be accepted. Rocks and rivers would continue to exist. Fungi and bacteria would continue to exist. Animals, from aardvarks to zebras, from primates to plankton, would continue to exist, procreating and dying – perhaps even thriving in the absence of Homo sapiens. The planet would continue to rotate around the sun, bringing changes of seasons, weather patterns and the migration of birds. Rain would continue to fall, flowers would continue to bloom and wither, and tides would continue to ebb and flow. But what would happen to that which we call language? In such a scenario, language would not merely no longer exist,3 it would simply not be in any meaningful way, because it would no longer be conceived and conceivable. Any residue of that which humans produced, from etchings in stone to ink on paper to bytes on hard drives, would simply be detritus in this ecology now devoid of Homo sapiens. This debris would no longer be produced, of course, and it would also no longer be interpretable, being

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void of semiotic potentiality. While its tactile materiality might well persist, its linguistic substance, that is, the ability to convey the mental images of its creators to those of its receivers, however imperfectly, would cease to be constituted and no longer be subject to constitutionality. In short, there would be neither language nor possibility of language – the very concept of language, at least as we understand this term, would be annulled. This highlights a foundational claim, one that may be summarized as Knisely and Russell put it, “Language is nothing without humans, although humans are likely a great deal without or beyond language” (2024, p. 22). Language does not exist, because it is not something that can be existent. This assertion depends upon two foundational assumptions: one concerning the nature of ontological reality, which I will not take up in any detail, as it far surpasses the scope and goals of the present work, and another concerning the nature of that which is normally called language and languages, with which I contend here and throughout this book. Language does not exist – and cannot exist – in a manner akin to conscious life forms, be these gorillas, flamingos or tuna; it is not a sentient organism with a neurological system and physical morphology. It is also unlike non-sentient forms of life, such as parasitic bacteria or viruses: it cannot replicate or be separated from its host for even the briefest of moments (even in the analogical Petri dish of recordings or writing, such supposed “language” is still hosted by its receiver-perceiver). Neither does language exist in the manner of inanimate objects rocks or trees: it has no definable form that can possibly be separated from the existential being apprehending it. Even if language were to exist in any manner other than the most elastically metaphorical, it would have to have some sort of bounded substance and non-predicated shape, and it would necessarily have a definable, tactile materiality distinct and separable from the human persons who make and receive it, who think and understand it, and who live in and through it. But it does not. If we accept the existential outcome of the preceding, we must conclude that what is commonly referred to as language is nothing more than a human consequence, a sort of dynamic tailpipe emission that is accomplished by the machine of humanity and human societies. Crucially, such manifestation through human activity is not existence: it is residuality. And equally crucially, the apprehension of this residuality depends entirely on humanity and the existence of human societies. Language does not exist, because it is not a thing, at least not in the way in which things are typically understood. It has no definable materiality, it has no independent form or substance, and it lacks any conceptual autonomy apart from humans and humanity. It is entirely and utterly dependent upon and predicated by the existence of humans and their interactions as existent beings. If there are no humans to do language, to receive language, to understand language and to imagine language, language vanishes into an epistemological nothingness.

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This is a profound assertion, but one that needs to be made time and again if we are to make progress in describing, let alone interpreting and understanding, the subject at hand in a critical manner, that is, transgressive languaging acts accomplished by transgressive languagers. I also assert that this claim needs to be made if we are to make any real progress in understanding how language affects others and ourselves in any number of domains and in any number of ways, from the most mundane (e.g. translating practices such as politeness across linguacultural contexts) to the most consequential (e.g. disrupting animus targeting vulnerable persons and communities). In short, I  argue that the reconceptualization of language represents a much-needed step for linguistics and related disciplines. If Not Existence, Then What?

Certainly, the assertion that language does not exist is not meant to deny that language happens – to us, among us, within us and upon us as individuals and within our sociocultural collectives. This requires a fundamental rethinking of how language should be conceptualized and enlanguaged, having profound implications for the interpretation of linguistic action and performances. For the purposes of the present volume, and acknowledging that so much of the conceptualization and reconceptualization contained within it is implicationally tied to the linguacultural community practices within which it has been written and to which it is addressed, language is understood to be a verb.4 Language is no more and no less than an activity undertaken by humans and within human collectivities, from which it cannot be separated in any meaningful way (see also Agha, 2007; Love, 1990). Any reader of these pages can accept that language is accomplished through specific action (see Chapter  6). Language is done when we pronounce, when we sign, when we post on social media, when we write emails, erotic novels and doctoral dissertations, and when we tag buildings with graffiti. It is done when we produce complex, structured, semiotic messages of any sort, using any medium and addressing any audience (including ourselves). In short, language is a doing. Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel (“language games”) serve as a foundational inspiration for this notion, as these constituting events are inherently inchoative: the naming of something is the calling forth of its existence (1953). Indeed, some of the most enduring metaphors of existential reality involve the use of language-as-verb, for example, the Genesis account through which Adam’s naming of things renders them real and epistemic. This is only part of the picture, albeit one that is important and, perhaps, most easily understood. To focus solely on this end of the language-as-verb equation ignores a great deal of other languaging activity, as language is also accomplished by those who participate in what is often considered passive

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or receptive communication. Language is done when we take in and process the languaging actions of others: listening to a talker; perceiving a signer; reading a book, tweet or email; apprehending and comprehending street signs and billboards. Of course, this is a different type of doing, a distinct form of positive engagement, but it is nonetheless verbal, as it involves a movement to and toward an object and its psychological transformation on the part of a receiver-perceiver (Harris, 1981). Importantly, language is also done within the self through the complex psychological action that involves cognition. We language to the audience that is our own mind, calling upon learned patterns and structures that we have inherited through anthropological interaction. This reflects what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) refer to as constitutive of meaning, specifically the ways in which languaging in an authorial way and doing it as a receiver create the conceptual space within which meanings emerge and may be contested (see also Ives, 2004). As discussed in Russell (2021, pp. 98–103), even that which is potentially prelinguistic, such as raw emotion, is necessarily rendered linguistic (i.e. is linguistically done) when it is conceptualized as such. Feeling a neurochemical stimulus certainly precedes linguistic action; however, to label this in one or another way, for example, as pain, pleasure or itching, is fundamentally and inescapably a linguistic act, predicated by prior linguistic acts. This is reflected even in the most canonical of grammatical verbal frameworks, distinguishing as they do between so-called action verbs (e.g. run, hit), stative verbs (e.g. be, exist) and psychological verbs (e.g. think, imagine). While it can be readily admitted that there are different forms of doing, including ones that are not necessarily agentive or transitive, and have distinct profiles of semantic association, these are all considered to be fundamentally verbal. The preceding assertion hints at another profile of language-as-verb, namely, accomplishment through ideation and ideologization. It is an oftrepeated adage that standard languages are ideologies, and yet the same can be said of all conceptualizations of language (including, indeed, the one offered on these pages). The boundedness of anything labelled as such depends not upon its material substance, but upon individual and shared imaginary doings that are accomplished through individual and collective instantiation and re-instantiation. Ideologies, like language, do not exist, but are accomplished, iteratively and reiteratively, through inchoative action and through passive reception. If ideology is conceived of as “meaning in the service of power” (Thompson, 1990, p. 7; cited in Holborrow, 2007, p. 52), this can also be rendered as semantic doing in the service of transitive actuation. In other words, language-as-ideology is just another manifestation of language-as-verb, albeit in a distinct domain and via distinct pathways. By implication, the reconceptualization of language-as-verb and of verbality as a plurality of action domains brings this object into alignment with

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Foucault’s understanding of discourse – concepts and ways of thinking or conceptualizing within a domain of semiotic achievement (1972; see also Chapter 7). Such a reconsideration of language, be it realized through physical or mental actuation, through individual or collective instantiation, or merely through passive reaction and perception (and it bears mentioning that reaction is a form of action), has important consequences: it recentres the human as the sole locus of languaging. Even when it appears that we separate language from its putative host, for example, by examining it in a grammar book, listening to recordings of speakers or viewing the fMRI of a study participant, that which we are doing remains concomitantly human and dynamic, as those apprehending these residual enlanguagements are doing the only thing that can be thought of as properly linguistic. Absent the human element, one that is fundamentally active and interactive, these apparent examples of language are nothing but ink on the page, noises in the air or neurochemical stimuli projected onto a screen. Implications of Language-as-Verb

Rather than simply being a matter of academic fancy or intellectual pedantry, the reconceptualization of language-as-verb has important consequences for this book and its topical focus. Firstly, it removes from consideration any idea that language is or can be conceived of as inherently taboo, transgressive or simply bad, even if it is freely admitted that such ways of imagining and believing are part-and-parcel of the ideological doing of languaging.5 Secondly, it places the human languager at the centre of all inquiry and critical examination, as it is only they who can be the locus of not only transgressions accomplished through languaging but the active reception of these as such, as well as any action upon and reaction to various enlanguagements and languagers, in turn. Language does nothing: humans do things by languaging. This reflects a well-worn (and deeply troubling) slogan, “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people with guns.” Of course, there is a crucial element of truth to this, distasteful as its usage might be: guns don’t do anything without a human actuator, much as language doesn’t do anything without the same. However, there are vital caveats that are often lost in this assertion, and these concern more than the materiality of firearms: the doing of language, much like the doing of a gun, may and very often does result in harm. And while a world without guns – or, at least, one with far fewer guns that are subject to far more restriction – is certainly possible, a world with less languaging is not, even if there are situations in which languaging is far more regulated and controlled (see Chapters 5 and 6). After all, gun possession and use are not intrinsic to humanity, whereas the capacity to language may well be its most defining and inevitable feature.

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For all the clunkiness and iconoclastic bending of labels, terminology and concepts, this approach represents a fundamental shift in both stance and posture for critical linguistic work. From such a perspective, language is not agentive but is an instrument or tool of agency. Language is not a stable, fixed structure or form that can be good or bad, polite or vulgar, acceptable or unacceptable, loving or hate-filled, but is a means of conveying, through structured actions manifest in enlanguaged forms and patterns, intentionalities that are judged in such ways. Language is not and cannot be owned by or belong to any person or collective; it is manifested through them, often at the level of ideological connectiveness. Language is certainly subject to constraint and control, and regulation and rebellion against such regulation, but not in the same manner as are firearms or motor vehicles, as its fundamentally verbal nature makes this more, if not solely, a matter of moral and discursive power. Always at the centre of this dynamic is the languager themself6 – the person who does language in one or more ways: they who transgress by the doing of language; they who demonstrate hate and animus via the accomplishment of language; and they who violate sociocultural norms via the actuation of language. Tying It Together

In this introduction, a good deal of non-standard terminology has already been used. For that reason, it seems useful to clarify what is intended by these terms, as well as by the reconceiving of language as fundamentally verbal. Henceforth, to language and languaging should be understood as any positive linguistic action that is undertaken individually or collectively; this involves production, of course, but also reception, imagining and ideological conceiving (Becker, 1991; Love, 2017). We language when we speak and sign, when we hear and see, when we type and tweet, when we listen and read. We also language when we ideate about communication, again individually and collectively, for example, when we align with or rebel against norms of academic writing, when we transgress mythological boundaries, when we judge the languaging of others, and so forth. In short, we language and are languaging constantly, in one or another modality (Thibault, 2017). On the basis of the preceding definition, it is possible to assert that languaging in all of its many forms may be one of, if not the defining characteristic of humans. It is certainly one of the ways in which humans self-define, often via labels that conflate languager with type or identity of languager.7 It might thus be more appropriate to refer to Englishing as the patterned action of languaging within the inherited system appearing on these pages; the same conditions would apply to non-standard dialects, sociolects and registers (e.g. Ebonicsing, Cockneying or frat-bro-ing). Logically, languagers

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are those accomplishing these actions, and, by extension of the previous assertion, we might better refer to them as Englishers, Russianers or Kweyolers, even if they will more often be evoked using more canonical forms (notably, Anglophones) in the pages that follow. Knisely and Russell (2024) make the case that languaging is an act of making imaginary worlds, a definition that applies not only to the focus of that volume, specifically the imaging of worlds beyond traditional gendered binarities, but to the imagining of any possible world. This is the process that is referred to as enlanguaging, the achievement of reality through linguistic activity. Enlanguagement is the procedural pathway through which languaging is accomplished, being constrained by inherited formal, structural and functional patterns that are themselves the inheritances of other enlanguagements (see Russell, 2021, pp. 98–103). The term thus conveys both the outcome and the tactile reality of languaging seen, for instance, in words on a page, sounds in the air, signs manifest through gestures accomplished in space and time, social media postings, and so forth and so on. When we contend with specific manifestation of languaging by specific languagers, we are describing and interpreting enlanguagements, the residue or outcome of languaging-as-verb. Several additional graphological conventions are also worth mentioning in closing, as they will prove helpful in interpreting the pages of this book with more precision. Specific languaging actions and their graphological manifestations are presented in double quotation marks: these may be attributable to a particular person (e.g. the overworked professor exclaimed, “give me a fucking break”), reflect generally shared languaging habits (e.g. it is possible to say “fucking awesome” without evoking sexuality), or constitute an assertion of new languaging reality (e.g. “fucking with that which would rather be unfucked with” is the heart of critical engagement). On the other hand, languaging acts that take place in the mind, namely, those concerning meaning and semantic networks, are presented in single quotes (e.g. pussy refers to ‘female genitalia’); this convention is also used for translation (e.g. cazzo ‘dick’). Italic script is used to refer to formal enlanguagements, that is, the material manifestation of linguistic materiality, as well as for emphasis. Following these conventions, description and discussion of an example such as fucking should be read as the enlanguaged form, whereas ‘sexual activity’ should be understood as the meaning evoked in an utterance such as “the two were fucking loudly into the night.” Choosing between different terminological and graphological conventions always requires walking a fine line between pedantry and provocation; it is hoped that the approach taken provides a new perspective and fuels new and more critical insight, both into languaging in general and into those languagers and enlanguagements understood as transgressive.

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Discussion Questions

• How is language usually understood in your community and in your scholastic life? In what ways does this correspond to or diverge from the previously discussed understanding of language-as-verb? • How do you ideologically language, that is, how do you accomplish through psychological or mental activity the work of languaging? How does this often concern languaging and languagers, itself? • How do you identify as a languager? How do others identify you as a languager? Through your enlanguagement? Further Reading

The ontological and epistemological foundations of language comprise a topic far beyond this work; fortunately, there is no shortage of antecedent literature for curious readers. A broad and accessible, but still solidly anchored, introduction can be found in Stephen Pinker’s widely acclaimed The Language Instinct; this is an especially good starting point for those who may not have taken a linguistics class. For those wishing to have a refresher in the subject, Fowler’s Understanding Language is perhaps somewhat dated, but it is still a useful companion. Trask and Stockwell’s Language and Linguistics provides key terminology, albeit often contrasting with that used here. For readers keenly interested in the history of these and related ideas, the most important writings of early twentieth century philosophers are an important complement to the preceding discussion. These include Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen, translated as Philosophical Investigations, as well as the work of contemporary linguistic philosopher Walter Benjamin, compiled in Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen and in Regine Kather’s 1989 anthology. For Anglophone languagers, the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (David S. Ferris, ed.) is another excellent reference. Finally, Russo-Soviet linguist Voloshinov’s seminal work should also be of interest to those whose passions lie in philosophical traditions, particularly that translated as Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Notes 1 Much of what is presented here reflects the introduction to Knisely and Russell (2024), in which the question of language and gender is taken up. My own reflections and intellectual evolution owe much to Knisely, to whom I am grateful for inspiration and for the sharpening of these and other ideas. 2 Here and throughout, I ignore the question of animal languages and the possibility of extraterrestrial life forms, along with that accomplished through artificial intelligence. There are certainly many compelling issues and paths of inquiry in these arenas, but they far surpass the scope and objectives of the present volume (not to mention the expertise of its author).

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3 With all due respect to grammatical pundits, the double negative accomplishes something fundamental to my argument in this sentence (see Chapter Four). 4 With this, I wish to acknowledge that even the re-enlanguaging of language is constrained to a great degree by that we might label English (or otherwise), whereby the noun-verb taxonomy is descriptively adequate. If we accept that all languaging is metaphorical and that these metaphors are learned (see, e.g., Kövecses, 2010), we must also accept that the very notion of verb is itself metaphorical and situated within the learned patterns of a given linguacultural community. 5 Importantly, recognizing others’ truths is not tantamount to holding these to be true or even “truthy,” to co-opt liberally from Will Farrell’s interpretation of former president George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live; it merely admits that many persons understand it this way, opening additional space for critical inquiry. 6 Throughout this book, I use singular they and its derivations (e.g. themself) both generally and when the gender of a particular individual is unknown or irrelevant, as well as when this does not correspond to a traditional binary and when the person in question prefers such pronouns. 7 Interestingly, this means of self-definition has some historical antecedence, for example, Deutch (‘German’), deriving historically from diutisc, meaning ‘the speech of people from the land.’

2 LANGUAGING TRANSGRESSION “Grabbing Pussy” and “Locker Room Talk”

Key Concepts

• • • •

Form and referent Sign: signifiers and signified X-phemy: euphemisms, dysphemisms, orthophemisms Complex signs: structure and utterance

In the fall of 2016, with the US presidential race in full swing, a decade-old audio recording of then-candidate Donald Trump and Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush resurfaced. Among the many cringe-worthy moments of what became known simply as “The Tape,” one stood out above the rest. Commenting upon his prior interaction with actress and model Arianne Zucker, Trump is heard to say, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” After Bush intervened stating, “Whatever you want,” the then future president replied, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”1 Supporters and opponents, alongside pundits on the left and right, were quick to react.2 One thing was clear: Trump had languaged in a way that might be looked down upon or didn’t fit within his political aspirations and, in so doing, had transgressed shared moral and ethical boundaries. While only the most naïve could imagine that politicians and other leaders never engage in such communicative activity, most readily assert that any person who wishes to attain the highest office in the country – arguably the DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-2

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most powerful in the world – is not supposed to say such things for all to hear. Perhaps because of the vastness of public reaction, be this from apologists or opponents, there seemed to be no consensus as to what, exactly, was transgressive about Trump’s languaging. In fact, there was wide disagreement about the nature of that which should be considered objectionable, let alone how this was specifically manifested, hinting at a shared ambivalence, one likely exacerbated by established media outlets’ tendency to not repeat or reprint the enlanguaged content of this moment. As may well have been expected, many within and beyond the press fixated on Trump’s use of pussy, referring to ‘female genitalia,’ while others passed attenuated judgement of so-called locker room talk, a catch-all for impolite banter between men that is typically thought to acceptable or expected in closed quarters (see Vaynman et al., 2019; Rhodes et  al., 2020). Few in the mainstream dared to examine in a closer, more careful manner this moment of languaging and ask what Trump’s enlanguagements and others’ reactions to these might have to say about such messy issues as power, authority and ideology as they intersect with politics, masculinity, sexuality, neoliberalism and the body, among much else.3 Any observations of collective reaction and discomfort notwithstanding, this and countless other instances of transgressive languaging raise questions that any critical analysis must contend with squarely and without hesitation. What about pussy made this worthy of moral indignation for some, but excusable (if cringe-worthy) for others? How can the linguistic actions of Donald Trump and Billy Bush, as well as the effects of these actions, be described in a careful manner, one that goes beyond personal or collective outrage and instead asks why anyone should be outraged in the first place? And what specifically about this exchange led those on different political extremes to interpret this moment in vastly different ways, with some labelling it as banal male banter and others an act of sexual violence? Humans are constantly languaging but spend very little time thinking about their actions, let alone the enlanguagements that they produce. With the exception of poets, speechwriters and linguists, not to mention a handful of others who are more often than not excluded from popular media and shared spaces of debate and discussion, most people don’t reflect upon languaging often or even at all – that is unless and until they are forced to, at which point few have little idea where to begin, falling back on their raw emotions (“I don’t like this word”), dogmatism (“people shouldn’t say shit”), or utopian positivism (“if we all just respected each other, this would disappear”). Such habits very likely inspired the media and political pundits responding to Donald Trump: for lack of either understanding or desire, Americans of varying ilk and persuasion seized on the most obvious part of the recording – his use of pussy – and demanded an apology; once this was

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offered (plausible or implausible as it may have appeared), they moved on, turning their attention to matters of more apparent importance or perhaps simply greater facility. But there is so much more to say – not to mention far better ways to say it – when it comes to transgressive languaging, as well as our reaction to and understanding of any such moments. This chapter offers a practical basis from which to better describe and begin interpreting moments of transgressive languaging, using this incident for the illustration and discussion of key concepts and terminology. Building upon Chapter 1, the notion of word is first broken down and replaced with a series of concepts more appropriate to the task at hand. A second section looks at complex structures and the enlanguaged content of these constructs. A  concluding section reverts to fundamental concepts normally excluded from language, notably context (anticipating the focus of Chapter 3). Each portion introduces key points developed further throughout this book; readers are thus encouraged to think of the following pages as a descriptive and analytical toolkit, a means of stepping toward and into the critical intellectual work that is undertaken in more detail in what follows. Describing Transgressive Languaging

As was obvious to nearly all observers, what Donald Trump languaged in this moment (much like he did in many hundreds of others in the ensuing years) contravened widely held social norms: he spoke of sexuality and evoked female genitalia, asserted his right to physically clutch the genitalia of women without their consent, and did all of this in a way that failed to respect collective notions of propriety. Languagers across the political, social, cultural and economic spectrum are well aware that this sort of thing “isn’t supposed to be done,” even if they might – and probably should – readily acknowledge that it is, in fact, done quite frequently. The knowledge of what is and isn’t acceptable within a linguacultural context points to the concept of taboo. This cover term refers to a shared proscription through which certain actions are considered outside of that which is permissible – in other words, that which is transgressive – setting the transgressor apart from the collective and marking them for punishment.4 Taboos are noted in all societies, regulating, for example, what is and is not considered fit for eating, regardless of personal taste or preference (e.g. in the US and many other settings, consuming the flesh of a cow is not taboo, whereas that of a dog is), body covering and notions of nudity (e.g. in these same contexts, the exposure of the male torso is not forbidden on the majority of public beaches, whereas the exposure of the female torso is subject to fines and even imprisonment), and the acceptability of different sexual relationships (e.g. the varying ages of consent, as laid out in law or custom). Quite

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obviously, entire books can be and have been written about taboo, both within and across any number of cultural boundaries. The very same examples raised here can be reconsidered in order to see just how non-universal any conceptualization of taboo may be, let alone its implementation: there are societies in which the consumption of dog meat is normalized, those in which the exposure of female breasts is not subject to constraint, and those in which the age of consent is vastly different than in the US (Taylor & Williams, 2017). What is more interesting in the present discussion is how taboo can be applied to languaging and how this affects linguistic life. As stated in the Prologue, this book is primarily concerned not with bad words but with the ways in which people use words – and much more – such that they cross one or more, often hidden, boundaries of acceptability. For this reason, it can be helpful to distinguish between common taboos pertaining to languaging: there are taboos that target what languagers speak, sign, write or otherwise produce, that is, their enlanguagements; there are also those concerning the concepts languagers evoke, regardless of how this is accomplished, that is, their ideas. Of course, taboo may also involve both sides of the equation – the how and the what of languaging. As is clear through the arc of this discussion, the bounds between different categories of transgressive languaging and enlanguagements are hardly crisp, nor are they rigid. Many examples might well be analyzable according to two or more profiles, whereas others might be more nebulously situated. On the one hand are moments of languaging that transgress ethical codes, always understood within a particular cultural frame (see Chapter 3 for more on this). These codes of conduct can be understood as the implicitly held, collectively shared knowledge of rules and the resulting constraints that govern how languagers may go about doing things. When it comes to languaging that transgresses such ethical bounds, it is helpful to distinguish between two sub-profiles and their respective canonical labels: obscenity and vulgarity. Both contravene conventions about what can and cannot be accomplished in a public or shared cultural space, although they do this in slightly different ways. Obscenity is linked to taboo subject matter, whereas vulgarity is linked to taboo ways of evoking any topic, regardless of whether it is taboo or not. One obvious example of obscenity and vulgarity can be noted when languagers evoke sexualized organs – the vagina, clitoris, penis and scrotum, as well as female breasts and, more recently, the buttocks.5 The enlanguagement of these is subject to constraint, specifying inter alia when and where it is acceptable to refer to such body parts. Furthermore, even when it might be acceptable to refer to these objects, deeply held and widely shared norms establish that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to go about this. Obscene languaging might involve the evocation of the genitalia of

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a classmate, a family member or some random passer-by: we know that all persons possess different sexual and sexualized body parts, and we know we are not supposed to mention them outside of very limited conditions, for example, in a physician’s office. At the same time, conventions govern how these may be enlanguaged, turning to the concept of vulgarity. Even in circumstances where it might be acceptable to refer to a person’s genitals, for example, during a medical examination, there are prescribed and proscribed ways of doing this: a physician is expected to refer to the penis, not the cum cannon, and to the vagina, not the tuna taco.6 Often conflated, it is helpful for the description of transgressive languaging and languagers to tease apart obscenity and vulgarity, if only because this points to different taboos and societal conventions. On the other hand, but always emerging within the bounds of shared collective, are those languaging actions that intersect with moral taboos: blasphemy and profanity. Like obscenity, these concern ideational objects. However, these objects are not a priori felt to be inherently taboo – quite the opposite. Profanity and blasphemy concern the enlanguagement of that which is situationally understood to be divine or spiritual, or at least that which is somehow above the realm of humanity. Profanity involves languaging the divine for non-divine reasons, such as the classic example of shouting Jesus Christ in pain after stubbing a toe; in a cultural environment where the Christ figure is considered sacred or morally consequential (as is the case for many practicing Christians), it would be profane to enlanguage this figure when not engaging in some sort of communicative activity oriented toward the divine, such as prayer or theological debate. If this evocation is done in a vulgar or obscene manner, for instance, if the same person were to employ the expletive Jesus Fucking Christ, such languaging would be considered blasphemous. Not only is this a non-divine evocation of Jesus Christ, but the association of this figure with sexuality is likely to be considered an even more serious infringement of moral precepts. For those whose morality stems from Christian tradition, it is one thing to evoke a deity for non-sanctified reasons, and it is quite another to also associate, even indirectly, this deity to the carnal act of sex. Obviously, all four types of transgressive languaging are not static, nor can they be universally applied. For example, in a cultural setting where Christian traditions are not part of everyday experience, it is unlikely that the interjection Jesus Fucking Christ will be judged blasphemous, much less profane. In a culture that does not have strict boundaries around the mention of dead persons, enlanguaging the name of a deceased family member would not be considered vulgar or obscene (in the US and elsewhere, such languaging might even be considered laudatory or celebratory, whereas in other settings it is highly offensive to refer to the deceased). Other

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transgressive languaging acts are similar in this regard: what constitutes an insult in one linguacultural space might be a rather commonplace statement in another (or vice versa); enlanguagements that convey hatred and incite violence in one time or place might be understood as factual in a different setting; and a humorous linguistic activity that might engender outrage in one time and place might be seen as an example of intelligent repartee elsewhere. Linguistic Signs

Thus far, our discussion of transgressive languaging has focused on words, enlanguaged units of meaning like pussy, fucking and Christ. This is quite expected, as for most individuals words appear to be the most basic, not to mention self-evident, place to start – after all, most people think about words when they think about language, often to the point of reducing the latter to the former. However, languaging involves far more than words – in fact, words are perhaps its most trivial component, at least if we are to understand transgression and its consequences (see Russell, 2019, 2021). If we are to truly wrestle with what is happening in moments like the Access Hollywood tape or countless others, from the action of those who author these moments to the reaction of those who receive them (and author subsequent languagings, in response), we must move beyond words and that which the late R.A. Lodge referred to as the layperson’s approach (1993). The layperson’s perspective on language is not unlike that of the average person with regard to biological or physiological life (I include myself in this latter grouping, understanding little but the basics of human anatomy and physiology). We know a thing or two about the body and what to do when we experience a physical problem, for example, that it is a good idea to clean a cut to our skin with soap and water and bandage the wound to prevent subsequent infection. We also have a sense of when to seek professional help, say, if the injury should begin to swell or cause extreme pain. However, very few people possess specialist knowledge as to what exactly is occurring inside a wounded appendage or which among many would be the smartest course of action to promote healing and stave off infection. For this, we seek the advice of persons with expertise and training. Something very similar occurs on a daily basis as it concerns our linguistic lives. When we focus upon some facet of our communicative existence that troubles and worries us, say a presidential candidate speaking of “grabbing women by the pussy,” we all too quickly focus on one component that is easy to understand and agree upon – words that we believe or are taught to believe should not be used, either at all or in mixed company. What we ignore or simply do not apprehend to be happening in this and similar moments is the complexity of

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action on the part of both languager-doer and languager-receiver, as well as how all of this contributes to a collective sense of transgression. In reacting to the Access Hollywood tape, languagers across the political and cultural spectrum fixated on Trump’s use of pussy – a short word counting five letters and two syllables. But why – what about this word is so transgressive, for anyone, let alone a powerful public figure? We know that millions of languagers use pussy to refer to female genitalia. We also know that most co-languagers believe that polite or conscientious people shouldn’t evoke such topics, except perhaps in the most restricted situations. We further know that pussy is also used to refer to men who are not behaving according to normative masculine gender scripts (think about a time when we or someone said, “Stop being such a pussy,” meaning something akin to ‘don’t be so afraid or unmanly’). Moreover, most of us know that pussy can also refer to a cat.7 Why is this important? Would it have been acceptable for Trump to use a different word that referred to the same thing, for instance bragging that he could “grab ‘em by the vagina”? Was it the fact that he did this so explicitly, implying that he could have accomplished the same end by non-transgressive circumlocutions such as “grab ‘em where the sun don’t shine”? Or was it that he even evoked female genitalia in any manner – what if he had said you could “just kiss ‘em” or “just hug ‘em,” asserting that powerful men have the right to physically interact with women, even in a seemingly non-sexual manner (a transgression of which current President Biden has also been accused)? Very little about what is happening in this moment – let alone the moments that preceded it – is self-evident, and even less has to do with pussy. Words are certainly at issue here, but in order to really understand what is happening in transgressive languaging, we must move past the concept word, simply because it isn’t very precise or helpful. Thus, a first step to adding to the intellectual toolkit of linguists is to replace word with two interconnected concepts: form and reference, distinct concepts that function symbiotically, much like two sides of a coin. Forms are elements of our communicative existence that have physical reality: they are enlanguaged. We can read forms on the page or screen for written languaging (graphic or orthographic forms), hear them when they are spoken live or captured by recording (phonetic forms) in the case of oral language, and see them as they are motioned and shaped in the case of signed languaging (gestural forms). Forms are evidentiary in this respect, because we can reach out and touch them in one or another way: they can be recorded, copied, pasted onto screens, texted, tweeted and so forth. This is perhaps the easy part of linguistic description and analysis, as the recognition of forms doesn’t take a tremendous amount of savvy, assuming one is familiar with the graphic, gestural and/or phonemic patterns of

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a linguacultural environment. However, forms are only one part of what languagers do in their linguistic life. They produce and receive forms in order to evoke something that they hold in their minds and that they wish to convey to others – in other words, to make and transmit meanings. These can be thought of as mental images capturing their experiences of things, qualities, actions, states and so forth; these images are held in the minds of individual languagers and shared among languager groups. Languagerdoers render their mental worlds by using forms that they expect will be interpreted in a more-or-less similar manner by languager-receivers. Together, form and meaning comprise what Swiss-Francophone linguist Ferdinand de Saussure referred to as the linguistic sign (1983), which he conceived of as an indivisible duality: on one side is the signifier, a form that does the work of pointing to ideas or images; on the other side is the signified, an idea or image. A schema of the sign is given in Figure 2.1. Here, the image corresponding to the signified (in French, signifié; in German, Bezeichnetes) ‘tree’ is associated with the signifier (the signifiant or Bezeichnendes) Baum: together, the observable form/signifier and the mental image/signified constitute an enlanguaged sign. Accordingly, the English form that is spelled tree and pronounced [tɹij] is associated with an image that might be described as a ‘woody perennial plant’; English languagers make this signifier-signified connection without much or any mental gymnastics, because they have acquired or learned the sign and its components. The same is true of all referential forms, including verbs like run or fuck, adjectives like pretty or shitty, adverbs like happily or bitchingly – and, of course, nouns like tree or pussy. The entire constellation of signs held by languagers is known as a lexicon, something akin to a mental dictionary of forms and meanings. Of course, no one person’s lexicon is a perfect copy of any other person’s lexicon, even among languagers with very similar experiences, leading to any number of consequential or inconsequential misunderstandings. Some languagers use distinct forms to evoke a unique mental object (e.g. the well-known pail and bucket pairing) or ones that point to different identity characteristics (e.g. soda and pop, which for US Anglophones point to regional origins, although they refer to the same object). Likewise, widely shared forms can be linked to vastly diverging referents, leading to debates about what a given enlanguagement does or might convey (e.g. the meaning linked to love). Finally, some signs simply are not held by one group of languagers in a broader linguacultural grouping but are by others, as is the case with ingroup jargon. The latter is occurring on this very page – readers are enriching their lexicon by adding new signs, including new forms and meanings, pertinent to the study of language. Although the two ends of the sign are largely inseparable in linguistic life, there is an important conceptual difference that distinguishes form-signifier

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Signifié Bezeichnetes

Baum

FIGURE 2.1

Signifiant Bezeichnendes

The linguistic sign

Source: Wiki Commons

from meaning-signified, one deriving from the material nature of languaging and enlanguagements. Whether it is something we read, see or hear, all enlanguaged forms are materially real. Forms are manifested in the physical world, even if ephemerally and even if we apprehend them from our own idiosyncratic, biased points of view. Reference or meaning, on the other

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hand, is not material – or at the very least, not in the same way. We only have indirect evidence for any signified, and even this is typically mediated through additional forms: we cannot see or hear reference and meaning in the same way that we can see or hear forms, even if it may appear so in many instances. The assertion that forms are constituted in some sort of material reality does not refute the claims of Chapter 1, namely, that no component of language is phenomenologically existential. The apprehension of any linguistic form – that is, the understanding that it is not simply ink on a page, sounds in the air or gestures in space – is entirely dependent upon receptive languaging action. At the same time, enlanguagement very frequently involves plural form-meaning associations, at least in the case of referential forms.8 It is sometimes the case that a single form is linked to only one referent; much more frequently, forms point to two or more. These are instances of polysemy, an example of which has already been cited: pussy may refer to ‘female genitalia,’ ‘a weak or cowardly person’ or ‘Felis catus.’ Examples of polysemy pervade linguistic life, ranging from forms normally associated with positive references, such as love, to those that are judged to be bad, a notable example of which is fuck, to that which is generally banal, such as table. A final mention should be made, especially for the purposes of this chapter, of forms that are sometimes languaged in non-referential ways. Consider the example of someone yelling fuck! after banging their head or a student muttering shit! when confronting a difficult exam. These are examples of interjections, forms that are used without pointing to a specific referent or activating a given mental image, instead providing situational information about a languager’s state of mind or perspective. When I shout fuck! after hitting my head, I am expressing a state of physical pain; the hapless testtaker grumbling shit! conveys frustration or anger. The forms fuck and shit may in other instances be languaged in order to convey meanings, but in these examples they do not: they are enlanguaged solely to give contextual information about the languager themself (and this for reasons that continue to elude full explanation; see Goddard, 2014). It is tempting for many to consider the signifier-signified dialectic as immutable or inescapable, particularly when it comes to signs labelled bad or seen as transgressive. To echo Saussure and countless linguists that have followed in his footsteps, however, any link between signifier and signified is neither innate nor inevitable, but is always acquired or learned. In effect, the association between form and meaning is both arbitrary and unstable. With the possible exception of onomatopoeic forms, also referred to as ideophones, such as hiss (the sound made by a snake) or thud (that of a book falling on the floor), the signifier-signified link depends entirely on experiences gained within a linguacultural setting.9 Reconsidering the example at

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hand, it should be readily apparent that there is nothing about pussy that necessarily and inevitably prompts languagers to associate this with any of its possible referents, taboo or otherwise. It has already been noted that the orthographic form pussy is used to refer to a feline in English, which is hardly a taboo referent in these societies. Likewise, a very similar phonetic form used by French languagers – albeit one that is spelled differently – is pousse-y, pronounced [pusi] (‘push there’), a distinctly mundane enlanguagement. Were the signifier-signified link anything other than arbitrary, if historically retraceable, these and any number of other facts of linguistic life could not stand as counterfactuals. The arbitrary nature of form-meaning dynamics goes a long way to better interpreting both transgressive linguistic moments and the transgressive languagers who author them. Most obviously any assertion that a given form is somehow intrinsically taboo or bad must be dismissed: this simply does not hold up to critical examination. There may be, and indeed are, some regularities to forms that are judged negatively, such as the prevalence of four-letter spellings or certain consonant-vowel-consonant phonemic sequences in English (Bergen, 2016), but this is hardly a sufficient motivation. After all, love is a four-letter word and cent has a phonemic profile similar to any number of supposedly bad words; likewise, fuck, shit, dick, butt and whore all include three phonemes, as do fun, ship, dive, buzz and hear. Clearly, the source of any transgression cannot arise from the form itself but must lie in something beyond it – and that something is the languager, an assertion repeated throughout this book. Any and all motivation for judgement concerns not enlanguagements but the individuals and communities who enact and receive these. Beyond Words

The preceding assertions are not made in order to claim that linguistic forms are uninteresting when it comes to an examination of transgressive languaging. Indeed, forms are fascinating components of transgressive languaging acts, particularly because languagers frequently modify them for a variety of goals and with differing social outcomes. Here again, it is useful to develop a broader terminological foundation, if only to better describe and understand what languagers do with forms. Two basic distinctions are crucial in this regard: derivation and composition. Derivation involves the modification of a base form through the attachment of affixes; English languagers most often make use of prefixes and affixes.10 Forms like fucktastic (fuck + -tastic), shittery (shit(t) + -ery) or megabitch (mega- + bitch) are derived from the bases fuck, shit and bitch, respectively. Other complex forms arise from composition, when bases that might otherwise function independently are

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combined, such as clusterfuck (cluster + fuck), dipshit (dip + shit) or bitchass (bitch + ass). Both derivation and composition give rise to novel, albeit related linguistic signs, some of which function distinctly (e.g. bitch and ass are both nouns, whereas bitchass is used adjectivally). Because languagers possess vast and always evolving knowledge, these processes are potentially limitless and ongoing (see Kastovsky et al., 2005). In many instances, signs that are deployed by languagers in a manner similar to a singular form are constructed from two or more sub-forms: these structured forms are often referred to as expressions or idioms, as they quite frequently express ideas that are only vaguely associable to their component parts. Consider the moment in which I exasperatedly confront a bullying colleague with the idiomatic expression shut the fuck up. Here, I am not really combining the forms shut, meaning ‘to close or confine,’ the, a functional form used as a determiner, fuck, which has many referents, ranging from ‘coitus’ to ‘person of little value,’ and up, activating situationally dependent meanings including ‘not down’ or ‘with greater intensity.’ Were it understood as the linear composition of each of these four formal elements, shut the fuck up would convey an idea loosely akin to ‘close the sexual act into a higher position’ – this is hardly the case. Any proficient English languager understands that I  am imploring my addressee to stop talking, albeit in a manner likely perceived as unprofessional or aggressive. These strings act as complex, structured forms and are arranged in a relatively fixed manner, creating a new, albeit formally more complex linguistic sign. In order to describe what languagers are doing in moments that are seen as transgressive – and not only, of course – several other concepts are useful, notably truncation and acronym, as these exemplify further manipulations of form. A  truncation derives from the reduction of a base into a small formal unit, such as puss for pussy or vaj for vagina; truncations are usually based upon a phonetic form, with commensurate modifications to spelling. Acronyms, on the other hand, are entirely dependent upon orthographic conventions: these are typically enlanguaged using the first letter or letters of a spelled-out form, such as WAP (for Wet Ass Pussy; see Chapter 8), HBIC (Head Bitch In Charge) and STUF (Shut The Fuck Up). Interestingly, many truncations and acronyms evolve such that they are no longer understood as having emerged from these bases, such as radar, originally an acronym of RAdio Detecting And Ranging, SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up), FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) and MILF/DILF (Mom/ Dad I’d Like to Fuck). There are also many reverse acronyms, forms that must be spoken aloud in order for their referent to be understood and their compositionality apprehended, for example, See You In Toledo, a euphemistic stand-in for cunt deriving from the homophony of C (the letter) and see (the verb), along with that of you and the letter U and in and the letter N.

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In all such cases, historical or preceding forms are being languaged creatively and are entirely dependent upon a languager’s lexical and grammatical competence. They know that certain forms can be spelled, that others will be understood based on phonetic shape, and that still more can be clipped or reduced, but only in certain ways, in order that fellow languagers will receive them with intended links to one or another meaning. X-Phemism

Thus far, discussion has largely focused on formal characteristics – the plural mechanisms used to language a mental image or reality. Variation also works in the other direction, involving multiple forms that point to the same image or idea. For referents that are associated with two or more forms, as in the case of ‘coitus,’ languager-doers have many choices, any of which will affect how their intended meaning will be received by languager-receivers (consider the forms fuck, do it, make love or know one another). For example, a languager may choose between pussy, noony and vagina when enlanguaging the referent ‘female genitalia,’ three forms that have little surface phonetic or graphological substance in common. This choice is consequential for how they will be understood and for how others might react in kind. Languagers are keenly aware of the stakes in such matters and vary their formal choices accordingly. The example of the Access Hollywood tape and reactions to it – particularly those who labelled Trump’s choices as locker room talk – are evidence of this knowledge on the part of all involved. Keith Allan and Kate Burridge examine the ways in which languagers move between distinct, but referentially associated forms in order to evoke the same thing, a dynamic they refer to as X-phemy. This umbrella term subsumes three profiles, each of which depends upon shared knowledge of the social value assigned to one or another enlanguagement. Euphemisms are forms that are not negatively valued, for instance, the use of private parts or nether regions to refer to ‘genitalia.’ Dysphemisms are the more familiar, but variably taboo and transgressive forms, such as pussy, dick and the like. And orthophemisms are forms thought to be neutral or clinical, such as vagina or penis. Allan and Burridge show that the interplay between form, meaning and social value is intimately associated with culturally framed understandings of politeness, considerations that are inevitably bound up in questions of class and social standing. In the case of English, and especially varieties spoken in the United Kingdom (the basis of their discussion), they propose a middle-class politeness criterion, a means of qualifying shared notions of value that are associated with different X-phemisms (Allan, 2019; Allan & Burridge, 2006). Accordingly, it is often less the meanings that are activated

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by languagers that are ultimately understood as transgressive and more the forms that languagers choose and the ways in which their linguistic choices position them as having crossed sociocultural lines, ones that have everything to do with norms of behaviour and mythologies pertinent to class, morality and civic mindedness (see Chapter  3). Languagers who violate politeness criteria contravene not just the rules of languaging in a given moment but the rules that determine who is thought to be what “kind of person” – and all that is expected of such categories – across and within a wider collective. With such conceptual tools, we can better describe what is happening when languagers transgress social boundaries and interpret the languaging of various form-referent pairings. In some instances, it is not a given referent or meaning that is subject to judgement but the enlanguaged form used to reference this – in other words, it is the signifier, not the signified, that is understood to be taboo or transgressive. One example of this was noted in 2003, when Irish musician Bono responded to an award given to him by stating, “That’s fucking brilliant” (emphasis added). Here, the meaning he enlanguaged was crystal clear to all: he wished to emphasize how “brilliant” or congratulatory he found the award, and no credible audience could have reasonably asserted the contrary. And yet, this enlanguagement led to a firestorm of protest and the sanctioning of the network that broadcast it.11 The reverse is true in other instances, when a given referent or meaning is judged to be off-limits or taboo, regardless of which form is enlanguaged. Here, the transgressive act involves not the formal choices made by languagers but their semantic and referential ones, examples of which are hardly lacking. Consider the oft-repeated adage that certain topics, such as ‘defecation,’ are not polite topics for dinner conversation; regardless of the form chosen, for example, shit versus faeces versus poo-poo, there is a broad proscription on the evocation of this topic, at least in those circles that Allan and Burridge might ascribe as holding middle-class values. In the case of the Access Hollywood tape, the nature of the transgression derives from a bit of both and a bit of either, largely depending upon which profile of languager-receiver is passing judgement. For some, Trump’s formal choice (pussy) was understood as the source of offence: this was seen especially on the part of his apologists and supporters but also among the media and many of his opponents, who fixated on the formal signifier. For this audience, Trump’s transgression derived from the fact that he used a dysphemistic form – and perhaps that this enlanguagement made its way past the walls of the proverbial male-dominated locker room. For others, the meaning that Trump enlanguaged was the source of judgement and assertions that transgression had occurred: among these languager-receivers, there was consternation that a presidential candidate should evoke ‘female

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genitalia’ at all, regardless of the signifier chosen. Of course, for still others, the entire communicative package – the languaging act that brought forth both form and referent – functioned as the source of ire or apologetics. Structured Languaging

The preceding discussion challenges the layperson’s view of language as being primarily a matter of words, while also reordering what these linguistic units are understood to be. A logical next step is to look at how different units are brought together to convey complex ideas, transgressive or otherwise. With linguistic structures such as clauses and sentences, languagers create, manipulate and transmit meaning through complex patterns that follow acquired rules or constraints, the nature of which is subject to intense (and often irreconcilable) debate in linguistics circles and is a matter that far surpasses the scope of the present work (see Fabb & Brown, 2006; Odden, 2011). Regardless of any specific theoretical stance about the nature and shape of grammar, it is clear that languagers don’t simply arrange forms haphazardly. Instead, their languaging activity follows predictable patterns, ones that are remarkably similar to those of their fellow languagers within a given linguacultural environment. By enlanguaging different and highly variable signs together within these patterned structures, they are able to convey potentially infinite meanings, ranging from the most mundane to the most complex, asserting truths and falsehoods, referring to events and states in the past, present and future, and casting these within any number of modalities, from volitive to conditional, deontic to hypothetical. In order to do any of this, languagers depend upon their knowledge of how, within a particular languaging reality, forms can and cannot be combined, as well as how these combinations will be interpreted by fellow languagers. Complex grammatical structures like clauses and sentences are linguistic units that bring words into a meaning-making relationship – one that is greater the sum of its constituent parts. It is important to note that in the construction of complex linguistic units, judgments and values – and thus power, ideology and authority (see Chapters 4 and 5) – are already and always in play. This is observable in the types of structures that are expected or unexpected, thought to be good, bad or neutral, and much more. Consider the forms grab and pussy and their respective referents ‘seize or clasp suddenly’ and ‘female genitalia,’ as they were enlanguaged by Trump. One of these is not, in and of itself, typically judged in a negative manner: after all, Anglophones can “grab a coffee with coworkers” or “grab a book off the shelf” without transgressing shared values or morality. Pussy, on the other hand, is widely considered to be transgressive, as is the referent ‘female genitalia,’ such that even if this were activated with an orthophemism (e.g.

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vagina) or a euphemism (e.g. flower), Trump’s linguistic activity would very likely have been seen as defective. However, when these forms are enlanguaged in particular configurations, something much greater than the sum of each part is produced. In this instance, the sentence enlanguages Trump’s assertion that the referent pussy is the object of the transitive verb associated with the form grab, modified by the emphatic adverb just and having as its implicit subject a famous, powerful man (the you in this instance is understood to be Donald Trump and people who are, in his words, equally “famous”). This complex linguistic sign is not simply the combination of smaller signifier-signified pairings but an elaborate, highly structured manifestation of what a languager asserts to be their reality. In the case at hand, it amounts to a factual declaration that might have been more transparently enlanguaged as ‘I am [and people like me are] a priori allowed to seize women by their genitalia.’ (It is worthwhile to ponder how various publics might have reacted were Trump to have made such a statement.) Of course, the languagers and enlanguagements under the microscope in this book involve more than syntactic structures such as these. Transgression is also intimately associated with the broader environment in which languagers evoke different referents, especially the presence of others who are actively or passively implicated in a linguistic action, as well as the relations between these persons. Consider the following: it is often acceptable among close friends to evoke someone’s mother or to allude to an interlocutor’s sexuality, but it is far different to evoke someone’s mother as a sexual being in relation with that person. From this, it is possible to understand the situational weight of a complex imperative along the lines of “go fuck your mother.” Linguistic signs matter, of course, in how such languaging will be received (as well as the responsive languagings it will undoubtedly engender), but the structures into which they are cast matter just as much, if not more. After all, the same invective could be rephrased euphemistically as “go engage in coitus with your mother,” and it would still very likely be understood as transgressive. Whatever may be negatively judged about this moment of linguistic life, it has little to do with specific forms and their respective meanings. Rather, it is the structured contiguity of form/meaning pairs with other form/meaning pairs: mothers and sex are not supposed not go together according to widely shared norms – certainly not as imperatives and especially not when the mother in question is the transitive object of a sexual predicate-verb having a co-languager as implicit subject. These are, to put it in the vernacular, fighting words, enlanguagements that can be expected to provoke negative, hostile or even violent reaction. Syntactically enlanguaged structures, whether clauses or sentences, can be understood as units that realize communicative ends or finalities. Of course, all of this depends upon who languages what to whom, how and

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within what parameters. Consider an example along the lines of “you are very pretty.” If we only take into account the forms contained in this sentence and the meanings activated by them, it would be very difficult to see how anyone could understand it as disparaging. However, we know that this isn’t always the case. In fact, this enlanguaged unit and its reception depend upon several factors that are bound up in its embodied delivery, involving the ways in which languagers deploy intonation, affect, pauses or hesitation, and much more. It also is only interpretable within a specific context, notably involving co-languagers – in this case, the person to whom the act is directed. If this were said to someone who is obviously dishevelled, perhaps rushing into a class late having just woken up, chances are good that it will be understood as sarcastic (at best) or insulting (at worst). If it is spoken to someone who has just completed a ten-round boxing match, it will be understood differently, perhaps taken as a joke or a form of encouragement. Regardless of these or any other possible situations, it cannot simply be the sentence structure and the forms/meanings that it contains that are both enlanguaged and received, but the entire complex of meaning that is created in situ that is understood, processed and – eventually – judged. This is a unit referred to as the utterance. Generally speaking, an utterance is understood to be a specific languaging act, involving formal or structural components that languagers do, as well as the entirety of factors that lead to this doing, frame its reception and predicate any subsequent languaging activity, ranging from reception to response (e.g. Crookes, 1990). An utterance is thus an enlanguagement that can only be described and interpreted in a context – some demonstrably experiential event involving human speakers and human audiences, as well as all of the cultural and emotional baggage they carry. Importantly, utterances are not the same thing as sentences, although the two do frequently overlap. Some utterances are single linguistic forms, such as when I yell “asshole!” at the careless driver who has cut me off on the freeway. This can be understood as an expression of my anger and my judgement of the driver in question (and, importantly, not as any reference to their anus). Other utterances comprise entire sentences in which a subject and verbal predicate are enlanguaged, often with varying complements and adjuncts, as can be seen in the example of me telling a tedious colleague to “shut the fuck up!” Still other utterances are longer and more syntactically dense, as can be seen in the case of jokes or moments of humour, which may best be considered the interleaved enlanguaging of utterances within utterances. Crucially, all utterances, from the most simple, monosyllabic to the most complex, scripted, multisentence ones, constitute languaging events that happen at a time, in a physical place and within a cultural backdrop (a matter taken up in more detail in Chapter 3). These utterances are often considered

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transgressive, even when their formal content (i.e. the linguistic forms that they contain) is anything but, leading to no end of confusion and controversy. Several of these moments will be unpacked in the following chapters, particularly ones in which languagers claim to not have transgressed shared boundaries, in part because they had not used putatively “bad words” or, as in the case of the Access Hollywood tape, because it was claimed to be only a matter of one such “bad word.” By reconsidering the entire linguistic package of these and many other moments, description, interpretation and analysis are able to take a deeper and more critical turn, peeling back additional layers and offering a more holistic understanding of what is at stake in these and other moments. Tying It Together

This chapter overviews some of the more useful tools that can be applied to specific languaging events, looking past the rather simple concept of word: the linguistic sign, including both form and meaning; simple and complex forms, such as derived and compounded forms, alongside truncations and acronyms; formal typologies bound up by social factors, including euphemisms, dysphemisms and orthophemisms; and the utterance, an entirely context-dependent physical enlanguagement. These tools allow us to better describe and interpret languaging activities and the languagers who both author and react to them. With this in mind, it is possible to reconsider Donald Trump’s comments and describe them with more precision. By asserting that “you can grab ‘em by the pussy . . . they let you,” Trump was deploying a series of forms, each of which activated situationally interpretable meanings. Some of these include straightforward signifier-signified relations, notably his use of pussy to refer to ‘female genitalia.’ Others involve complex structures, such as Trump’s use of a sentence that positioned the female body – and especially genitalia – as something that is susceptible to be grabbed by men “who are famous” (i.e. men like him), and also framing this assertion as something that women just allow. This is the crux of the moral and political issue at hand: a man asserts the factuality of his permission to seize women by their genitalia, not to mention their expected acquiescence to this, because of his celebrity and power. Form and structure have, in and of themselves, little to do with how this may be labelled transgressive: after all, Trump could have said something like “women simply allow powerful men like me to forcefully and suddenly clutch their vaginas,” and this would only dubiously be seen as less transgressive (in fact, the boundary crossing of this utterance might well have been clearer, not to mention excused with greater difficulty by his apologists).

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Trump’s utterance can be argued to have transgressed a litany of social boundaries, and not only for the previously mentioned reasons. In order to push further into this example, we must also consider the contextual interpretation of the utterance and of the sequence of utterances in the wider linguistic moment. We understand from what preceded and followed this, as well as the huis clos physical and temporal context of a one-on-one interview with an entertainment reporter, that Donald Trump was engaged in bragging. He enlanguaged his ability to affect others, specifically women, as well as their own inability to do anything but acquiesce to his capacity and dominance. This is nothing more than the linguistic realization of misogynistic manhood (see Harp, 2019; Maas et al., 2018), the linguistic rendering of a mental world in which men are understood as able do what they want to women, provided they possess significant enough cultural, political and/or economic capital, notably the sort of fame and fortune that Trump holds in spades (whether this is positive or negative capital is a matter for other scholarship). This sort of languaging is, indeed, common to homosocial environments (see, e.g., Kimmel, 2013), that is, it is part and parcel of the locker room talk of many, but far from all, males. And therein lies the greater critique of this one linguistic moment, one that largely slipped by the mainstream press and political positioning of others. That which is “bad” in this instance, that which transgressed shared social morality, was not merely Trump’s choice of form or structure, the utterance he enacted or how it was received: it was all of this and it was more.

A Closer Look Turning our attention to more complex, structured elements of languaging, let’s consider Trump’s response to the controversy that erupted following the release of the tape and its transcript. Soon after these were leaked to press outlets, and confronting a mounting storm of criticism, Donald Trump issued an official response to his then decade-old comments. As reported by CNN, he stated, “I  said it, I  was wrong and I  apologize,” before continuing on to note, “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”12 Following this and other repetitions of similar utterances, Trump supporters claimed that the matter had been settled: candidate Trump had offered an apology. His detractors and opponents refuted this, asserting that his utterance had failed to get to the heart of the matter, and even asserting

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that this constituted a sort of half-hearted “un-apology.” Given the descriptive tools applicable to transgressive languaging covered in this chapter, how might you understand one or the other point of view? What about the structured forms of the original tape and the utterances of Trump’s reply led his supporters and his opponents to understand these languaging events in such radically different ways? This is clearly a matter of more than just languaging – whether this is reduced to words or sentences, linguistic signs or utterances – this is a matter of how language is used and by whom and, perhaps more importantly, what the reception of this says about our shared beliefs and values. Languaging is not simply about transmitting our mental images to others, it is also about who we are and who we claim to be, the types of power that we hold, and the ways in which we are situated in society. Were someone else to have produced the same utterances as Trump, perhaps someone who does not have access to vast amounts of social and material capital, someone who does not hold sway over powerful institutions, do we really think the same outcome would have occurred? Upon this there is wide, if largely unspoken, agreement, even across the political fault lines of the present day. The next chapters delve more deeply into the ways in which doing language is doing much more than mere communication: it is doing mythology and ideology, power and authority. And it results in more than just words on a page or sounds in the air: it affects real lives, particularly when it concerns transgressive languaging.

Discussion Questions

• Reconsider Trump’s languaging activity captured in the Access Hollywood tape, applying some of the terms and concepts from this chapter to the different components of this moment. We have seen that pussy is widely understood as a transgressive or taboo form, at least among English languagers in North America (and elsewhere) and admittedly with a degree of variability. Related to these are several others, including • puss, a truncation with similar dysphemistic qualities • pussyhound, a compound form referring to a person – usually male – who is drawn to or seeks out women as sexual, but not necessarily intimate or romantic, partners • pussify/pussified, a verbal derivation referring to the act of rendering a person or object used or usable in the way that would otherwise signify or be associated with female genitalia • bussy, a blending or portmanteau of boy and pussy, referring to the male anus as a sexual organ

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What other forms can you think of that maintain a referential relationship with the base? How can you describe these forms, for example, as derivations, truncations, etc.? • Now consider things from a different vantage point, taking into account the referent that Trump enlanguaged in this moment, ‘female genitalia.’ English languagers use a number of other forms to activate this referent in the minds of co-languager receivers, such as • vagina, an orthophemism • slash, box and cum dumpster, dysphemisms • flower, cookie and muffin, euphemisms When do you think that one or another of these forms might be judged less harshly? What other X-phemisms have you observed, and how might they be interpreted or classified? • Name three other supposedly bad forms (i.e. ones that are widely subject to taboos) that are used regularly in your day-to-day life and identify their meanings. What derivational or compositional forms can you think of that are constructed from these bases? • Give an example from daily life in which languaging – yours or someone else’s – has been judged negatively in some way. How can you better describe and understand this in light of the discussion in this chapter? Further Reading

For readers who haven’t taken a course in basic linguistics, as well as for those who might need a bit of a refresher, Randall Eggert’s This Book is Taboo: An Introduction to Linguistics Through Swearing provides an excellent overview. Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s volume Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language includes very useful examples of X-phemy, as well as several other strategies that speakers deploy when avoiding – or activating – linguistic taboos (also see Chapter 2). Additional sources, including those taking a non-Anglophone perspective, can be found in the suggested readings to Chapter 1. Notes 1 www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html 2 It cannot be forgotten that several women at this time had already, and others in the weeks following, alleged that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted them. That anyone was surprised by or feigned shock at Trump’s misogyny is certainly a topic that demands more attention than this chapter could possibly provide: see Benoit (2017), Maas et al. (2018) and Serwer (2021). 3 One notable exception was commentator Ana Navarro, whose excoriation of Republican apologists became a media sensation and was instrumental in furthering

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4

5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12

her career as a sort of rebel conservative (www.cnn.com/2016/10/08/us/ cnn-panel-trump-language/index.html). The form taboo appears to have come from the Tongan word tabu, meaning ‘forbidden’ or ‘to be kept apart,’ originally referring to certain foods, as documented by Cook and King during their colonialist explorations of the Pacific (1793). The American Dialect Society even anointed -ussy as its 2022 Word of the Year. This suffix and its productive derivations, including -ussify/ussification, derive from the portmanteau of boy and pussy, referring to the male buttocks as a site of sexualization (www.americandialect.org/2022-word-of-the-year-is-ussy). I owe a debt of gratitude to many years of undergraduate students in HUM 15, who have given me these and countless other examples of ways to refer to genitalia, stemming from their own language research assignments and in-class discussions. It doesn’t seem like we use that very much anymore, a point made with great humorous effect by the character of Miss Slocomb in the (now rather dated) British comedy series Are You Being Served (1972–1985). Referential forms include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. These stand in contrast to functional forms, such as determiners, auxiliaries and prepositions, which contribute to the construction of meaning in structured clauses, but which are not linked to semantic referents. Even in the cases of onomatopoeia, there is a great deal of cross-linguistic variation (see Dingemanse, 2012). Infixation, a process whereby languagers insert different morphological components within lexical bases, is rarely seen in English. One seemingly productive example of this involves the insertion of fucking within complex forms, for example, unbefuckinglievable; for more discussion and compelling examples, see Yu (2003). https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/03/this-is-really-really-fuckinbrilliant.html www.cnn.com/2016/10/07/politics/donald-trump-women-vulgar/index. html

3 LANGUAGING MEANING “Rolling Coal” and “Having Balls”

Key Concepts

• Meaning: denotation, connotation, association • Languaging community, community of languaging • Enregisterment and indexicality On 12 March, 2021, the crew of Southwest Airlines Flight 531 prepared to take off from San Jose Airport in California’s Silicon Valley. Typically, communications between air traffic controllers and pilots consist of formulaic exchanges about weather, flight plans and related details. On this day, however, things took a decidedly different turn: a series of irrelevant, expletive-laden communications were broadcast for all to hear, including hobbyists who record and upload aviation events to social media platforms.1 This moment and its linguistic content afford a distinct perspective on transgressive languaging and languagers, specifically about how transgression arises from the actuation, reception and contestation of meaning. While the linguistic sign is certainly at stake in this example, much more interesting for discussion below is the linguistic context: the assemblage of physical, interpersonal, and cultural factors that allow such events to be interpreted. This chapter pierces the surface of linguistic signs, as introduced in Chapter 2, breaking meaning down into three ideational constituents – denotation, connotation and association – each of which is anchored within a cultural frame. This understanding of meaning subsequently engenders a DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-3

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complexification of the notion of culture, as well as the elaboration of two additional constructs – the languaging or speech community and the community of practice or languagers – as the sites of linguistic life. Discussion then turns to theories in cultural linguistics, most notably relativity, while also pushing back against deterministic reflexes often operating beneath the surface of disciplinary habits. Summarily, this chapter explores how language and culture are inseparably enmeshed. Unintended Transgression

On the early spring morning in question, the pilot of Southwest 531 accidentally cued his mic to the tower frequency of San Jose airport, broadcasting for all to hear – and record. In what might be considered a moment of unintended transgression, he engaged in an expletive-laden diatribe, providing a very personal view of California and Californians, the transcript of which was reported in a number of local outlets.2 “Yeah, fuck this place: goddamn liberal fucks,” he is heard to say. “Fuckin’ weirdos: prob’ly drivin’ around in fucking Hyundais . . . fucking lowered shit that go slow as fuck,” he continued, enlanguaging clichéd stereotypes concerning the automotive choices and driving habits of residents in this multicultural, multiethnic region. Despite a controller’s attempt to warn the pilot, he continued, commenting on the practice of modifying pickup trucks so that they emit thick diesel smoke, asserting that “you don’t have balls unless you’re fuckin’ rollin’ coal man . . . god dammit.” At some point, someone must have realized that this putatively private conversation was not private at all, as another voice from the cockpit of Southwest 531 reverted to the sterile tenor of airline verbiage and the plane took off for a routine flight to Seattle. These 20-some seconds made a splash in the news over the ensuing week, a rather daunting achievement in a period otherwise dominated by a health emergency (the Covid-19 pandemic) and political turmoil (the aftermath of an insurrection at the US capitol and the ascent of a new presidential administration). Southwest Airlines, keen to dispel negative publicity that might arise from any press coverage, responded to questions from a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, stating that they were “fully addressing the situation internally,” while also noting that their “corporate Culture is built on a tenet of treating others with concern and dignity and the comments are inconsistent with the professional behavior and overall respect that we require from our Employees.”3 Obviously, the pilot’s languaging is contrary to both airline protocols and established flight procedures, and is thus transgressive on its face. Per the Federal Aviation Administration, so-called sterile cockpit regulations require all pilot communications to be restricted to matters such as flight

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procedures and aircraft performance; invectives lamenting slow drivers and liberal-leaning communities quite obviously do not fit into this scope.4 Furthermore, the Southwest pilot very clearly failed to comply with broader proscriptions on language use, whether these be company-internal norms or a sense of propriety. In a work setting, particularly one as codified and stratified as aviation, shared notions of verbal hygiene (Cameron, 1995; see Chapter 5) dictate the avoidance of expletives (shit, fuckin’), taboo referents (balls) and interjections that might be considered blasphemous or simply impolite (goddamit). In short, but only on the surface, this incident appears to be a rather ordinary example of transgressive languaging, a lapse of judgement on this pilot’s part that might be metaphorically understood as his “forgetting to close the locker room door” – only in this case the locker room was the cockpit of a commercial jet. If examined more critically, however, this incident can be understood as much more than a person making infelicitous linguistic choices, ones that, while certainly transgressing shared norms, are also part and parcel of daily life. This diatribe and the public reaction to it put on stark display the ways in which languaging reflects cultural values and languagers enact cultural stances. Crucially, this moment did not simply arise from the pilot’s invoking non-pertinent matters at a non-sanctioned time; after all, the same person complaining about a mediocre layover meal or lauding the scenic beauty of Northern California would have been unlikely to engender much or any response, even though these also represent apparent violations of FAA regulations. At the same time, transgression is only tangentially a matter of the use of taboo forms or the evocation of taboo referents in the workplace: while impossible to prove, it is very likely that such forms and referents permeate the cockpits of airlines around the world, dominated as they are by males and masculine codes of behaviour. Summarily, this single moment is far from a straightforward matter of transgressive words or ideas, and it is more than just a question of poor taste or hot-headedness. At stake in this or similar incidents are the ways in which languagers transgress established boundaries by evoking referents that can only be understood through a cultural lens and doing so in a manner that is judged to be unacceptable, unwanted and/or unworthy, reactions that themselves must be evaluated from additional cultural perspectives. For this reason, the notion of meaning and referentiality introduced in the preceding pages requires a good deal of complexification and retooling. Languaging Meaning

Chapter  2 introduced the linguistic sign and its two components: form and meaning. This bifurcation breaks apart the often underexamined

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connection between the two halves of what languagers apprehend. That which are often understood as words, expressions, sayings, sentences and the like are actually very complex, learned ways of linking mental and experiential realities and expressing these to others. In this section, the seemingly straightforward notion of meaning is teased apart and replaced with something more multifaceted, acknowledging that meaning exists in the imaginary world of speakers and listeners, writers and readers, languagerauthors and their languager-receivers. As such, meaning and its components are inherently bound up in the images linked to a form, the ways in which these images are connected to other images, and the pathways through which any of this mental reality is arrived at and shared among communities of languagers. To begin unravelling meaning, let’s consider the linguistic sign in Figure  3.1. On the left side of the sign is an image likely familiar to all readers; on the right are written and phonetic forms used by Anglophones to enlanguage this image. So far, so good: meaning and form appear to be describable in a straightforward manner. If we take other linguacultural environments into account, the primary element that changes in this

FIGURE 3.1

Linguistic sign

Source: Photo by the author

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schematic is not the mental image but the forms used to project this, ranging from hond in Afrikaans to inja in Zulu. Any question of how a given image might be variably interpreted must, accordingly, arise from the signifying end of this pairing. However, languagers also know that this image, like all others, exists in a complex web of connections to other images, each with respective forms. They also know that any such form-meaning matrix is intimately related to how they use the linguistic sign; this is referred to as semantic knowledge, that is, knowledge pertaining to enlanguaged and languageable meaning. Reconsider the knowledge held by Anglophone languagers living in the United States and many other settings as it applies to Figure 3.1. On the basis of their lived experiences, they understand that the referent linked to the form dog exists in contiguity with the referent linked to the form pet: they have undoubtedly seen dogs kept as domestic companions, perhaps even in their own home, understood that these animals are treated like members of families, and felt or observed that others in their midst hold strong bonds of affection for dogs. They have also observed expressions like man’s best friend used within their linguacultural environment, concretizing the ways in which these animals are viewed and understood, while also testifying to strongly held, although at times elusive, values associated with this object, for example, ‘loyalty.’ Their knowledge about these connections emerges from shared experiences or moments lived directly or vicariously, for example, having a pet dog or seeing others with one. At the same time, this knowledge is subject to idiosyncratic experience and personal taste that colour how dog connects with pet or affection or any other linguistic form-meaning pairing. Perhaps they have severe allergies and thus associate the same linguistic sign with sneezing; perhaps they had a run-in with an aggressive dog and associate this referent with fear; or perhaps they simply do not like pets at all, whether they are dogs, cats, hamsters or any other animal. All such knowledge – information linked to physical characteristics, culturally emergent relations between a form-referent pairing and personal understandings derived from life moments – is bound up in the linguistic sign and in the semantic network within which any sign exists, and these networks are both communal and idiosyncratic. Clearly, meaning is not simply a matter of form-referent pairing; there is much more going on behind the scenes of any linguistic sign, ranging from the rather simple example of dog to the high-stakes ones of love and hatred. This concerns not simply how referents stand in relation among each other but how different parts or qualities of reference link together to constitute semantic networks. At risk of oversimplifying, it is possible to distinguish among three components of meaning, all of which have to do with the ways in which different

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referents interact and coalesce in the minds of languagers: denotation, connotation and association (see Sonesson, 1998, for a useful background). Denotation is perhaps the most straightforward piece of this puzzle: a given form denotes (from the Latin ‘to indicate’ or ‘point to’) a particular image or images. For example, the nominal form crab denotes ‘a crustacean of the infraorder Brachyura’ (e.g. “crabs live in the ocean”), the verbal form crab ‘to fish for crabs’ (e.g. “he crabs in early winter”), the adjective crabby ‘irritable’ (e.g. “she was in a crabby mood after the tedious meeting”), and crabbedly ‘in an irritable manner’ (e.g. “he responded crabbedly to my question”). From the discussion here and in Chapter 2, it should already be clear that denotations are not always canonically specified, akin to proscribed dictionary definitions, nor are they shared universally within a languaging community. However, they are generally understood by co-languagers and across such communities, such that the link between a given form and denotation is considered a convention (Gärdenfors, 1993). Importantly, the form-denotation link can and often does vary widely, deriving from experiences and habits, personal or community realities, or any number of other forces. This fact was made clear while researching the Southwest Airlines incident that is the focal point of discussion here: among pilots and aviation enthusiasts, crab has an additional denotation, specifically ‘to align an aircraft diagonally to a runway approach in a crosswind landing’ (e.g. “the pilot crabbed on final approach due to strong winds”). Thus, it must also be recognized that the bidirectional form-denotation relationship is inherently unstable and can even contain highly specific links within languager subgroups, cohering around diverse experiences or activities. If denotation is variable, but at least relatively easily conceptualized, a second component of meaning is somewhat less straightforward: connotation. From the Latin meaning ‘to invoke’ or ‘to point toward along with,’ connotation refers to a unidirectional connection among different semantic denotations. Connotations are activated by languagers along with denotations, typically without much or any attention or thought. Describing these co-activations facilitates an understanding of how different images coalesce, constituting semantic nodes, fields or points of intersection. Consider again the canonical denotation of crab and the denotation ‘a crustacean of the infraorder Brachyura.’ On the basis of the knowledge held by languagers familiar with this sign, we can assert that crab also connotes ‘a large, mainly aquatic arthropod,’ bringing it into semantic contiguity with other signs. Crab, lobster and shrimp are joined together via a common connotation, as all crabs, all lobsters and all shrimp share the denotative quality ‘aquatic crustacean.’ This is a one-way logical implication, however: crustacean does not connote crab, as not all crustaceans are crabs (indeed, some crustaceans are shrimp, others are lobsters, still others are barnacles). Of course, and like

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denotation, any link between a form or forms and their respective connotation is arbitrary, emerging within the linguacultural environments in which languagers come to understand these signs and their connectedness. For that reason, different languagers and different communities of languagers may well hold different connotative links. For pilots, crab connotes a ‘manoeuvre’ and is thus connotatively linked to take-off, land and taxi; for other groups, at least according to the Online Slang Dictionary of American English,5 crab (denoting ‘a person who only pays for things when in the presence of others’) connotes ‘miserliness’ and is thus linked to stingy, penny-pincher and cheapskate. A final semantic concept, one that is far more variably bound up with the sociocultural knowledge of individual languagers, is association. As the name suggests, a semantic association captures the relative expectation or contiguity of one denotation vis-à-vis other denotations, albeit in a way that is neither necessary nor unidirectional (and thus can be distinguished from connotation). Associations are closely related to biases, knowledge built upon and deriving from past experiences, and are thus much more fluid, even within a grouping of relatively like-minded languagers who share common experiences (Bhatia et al., 2019; Kenett et al., 2023). For example, languagers living in the Chesapeake Bay areas of Maryland and Virginia, regions famous for a blue-shelled variety of crab, may associate the corresponding crab with local heritage; others, even those living in the same communities, who happen to be allergic to crustaceans might associate crab with trauma and danger; and still others might associate this with summer, the traditional high point of crab catching and consumption. That one or another individual does not share identical associations with all others in their languaging community does not deny the relative strength or weakness of semantic associations and their related links, but it does serve to point to the inherently fluid, dynamic nature of such relations and their intersections with other cultural constructs and linguistic signs. Like denotations, the connotations and associations activated by a linguistic sign do not exist in a vacuum but are connected within semantic networks of varying density and complexity. When used by most semanticists or computational linguists, a network refers to an interconnected whole of knowledge, be it held by a single person or an operating system, that brings different linguistic signs and signifier-signified couplings into relation (Zimmermann & Sternefeld, 2013). Accordingly, a form-referent pair like fly ‘to move in and pass through the air’ exists in a complex network involving different near synonyms (e.g. travel), antonyms (e.g. crash), complementary subparts (e.g. take off – land), a host of connotations (e.g. airplane, pilot) and associations (e.g. ticket, vacation). As it concerns transgressive languaging, the precise nature of semantic networks and their theorization

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are far less important than the overarching supposition that both forms and meanings, as well as the content of meaning, are languaged within complex matrices of experientially gained knowledge and that the enlanguagement of meaning at all levels can only be understood within a cultural backdrop, involving fellow languagers and their lived understanding of the world. Meaning and Languagers

Considering the preceding information, the Southwest pilot’s assertion that “you don’t have balls unless you’re rollin’ coal” can be re-examined, and a complex web of semantic meanings that he enlanguaged in this moment can be unravelled. Of primary interest are two complex forms and their semantic content: have balls and roll coal. Both of these should be considered idiomatic, as the meaning activated by them has little, if anything, to do with those linked to the simplex forms constituting them (i.e. have and balls, roll and coal). Regarding the first token, have balls, Anglophone languagers understand that this denotes a verbal image akin to ‘displaying courage’ or ‘acting in a fearless manner’; the second, roll coal, denotes the action of ‘emitting thick smoke from a diesel engine.’ So far, so good. But what else is made real with these forms and their linguistic actuation? And what, precisely, about these linguistic actions can be considered transgressive (besides the fact that they violated FAA regulations)? To answer these or related questions, attention must be given to the knowledge held by languagers, both the one who authored this event and those who received and reacted to it. Consider the connotations and associations activated by these forms. To have balls is connotatively linked with a number of other images and their associated values, some of which are ‘virtue,’ ‘physical and mental strength,’ and ‘agency.’ When an individual is said to have balls, they are inserted within a semantic imagery that includes these and many other positively connoted components of shared mental reality: having balls connotes doing that which is daring and difficult or tackling a challenge. All acts of having balls are understood to be acts of putative agentive strength and courage, even if a given languager-perceiver does not like the action in question. As such, and no doubt because of the connotations linking one part of this complex form with ideational masculinity (balls denotes ‘male testes’ and connotes anatomical sex), having balls is undoubtedly closely associated with traditional mythologies about gender roles, presentation and embodiment (see Chapter 4 for more discussion of ideology and mythology). While it is not necessarily true that all those who have balls need to identify as male or as a man, there is a relatively strong expectation that having balls is correlated with this status, regardless of whether this bias is also associated with qualities that might be labelled as good or bad, proper or improper, desired or undesired.

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Similar interpretations can be made of the form roll coal, denoting a phenomenon that is largely limited to North American linguacultural settings. For those who can interpret this form in the way described earlier, semantic connotations of ‘pollution’ and ‘vehicle’ are necessarily co-activated: all acts of rolling coal involve polluting and some sort of motor vehicle, regardless of whether this is viewed as positive or negative, amusing or disturbing, or by any other optic. The associations activated in the minds of different languagers and languager groups vary widely, of course, in part based how such connotations link with their held values. For some (including the present author), rolling coal is closely associated with political populism, reactionary conservatism and related identities. Perhaps for this reason, and given experiences of seeing people rolling coal and having coughed through the resulting thick emissions of black smoke that this action produces, there is also an association with aggression and anti-environmental stances. Of course, for others (and presumably the pilot of Flight 531), rolling coal might be associated with positive qualities and experiences, perhaps even with deeply held values and identity characteristics (see Daggett, 2018; Lindquist, 2019; Nelson, 2020 for discussion of this and related phenomena). Obviously, the preceding semantic breakdown is far from complete, as much more information – particularly concerning connotation and association – could be added; these very same forms might have distinct denotative, connotative and associative properties when used by other speakers and/or in different contexts (consider how the semantic content of to roll coal might be described were this uttered by workers in a coal mine). Such generalizations notwithstanding, it is important to consider how the same signs might be linked to dissimilar connotations and associations by diverse languagers in the very same linguacultural environment, where such divergences could go a long way to explaining differential reactions to this or similar incidents. For example, persons who identify as feminists might associate the form to have balls with misogyny and sexism, particularly as the compositionality of this complex form implicationally removes those who do not physically possess balls from the domain of those who are able to ‘have and display courage’; to assert that the positively valued qualities of bravery or tenacity are somehow linked to genitalia, and genitalia to traditionally defined male anatomical properties, might well be offensive to many. At the same time, those belonging to socioculturally conservative communities of languagers might associate rolling coal with worthy characteristics and behaviours, with pride of place or of economic status, a display of normativity to be celebrated and emulated. This differential view of meanings activated by languagers goes a long way in clarifying what happened in incidents such as Flight 531, both the original languaging on the part of the pilot and subsequent languaging on

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the part of recipient audiences. Accepting, if only for discussion’s sake, the preceding semantic descriptions, the boundary-crossing component of this act derives from the pilot articulating an assertion that could be otherwise expressed along the lines of, “If a person does not emit thick black diesel smoke from their pickup truck, they do not have and do not display the type of courage that is generally expected of men or persons who identify as such.” What very likely outraged those who first heard this or listened to the recordings broadcast on various media was not simply the denotative content of this utterance but the potentially connoted assertion that ‘all such acts are necessarily virtuous,’ as well as the concomitant associations that they may have made with southern conservatism, a particularly situated form of hostile or aggressive masculinity. Of course, the preceding interpretation is also coloured by additional semantic matrices activated by the Southwest Airlines pilot during his illadvised screed, ones that might be unpacked following a procedure similar to that just discussed. The complex, structured form goddamn liberal fucks denotes a number of images, notably a referent that might otherwise be rendered as ‘persons having non-traditional views of society that are judged to be of little worth or value.’ But this enlanguaged noun phrase, uttered as an expletive, exists within a complex, culturally bounded and culturally actuated matrix of connotations and associations, including ‘conservatism’ and ‘traditional sociocultural precepts.’6 Just as a languager cannot evoke flying without conjuring up a host of connotations (e.g. ‘taking off,’ ‘landing’) and associations (‘airline,’ ‘travel’), the Southwest pilot activated not merely widely held stereotypes of Californians but an entire network of highly charged meanings, involving signifiers brought into connotative contiguity (e.g. ‘politics,’ ‘values,’ ‘Americanism’), some of which are also antonymic referents (e.g. ‘conservatism,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘worth’) and others of which have more slippery associative connections (e.g. ‘toxic masculinity,’ ‘populism,’ ‘Red State/Blue State antagonism’). To fully understand these matters, many of which arise more from what languagers feel than from what they can empirically demonstrate, it is useful to turn to the question of how culture and language are inseparably interwoven and how this interconnection can be better understood and applied to the interpretation of languaging moments. Languaging Culture

It should already be clear that incidents like that of Southwest Flight 531 can only be understood within a cultural backdrop, in this case that of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century, one that may be further broken down into sub-cultural groups defined according to

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economic, ethnic, geographic, racial and any number of additional criteria. This might appear to be a straightforward consideration, yet the concept of culture, anchored to place and time, has proven to be vexingly difficult to pin down. Depending upon what is invoked by culture, not to mention the perspectives and experiences of languagers and languaging communities that do this, this form may denote “the collective manifestations of human intellectual achievement,” “the customary actions, interactions, productions and their reception of a given social group,” or “the non-physical environment within which human groupings live together,” among many other possibilities (see Baldwin et  al., 2005; Birukou et  al., 2013, for an overview of debate among human and social scientists, as well as Kroeber  & Kluckhohn, 1952, for a historical perspective on the question). Regardless of these sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent understandings, it should be clear that culture is intimately associated with humanity, much like languaging as defined in Chapter 1. Importantly, culture is not something that exists or simply is, but something that is done. Culture is iterated and reiterated, acquired and transmitted, and it is inseparable from its human author-hosts. Rather than considering culture as a fixed target, it is perhaps most helpful to follow anthropologist Helen Spencer-Oatey’s approach and consider this concept to be a slippery ideational signifier, one that spans several academic disciplines and can be viewed from any number of perspectives (2012). Accordingly, it is possible to refer to culture as the habitual actions of a community, for example, the different ways of greeting or expressing commonality, through which culture might be accomplished by shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, patting on the back, or maintaining eye contact. It is also possible to refer to the encultured artifacts that a group produces and uses, as well as the various ways in which these artifacts are received, deployed and valued. From this perspective, various models of cars can be understood as encultured products and their reception by individuals and groups an enculturing act, reflected, for example, in the status of different models or the importance people attach to them, at times to the point of constructing deeply held identities around these. Any number of other examples and complications could be cited – what is important to grasp is that culture is not any one thing, nor is it ever static or fixed. Culture is a moving target, one that is perhaps best understood as a heuristic rather than a substantive truth, although its effects are certainly observable and held to be truths (Baldwin et al., 2005). All human individuals are cultural participants and belong to various, sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping and always fluid cultural assemblages, some of which are easy to see and others of which are difficult to describe or even discern. All individuals also operate in ways and understand the world

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according to parameters that emerge from these cultural dynamics and are transmitted within them by fellow cultural beings. Consider the example of politeness, a collection of behaviours and attitudes that are enacted with the goal of demonstrating respect for others and presenting a positive social persona (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003; Leech, 2007). While the phenomenon of politeness might well be a conceptual universal, in that all humans putatively adhere or are expected to adhere to some set of values cogent to social personae, the precise expression and reception of politeness are far from it; any and all ways of doing politeness are entirely locally emergent, as anyone who has crossed cultural boundaries can readily attest. An action that is understood to be polite in one setting, for instance, smiling and making eye contact, might be considered invasive in another; according to some cultural frames it is polite to ask a person’s name or occupation upon initial contact, whereas in another this would be considered ill-mannered; and even the ways in which the physical body is displayed or adorned are deeply tied to situational concepts of politeness, ranging from what limbs may appear unadorned to the nature of what is considered acceptable adornment, for whom, and in which configurations. There is no such thing as a universal politeness of gesture or presentation, much like there is no culturally transcendent notion of humility, kindness, friendliness or any other value. All of these ways of understanding ourselves and others, not to mention the labels given to them, are bound up in the knowledge we acquire from our surroundings, as well as the ability we possess – and sometimes fail to draw upon – that enables us to conform to expectations and share commonality with others. Denial of cultural universality gives rise to a number of tensions, especially as it concerns the boundary between one and another community, as well as those elements or practices that are or are not shared within community bounds – and, of course, how the actions of languagers and their enlanguagements are received and evaluated. It is abundantly clear to any student or scholar that doing language and doing culture are intimately connected, although the two are neither synonymous nor straightforwardly overlapping. Certainly, a common way of communicating is central to the development of encultured patterns and practices, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient ingredient to what might be considered cultural groupings, as alluded to earlier. Consequently, the central question for description and analysis of moments such as the Southwest pilot – or any other transgressive languaging events – is not how language is central or peripheral to culture but how languaging mediates culture and, concurrently, how culture mediates languaging (see notably Kramsch, 2014). To better wrestle with this, a short historical overview should prove useful. Beginning in the nineteenth century, expressed for instance in the writing of German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, culture came to be

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seen not as a series of things or fixed reference points but as a way of perceiving reality – in his words, a Weltansicht or ‘worldview’ (1820, 1822). Language was, for him and many of his contemporaries, a manifestation of culture, one that determines the cognitive ability of individuals and constrains how different peoples process experience and imagine the world. From this stance, it was possible to classify different cultures – that which might be understood today as linguacultures – according to positivistically framed taxonomies of advancement or primitivity, ones that can no longer be viewed as anything except racist and Eurocentric (see Trabant, 2012). Rosa (2018) provides a thorough and needed critique of this and its descendant views, showing how such deterministic biases and understandings of the connection between language, thought and culture continue to resonate in popular and academic thinking to this day (Alim et al., 2016; Hutton, 1998; Rosa & Flores, 2017; see also Chapter 4). Over a century later, German-American anthropologist Franz Boas took some of the first scholarly moves past Humboldtian taxonomies as they concerned the language-culture dialectic, countering determinism and its racist foundations with assertions that culture is both a personal experience and a means of conveying the collective beliefs and habits of a group of persons, including their linguistic habits (Boas, 1941, 1942; Seiferle-Valencia, 2017). Rather than determining the ways in which languagers conceive of the world, Boas asserted that this influenced ideational reality. He also took a thenrevolutionary stance against Eurocentrism and its trappings, which proposed that certain categories of people possessed inherent traits, such as cunning or creativity, by questioning the biased ways in which these evaluations were made in the first place (Custred, 2020; Senft et al., 2009; but also consider Bil, 2020). This determinist versus relativist tension persists in contemporary scholarship, including linguistics (see Knisely  & Russell, 2024, for a thorough critique). Linguistic anthropologist Michael Agar reiterates the relativist stance of Boas and his followers with a particularly useful metaphor as it concerns the link between culture and language. Rather than being a fixed object, he conceives of culture as a circle, within which outward manifestations such as language forms, structures and habits are situated within a field (1996). Agar uses fellow scholar Paul Friedrich’s term linguaculture, already familiar from prior chapters, which captures the necessary and fundamentally inseparable tie between the two (pp. 52–60). While it is far beyond the scope of this chapter or even this book to enter into the debate as to how to best account for the resulting tension, what is crucial to grasp – and which Agar and others have eloquently argued – is that language and culture cannot be disentangled. The circle of language, whatever this is thought to contain and however it is conceived, is bound to the field; at the same time, the

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field is constituted in no small way by this very circle. It is important, however, to note that the conceptualization, let alone the position, of a given linguaculture is not deterministic but relative, as the forms and structures of one system do not decide how the world is perceived by those who language them, akin to a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.7 These languaging patterns do, however, influence the ways in which the world is apprehended and envisioned, if only because cognition is also a linguistic activity (see Leavitt, 2015; Sharifian, 2017). In essence, Agar’s approach presumes that languagers are shaped, but not trapped, by the enlanguaged patterns and practices that they acquire and subsequently deploy. Similarly, culture can be understood as practice or a complex set of practices that are inherited through experience and iterated or reiterated through action, ones that constrain but do not confine languaging in all its forms. Linguistic anthropologists such as Agar and cultural linguists like Sharifian offer important conceptual tools for better grasping the language-culture connection, as well as the ways in which both can be seen as shared values and practices that are fundamentally verbal and active. Sharifian’s view of conceptualizations as culturally emergent structures is constructed upon schemas and categories, that is, integrated knowledge units that can be thought of as associations of experience and understanding (2011, pp. 24–25). Such units emerge from and through social interaction and are distributed across a population, which can, in turn, be defined and bounded by the degree to which it shares a particular cultural conceptualization. Importantly, the congruence or dissonance of conceptual sharing within populations is not binary or absolute but is much more akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic theory of image-thought associations (1980). For any given sociocultural grouping, conceptualizations will be variably shared, both in terms of their schematic and in categorical content. In fact, the relative importance or scope of these variations often leads to inter- and intra-community divergence (see Sharifian, 2011, pp. 4–16). On the one hand, there is a shared semiotic and communicative space that is already and always shaped by prior languaging and cultural action – no languaging is accomplished in a vacuum or is undertaken tabula rasa; it is born from and shaped by prior languagings, in turn serving to constrain and make realizable future languagings by other languagers. On the other, the very doing of language, not to mention the pathways through which this is done and received (i.e. the forms and structures used, the meanings evoked), can only be understood within the very same cultural ecosystem; languaging and culturing are accomplished simultaneously and dialectically. This is nothing less than a chicken-and-egg dynamic. What does all of this mean for any understanding of transgressive languaging and languagers, including that which is under the microscope here? In short, both everything and nothing. While there is a level of descriptive

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adequacy that can be attained by looking solely to the enlanguaged content of the languaging moment, holistic description cannot limit itself to this level; the words and utterances of the Southwest pilot are, absent an interleaving within a cultural frame and an understanding of cultural schemata that preceded this activity, neither describable nor interpretable. And yet, absent a better understanding of languaging, in both this moment and the moments that preceded it, it would be impossible to make anything other than an idiosyncratic supposition about what was being culturally accomplished in this moment, either by the pilot or by those who heard his actions, not to mention their reaction to these. As fellow linguacultural community members, we know a thing or two about what it means when a person refers to others, in a fit of pique or a moment of outrage, as goddamn liberal fucks. We also know a thing or two about what it means to assert that “you don’t have balls unless you’re rolling coal,” regardless of whether we share this sentiment. We are not naïve as it concerns our and others’ associations vis-à-vis the languager-authors of these or similar utterances, as well as the cultural frames – in this case, sociopolitical ones – that are linked to this languaging activity. And we infer, rightly or wrongly, correctly or incorrectly, the positionality and perspective of this individual based on his languaging activity, in large part because we have been exposed to similar languagers and enlanguagements the past. In short, we understand this to be a transgressive act – or perhaps we might deny that it should be labelled as such – solely and entirely due to our cultural knowledge. Languaging Communities and Communities of Languaging

The connection between language and culture is rather obvious, even if frequently overdetermined – and not just in academic circles. In daily life, language practices and patterns, as well as the labels given to these, are often used distinguish between different cultures as a sort of shorthand. We frequently refer to people as Chinese or Bulgarians in sweeping, overly generalizing terms, and in so doing we establish lines that determine who is included in and excluded from sociocultural constructs, most notably the nation. We regularly confront truths such as “Japanese citizens speak Japanese” or “this is America – speak English!” Of course, this ignores a vast variability, even among those who are seen as legitimate languagers (let alone those who are not); these divides also gloss over numerous differences concerning how people language, with whom they language, and much more. As tempting as these shorthand labels might be, they are not terribly useful for the description, let alone interpretation and analysis, of different linguistic facts and patterns. Much more applicable are two concepts – the speech or languaging community and the community of practice or languaging.

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Coined by the eminent linguist John Gumperz, a speech community is defined by its linguistic norms, that is, by different characteristics around which it coheres and through which it distinguishes itself from other speech communities, including a shared lexicon and grammar (1968). Henceforth, this is referred to as a languaging community, in part to reflect the foundations laid in Chapter 1 but also to acknowledge that languaging is not always equitable to speech, at least as this is commonly understood: some languaging is aural, some gestural, still more graphological; a great deal of languaging is done in the mind; some occurs in proximal interactions among languagers, other over distances, using different media, all of which render the foundational concept of speech somewhat antiquated, at best, or ableist, at worst. Building off of Gumperz’ original definition, a languaging community can be defined by the relative coherence of communicative activity and the relative similarity of enlanguagements produced by a cohort of languagers who recognize themselves to be in community, in part because of these facts. Languaging communities may be bounded and delimited by different isoglosses or features of enlanguagement observed at any level, from the formal to the semantic or from the syntactic to the pragmatic. They may also be bound by ideational conformities, notably mythologies and ideologies pertaining to their and their fellow community languagers’ activities and identities. Following sociolinguist William Labov’s understanding, the languaging community is a rather elastic construct, allowing for the overlapping and interleaving of different sub-communities along political, socioeconomic, racial, ethnic or any number of other lines (1972). From one perspective, a languaging community might be relatively expansive and populous. The Hispanophone community, for instance, spans an enormous geographic area from California to Argentina to Spain and includes hundreds of millions of persons; despite differences in the languagings of a Los Angelino, a Mendozan or a Sevillian, common characteristics allow them to be grouped under this heading. At the same time, beliefs about these commonalities serve as a complementary point of ideological cohesion: most understand themselves to constitute a languaging community, albeit one in which there is significant variation. Considered more narrowly, any number of smaller, more geographically defined languaging communities exist within this overarching construct, such as one city, for example, Buenos Aires, or even one neighbourhood, for example, La Boca. By referring to languaging communities rather than simply abstract cultures, we can focus our description and analysis on the linguistic and/or ideational components around which a grouping coheres, without overdetermining extralinguistic factors that might otherwise be associated with those sharing these languaging norms. This is a crucial assertion, as there may well be countless cultural dissimilarities among those who otherwise language in similar ways.

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In the case of Flight 531, the pilot and the controller, as well as the journalists and social media followers reacting to the exchange, all belong to the same languaging community, which for the purpose of discussion here is labelled US Anglophone (acknowledging the tenuous nature of this shorthand). Because all involved are proficient participants within this languaging community, they are able to receive and interpret the enlanguaged forms and meanings produced in this moment, even if their judgements concerning these were far from unanimous. At the same time, there is obviously more going on than the simple understanding of words or sentences that promotes the grouping of different participants within different cultural categories. By languaging in the way he did and by reacting in the ways they did, the pilot and various press commentators, along with the airline itself, demonstrated an understanding of norms and rules that are specific to particular configurations and domains of language activity and interaction, a consideration that points to a distinct configuration of languagers, cohering not around matters inherent to the doing of language but around factors that emerge from the outcomes of languaging. First coined by educator Etienne Wenger, a community of practice (henceforth, community of languaging) comprises persons who regularly take part in common activities and share common concerns (1998, 2000). Whereas a languaging community is primarily defined by the form and structure of linguistic activity, communities of languaging emerge around shared goals and interests, such as professions, religions or hobbies. Applied beyond its original pedagogical use, communities of languaging have come to encompass any number of cohesive, culturally constructed groupings, for example, gender, which shares a number of often unspoken and unrecognized common threads, as well as any number of distinctions (Eckert & McConnell-Genet, 1992).8 In essence, a community of languaging is narrower and more limited as it concerns the teleology of communication than is a languaging community: the former is defined by the why of languaging, that is, those factors that propel different persons to communicate, whereas the latter is defined by the how of languaging, that is, the mechanisms deployed to accomplish this. Unlike a languaging community, within which persons tend to be lumped into one (and occasionally more) group, communities of languaging are inherently modular, reflecting French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s understanding of assemblages (1980), a heuristic expanded by contemporary cultural critic Jasbir Puar (2007). An individual may belong to several assemblages at the same time, while also moving among and across these, giving their content variable salience. Depending upon the assemblages implicated by a particular act and context, specific languagings will reflect not only the broader linguaculture and the conventions shared

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by a languaging community but also its shared values and imbedded practices; an individual may language in more-or-less different ways across time and space, depending upon the community of languaging in which they find themself. The pilot of Flight 531 demonstrated this point when he abruptly shifted languaging patterns once he realized that his microphone was cued to an incorrect frequency. Before this, he presumably understood his languaging to be directed at a much narrower audience, one consisting solely of himself and his co-pilot (also male), and that such linguistic activity was either acceptable or not transgressive within this space (it should be noted that airline cockpits are reputed as communities of languaging dominated by male-male interactions, frequently involving the types of banter seen here; see Davey & Davidson, 2000; Neal-Smith & Cockburn, 2009). In the second instance, he languaged in a way that reflected the norms shared within the broader community of languaging of professional aviation, abruptly shifting his actions to meet the expectations of this conceptual space. This incident affords one example of how various communities of languaging can and often do come into contact and conflict. Here, when broadcasted beyond the intended community of languaging, the pilot’s cockpit-directed languaging brought him into a space in which different norms of behaviour were active: he crossed a boundary not only by languaging in a way that was seen as inappropriate for the wider languaging community but by not realizing that he had, metaphorically at least, stepped out of the narrower space of the cockpit. He failed to apprehend the assemblage of languager-receivers that he was accidentally addressing, thus transgressing within a transgression. Of particular interest then is how this sort of boundary crossing is also situated within a particular form of masculinity, one intersecting with regionalism and politicocultural orientation. Languaging Context

As is made clear in the previous section, languaging happens across time and space. This harks back to the crucial role of context, a somewhat broad notion that is used to convey the conceptual world or shared frame surrounding a linguistic event that allows anyone to interpret it (Duranti  & Goodwin, 1992). More daily understandings of context look to physical features of these settings, notably, the spaces of languaging and the languagers who occupy them. However, context is far richer and more complex that these common views would allow. Any given context certainly includes persons and objects that are physically present and empirically evidentiary, such as the pilot and air traffic controller in the case under discussion here, and of course it subsumes the physical environment, here the cockpit and airfield. Yet a host of invisible, but still very much active, persons, things

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and forces are also contextually present, albeit distally. These include persons who are present only by implication (e.g. airline management and the travelling public), ideological forces that are felt but are difficult to delimit (e.g. political divisions between conservative and progressive factions, geographic divisions and their intersection with ideological masculinity), and ethereal concepts that are perhaps best understood as heuristic (e.g. national political cultures and subcultures). To take these factors into account necessitates a broad rethinking of context, as well as of the role that contexts play in languaging, writ large. Consider once again the example of Southwest Flight 531. Some elements of context are indeed rather apparent, as is obvious by the previous discussion: the physical context (where a languaging act is accomplished) and the persons situated within it (languager-authors and -audiences). These can be thought of as actors or participants (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005; van Leeuwen, 2005), although the latter term is often used in a more conceptual manner in discourse studies (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Fairclough, 2013; see Chapter 7). Others are implicationally involved in this context, in this case the public, press and company officials. Furthermore, and like all contexts, that surrounding the moment under the microscope here had also already subsumed a series of invisible or less-visible factors such as time, including a chronological map of time (e.g. a specific date as formalized by a given calendar) and the point in time as this relates to actors, those both physically present and distally implied. At the moment of the Southwest incident, the United States was confronting deep political, social and cultural divisions, ones that eventually led to an insurrection at the national capitol on 6 January of that year. The pilot’s diatribe about goddamn liberal fucks, echoing the sentiments (and perhaps even the words) of pro-Trump insurrectionists, occurred mere weeks after these traumatic events. Acknowledging such chronological aspects of the broader context does not excuse or even attenuate the content and effect of this languaging, but it does offer a critical window to better understanding the conceptual space in which it occurred. Moreover, these factors are inseparably entwined with the cultural positionality of contextual actors, both those physically present and those implicated by the linguistic act itself, involving invisible forces such as status and prestige. This in turn harks back to much broader forces than any one person, as well as to a shared understanding of the ways in which societies are organized, different actors’ place and position within it, and the relative power anyone may access and deploy at a given moment (see Chapter 5). All languagers confront linguistic action of which they must make sense, drawing on perspectives that are framed by previous experiences and inevitably biased ways of interpreting these. The ability to understand language

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activity is also predicated upon encultured knowledge that binds the reception of this and constrains subsequent reaction. In other words, languaging is an inherently subjective activity, and any pretence of ultimate objectivity can only be viewed as wishful thinking, at best, or pompous self-importance, at worst. This does not mean, however, that subjectivity is unanchored or is merely a matter of whim or capriciousness. The grounding of subjectivity in antecedent experience and the cultural contexts in which experience is lived may be likened to what French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus (1991): “a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways [that] are acquired through a gradual process of inculcation in which early childhood experiences are particularly important” (cited in Thompson, 1991, p.  12). Habitus is a useful heuristic for conceiving of linguistic performances and accounting for all other ingredients, evidentiary and ephemeral, physical and ideational, that precede a languaging moment, as well as those that flow from it. Habitus can thus be thought of as a lens allowing us to both take up (passively) and perceive (actively) the world, somewhat akin to von Humboldt’s concept of Weltansicht. This is, however, much more than a mere worldview, and it certainly is not deterministic or racially anchored. Habitus or the expanded context can be reconciled with several other theoretical approaches to the mind-language-reality dynamic, particularly those used in critical discourse studies (see Chapter  7). Van Dijk retools the notion of context, looking at it from the point of view of both speakers and audiences. Rather than adhere to empirical fact, this is understood to be all that languagers “know,” regardless of whether it is held to be true or real by others or even putatively objective observers (2006, p.  163). Van Dijk argues that context is indirectly observable by its effects, that is, what is accomplished through discursive action, reflecting Fairclough’s view of a constitutionality circuit (1992). Accordingly, languaging acts upon the world while the world concomitantly acts upon languaging; these knowings and doings (or realizings) function in a chicken-and-egg dialectic (see also Knisely  & Russell, 2024). The context of one languager thus might vary greatly from the context of another, a disjuncture that as can be deduced from the recorded languaging of Flight 531’s pilot. Similar to van Dijk’s view, and taking an important step toward the insertion of cognition within wider sociocultural frames, Wodak argues for sociocognitive mediation of reality and the circuitous dynamic of this with regard to language activity (2006). This is entirely compatible with Sharifian’s and others’ cultural conceptualization of languaging activity and enlanguaged forms, albeit from a distinct stance. If cultural schemata are understood to underly the ability to language between different individuals and groups of individuals, the mental models of context outlined by van Dijk and Wodak

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can be considered the ways in which languaging is rendered both necessary and doable in the first place. The proposed mental representations in Wodak’s work constitute a sort of conduit for the interpretation of context, linking prior and new interpretations of experience and further providing for the conjunction of frames (areas of experience) and schemas (structured patterns of experience and knowledge) as an explicit means of connecting history, social practice and discourse actuation. While it is impossible to look inside the so-called “black box” (pace Wodak, 2006), it is possible to describe and interpret the external manifestation of this in the form of enlanguaged materiality, including texts, speeches or social media posts. Indexing and Enregisterment

Communicative activities are obviously intimately associated with the context in which they occur, both physical and mental. What is accomplished through languaging, from deploying the simplest form to the most complex structure, serves to iterate and reiterate held truths pertaining to any number of factors, including place, speaker and goal, all of which recursively frame and scaffold these very same contexts. In effect, languaging and context are bound up together and cannot be fully or even effectively teased apart. The former is only interpretable within the latter, and the latter is in part framed by the former. In order to better understand this dynamic, the scholar’s descriptive toolkit can be expanded to capture how speakers create both themselves, as social persons, and their environment, as social constructs, taking into account two complementary concepts: indexing and enregisterment (Agha, 2008; Eckert, 2008; Johnstone, 2016). Through enlanguaged acts, whether singular or iterative, languagers index different facets of shared existence: in essence, they “point to” a shared ideological frame. A great deal of indexing happens subconsciously or merely out of habit, as many learned patterns point to socially emergent identities in a manner that appears to defy a languager’s will or knowledge, such as the ways in which someone might pronounce a sign that links them to a sociogeographic and/or socioeconomic identity (this is often referred to as their accent). Languagers project themselves and interpret others’ projections on the basis of enlanguaged experiences, situating them as of one or another place, one or another class, one or another race and/or ethnicity, and so forth and so on. At the same time, languagers consciously deploy specific forms or patterns to activate identity characteristics, for example, the ways in which gay men use phonological patterns to index their social persona (Moore & Podesva, 2009; Podesva, 2011) or the rhetorical structures deployed by women in the workplace to convey, challenge or appropriate authority (Tannen, 1990, 1993). So much of what is indexed through

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languaging, from the mundane to the consequential, points to more than the canonical semantic content of a linguistic sign; through any number of mechanisms, languagers index a wide array of proximities and divergences, roles and relations, identities and positions. From the post-vocalic rhotic dropping that indexes a Bostonian in-group cultural alignment to the Received Pronunciation norms that index an English upper-class background, and from the sibilant fronting that indexes a gay male identity to the tag questions that index white, middle-class American femaleness, languaging functions as a tactile, experiential ornamentation facilitating the triage – correctly or incorrectly, generously or discriminatorily – of persons within socially constructed and propagated categories. The linguistic features of an utterance through which a constellation of referents become packaged and labelled in a particular context are conceived of as a lexical order by Silverstein (2003). Any such lexical order might include form, meaning or other linguistic features; collectively, it acts as a shortcut to categorization and identification, emerging from and concomitantly reinforcing languager biases. For example, when used to denote ‘female genitalia’ and enlanguaged in a heterosocial space, pussy might index a masculinist stance or male gaze, whereas the same form used in a closed space involving two men to denote a ‘person lacking in courage’ might index homosociality and male hegemony (Connell, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2018). At the same time, much of how languaging and context are intertwined depends upon how different enlanguagements will be categorized, based in large part upon experience with prior performances. An utterance or sequence of utterances influences the ways in which languager-receivers respond to enlanguagements and situate themselves within the mental context that is influenced by this activity. Such moments of languaging come to be enregistered, referring to the “processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorised semiotic registers by a population” (Agha, 2007, p. 81; see also Gal, 2018, 2019). Enlanguagements that are enregistered are associated with a host of identity features, pointing to different ideological and cultural constructs such as race, gender or socioeconomic status. In effect, enregisterment feeds the indexical order in a type of dual mode of action: it actuates and reiterates prior effects, while simultaneously actuating and reiterating prior categorizations of others. As such, languagers do not experience any single moment of linguistic life ex nihilo, but as type examples of categories. Much of this operates subconsciously, much like implicit bias (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006). This has consequential effects on audiences and on subsequent actors, contributing to the contextual ecology and the ways in which different participants in this interact. By considering what a languaging act might index and how it enregisters varying social factors, it is

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possible to better apprehend what languagers are doing both as doers and as receivers, as well as those who become doers through subsequent reaction. Tying It Together

This chapter moves past the simpler duality of form-meaning introduced in Chapter 2, teasing apart the semantic worlds that exist in the minds of individual languagers and in the collective imaginary of languaging communities. This is understood to be grounded in the cultural experiences of languagers and the shared mental schemata that emerge from linguacultural life. These images and their enlanguaging are solely understandable in context, a concept that has been extended well beyond the physical world, encompassing the cognitive or mental realities of languagers as well. This view of linguistic activity affords additional descriptors, specifically index and enregisterment. From the bases of this chapter, transgressive languaging can be better described and interpreted, and stronger, more motivated arguments as to what is being done by languagers through their actions can be made. Transgression is not simply a matter of signs or their content but is fundamentally a question of culture and of context, as it is only in collective communities that meanings emerge and only in contexts that they are actuated. In short, transgression is very much in the (linguacultural) eye of the (linguacultural) beholder, whether this be an individual, a languaging community or a community of languaging. The supposed “truth” of any moment is really just another mental context, one that, like languaging itself, cannot be untangled from its human host.

A Closer Look: Fucking Weirdos and Lowered Hyundais What does the culturally framed, contextually grounded understanding of language have to offer the description and interpretation of the communicative moment captured on Flight 531’s hot mic? To begin answering this question, first reconsider two elements of the pilot’s languaging, specifically, his evocation of fucking weirdos and his characterization of Californians as “driving lowered Hyundais.” Obviously, some forms are readily understood and of little importance (e.g. driving). But what of the rest? Certainly, the pilot broke a number of rules by speaking about non-pertinent matters during taxi and take-off, but this would be unlikely to have engendered a sense of transgression from the wider public. Likewise, it is hardly taboo, even if it may be judged mildly transgressive, that a person would insult others, especially

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when they are engaged in private conversation. The offensive nature of this moment is something more: it is something that many feel but have a difficult time articulating, perhaps beyond admonitions that such languaging should not occur in the first place. What happened in this moment can be evaluated as transgressive because of different cultural values presumptively shared by all involved. A  part of this certainly involves the pilot’s use of the expletive fucking and his labelling Californians as fucking weirdos. In doing this, he not only flaunted norms of professional decorum but did so in a way that inserted schemata of conservativism and politics, along with more nebulous associations of racism, into the linguistic moment. The latter derive particularly from his assertion that these very same fucking weirdos “driv[e] lowered Hyundais.” For those unfamiliar with this practice, lowering involves making modifications to the suspension and drivetrain of a vehicle, such that it is much closer to the street surface than original factory specifications. This practice, especially when applied to smaller cars produced by manufacturers such as Hyundai (based in South Korea), is culturally associated with Asian-Americans, a group that constitutes a sizable minority in California’s Bay Area, where the incident occurred. Thus, by languaging fucking weirdos and referring disparagingly to their practice of lowering Hyundais, the pilot was activating mental models and cultural frames infused with political and racial assemblages – and did so in a way that clearly did not celebrate them. His subsequent assertion that “you don’t have balls unless you’re rollin’ coal” (an utterance that might be more canonically rendered “a person is not normatively masculine unless he is driving a large truck emitting thick diesel smoke”) affords a similar interpretation of the pilot’s mental context, as reviewed earlier. Participants in the broader languaging community reasonably interpreted this as demonstrative of a worldview looking down upon certain racio-ethnic groups and celebrating a white, conservative American masculinity. Far from simply speaking on a hot mic, the pilot of Flight 531 enlanguaged his mental reality: real men have balls; those who have balls roll coal; and the state of having balls and the action of rolling coal are positive and desirous. At the same time, the state of being a fucking weirdo and the act of driving lowered Hyundais are cast as undesirable. That this assertion was made for all to hear, especially in a setting in which the putative fucking weirdos constitute a sizable population, and by a person otherwise tasked with the safe transport of passengers (many of whom might be fucking weirdos themselves) constitutes a very clear transgression of shared norms of behaviour.

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Admittedly, it is impossible to know with certainty what the pilot of Flight 531 was thinking and how he understood himself and his relation to others – in other words, no person has access to the black box of his mind. However, it is possible to assert a reasonable interpretation that this action was intended to deprecate people on the basis of racialized characteristics (see Chapters 6 and 7).9 All such factors must be taken into account when developing a clearer picture of this incident, as the pilot was languaging not into a void but into a cultural context that could not help but language in return, construing this as yet another piece of evidence of deep-seated prejudice and hostility. This was, in essence, understood as another instance when the proverbial locker room door separating a certain profile of male languager from the wider world was left open, exposing their own views to the world at large. The case of Flight 531 involves a layering of transgressions, some more serious than others. From the violation of codified rules of languaging put forth by the FAA, to the unwritten rules of politeness that govern public-facing professions, to the even more opaque boundaries that separate appropriate from inappropriate expressions of personal taste, the pilot of Southwest 531 crossed many lines on that spring day. These lines had already been crossed before and would be crossed countless times again by other languagers in other settings; acknowledging this and its apparent banality does not mean that such moments are uninteresting, however. In fact, they may be seen as all the more compelling for analysis because of their commonality, not to mention the ever-evolving nature of reaction and response.

Discussion Questions

• To what languaging communities do you belong? How is language activity used to define these communities? • With which communities of languaging do you affiliate? How does your languaging change when you are within these groups versus when you are not? • Consider the commonly heard gender stereotypes, such as “she is so ladylike” and “he’s a man’s man.” What are the denotations activated by forms such as ladylike and man’s man? The connotations? The associations? • How do different ways of languaging point to or index the identities you noted earlier? In what ways might these also be enregistered? How do your or others’ languaging habits transgress broader cultural norms?

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• Chose a moment when a prominent individual was captured saying something on a hot mic or in a similar manner, that is, unintended for wider distribution. What contextual factors must be taken into account in order to understand this moment? How can you tease apart the physical versus mental participants in this context, reconstructing a type of mental map pertinent to the languager in question? • Thinking of this same moment and the enlanguaging that was accomplished in it, what cultural knowledge is held by different participants – both the languager-author of the moment and the languager-receivers who reacted to it? How can you describe this cultural knowledge in a way that affords greater clarity vis-à-vis the semantic worlds that were languaged and their reception? Further Reading

For those wishing to further explore meaning and the linguistic subfield of semantics, excellent starting points are Cruce’s Meaning in Language: an introduction to semantics and pragmatics and Griffiths’ An introduction to English semantics and pragmatics. Palmer’s Toward a theory of cultural linguistics provides an accessible primer to the culture-language duality and to related questions. For those interested in context, Duranti and Goodwin’s edited work is perhaps the most cited source; additional readings can be found in Stanley’s Language in Context. While somewhat dated, Holland and Quinn’s Cultural models in language and thought also maintains resonance and importance. In addition to the sources cited previously related to indexicality and enregisterment, readers are pointed to Gumperz’ seminal works Language and social identity and Rethinking linguistic relativity, the latter co-edited with Levinson. They will also find important clarifications and rich discussion in Corazza’s Reflecting the mind: indexicality and quasiindexicality, which develops a mental model of perception and context. Notes 1 The incident was broadcast by local ABC affiliate channel 11 (https://abc11. com/southwest-airlines-pilot-rant-on-hot-mic-against-san-francisco-josemineta-airport/10456214/). All transcriptions are the author’s, based on the recording made available at the hosting platform Vocaroo (https://vocaroo. com/1jvOncVfdwNb). 2 Here and in the following, boldface font indicates emphasis; non-standard spelling is used to reflect pronunciation. 3 www.sfgate.com/travel/article/pilot-hot-mic-bay-area-airport-16049942.php 4 Federal Aviation Regulation Part 121, Section 541, amended 1981 (https://rgl. faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgFAR.nsf/0/7027DA4135C34E 2086257CBA004BF853?OpenDocument).

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5 http://onlineslangdictionary.com 6 This is, quite obviously, an inference made on the basis of the author’s decades of participation in American culture and linguistic life. For those less familiar with liberal in this landscape, it has little to do with other Anglophone uses of the form. 7 Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never collaborated, but their collective understanding of linguistic relativism, by which it is asserted that linguistic patterns influence thought, has come to be known under this title (Koerner, 1992; Sapir, 1983; Whorf, 1956). 8 Echoing Judith Butler’s view that gender is something that a person does, rather than something that a person merely is (1990), Eckert and McConnell-Ginet highlight the ways in which language is used by males and females (they only look at gender binarity) to perform salient identities, reframing communicative patterns as community-based practices. 9 Similar rhetoric is noted in former president Trump’s labeling Covid-19 as the “China flu,” increased incidents of anti-Asian violence and rhetoric, and the storming of the US capitol by insurrectionist groups, many of which were blatantly white supremacist (see, e.g., Gover et al., 2020; McHendry, 2018; Schaefer, 2021).

4 LANGUAGING WORLDVIEW Ideology and Mythology

Key Concepts

• Ideology • Mythology • Academic English and standard language ideologies “In my opinion, I personally think this author has got no business telling us what to think about what you can say.” The preceding line is taken from a student assignment that required undergraduates to reflect upon and respond to a reading about taboo language. Upon review, at least three supposed errors stood out and begged “corrective” attention: the lexical and semantic redundancy enlanguaged by my opinion, personally and I; a colloquialism, namely, got business, here conveying the idea of “be allowed to engage in an activity”; and the use of impersonal you referring to “anyone,” rather than the canonical second person. For instructors like me, whose responsibility includes guiding students toward standard writing practices, these choices appeared flawed, triggering a professional instinct to point them out and offer correction. Importantly, the student’s opinion and the expression thereof were never concerns – in fact, I fully agreed with their assessment (I found the reading in question to be blathering and pedantic). It was how they expressed this opinion that led to me providing some less-than-enthusiastic feedback. Like most of my DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-4

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colleagues, I suspect, this sentence transgressed the boundaries of what an academic writing assignment should look like and how an undergraduate should articulate their opinion. This chapter explores linguistic ideologies and mythologies from the perspective of critical linguistics, a stance that seeks to better understand the relationships between different institutions and structures, as well as the boundaries that separate supposedly good or conforming from bad or non-conforming languagers and practices (Charity Hudley et  al., 2020; Fowler  & Kress, 2018; Pennycook, 2001; Wodak, 2011). It begins by rethinking this linguistic moment based upon a review of Academic English, before moving on to define what is meant by ideology and mythology, both in general and as applicable to languaging and languagers. Next, the question of how linguistic ideologies are inherited and passed along is tackled, revisiting putative transgressions such as the one shown previously. In closing, ideologies are brought into contiguity with the themes of power and authority, anticipating the foci of Chapter  5 and asking the foundational question of who has entry into ideological and mythological formations and who is excluded from these dynamics. Beliefs and Languaging

The preceding example and many thousands like it are undoubtedly echoed in any given university course, on any given day, in any given discipline or field of study. Whether through the forms they choose, the structures they deploy or the rhetoric they employ, countless students simply do not play by the rules of academic linguistic life. They transgress boundaries separating the “educated” from the “uneducated”, those who respect languaging traditions from those who disrespect them, those who are labelled as sophisticated, clear-headed or talented from those seen as crass, vague or unrefined. Students are told that they must write clearly, intelligently and with precision – if not, they will have fallen short, not only in a course but as a demonstration of their cognitive ability and ideas. Playing by the rules of this game is not about language, per se, but about languagers and how they are or will be perceived. But how, precisely, does the sample sentence above demonstrate a lack of intelligence, a dearth of clarity or any intellectual shortcoming? Why should what the student languaged be considered erroneous? Despite what legions of professional educators may say, any answer to these questions is far from straightforward. Firstly, the supposition that this linguistic act is fundamentally flawed must be dismissed, that is, unless an explicitly dogmatic and overly determined stance were to be taken. It is wholly understandable, as only the most ingenuous (or perhaps pretentious)

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of co-languagers can honestly claim to not comprehend what was written. In the same vein, the sample sentence fully respects the structures of English syntax and morphology, at least as they are done by contemporary languagers in California and other Anglophone settings. Moreover, this sentence is pragmatically impactful and persuasive – the writer deploys an anti-topical cleft to clearly situate their stance (“in my opinion”), establishing the personal bias of what follows. Even the apparent redundancies manifest by “in my opinion, I  personally think” may well be considered a form of argumentative transparency, something that should readily be seen as an act of intellectual honesty. Despite the this, I critiqued the student’s writing in my feedback, encouraging them to reconsider their languaging habits and pointing them to sources that I  believed would help them perform better (which is to say, according to the rules) on future assignments. And yet, I am a linguist, one who has spent decades preaching that there is no such thing as intrinsically good or bad in linguistic life, that native languagers are incapable of error, and that the task of any linguistic scholar is to describe, rather than dictate. Why then did I feel no compunction in passing judgement on this sentence and indicating that such formulations should be avoided? And why did the student not respond with prima facie evidentiality, highlighting the very grammaticality of the sentence, its comprehensibility and even its effectiveness, rejecting my heavy-handed verdict (something that upon reflection would have been logical and beneficial)? What does this moment and countless other moments like it, ones that virtually all who read these pages have encountered and in which the vast majority have even taken part, have to say about how forces acting upon our existences shape our actions, either as languager-does or languager-receivers? This line of questions points to stances and postures common to critical linguistics, a subfield often confounded with critical discourse analysis (CDA) or, as it is perhaps more aptly titled, critical discourse studies (CDS; van Dijk, 2009; see Chapter 7). According to Fairclough, all such frameworks are founded upon the “increasing consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others” (2014, p.  1). Critical approaches understand all semiotic activity, including that which is labelled languaging here, to be mired in a network of power and authority, as well as the structures and institutionalizations of this (see Chapter  5). Building upon this foundation, critical linguistic inquiry requires that scholars interrogate how culturally inherited and socially transmitted beliefs shape languaging and that they examine (or perhaps re-examine) the ways in which these forces precondition how languagers will be valued or devalued, celebrated or diminished, included or excluded. In the case at hand, a critical approach begins by asking what subjacent mythologies

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and behind-the-scenes ideologies lead people – especially ones like me who are vested with outsized authority – to interpret languaging such as the preceding example and languagers like this student in the ways we do. And at the heart of the matter is one overarching ideological enlanguagement: Academic English. Languaging Rules

It is common in university settings in the United States and, very likely, around the world to hear professors lamenting the poor writing skills of their students.1 At times, such complaints focus on a poor grasp of the subject matter, such as the mistaken use of terminology or an erroneous interpretation of data. At others, criticism concerns banal conventions of writing, notably formatting and normative punctuation. Such matters are easily remedied by students with a bit of attention. Much more cumbersome are concerns stemming from the mastery (or lack of mastery) of what is commonly referred to as Academic English (henceforth, AE; Scarcella, 2008), a cover term for a series of languaging practices that are expected to be respected by all who participate in university life, as well as in other privileged sociocultural domains, including corporations and government. Similar to ways of languaging that are deemed prestigious and considered proper in other linguacultural settings, AE (also known as Standard, School or Professional English) is a target that, once achieved, affords languagers entry into domains of power and privilege (Rumberger & Scarcella, 2000; Scarcella, 2003). However, this is a slippery, even elusive target, as are those forces that regulate what is and is not believed to meet the target, how far from this a given languager may fall, or how their enlanguagements are or should be judged. Unlike in many other linguacultural settings, there is no official governmental institution standing guard at the gates of AE making politicolinguistic pronouncements pertinent to enlanguaged form, structure and patterns: AE emerges from the patterned languagings of those who are understood to be its practitioners, rather than from a physical institution. This distinguishes it from, for example, the standardized forms of populous languaging communities such as French (governed by the Académie Française) and Spanish (Real Academia Española), something also seen in demographically smaller communities, including Icelandic (governed by the Íslenska málnefnd language council) and Slovenian (Slovenska akademija). AE language regulation derives largely from the de facto authority of persons and institutions who practice power over languaging and languagers implicitly, rather than explicitly, with the latter being akin to the de jure mechanisms of linguistic control seen elsewhere (see Chapter 5). Such diffuse, couched and often invisible sway over what languagers do and how

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their enlanguagements are judged is at times difficult to pin down, although it is quite easily felt. In fact, the result of authority and its manifestation in sanctioned and celebrated patterns of languaging permeates the linguistic life of all community members, even (and perhaps especially) those who do not succeed or simply refuse to language in ways that are cogent to AE norms. These languagers are not simply transgressive, in that they cross boundaries, but are banished, that is, they are removed from any contiguity to the boundaries themselves (just ask any student who fails to attain sufficient mastery of AE). Of course, the preceding does not mean that languagers who wish or are required to perform to the standards of AE must navigate in perpetual darkness and confusion, as numerous sources are available to guide them (see Anstrom et al., 2010, for a thorough literature review). The AE lexicon is formalized in and validated by published dictionaries whose use is required in public and private schooling and whose prescribed enlanguagements, including the phonetic and orthographic form, canonical denotation (as well as possible associations, e.g., of vulgarity), and any derivations, are held up as evidence that there are “real” and “not real” words, “accurate” and “erroneous” meanings, and so forth and so on (see, e.g., Peterson, 2020). AE morphosyntactic structures are prescribed in formal grammar manuals for learner languagers, with specific patterns asserted as the “true” and “correct” ways to do English (with other ways being variably asserted as “flawed,” “sloppy” or simply “incomprehensible”). And AE rhetorical and stylistic patterns are conventionalized by pundits extoling the virtues of these and the languagers who accomplish them, ranging from writers admitted into the ideological fold of capital L Literature to languagers who are put forth as orators of acumen and effectiveness. For those who have not yet attained proficiency in AE, countless self-help instruments are available offering detailed lists of “dos and don’ts,” as well as step-by-step instruction for any number of languaging tasks, ranging from writing a doctoral thesis, to crafting an effective email, to engaging in political debate. Like so many other resources affording persons entry into the middle class and its trappings, vast resources are dedicated to AE, notably its defence and its propagation – entire departments and curricula are even dedicated to it in primary and secondary schools, as well as universities, often in response to governmental or para-governmental mandates. AE can be thought of as a shibboleth, a linguistic line separating two ideologically defined camps. On the one side of this boundary are those who language in a manner deemed close or close enough to this moving target: they and their enlanguagements are labelled in a number of ways, nearly always positively, ranging from intelligent to effective, clear thinking to poetic; even when they are judged negatively, perhaps as snobbish or elitist,

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the shared connotation of being educated or erudite is still active. On the other side of this line are those who do not, cannot or simply do not wish to language accordingly: they are seen as illogical and unintelligent, their enlanguagements are incorrect and poorly done, and the thoughts or mental images that they convey are seen as sloppy or false, among the many negatively connoted terms that might be observed (Snow & Uccelli, 2009; but cf. Zwiers, 2006, 2007, 2008). Importantly, AE not only separates persons according to their languaging but also triages them in a possibly infinite number of ways. The ability to do AE constrains languagers throughout sociocultural, -political and -economic and even physical spaces, affording them movement into and acceptance within prestigious settings, with all of the trappings of power and privilege that these proximities beget. Doing AE is not only about getting good grades and being seen in a positive light – it is the key to corporeal security (Lippi-Green, 2012; Milroy, 2001). Despite claims to the contrary by celebrated authors and academic institutions, there is no precise delimitation of what is and is not or of what does and does not constitute AE. Like all other ideologically defined languages and forms of language, AE does not exist: it has no ontological reality aside from its doing, be this through positive languaging action, passive languaging reaction or individual and collective conceptual accomplishment. Also, and again despite the claims of numerous pundits and pedagogues, there is nothing intrinsically better, clearer, more effective or more efficient about AE than any other pattern of languaging. A person can realize any number of ideational worlds, ranging from mundane concepts, such as driving, cooking or changing a lightbulb, to the most complex and expertise-laden activities, such as poetics, philosophy or automobile mechanics, by languaging in ways that fail to conform to AE. As concerns the first two elements of AE, it is fundamentally no different than any other languaging paradigm: all languagers and all enlanguagements follow inherited, shared pathways of realization, configurations that can be exploited to achieve an infinite number of communicative ends. The question of AE and of languagers who do not conform to it is fundamentally a matter of what is believed and the implications of this belief, a third ontological component of languaging (Irvin & Gal, 2000; MacSwan, 2020). Accordingly, any critical description of languagings and languagers who transgress the boundary separating AE from other ways of doing English must contend with two distinct, but fundamentally interleaved ideas: mythology and ideology. Mythology and Ideology

The two concepts introduced in this section are often used in day-to-day life in a way that is distinct from what follows; for this reason, it is useful

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to begin with some terminological clarification. Here and throughout this book, mythology refers to that which is considered known and understood, following Barthes’ seminal work on the ways in which cultural understandings emerge and circulate (1957/1972). Mythologies may be thought of as beliefs that are not overtly or explicitly conceived of as such, in large part because they operate in such a way as to appear as common sense or simply “that which is unquestionably true.” Ideology, on the other hand, refers to a series of attitudes and sympathies that go beyond epistemic ideas and concepts that people hold true, encapsulating beliefs about the ways things “should or should not be.” In other words, ideology concerns not just the world as it is but the world as it is intended or desired to be. Mythology and ideology are intimately associated, at times to the point of appearing conceptually interchangeable: a person’s or collective’s understanding of truth (their mythologies) inevitably frame their understanding of how truths should be interpolated, that is, the consequence of truth as it concerns different facets of existence and life (Flood, 2003; Halpern, 1961). From Barthes’ point of view (one, not uncoincidentally, inspired in part by Saussure), a myth can be thought of as a semiotic whole that is greater than any given sign (see Chapter 2). Beyond the duality of signifier-form and signified-referent, a myth encapsulates all communicative potentiality that is accomplished by the enlanguagement of a sign. Barthes exemplified this by looking at a number of material objects, some of which have gained distinct mythological qualities since the 1950s, and others of which have remained relatively unchanged. His analysis of wine, for instance, argues that this was (and perhaps is still) not just a beverage for participants in French society; rather, it was an icon steeped in notions of national belonging and éducation, something that might be loosely understood as socialization and civic formation. According to Barthes, wine came to mythologically manifest a certain type of Frenchness: its presence, consumption and integration with different aspects of social life signalled partaking in the ideological community of the nation and separated those who engaged with this myth from those who engaged with other products and practices (famously, milk among those in Anglo-Saxon cultures). Myth can thus be thought of as the practice or doing of social meaning, involving multiple layers of semiotic practice. If mythology is somewhat straightforward, describing the broader shared beliefs vis-à-vis some sort of object or identifiable referent, ideology is a far more fraught and contentious concept. The term has been used across disciplines such as politics, economics, literary criticism and anthropology (among many others) to refer to sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct phenomena, ranging from belief (as mythology was formalized earlier) to ephemera (i.e. something that operates at a level beyond description). Even a cursory examination, such as one that might be offered by an internet

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search, points to a nearly limitless and frequently contradictory range of definitions. For this reason, it is useful to have an operational understanding for discussion throughout this book, one that comes, not uncoincidentally, from critical linguistic scholarship. Van Dijk distinguishes between several conceptualizations of ideology, while also acknowledging the vagueness of this concept. Rejecting, or perhaps simply nuancing several more traditional understandings, including those that see ideology as a set of false beliefs, a dynamic concealing social relations and deceiving masses and a system based in truth and falsehood, van Dijk articulates a seemingly simple definition of ideology as “the basis of the social representations of a social group”; in other words, ideologies are not simple beliefs but the foundation of believing (1998, p. 8). This is similar to Thompson, who considers ideology to be “meaning in the service of power” (1990, p.  7; Holborrow, 2015); accordingly, ideology encapsulates understandings that augur authorities and their ability to exercise such authority over others. However, even this apparent simplicity belies a complex tension, one that van Dijk formulates as concurrently social and cognitive. In this view, ideologies are not simply facts or epistemes – they are frames that are held by individuals and shared across a collective. More than simply a worldview, ideologies constitute mental frameworks that allow persons and collectives to know or believe anything, anticipating Sharifian (2011, 2017; see Chapter 3). The preceding articulation of ideology provides a powerful tool for the interpretation of social phenomena, ranging from the most mundane (e.g. salutations) to the most consequential (e.g. physical violence). Consider the example offered by table etiquette and related comportments in settings where food is consumed in public: for a person to act in ways that are considered ideologically appropriate, there must be a shared understanding of the mental frameworks, themselves anchored in beliefs, that are at play in any given context. These frameworks constrain how individuals are thought to best configure their body (i.e. posture), which utensils should be used to consume different foods and how these should be wielded, and the manner in which persons should interact with others sharing a meal. Underlying this constellation of moments and actions are two ideological frames: politeness, or the phenomenology of appropriate and inappropriate ways of interacting, and the table, conceptual shorthand for a given model of eating. Both ideological frames predispose individuals and collectives to comprehend various actions or states in contextually predetermined ways. For instance, a person who loudly slurps from a bowl of soup may be understood to violate shared frames of politeness, whereas a person who consumes soup without making noise and using a spoon (perhaps a particular spoon ordained for a specific type of soup) may be understood to have respected such frames. Of course,

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it is not the case that most or any participants will explicitly recognize this as an ideological enterprise; in fact, most simply “know” and “believe” that certain actions are impolite and others polite, even if they may be aware that this is not universal. It is important to note that van Dijk’s conceptualization of ideology rests on a fundamental tension between individual and collective dynamics. On the one hand, only the individual can cognitively apprehend any phenomenon; on the other hand, this can only be cognitively perceived when nested within a collective frame. In the example of a person slurping soup, it is not that the entire cultural or anthropological community sees and hears this action; rather, this is seen and heard by a collection of individual cognitive actors who are acting as a sort of proxy for a wider community. The action of soup slurping only comes to have meaning, and thus fit into a broader frame (here, politeness), when all cognitive actors act as one, deeming such an act to be impertinent, a sign of ill-mannered upbringing or something along these lines. As should be obvious to any reader who has made it this far, languaging and languagers are steeped in both mythology and ideology (see, e.g., Bauer & Trudgill, 1998; Blommaert, 2010). It has already been noted that certain linguistic signs function like icons, standing in for something much larger than the written or spoken forms, let alone the meanings that they canonically evoke. In the same vein, and very similar to the material examples evoked by Barthes, linguistic elements are imbued with mythological significance. Not only are forms associated with meanings far beyond their denotations or connotations (Chapter 3), but more complex enlanguagements also come to be mythologized, a prime example of which is seen in accents, the regularized articulatory patterns that are associated with geographically and/or socioculturally defined communities. For many participants in the languaging community of US Anglophones, British accents (however vaguely this might be understood) are imbued with mythologies pointing to class sophistication or nefarious otherness, both of which are manifested in any number of popular television shows and movies (Zabalbeascoa, 2021). A  given character using an iconically British accent will be understood as cosmopolitan and refined (e.g. Renée Zellweger’s somewhat clumsy attempt in Bridget Jones’s Diary), suave and sophisticated (e.g. virtually any character interpreted by Hugh Grant), dastardly and cruel (e.g. Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of Amon Goetz in Schindler’s List), or aloof and cool-headed (e.g. Judy Dench’s Q in the James Bond series). In the same cultural spaces, phenomenologically similar myths are associated with the so-called southern drawl, heard as charming and folksy (e.g. Sandra Bullock’s incongruously Oscar-winning role in The Blind Side), “southy” Bostonian, considered mythologically rough and uncouth

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(e.g. Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting), “valley girl” Southern California speech style, portrayed as vapid and materialistic (e.g. Alicia Silverstone’s hallmark character in Clueless), and too many more to exhaustively list here (see Lippi-Green, 2012, especially her Chapter 4). It is not that these phonological patterns, loosely defined and variable as they may be, convey meaning in the same manner as a linguistic sign; rather, they are enmeshed with meaning through the shared beliefs and semiotic values made real by languagers and conveyed through continual relanguagings. Accents simultaneously index and are enregistered: they point to and point out the purported qualities of languagers and languaging communities. Of course, accent is not the only component of linguistic life ideologized and mythologized: languagers and languaging communities are also steeped in mythological truths and framed by ideologies. One of the prime examples of this is the very focus of this chapter – languagers who master AE and languagers who do not. Lippi-Green formalizes these as examples of standard language ideology, which she views under a subordinate-ordinate hierarchy as “the promotion of the needs and interests of a dominant group or class at the expense of a marginalized group, by means of disinformation and misrepresentation of those non-dominant groups” (2012, p. 68). Such ideological formations mythologize homogeneity and favour the upper-middle-class elites, themselves long-standing holders of authority and power over matters of education, politics and related social institutions. Collectively, standard language ideologies work to not just stigmatize non-standard accents and other ways of languaging that do not conform to mythologically “true” or “acceptable” patterns; they produce the very enregistered patterns of languaging that often stand in for social, economic and cultural identities. In the United States, this is perhaps most noted when languaging ideologically intersects with mythologies of race and class, a topic taken up more later in this chapter (Lippi-Green, 2012, pp. 207–208). Silverstein formalizes linguistic ideology as “a set of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use,” providing a particularly useful expression of how beliefs about and imperatives pertinent to standard languaging shape linguistic life (1979, p.  193). This view of language ideology interleaves with mythologies, as defined earlier, but does not fully capture the ways in which the former predispose both persons and communities to understand language praxes according to mostly invisible, subjacent frames. Irvine bridges this gap, asserting that linguistic ideologies are “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (1989, p. 225). From this, it can be inferred that ideologies operate not only on the perception of languagers and languaging communities but on their evaluation according to other, broadly

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shared concerns. In the case of AE, this is readily apparent: what languagers do and how they do it function as a metonymic stand-in for intelligence and skill, upward mobility, acquiescence to middle-class values and much more. Obviously, the ideological frames that precede AE are closely related to those of other standard languages used in university and other formal instructional settings. Such languaging practices and their enlanguaged byproducts are ideologized as both non-aligned, that is, as a site removed from power contestations, and meritorious, that is, as lacking in the deficiencies of other registers, dialects or sociolects (Milroy, 2007). They are also asserted to be reference points and to constitute common ground, at least among a wider languaging community, and they “are perceived as neutral and correct, implemented with the goal of uniformity or invariance so that every speaker uses the same grammatical form and vocabulary” (Gámez & Reyna, 2022, p. 6). Summarily, languaging is bound up in multiple layers of mythologies and ideologies, pertaining to languagers and enlanguagements, all of which operate in such a way as to implicitly – and at times explicitly – promote conformity to pre-existing norms, themselves ideologically framed and mythologically grounded. Linguistic ideological status and frames can be seen as anthropological inheritances: shared cognitive schemata that are passed down from generation to generation, albeit with inevitable modification, akin to the shared mental schemata of cultural linguistics (see Chapter 3). Such statuses frequently circulate beneath the surface of collective consciousness; occasionally, however, they are rather nakedly manifested, especially when it comes to formal instruction and educational policies. In the US and other countries, educational policies explicitly target the mastery of prestige forms like AE, and continuation within institutional tracks requires this, with varying repressive and exclusionary mechanisms applied to pupils who do not master it. Through this wielding of symbolic power and its canalization as symbolic violence (see Chapter 5), students are subject to a myriad of mythological and ideological forces, for instance, those that reframe their home languages as defective, in many cases excluding them from participation in other social settings or labelling them as cognitively deficient. These forces intersect, again most often in a quasi-invisible manner, with additional mythologies and ideologies pertaining to still more identity constructs, most notably race, a fact that merits specific attention. Languaging and Race

Language ideologies are intimately bound up in those pertaining to languagers, notably identities such as regional origin, socioeconomic class, religion and ethnicity. In the United States and elsewhere, such factors are intricately interwoven with the construction of race (Lippi-Green, 2012; Rothenberg &

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Mayhew, 2014). The ideological foundations of what people linguistically do – or what it is asserted that they should and should not do – are thus inseparable from those pertinent to their individual and collective identities, whether personally held or socially imposed. A vast array of scholarship testifies to the ways in which racial ideologies have led to the stigmatization of different persons and communities, based in part on real or perceived languaging patterns. Those who language in one way, typically reflecting mythologies of mythological whiteness, are seen as acceptable and normative, whereas those who do not are viewed as transgressive and marginal – or worse, dangerous. This is especially noted in the case of Black and Indigenous populations, whose accents are othered or removed from the domain of acceptable practice dominated by ideologies of whiteness (Hill, 1998; Urciuoli, 1996; Wodak, 2008). Careful historical and contemporary scholarship has also demonstrated how ideological standard languages, including those cogent to AE, can only be understood in relation to racialized worldviews (e.g. Bonfiglio, 2002, 2010). At the same time, the processes by which languagers are evaluated as conforming to ideological practices are also racialized, including educational attainment and classifications of proficiency and native-language status (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2016). A field of critical linguistic inquiry that has only recently come to prominence, and one that has engendered no end of controversy and backlash, raciolinguistics focuses on uncovering the seemingly hidden past and present dynamics that have and continue to racialize languagers and language race. From its roots in the first decades of the present century and the founding work of Alim et al. (2016), raciolinguistics has always kept in its sight issues of language and education. This is particularly pertinent in the US and other settler colonial polities, where race is one of the primary and historically foundational ideological frames (viz. Charity Hudley, 2017; Fanon, 1952/1967). Looking to how language is both deployed in and shaped by racializing ideologies, linguists like Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (e.g. Rosa & Flores, 2017) interrogate the often unspoken and continually reinforced appropriateness of different language variants and performances. These have long situated the linguistic forms, structures and variants associated with white Europeans as hierarchically superior to those associated with non-white and nonEuropean languagers. Re-reading some of the earliest modern philological and anthropological texts, they show that hierarchical, deeply prejudiced ideologies around race and language emerged concurrently: language was used to support theories of white supremacy, much as racial taxonomies were used to classify languages along an advancedprimitive axis. Rosa and Flores’ work reconsiders the place of Iberian Spanish in US language curricula, unravelling the ways in which Eurocentric, racialized

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ideological formations have historically and continually pressured Indigenous and non-white languagers and languaging communities to conform. They suggest that it is not a language itself that is perceived as defective or flawed, at least in the first instance, but the racialized bodies that are associated with and are ultimately the source of such action. Parallels between the status of AE and racialized languagers and the ways in which Iberian Spanish is promoted to the detriment of other registers is further taken up by Gámez and Reyna (2022), who consider the status of so-called heritage speakers in US language instructional settings. They note that, despite having a high level of functional proficiency and rich cross-cultural knowledge, heritage speakers are frequently told that their languaging and enlanguagements are defective or faulty, if they are acknowledged at all. In such examples, transgression is born on the very skin of the languager: racialization of the physical person entails racialization of the languaging person, and vice versa. What emerges from a raciolinguistic perspective of AE and of a languager’s ability or inability – perhaps their desire or lack of desire – to conform to the ideological frames that gird this is a much more complex understanding of transgression and of transgressability, that is, that which is considered defective language and the ideological foundations of this judgement. It is not simply that a given languager does not follow an ideological pattern or mythologized practice but that this languager brings into being other ideological frames, ones that are steeped in mythologies of race, belonging and whiteness, among much else. Understanding such moments from a raciolinguistic point of view opens additional paths of inquiry, notably those concerning who has the power and authority to frame ideology in the first place and how the identity of these persons – as well as that of those who are racialized – leads to a particular hierarchical configuration and power dynamic. This critical posture also raises questions as to the consequences paid by those who transgress ideologies of enlanguaged racialization and of racialized languaging, ranging from exclusion from different institutions (notably education, but also many other prestigious professions) to exclusion from domains of social action (e.g. housing, employment). In sum, raciolinguistics provides a critical lens through which to interrogate transgression and the biased scaffold that inaugurates and reinforces any boundaries – not to mention any boundary crossings. This allows scholars to apprehend mythologically non-normative and ideologically non-conforming languaging for what it is: a challenge to long-held understandings of the way the world is understood to be and how it should be. It also allows for a clearer picture of how AE and other standard language ideologies operate, reinforcing white centrality and all that this entails. In this chapter, languagers and languaging are understood to be permeated with mythologies concerning what is believed to be true or authentic,

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as well as the ideological formations that fuel and frame such myths, a dynamic that augurs the position of those who have relatively more access to power (see Chapter 5). At times, ideologies and mythologies concerning languagers and languaging intersect with those about gender, race and ethnicity, such that it is impossible to fully tease these apart. Because of their contextual experiences, languagers know what is valued and lauded, what is devalued and disparaged, and the material benefits that access to different languaging spaces affords. This knowledge is reinforced, sometimes subtly, but often very explicitly, through educational and related institutional practices, as seen in the example evoked at the beginning of this chapter. By providing this student with feedback about their writing in my role of instructor, I reinforced any number of ideological frames pertaining to AE, the status and intelligence of languagers who acquiesce to this mythology and ideology, and the need to do so in order to achieve academic success. It is very likely true that similar dynamics are repeated hour after hour, day after day, week after week in classrooms and on campuses around the country and across the world. And yet, some people are never fully admitted into the mythological fold of the educated, the sophisticated or the rhetorically effective. Some do not language in a way that corresponds to prevailing ideological frames and mythological norms – and this for any number of reasons. They are inevitably deemed transgressive because of their supposed failure, that which may be better re-ideologized as differential success, because they no doubt language in a way that allows them entry into any number of other sociocultural domains, albeit ones that fail to correspond to additional and interleaved ideologies of capitalism and the model neoliberal citizen. Others do indeed language in manners that correspond to prevailing ideologies but are never admitted into the corresponding domains because they are racialized in a way that precludes such entry. These languagers often cannot not transgress ideological boundaries (note the importance of transgressive double negation), no matter how hard they might try, as their very personhood represents a sort of meta-transgression of ideological whiteness. Still more refuse to acquiesce to the very notion that one or another way of languaging is somehow better or refuse to renounce their ways of languaging, as doing so would constitute a loss or erosion of identity. These languagers challenge ideological foundations themselves, as well as the possibility that any languaging pattern can be considered transgressive in the first place. Tying It Together

Where does the preceding discussion leave the question of AE and the very basic task of education, that is, the formation of community

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members who are capable of effectively participating in civic and collective life? What does this mean for critical scholars of language, those who aim to peel back multiple layers of belief, rendering the fundamental inequalities and injustices plain for all to see? These are, perhaps, questions best left open or answered only tentatively, as any rush to conclusion risks oversimplification and the reification of the uneven power structures propping up and propagating pertinent mythological bases and ideological frames. Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically better or worse, clearer or murkier, more or less elegant, and so forth and so on when it comes to different languaging patterns or their content – to claim this is not to stake a defensible linguistic position but to assert an aesthetic value. (Of course, aesthetics are also part of human experience, but this is a distinct – and distinctly acritical – matter: one can very well like or dislike something without asserting that it is intrinsically likable or should be disliked by others.) At the same time, AE is hardly just another variant. To use AE is to conform to the conventions of a powerful social structure (education) and its powerful institutions (schools, colleges, universities, academic journals and publishers, etc.); to fail to do so is to be excluded from these spaces (and thus be branded as poorly educated or entirely uneducated) and to be banished from these institutions (sometimes even by expulsion). Given the immense stakes involved in AE, it should be no surprise that the vast majority of instructors believe it is their duty – and some even their mission – to teach students this linguistic variety, to insist that they use it and to punish them (typically through poor marks) for not conforming to the morphosyntactic structures, lexical choices and rhetorical pathways associated with this variety. Not uncoincidentally, these are the same structures, choices and pathways that instructors themselves were taught and eventually acquired, at times at great cost, that those who taught them were previously taught, and so forth. AE is thus a social inheritance. And much like wealth or titles can be inherited, variably but nonetheless steadily, AE and related mythologies and ideologies are passed down from generation to generation, a process that in many ways renders it mostly undetectable and seemingly inevitable, much like the “best of all possible worlds” of Molière’s Candide. However, and echoing the title character of this play, it is possible to ask the question: if this really is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? It is also possible to ask the equally compelling question: who decided and continues to insist that this was best, why and at what cost? It is to these questions that subsequent chapters turn, further complexifying the world of languagers and languaging, as well as any concept that these are or can be transgressive.

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A Closer Look: Gender in Academic English Few topics pertaining to language in the present day have garnered more interest – and engendered as much controversy – as that of gender. Anglophones, unlike most other Indo-European languagers, do not normally mark the gender of inanimate nominals: table and chair are not realized within a category labelled masculine, as in German (der Tisch and der Stuhl), nor are they classed as feminine, as in Spanish (la mesa and la silla). At the same time, English languagers do not mark nominals as specifically neutral or non-gendered, as seen, for example, in the Dutch words for book and work (het boek and het werk, respectively). Moreover, Anglophones do not use gendered labels for nominals unless they are realized as pronouns, when all inanimate referents are projected with the third-person it (e.g. “the students read the book” versus “the students read it”). Even in the case of animate beings, notably animals whose biological sex characteristics are unknown or irrelevant in a given context, it can be used (e.g. “the lion ate the gazelle” versus “it ate it”). This is not to say that Anglophones do not enlanguage gender, particularly in the case of human referents (e.g. “Anne is here” versus “she is here”, “Roberto is there” versus “he is there”).2 While grammatically possible, the use of it when referring to any human is typically seen as offensive, leaving open the question of how to refer to a person whose gender is unknown, those who do not identify within the canonical woman-man binary, or simply when referring to persons in general, irrespective of gender identities. In the past, this possible conundrum was prescriptively resolved via two mechanisms, at least in AE and other standardized ways of languaging: the use of a default masculine third-person pronoun (viz. “any student who does not come to class cannot turn in his paper”) or the seemingly inclusive, but somewhat cumbersome, conjoined use of both masculine and feminine forms, most often in that order (viz. “any student who does not come to class cannot turn in his or her paper”). As gender and related topics have become more socioculturally salient, particularly on university campuses and in other areas of public life, both purported solutions have been subject to increasing scrutiny. In the first instance, a default to a masculine-marked pronoun can be seen as reinforcing male hegemony and patriarchal power structures (Cameron, 2006; Lakoff, 1975; Mills, 2008; Pauwels, 2003). In the second instance, the alternation between marked male-female pronouns or possessive determiners excludes the possibility that persons might identify otherwise, while also being widely seen as syntactically clunky (Conrod, 2022; Eckert, 2014; Zimman, 2019).

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Non-standard and non-academic practices have long offered a distinct solution to this apparent conundrum: the use of they, them and their for singular third-person referents (viz. “if any student do not come to class, they cannot turn in their paper”). Usages such as this are documented from at least the fourteenth century, particularly when referring to generic or nonspecific third persons (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002). Until relatively recently, however, such practices had been disfavoured in AE, as noted in instructional books throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even in some in the twenty-first (Choy & Clark, 2010). As questions of gender inclusivity and non-binarity have become more mainstream, the use of singular they has gained wider traction, affording languagers the means to reference themselves or others in a way that better matches their identity (Bjorkman, 2017; Conrod, 2022; Konnelly  & Cowper, 2020). Such patterns have even been sanctioned by influential style manuals, including the Chicago Manual of Style and that of the Associated Press, and are used throughout this book. As might be expected, singular they has been met with significant backlash, particularly from those who proclaim such usage to be an affront to good writing and precise thinking – in other words, as a transgression against prescribed ways of languaging, akin to the sample sentence opening this chapter. Part of this undoubtedly stems from transphobia and heteronormativity (Bandini & Maggi, 2014; Bettcher, 2014; Herz & Johansson, 2015; Robinson, 2016), while other reactions might best be described as stemming from a sort of genteel angst in the face of change. One example of this is noted in the musings of Atlantic columnist Jen Doll, who in 2013 asserted that speakers “must stop it before it goes too far,” portending linguistic cataclysm on the horizon (although, to be fair, such voices appear fairly muted, especially compared to reactions to parallel neologisms in other languages).3 In this short, monosyllabic pronoun, a series of clashes come to the surface: mythologies concerning the place of gender and gender marking, as well as the status of default masocentrism; ideologies of language purity and language change, reverting to questions of authority and power; and counter-positioned ideologies promoting inclusion and representation, not only of women but of trans and non-binary persons, as well as those who refuse the primacy of gender marking. Quite naturally, most languagers don’t seem to care much, if at all, about such hubris when it comes to their daily habits. Despite the admonitions of pundits and purists, singular they appears to be on the road to acceptance. But this is not the end of the gender story in English, nor is it the most prominent example of language ideology in contemporary life. From the use

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of additional non-binary pronouns (e.g. ze) and terms of address (e.g. Mx.) to any number of ways in which languagers have evolved their repertoires, the boundary between that which is acceptable and unacceptable may have been moved, but it has not been dismantled, nor do there appear to be fewer persons willing to challenge such restrictions or to act as their bulwark. A particularly interesting example of transgressive languaging was provided by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In early 2021, as part of her regular public messaging during the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, she issued a statement “recommending pregnant people receive the Covid-19 vaccine.”4 In what seemed like common-sense advice in the face of a deadly virus, Walensky purposefully omitted gender marking, referring to pregnant people instead of pregnant women, acknowledging that there are individuals who do not identify as women and become pregnant. Likely augured by the politicization of vaccination and increasingly partisan reactions to all matters of public policy in the Trump and post-Trump eras, the controversy that ensued pitted not just right against left but progressives against feminists5 and those promoting inclusion against those who viewed the removal of female nominals from associations with pregnancy as yet another battle line in a culture war aimed at erasing sex and gender differences.6 Eventually, Dr. Walensky was forced to revert to traditional enlanguagements, referring in subsequent communications to pregnant women, a testimony to the power of ideological formations. In this case, the mere mention of pregnant people was viewed as a transgressive act, albeit for various reasons. For some, Walensky had transgressed ideological gender formations by languaging pregnancy in a way that weakened connotative links to women and femininity. For others, enlanguaging people transgressed ideologies pertinent to reproduction and the traditional family, along with all of the trappings that this construct entails. Both stances suggest the operation of ideological frames. The removal of gender markers from syntactic constructions of pregnancy and childbirth was viewed as transgressive, and not simply because of its unusualness or statistical peripherality but because such languaging realizes a world that runs counter to beliefs of how things should or must be.

Discussion Questions

• Reflect upon other mythologies about language and about languagers that are part of your linguistic life. What other facets of languaging are held to “just be true”? Consider different ideologies or shared beliefs

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that people hold concerning how languaging “should be/shouldn’t be done.” What values are imposed upon different languagers and ways of languaging? • To what extent do standard language ideologies, especially AE, influence the ways you language, both in class and outside of class? What has been said to you (or to others you know) about conforming to AE and the possible consequences of not achieving this objective? • Consider your experience as a student. In what ways have you been required to adjust your languaging to conform to standard language ideologies, specific to English or otherwise? Try to identify these and describe them in terms of the ideological frames dictating how you should and should not language. • Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, consider how languagers are racialized in your community. Identify two concrete examples in which languagers are racialized and in which race is enlanguaged. What ideological formations do you suspect to be at play in these examples? Further Reading

Those who are interested in delving deeper into questions of language and identity are encouraged to consult Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent: the third edition (2022), authored by Rusty Barrett, Jennifer Cramer and Kevin McGowan, substantially expands the original work, including more up-todate examples and folding in a number of other communities. Although somewhat dated, Patricia Bizzell’s Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness attends to many pressing questions in educational settings, as well as their effect. For those interested in ideologies of race and their intersection with languaging ideologies, the volume Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John Rickford and Arnetha Ball, is an invaluable resource and a solid basis for further exploration. Jonathan Rosa’s Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race provides a compelling companion to Alim et al., focusing on the experience of Latinx languagers in US public schools. For questions of gender and ideology, readers are pointed to Tommaso Milani’s edited volume Queering language, gender and sexuality and to Michelle Lazar’s Feminist critical discourse: gender, power and ideology in discourse, both of which provide useful overviews of trends in the fields of critical linguistics and critical discourse studies. Notes 1 I admit to having done this more times than I  care to count, although I  feel more and more ambivalent about what Brightman and Gutmore (2002) have labelled the educational-industrial complex, not to mention its demands for rigid conformity to standard language ideologies.

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2 For more on the distinction between sex and gender, both in general and as discussed here, see Butler (1990, 1993, 2004); for a background to contemporary understandings of the intersection of gender, sex and language, see Knisely and Russell (2024) and Milani (2018). 3 One need only consider the case of French iel, a non-binary complement to il and elle (‘he’ and ‘she,’ respectively), whose inclusion in the authoritative Dictionnaire Robert led to near-riotous pedantry, including commentary from the first lady of France and former teacher Brigitte Macron, who asserted that “two pronouns were enough” (www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/actu-des-mots/ brigitte-macron-desapprouve-l-entree-du-pronom-iel-dans-le-petit-robert20211118, www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/europe/france-nonbinarypronoun.html). 4 www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/04/23/990195585/ cdc-director-recommends-pregnant-people-receive-covid-19-vaccines 5 www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/pregnant-people-genderidentity/620031/ 6 www.independent.co.uk/voices/pregnant-people-bma-pregnancy-motherhoodintersex-transmen-nhs-a7553601.html

5 LANGUAGING AUTHORITY AND POWER Karens in the Wild

Key Concepts

• • • •

Power, symbolic power and symbolic violence Authority Censorship: de jure, de facto, self-censorship Verbal hygiene

In early October 2020, Laura Karowsky Norris stood at the entry to BonesN-Scones, maskless but insistent that she be allowed to shop, where she was confronted by Aidan Bearpaw, the pet supply store manager. Like all of California and much of the world, the city of Palm Springs had mandated that facial coverings be worn in public spaces in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Refusing to comply, Ms. Norris dialled 911 (emergency services in the US), asserting that her rights were being violated, specifically claiming that she was the victim of discrimination and demanding intervention. Like many other incidents of this nature, the encounter was recorded and uploaded to YouTube,1 from where it proliferated across social and even traditional media. Quickly branded “Pet Store Karen,” Ms. Norris became the object of ridicule and scorn,2 although this did little to dissuade her efforts to sell essential oils, promote anti-vaccine theories and position herself as a victim of unjust treatment.3 This chapter unpacks moments such as this, in which languagers transgress behavioural norms in stereotyped ways. The chapter begins with a DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-5

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necessarily brief overview of the Karen figure, moving on to introduce and problematize the concepts that are applied in the description and interpretation of such cases: power and authority. Discussion is founded upon a series of related concepts – notably, symbolic power, capital and violence – also taking into account censorship and verbal hygiene. These concepts allow critical linguists to tease apart controversial tropes such as Pet Store Karen, recasting them within a broader sociocultural light. From this, it emerges that the confrontation between Ms. Norris and Mr. Bearpaw is much more than a petulant customer insisting on getting her way; it is the enlanguaged instantiation and re-instantiation of much larger forces playing out across and within multiple and varying linguacultural settings. Karens (as well as Darrens, Beckys and Warrens)

It is important to begin any description and interpretation of the preceding incident by re-examining Karens and related cultural tropes – figures famous (or infamous) enough to have been given their own emoji.4 In Anglophone linguacultures, especially, Karens have taken on a mythological quality in recent years, defined by BBC journalist Ashitha Nagesh as “the kind of person who demands to ‘speak to the manager’ in order to belittle service industry workers, is anti-vaccination, and carries out racist microaggressions, such as asking to touch black people’s hair.”5 In other words, a Karen is an individual – often, but not always, a woman – who transgresses explicitly stated and implicitly circulating rules of social interaction, asserting themself upon others, most often those of lower socioeconomic and sociocultural standing. Of course, the very act of labelling Karens is fraught with misogyny and sexism, even if it does serve to cast a light on racist practices and positionalities (Tiffany, 2020). It is also worth recognizing that related memetic labels, such as Becky (often thought of as a younger, college-aged Karen) and Darren or Warren (their male counterparts), have not received commensurate cultural traction, this for reasons that far surpass the present chapter. Love it or hate it, Karen has come to embody white womanhood and a violent weaponization of the privilege afforded this identity and positionality (Armstrong, 2021; Deckman, 2017; Kendall, 2021). Of course, this may be due in part to the status of a stereotypical Darren or Warren, who shares white, bourgeois privilege, but is more often represented as someone who assaults the manager, that is, if he is not in fact the manager who has been summoned by a Karen. While it is impossible to point to a single moment in which this label appeared, by the second decade of this century it had become firmly anchored in Anglophone public consciousness. The Karen image came into sharper

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focus in the later 2010s, particularly as systemic discrimination and violence against Black and other minority persons and communities in the US and elsewhere was increasingly recognized, much like the complicity of white persons and communities in this dynamic. On social media, “white women who take it upon themselves to police the actions of others – primarily Black and brown people” were, like Ms. Norris, attributed this label (Lang, 2020). L.A. Jones also observes that one of the primary characteristics of a Karen is her ability to deny her own privilege and racist bias, even as she asserts her victimhood and its status, railing against Black Lives Matter actions while insisting that she cannot be racist for various reasons, consequently and concurrently upholding pre-existing racio-economic orders (2020; see also Harris, 1993, for a historical perspective). Similarly, Negra and Leyda note that the positioning of Karens is integrated within a neoliberal, capitalistic service economy and related hierarchies of socioeconomic power, as well as related anxieties concerning race and societal change (2021). The Covid-19 pandemic and related public health measures provided fuel to Karens’ collective fire, when wearing – or not wearing – a mask emerged as a semiotic marker of white reactionary conservatism (R. Jones, 2020) and also as a shibboleth for supporters of former present Trump and his political movement (Russell, 2022). Bhasin et al. specifically note that those who were labelled Karen frequently held positions counter to public health mandates and were more often self-described anti-maskers (2020). It is thus little surprise that incidents such as the one involving Ms. Norris became a familiar part of linguistic life in the US and elsewhere in the socioculturally supercharged years of Covid-19, at times culminating in physical violence. The actions of Pet Shop Karen, along with so many others, transgress widely shared, but also widely contested, ideologies concerning collective conduct and response in times of emergency. What is required of the individual in the face of community danger? What is the nature of rights and that of responsibility – notably, who is afforded rights and upon whom are responsibilities imposed? What does it mean to have and assert such rights, as well as to negotiate or refuse to negotiate them, when doing so might limit or violate the rights of others? Obviously, these questions are not explicitly or even immediately linguistic; however, their manifestation and negotiation are inevitably enlanguaged (while also being embodied). It is most often through languaging that Karens assert their power and status; it is through languaging that their position and identity are made visible to others; and it is through languaging that they are contested, rejected and/or tolerated. Language is thus one of the primary, if not the primary, domain of Karenhood and its daily expression. (Of course, there are numerous incidents in which fists fly and bodies become the site of power and its effects; fortunately, these are relatively

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rare, even if they are tragic.) Summarily, the social reality and performance of “Karens in the Wild”6 is nothing more nor less than a specific profile of transgressive languaging and of transgressive languagers, as well as a collective reaction to this. Authority and Power

Before delving further into the incident at hand and others like it, it is helpful to have a general understanding of what is meant by two key terms: power and authority. Both are used in daily life in ways that are both similar to and distinct from their operationalized meanings in the following pages. Both are also subject to disciplinary debate, if not outright controversy. For these reasons alone, the following discussion avoids a rigid, dogmatic understanding of either power or authority, specifically avoiding one that is physically grounded, as might be more common in scientific domains. Instead, it strives to deploy these from a wider, purposefully eclectic, albeit critically situated perspective. When it comes to languaging, neither power nor authority need be explicitly embodied, akin to physical power; these are, however, social phenomena arising from the interaction of embodied actors. This should not be taken to mean that there is a complete disconnect of power or authority from its physical manifestation. The former conveys a sense of tacit, manifest faculty: the power to read this book, as one commonplace example, captures the ability of an individual to apprehend and process the words on the page. Such an understanding of power is thus grounded in the potential or capacity, held by individuals or groups of individuals, to engage in some sort of activity. Importantly, any manifestation of power is always preceded by other manifestations of power: for example, the cognitive ability required to read this book is preceded by the ability to access it in the first place (nodding to economic power and monetary capital); the affordance of monetary capital is preceded by the ability to access sites and institutions that grant this capital (implicating sociocultural power); and so forth and so on. The point of this thought exercise is not to render power concrete – indeed, it is not – but to underscore that power always involves multiple, often opaque layers of prerequisites and preconditions (Foucault, 1980). If power captures a potentiality or capacity to engage with objects, authority is somewhat more concretely manifest. It refers to the embedded and embodied governance of power. Authority is a conduit to power that is sanctioned and contested, one that is claimed and vested, and one that is always in need of sustenance and reinforcement. Returning to the example of reading a book, it may be noted that writers and publishers grasp at transitive powers and receive demonstrative acquiescence to these

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potentialities in order to produce, distribute and market a given work. The accomplishment of these acts is afforded and endorsed by various forces, ranging from the legal to the economic, from the cultural to the political. Authority is thus accredited, notably, with titles and documentation given juridical standing and imbued with power in particular configurations. This is all well and good for the rather ordinary example of a book – including its reading, writing, publishing and selling. But how do power and authority relate to languaging and to languagers, let alone to those moments of languaging and their respective languagers that are understood to have transgressed ideological boundaries in one or more ways? To arrive at a deeper understanding of what is happening in this example, let alone that of Pet Store Karen, requires a more nuanced understanding of power as a plural and multifaceted potentiality, as well as a rethinking of authority as the evercontested discipline of such potentiality. For post-modern scholars of language and culture, power is much more elusive to description than the preceding. Much of this is due to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s seminal work, in which power is intimately associated with knowledge and what he termed regimes of truth, culturally specific discourses that regulate what “counts as true” and what therefore becomes unquestioned, at least by the vast majority in a given setting (Foucault, 1976, p. 112; see also Lorenzini, 2016). Accordingly, power is not simply a capacity or an ability to accomplish but a capacity and ability to apprehend and understand that which has been accomplished and what might be accomplished in the future. To return to the previous example, there is certainly power implied by reading a book, and not only as the facility to read the words on a page, making correspondences between graphemic representations and antecedent linguistic competence. Power is also deeply interleaved with a reader’s ability to intellectually contend with what they read, implicating their knowledge of textual (e.g. style) and contextual factors (e.g. positionality), as well as shared truths and untruths that are implicated in all levels of interaction with the written object. The ability to language, as well as the particular manifestations or limitations of this ability – that is, the ability to language in one or another way – thus constitutes a quotidian, but particularly impactful manifestation of power. Building on the stance articulated in Chapter 1, languaging (doing language) is a very specific expression of powering (doing power); at the same time, one of the primary mechanisms of powering or empowering is also languaging. This understanding of power is intimately bound up with the construction and contestation of knowledge and truth, a consideration that demonstrates the inseparability of power from authority, which Milroy and Milroy consider to be the physical persons and institutional structures that lay claim to and subsequently exercise power through regularized action (1991).

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In the reading example, authority precedes and supersedes the ability of an individual to access a text, as power-dependent and power-deploying authority is directly implicated in textual enlanguagement. To offer a rather simplistic application of this, a writer cannot simply choose any spelling or grammatical conventions at will – they must acquiesce to various personal and institutional authorities regulating these matters. Implicitly, those who have more ability to power – those who have greater capacity to dictate what counts as true and to constrain or canalize knowledge – have greater authority in this domain. At the same time, and again following Foucault, power is always unstable and dynamic, as are the authorities who hold and exercise it. Just as power is never static or fixed but always in motion and up for grabs, authority is never stable or eternal but is forever challenged and confronted by other claims to authority. And, like power, authority is almost inevitably enlanguaged: it is rendered, apprehended, acquiesced to and contested through languaging by languagers who do, receive and respond to these actions. Another French philosopher of the late twentieth century, Pierre Bourdieu, makes an important distinction between the type of raw physical power more commonly understood and more transparently noted in daily life, on the one hand, and the ways in which power plays out in various semiotic domains, on the other. He refers to this as symbolic power: the capacity to construct shared sociocultural reality through the creation, use and manipulation of signs and symbols (1991, p. 170; see also 1982). Symbolic power encapsulates those potentialities which construct and influence meaning: it is the facility to “constitute reality through language and other symbolic systems, to make people see and believe in this reality, and to confirm or transform their vision of the world and thereby their action on the world” (Kramsch, 2021, p.  216). Symbolic power subsumes the faculty to create and transmit sharable signs in order to convey one individual’s mental reality, such that this influences others’ mental realities. The transitive potentiality of languaging is thus a display of symbolic power. Consequently, power emerges as much more than an exercise of material or physical force to coerce others (pace Gramsci, 1933; see Chapter  7 of the present book) – it is a potentiality to affect the ways in which people understand that which they or others experience, to see a given moment as good or bad, a particular performance as normative or transgressive, and so forth and so on. This book is a concrete manifestation of symbolic power, negotiated at numerous levels both before and after it reached any reader’s hands and mind. Linguistic authorities and their claims to symbolic power (successful or unsuccessful as they may be) are part and parcel of everyday existence, from the most mundane routines to the highest stake situations. At times, this is

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revealed in that which Bourdieu classified as symbolic violence, an output of symbolic power exerted upon others – as well as the self – to behave in a certain way, sometimes, but not always, against a person’s known will, desire or habit (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1995). For many, especially those whose daily habits differ from norms associated with prevailing authorities, acquiescence to symbolic power requires that they language differently and even abandon parts of their own cultural identities, a particularly vivid example of which is noted in the ongoing debate around the use of forms of English associated with African-American communities, sometimes referred to as Ebonics (see, e.g., Baugh, 2000; Delpit, 1997; Rickford, 1999). The punishment for not adhering to these norms may not be corporal or involve bodily injury, but it is nearly always enlanguaged: failure to achieve the all-important university diploma has economic, social, cultural and even physical consequences in both the short and long term (Russell, 2021; see Chapter 4). Kramsch offers a particularly telling example of how symbolic power and authority manifest through language in her re-reading of La Fontaine’s fable of the lamb and the wolf. Her analysis of the symbolic power of this wellknown tale shows how the male wolf convinces the female lamb that not only is she susceptible to be eaten but that it is her inherent nature that leads to this end (2021, pp. 40–43; see also Marin, 1988). Kramsch goes a step further in her discussion of how symbolic violence plays out in this instance, making connections to the allegorical basis of the original fable. Much like the lamb who comes to understand herself as intrinsically and inevitably food for the wolf’s voracious appetite, the eighteenth-century French monarchy exercised authority and wrought symbolic violence over its subjects. In this instance, the ability to dictate not only what someone should do but the very forms, structures and utterances that make such activity knowable and understandable is a particularly prescient form of sanctioned authority and the power dynamics that it realizes and upon which it relies. The wolf was able to reframe the lamb’s understanding of her nature and purpose on earth (not to mention his place in a power hierarchy) and to promote a truth about his relationship to her, much like European aristocracy was able to frame its subjects’ understanding of themselves, their kings, and the physical, economic, social and spiritual relationship of king and subject for centuries – and perhaps still to this day. Doing Language and Doing Power

While allegorical and certainly diverging with regard to embodied and enlanguaged authority, Kramsch’s approach can be applied to the Pet Store Karen incident, especially the portion of this in which Ms. Norris summoned the sanctioned authority of the police and simultaneously claimed

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that of her own. Consider the following transcript between the three participants in this incident: the emergency response operator, Ms. Norris and Mr. Bearpaw:7 Operator [O]: 9-1-1 what’s your emergency? Laura Karowsky Norris [LKN]: um yeah: as per the 1964 civil rights act I cannot be discriminated against: um I do have a right to be able to breathe O2 not CO2 and um I  am being discriminated against *right now* Aidan Bearpaw [AB]: # (sigh) LKN: at a store so O: what are are you calling to *report* something ma’am? LKN: uh yes that I’m not being allowed into the store because I’m being discriminated against AB: # cuz you would not like to wear a mask O: @@@ you’re being discriminated against and what store is that? LKN: um it’s called *Bones N Scones* and I’m being discriminated against because I’m being told I  need to wear a ma:sk even though I have a: religious exemption right and: a god given right to breathe O2 not CO2. In this portion of the exchange, Ms. Norris makes two specific claims to authority, through which she asserts symbolic and physical power: one that revendicates bodily autonomy, specifically the authority to decide whether to wear a mask, and another that extends this personal jurisdiction to the shared public space of the store. In both regards, her assertions of authority are predicated on pre-existing institutionalizations of symbolic power. Some of these are uncontroversial, most notably bodily autonomy, although the consequences produced by the exercise of this right are not attended to by Ms. Norris. What edges toward symbolic violence is her implicit claim over others’ bodily autonomy. In asserting her right to not wear a mask while in a public space in which air is circulated among many individuals, Ms. Norris asserts her right to overrule the pronouncements of health authorities and others’ embodied experiences. As asserted through her languaging, she should do what she wishes and others not only must accept this ability but must contend with the consequences of her desires expressed through

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action, regardless of any rights that they might believe they hold. Much like the wolf, albeit without his ultimate success, she attempts to convince the lamb (here, Mr. Bearpaw and, presumably, others in the store) that it is (and they are) intrinsically destined to submit to her will. Ms. Norris asserts her authority and exercises symbolic violence in another, related way. Having telephoned a 911 operator – a person who has the authority to dispatch police officers, who in turn are conveyed specific authority and embodied power – she attempts to frame subsequent understandings of this moment, anticipating the insertion of additional actors who might see it, and react to it, differently than Mr. Bearpaw. By calling emergency services, Ms. Norris summons authorities and their institutionally sanctioned powers through a very specific type of linguistic intervention, one that could very well result in more than mere symbolic violence to Mr. Bearpaw or a third party. This is a claim to authority and an enactment of power that are implicitly tied to white privilege at the intersection of gender, race and economic status. There is a long, tragic history of white persons, both women and men, asserting authority over others, especially those others whose role or status is presumably below theirs and who are understood as being required to meet their needs, accomplishing this through the interpolation of state institutions (Armstrong, 2021; Deckman, 2017; Kendall, 2021). Even in the absence of a response, the very act of calling the police serves as a reminder of established hierarchies: the health and comfort of some are proclaimed as more important than those of others. Like the interaction between the lamb and the wolf, this is not the first time a predator has reminded its prey of the supposed natural order of things – specifically, that wolves eat lambs with impunity and that the customer is to be served no matter the cost. This is nothing more than the enlanguaging of symbolic violence, an observation made even clearer later in the recorded exchange, involving several conversational turns with the 911 operator. O: it is (a) mandated *county wide* LKN: but it’s also not a law so I could actually uh you actually so you’re one of the first people that I’ve called 9-1-1 who actually doesn’t seem to understand that in the end I’m actually the one with the rights even though it’s *mandated* it’s not actually a law it’s based off of an *emergency* state of emergency that we are *no longer in* so: uh O: but it’s certainly a municipal code that *is in effect* LKN: that’s okay I mean you can you can say *all you want* I *do know* in the end I have the right and in the end O: #okay LKN: if I wanted to sue this gentleman I could and I will win I’ll work with Dell Bigtree I’ll work with Robert uh Kennedy Jr. I’ll work with uh Peggy Hull uh and uh those are names that you might not be familiar

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with but *I am* and I know that everyone who calls and orders to have their rights be supported uhm to be able to shop by being able to breathe in *O2* not *CO2* uhm they’re all winning their cases. Ms. Norris’ claims were largely – but not explicitly – rebuffed in this case, accomplished through the enlanguaged assertion of counter-authority and other codified powers on the part of the operator, who echoes the public mask mandate. At the same time, Ms. Norris continues to evoke her own authority to interpret legal mandates, denying that the operator or Mr. Bearpaw might have any power over her, while also asserting the authority to punish others for what she has framed as a transgression of her rights and reinforcing her contention by providing a list of names putatively intended to add credibility to her claim. As farcical as this exchange might appear from the safe distance of these pages, such moments of duelling potential transgressions – or, at the very least, acts that can be seen as such from one or another perspective (i.e. that of Ms. Norris or that of Mr. Bearpaw) – provide another prescient example of mental context and its effect on discourse (see Chapter 3). The fact that Ms. Norris makes specious threats is not particularly relevant if van Dijk’s view of context is adopted. She asserts her authority over others as the ability to sue them, presumably in civil court, an overt attempt to enact symbolic violence, not to mention that which might be both economic and physical. She thus stakes out the authority to shape the physical context – to impose her body and breath on others – and to shape the discursive and linguistic context. While Norris ultimately failed in her attempt to exercise physical violence (she was impeded from entering the store and eventually left), the very conjuring up of other authorities was, and still is in many other circumstances, a prescient realization of symbolic violence in and of itself, one that was exerted upon countless front-line employees during the pandemic and continues to be seen at present. Censorship and Self-Censorship

Moments such as that exemplified by Pet Store Karen are hardly isolated cases of authority and power being deployed and contested through languaging. At the same time, no such event occurs in a vacuum: all are part of a chronology of events that precede and follow, moments that also involve claims to authority and the exercise of symbolic power – and all too often physical violence. In order to better understand the wider cultural and temporal context surrounding Pet Store Karen or any other linguistic moment, as well as to better apprehend how they come to be seen (by some at least) as transgressive, it is important to grapple with the concept of censorship, albeit in a way that is distinct from how this term is usually employed.

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For many readers, censorship conjures up images of imposing state authorities dictating what can or cannot be printed on paper, published online or spoken aloud. The term evokes historical periods when political authorities exercised control over many facets of linguistic life, sending those who violated norms to gulags or placing them on blacklists, for example, Stalinism in the former Soviet Union or McCarthyism in the United States. These forms of de jure censorship are, of course, impossible to forget or to consider as anything other than overt manifestations of symbolic violence. But there are many other instances in which states or official institutions impose restrictions on languaging, one of which can be seen anytime a television set or radio is tuned to broadcast channels. In nearly all polities, a governmental or paragovernmental institution is charged with overseeing what can and cannot be languaged, what can and cannot be presented, and what topics may or may not be raised, at the very least in contexts that are deemed sensitive, most notably over public airways or traditional media. Such overt restrictions most often target forms (e.g. fuck), utterance types (e.g. libel) and referents (e.g. ‘paedophilia’), although the ways in which different institutions operate and the extent to which they attempt to or succeed in achieving symbolic violence vary widely. In the US, languaging authority is vested in the Federal Communications Commission, an intergovernmental institution founded in 1934 and authorized to impose fines of up to $325,000 for violations of decency standards, as defined in their Program Content Regulations.8 Other polities maintain similar institutions, including the Independent Press Standards Organisation in the United Kingdom, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, and the Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore. Of course, de jure censorship is not only applied to media by these and similar institutions: sanctioned prohibitions on languaging exist in many forms and apply to any number of modalities. These include blanket bans on speech that incites physical violence or lawlessness, such as that codified into law in the US by the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which provided that various American polities may limit the right to free expression if this is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”9 In other jurisdictions, censorship extends to the regulation of blasphemous speech (see Chapter 2), for example, those laws long in force in the United Kingdom that, while repealed in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2021, remain in effect in Northern Ireland at the time of writing. Other authorities target sensitive topics, such as the censoring of Holocaust denial through speech or print that is in effect in many European countries, including Germany, Austria and France. These and other legal conduits of authority formally

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express and institutionalize the authority of different social and linguistic actors – most notably governments or their administrative arms – to exercise power over citizens, prohibiting the use of various forms or structures, the performance of different utterances, and the evocation of referents under the force of law or policy. If de jure censorship is relatively easily perceived and understood, this is because it is almost always laid down for posterity through some formal mechanism, such as laws or policy regulations. Far less clear are instances of de facto censorship, those manifestations of authority and power that are rarely, if ever, clearly spelled out in text or law. This type of symbolic power and violence permeates linguistic life, ranging from family settings to the workplace, from life on the street to online chat rooms. And because it operates in an informal, albeit far from accidental, manner, de facto censorship can be maddeningly difficult to apprehend, let alone to tease apart its effects. In fact, most daily control of languaging escapes notice – that is, until transgressions occur or someone objects to the limitations placed upon them. Languagers are expected to avoid certain topics in certain situations, for example, a professor is not supposed to refer to their sexual conquests during a lecture about medieval history or cell biology. Languagers are expected to express certain opinions carefully to and about colleagues whom they might find abrasive or inadequate, for example, “choosing their words” such that they are judged to be professional in work settings. And languagers do not or are expected to not tell offensive jokes in most settings, the with the possible exception of those involving very close friends or confidants and in relatively restricted social spaces such as locker rooms, in which these sorts of otherwise transgressive performances are more accepted, if not implicitly required (see Chapter 2). When a languager breaks these unwritten rules – if a professor were to brag about their sexual prowess to students, if a colleague were to say to another, “You’re a fucking asshole,” or if a person were to tell a racist joke in the office breakroom – there will, more often than not, be a steep price to pay. At times, these involve overtly codified penalties, such as a professor being censured, demoted or fired; such outcomes are specified in personnel manuals or labour contracts, making them consequentially more similar to de jure cases of censorship. At other times, consequences are much more elusive to qualification, while still being very real. A languager who has violated unwritten rules might engender feelings of animosity in the workplace and be ostracized by colleagues, suffer a breaking apart of friendships and feelings of emotional pain, or find themself excluded from communal events and face social isolation. Regardless of any specific outcome and its stipulation, the penalties for violating unspoken languaging rules are always very real in the lives of languagers and their communities.

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Facework and Verbal Hygiene

The preceding and any number of other examples point to how languagers are required to police their own and others’ communicative actions at several contending levels. Particularly when it concerns self-censorship, this is invested by a host of visible and invisible authorities, as well as by codified and uncodified conduits of power. Much of self-censorship becomes ingrained to the point of appearing automatic and inevitable, such that languagers don’t often or ever consciously realize that they are engaged in any such behaviour. In fact, languagers are constantly self-regulating, avoiding certain activities and configurations of activity while preferring others; they exercise symbolic power and enact a form of symbolic violence over themselves. Selfcensorship extends into the realms of personal preferences and habits, even if all such action is idiosyncratic and highly variable (most readers will be able to cite the example of someone who is not terribly good at self-censoring or who violates norms that seem self-evident to nearly all others). However inconstant and variable, self-censorship is always an indirect manifestation of diffuse authority and symbolic power being internalized and reflected through languaging. Sociolinguist and discourse analyst Susan Gal refers the power that is exerted upon the self as a configuration of ideological constraints (2019). This concept encapsulates the myriad ways that languagers align themselves with existing categories of persons through repeated languaging activities, for example, the ways in which they act in order to be regarded as the ‘socially aware co-worker,’ ‘supportive friend,’ or ‘caring professor,’ all of which are intimately associated with culturally emergent qualities and characteristics. Acquiescence to ideological constraints requires that languagers engage in multiple acts of facework, a term Goffman (1967) used to describe how individuals construct and mediate their social personas: the projection of the self that is meant to be interpreted by others. Facework involves a wide array of linguaculturally specific, pragmatic knowledge, for example, understanding what actions might be judged as polite or impolite, appropriate or inappropriate, and so forth. Importantly, all facework and subsequent judgement occur within contextual parameters: there is no such thing as neutral languaging, just as there is no such thing as a context-free enlanguagement. One languaging act, such as bragging about sexual conquests and seductive prowess, might result in positive face if it takes place within a group of intimate friends and in a context that augurs this, for example, in a locker room with teammates. However, it will very likely produce negative results in other contexts and when distinct languagers are implicated, for example, at a work meeting of office colleagues. The same is true of less controversially understood topics; a reader need only consider what it would be like to bring up research into nuclear fission or an alternative textual analysis of Marcel Proust’s writings among friends at a bar

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on any given Saturday night. While such languaging might very well produce positive outcomes in a lecture hall or academic conference, it is very unlikely to reflect a desirous social persona in other settings – in some cases, it might even lead to social exclusion. As this one, admittedly light-hearted, example illustrates, when languagers fail to do adequate facework and do not align with ideological constraints, there is always price to pay: they risk being seen as inept or rude, being branded a sexist or racist, or not being invited to participate in the next fun outing with their friends. Like other forms of censorship, facework amounts to a form of language policing, in this case the exercise of power over the self. Sociolinguist Deborah Cameron coined the term verbal hygiene, capturing the myriad ways in which languaging is subject to both de jure and de facto control. According to her formulation, verbal hygiene is akin to linguistic prescriptivism, which operates complementarily to proscriptions or censoring acts but is also more expansive. Verbal hygiene takes place through speech, writing or any other formal mechanism, while also transpiring within the mental side of languaging. Cameron notes that verbal hygiene “comes into being whenever people reflect on language in a critical (in the sense of ‘evaluative’) way” and has the result of “putting ideology into linguistic practice” (1995, p. 9). Allan and Burridge bring verbal hygiene into alignment with linguistic purism, particularly as this concerns standard forms of language, noting that such actions promote these as “a kind of linguistic ‘best practice’ ” (2006, p. 114). Cameron further observes that verbal hygiene is inextricably bound up in both authority and identity, albeit in ways that defy facile description. When it comes to such internalized ways of doing and understanding what is done, authority is not always emergent from an external institution, although this can certainly be the case; it often comes from within, both collectively and individually (1995, pp. 12–15). Questions of linguistic authority imbue all aspects of verbal hygiene, as well as reactions to it, as only a limited subset of persons and groups of persons get to “call the shots” and are allowed to define relevant truths, standards or related prescriptions and proscriptions (pp. 118–122). In effect, while verbal hygiene is something that all languagers must contend with, not all are equal participants in this dynamic. Certain languagers – ones with greater cultural, political and/or economic capital in a given languaging community – are frequently among those who explicitly or implicitly determine what sorts of practices should and should not be valued, to what extent and in what manner these will be evaluated, and the consequences of any eventual transgression. On university campuses, verbal hygienic requirements are codified in style manuals and prescribed in course syllabi, all of which explicitly instruct students how they are to act and how they must language. This is also deeply internalized, such that all languagers, from the most senior expert in the field to the first-year

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student, orient toward so-called “good writing.” This orienting toward and the myriad actions that it requires – from the mastering of vocabulary, to the reproduction of syntactic structures, to the use of rhetorical patterns, to the very internalization of these and all other languaging yardsticks – is a very prescient manifestation of verbal hygiene (see discussion in Chapter 4). The Pet Shop Karen incident offers a compelling, but perhaps easily overlooked, example of verbal hygiene and self-censorship – in this instance, not from Ms. Norris but from Mr. Bearpaw, the store manager. This occurred at a particularly prescient moment in the final portion of the video recording, as in the following written transcript: AB: LKN:

AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN: AB: LKN:

Ma’am you hear them you hear me I’m just doing my job can you step outside yeah uh huh [stands in door, blocking] and could you make sure this gentleman gives me his name as well ma’am just through the phone can we at least help me to get his name:: if I can have your name too ‘cuz my name’s: Aden: N: Bearpaw Bearpaw I’m an employee here at Bones-N-Scones okay good perfect: so at least I have *your name* because if I wanted to I could take it further and I won’t okay fine cuz I’m not here to do that okay have a *lovely* day but in the end *I* was discriminated against okay for not being able to stop shop at your store that’s your narrative okay wonderful thank you in fact I’ll just go live too for a second I mean if you want to okay there you go I’m just doing my job #and I’m just doing my job I have rules I will get in trouble if I let you in without a: mask we have a lot of *elderly* customers you know it’s I get it cuz there are *no* elderly customers #it’s a county there are no elderly customers here it *really* doesn’t matter yeah uh huh so:

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officer could you ask her to step away from the door she’s making me feel kind of unsafe LKN [talking over]: Aidan Bearpaw could you just tell me tell me your last name again Bearpaw? AB: yeah uh huh LKN: okay Aidan Bearpaw thank you so much AB: yeah take care *god bless you* AB [to phone?]:

In this exchange, several elements of Mr. Bearpaw’s languaging are of interest: his use of the honorific ma’am, the evocation of other persons, notably the elderly, presumably to provoke sympathy, and the formulaic salutation god bless you. Through such languaging, Mr. Bearpaw exercises a disciplinary power over himself, one that most contextual participants would understand as polite and even-tempered, if perhaps exasperated, corresponding to expectations of a person occupying his role and position. Verbal hygienic authority is bound up in identity, both that held by the self and that imposed by others. The ways in which languagers exercise verbal hygiene over themselves and respond to that of others frame how they understand themselves and such others. Who is intelligent or clever? Who is rude or petulant? Who is friendly or antagonistic? Like languagings, identities are never neutral, but intersect in complex ways with other components of social personas, including gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, that is, that which Puar calls assemblages (2007). Languagers know that a ‘smart man,’ for example, is expected to engage in verbal hygiene differently than a ‘smart woman.’ They also know that the price to pay for any failure in this regard includes being seen as something other than ‘smart,’ ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ – they might well be understood as something less flattering or even highly denigratory, for example, an ‘indecisive man’ or a ‘pushy woman’ (Cameron, 2006; Lakoff, 1975; Tannen, 1990). In all instances, verbal hygiene and facework act like regulatory frames, mediating not only interactions between languagers but the ways in which languagers understand themselves (Cameron, 1995, pp. 15–17). This interplay of authority and identity is, in turn, related to concepts of agency or the amount of control different languagers have over a given activity, the domain in which this may or may not take place, and how this will be interpreted, notably, their ability to engender desired outcomes. Tying It Together

It may seem odd to use Pet Shop Karen – and the very ideological construct of Karens, itself – as the basis of a chapter dedicated to the thorny concepts of authority and power, not to mention symbolic power and violence,

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accomplished through languaging activity. What do these languagers have to do with lofty academic theories, and why should they be centred in the application of these? The answer to these queries is rather simpler than might first appear: all such moments are in fact always and already about power and authority, as well as the wielding of symbolic forces. While they might be more mundane than scandals involving prominent political figures or widely recognized celebrities – many of whom have and continue to engage in similar languaging – the banality of these moments, not to mention the apparent omnipresence of such “languagers behaving badly,” makes them all-the-more interesting and important objects of examination. Significantly, the transgression example of Pet Store Karen occurred entirely within the semiotic realm. Ms. Norris is not reported to have physically injured anyone, at least not in this example – she “used her words” and not her fists, as cringy as these actions might be judged. As such, hers is a fundamentally linguistic transgression. Whether labelled a Karen or in some other, perhaps less back-handedly misogynistic way, languagers like Ms. Norris are grasping at power and asserting their authority over others – here Mr. Bearpaw, fellow employees and shoppers in the store – while also making broader claims to authority over a wider community. Like that of other socalled Karens and Darrens, Ms. Norris’ languaging is a manifestation of not simply what she wanted or desired but what she required and demanded, that is, compliance with her will above that of others. And in so doing, she exercised – or attempted to exercise – symbolic violence, subjugating Mr. Bearpaw and all others. In the next chapter, attention is turned to the broader ideational backdrop in and through which languaging takes place and through which languagers accomplish – or seek to accomplish – specific ends. Although attention turns to a distinct example from linguistic life, the question of Karens and their actions can also be understood in this light, representing a further unravelling of transgressive languaging moments by considering the finalities that are achieved and those that remain unachieved through their interpolation.

A Closer Look: Karens and Moral Panic The preceding incident provides one example of a languager grasping at power and exerting authority over others and, in so doing, transgressing shared norms by failing to exercise verbal hygiene in a way corresponding to widely shared ideologies and mythologies. Cameron notes that such practices have the effect of naturalizing and even rendering many languaging events inevitable or unquestionable, whereas others are denaturalized and

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cast as dangerous or defective (1995, pp. 18–23). This is notably observed in instances of moral panic, a moment of collective anxiety or hysteria that, according to Cameron, “occurs when some social phenomenon or problem is suddenly foregrounded in public discourse and discussed in an obsessive, moralistic and alarmist manner, as if it betokened some imminent catastrophe” (p. 82). When it comes to moral panic associated with languaging, different enlanguaged components (what she refers to as words and grammars) stand in for other issues or are co-opted to give materiality to the object of the moral panic (pp. 94–97). While the case of Pet Store Karen is not a quintessential example of moral panic, it certainly encapsulates a moment of moral indignation. Ms. Norris echoes long-standing authorizations of behaviour by a certain category of persons when in confrontation with another category of persons – specifically, a white adult female customer confronting a younger service employee, who is also a person of colour, and claiming authority not only over her own body but over a situation in which other bodies come into contiguity, all in the context of a deadly global pandemic (it bears mentioning that the event occurred in the fall of 2020, before vaccines and other treatments were available). This claim to authority and its stated bases, anchored in neoliberal conceptions of society and tainted by racialized privilege, act as a conduit of symbolic power and authority (and not only). Such moments and their actorauthors convey not shared terror in the face of a new or unknown element but one of individual “unnerving” in the face of a new or unknown challenge to long-held authority and long-canalized ways of doing power. These same events and their participants also provoke moments of collective anxiety and dread on the part of a wider public, especially those who do not have access to the gender and racial identity characteristics associated with Karens. In such situations, symbolic power and symbolic violence play out in a maddeningly intricate, shadowy languaging dance (assuming the interaction does not turn physically violent). Quite obviously, Karen phenomena involve a lack of self-censorship and corresponding verbal hygienic exercise. The question of how fellow languagers should respond, most notably those who find themselves in a Karen’s (or a Darren’s) line of fire, is rarely spelled out in practice or law, requiring participants to walk a tightrope of understanding social convention, corporate policy and idiosyncratic emotion. Although these do not have the force of a governmental policy or administrative institution, they can result in very real – and at times very severe – penalties for those who do not follow

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the explicitly codified or implicitly felt rules. This certainly occurred in the case of Ms. Norris. While she was not subject to any sanction by the public authorities for having called 911 and requested that an officer be dispatched, she did become subject to qualitatively elusive – and far from incontrovertibly negative – outcomes, including her name and image being spread across social and traditional media.10 In the age of constant and instant connectivity, it would be difficult to argue that this does not constitute a real consequence. Of course, not all such incidents end innocuously; indeed, several wellpublicized examples have resulted in efforts to codify rules of languaging and to impose legal penalties on languagers whose actions have resulted in harm, of which the infamous case of Central Park Karen provides a compelling example. This occurred on 25 May, 2020, in New York City’s Central Park, when avid birdwatcher Christian Cooper, a Black man, encountered Amy Cooper, a white woman (of no relation to Mr. Cooper). According to reports published in the New York Times and broadcast on CNN,11 Mr. Cooper requested that Ms. Cooper exercise greater control of her unleashed dog, beckoning the animal with a treat that he kept to hand following similar incidents in the past and recording the interaction on his mobile phone. Ms. Cooper is heard responding with panicked breath, “I’m calling the cops . . . I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” which she proceeded to do in the now-famous footage.12 Fortunately for Mr. Cooper, the police who arrived on the scene successfully diffused the situation and did not respond in a manner that might otherwise be feared or even expected, given the now well-documented police bias toward Black men who have been accused of aggression by white women (Armstrong, 2021; McMahon & Kahn, 2018; Ware, 2015). As in the case of Ms. Norris, Ms. Cooper’s actions can be understood as a grasping at power, through which she violated several largely unstated rules of linguistic life, most notably that persons are not supposed to lie, especially to the police. Mr. Cooper had not, in fact, made any threat on Ms. Cooper’s life, a detail that she later acknowledged to be true. Her actions also transgressed widely shared ideologies pertinent to race, that is, that such topics should not be evoked, despite the persistence of racial stereotypes, ideologies and actions (see, e.g., DiAngelo, 2018; Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Payne & Hannay, 2021). Unlike the event involving Ms. Norris and hundreds, very likely thousands, of similar incidents occurring each year, this moment produced a very public and overtly political response. Long-standing and widely shared de

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facto norms governing languaging behaviour and widely (albeit not universally) shared ideologies specific to languagers and their enlanguagements became codified de jure – and this at a rather surprising speed. In June of that year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law State Senate Bill 8492, an act imposing civil penalties for any person who calls emergency services and makes accusations regarding someone of a protected class absent “a reason to believe a crime or offense, or imminent threat to person or property, is occurring.”13 Unlike the public, political and institutional reactions in other cases, that set in motion by Central Park Karen changed established law, with specific punishment and means of adjudication.

Discussion Questions

• Consider the authorities who determine how you can and cannot use language in your day-to-day life. Who are these authorities? What prescriptions and proscriptions do you encounter on a regular basis, and how can you describe these in light of the reading? • Thinking about power as a capacity to affect others, describe the power held by the authorities in your linguistic life – both individuals and groups. To what sorts of symbolic violence are you subjected? Do you hold symbolic power over others? If so, how and in what manner? • How is language policed in your community (give some relevant examples)? Is this de jure or de facto? What are the consequences for those who do not follow these rules? • Consider self-censorship, acts of self-control in which we all engage, frequently without thinking much about them as they have become quasiautomatic. Identify and describe one example of self-censorship that transpired in the past 24 hours. • Identify three examples of verbal hygiene. Describe the mechanisms of verbal hygiene – the forms, referents, structures and/or performative packages that are subject to these actions. How do these involve concepts of face? How have these become internalized or part of mental reality, implicating verbal hygiene? • Consider another moment in which you witnessed a languager or several languagers “behaving badly.” Using concepts and terminology from this chapter, describe and interpret the symbolic underpinnings of these events. What authority was being claimed? What power was being grasped? Who was affected by the exercise of symbolic power and violence in this instance? How were they affected?

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Further Reading

Those wishing to delve deeper into questions of linguistic authority, specifically authorities who pre- and proscribe different forms of language, are pointed to Milroy and Milroy’s classic work Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. As noted in prior chapters, Lippi-Green’s English With an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States also provides important grounding to the ways in which language authority plays out in daily life. For questions of linguistic power, notably symbolic power and violence, an excellent starting point is Claire Kramsch’s Language as Symbolic Power. In this, she offers an accessible overview of much of the most important scholarship in this field, notably looking to the work of Bourdieu and his inheritors. Bourdieu’s original work, translated as Language and Symbolic Power, can also be read in conversation with Buraway’s compelling Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu. For questions of power and discourse, McHoul and Grace’s A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject is a useful and approachable first step into rethinking many of these concepts from a distinctly post-modern perspective. Finally, those interested in the history of Karens, notably at the intersection of whiteness, race and gender, are pointed to Jackson and Rao’s White Women, alongside Robin DiAngelo’s accessible work White Fragility and Janet Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism. Notes 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ-3MMIO2xw 2 https://centralavetv.com/karen-viral-videos/ 3 www.facebook.com/laura.karowsky, www.linkedin.com/in/laurakarowsky, www. youtube.com/user/laurakarowsky/about 4 https://aknextphase.com/the-rise-of-the-karens/ 5 www.bbc.com/news/world-53588201 6 See the YouTube channel by this name, one of the first to collect and disseminate incidents of Karens, as well as Darrens and similarly labelled social actors: www.youtube.com/channel/UC1e8uA3YdIU_rB49ksUO6kg 7 Here and in the following transcripts, asterisks are used to convey relative prosodic emphasis, # shows overlap between different participants, and the ampersand (@) conveys unclear elements. 8 www.fcc.gov/media/program-content-regulations 9 https://tile.loc.gov/storage-ser vices/ser vice/ll/usrep/usrep395/usrep395444/usrep395444.pdf 10 In fact, a simple Google search for “Pet Store Karen” undertaken in June 2021 yielded a surprising number of results – approximately 32,800,000 in under 1 second. 11 www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/nyregion/central-park-amy-cooper-christianracism.htmland(www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-videoafrican-american-trnd/index.html, respectively. 12 https://time.com/5842442/amy-cooper-dog-central-park/ 13 www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/s8492

6 LANGUAGING CONSEQUENCE Linguistic Performativity and Hate Speech

Key Concepts

• • • • •

Insults Hate speech Pragmatics Speech act theory Illocution, perlocution

Early in 2021, a Rutgers University law class discussed a court transcript that included a portion in which a trial witness used the n-word, which was spoken verbatim by a white student. In the days that followed, a Zoom recording of this moment circulated, prompting angry reactions from students and faculty alike.1 A few months later and a few hundred miles away, University of Illinois-Chicago Law Professor Jason Kilburn faced dismissal after invoking a hypothetical case on an exam in which a plaintiff was referred to as “a ‘n____’ and a ‘b____’ (profane [sic] expressions for African Americans and women),” using the truncations given here.2 Although he had warned his students about the topic, and despite agreeing to mediation, prominent civil rights leaders demanded Professor Kilburn’s ouster: upon facing intense backlash, this decision was reversed. (Ironically, it was also reported that the very same slurs were languaged without redaction in the training Professor Kilburn was required to follow, leading to allegations of hypocrisy and calls for verbal hygiene on the part of university administrators.)3 Countless DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-6

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other examples of the n-word and the repercussions of its enlanguagement can be cited within and, especially, beyond the confines of academia. Consider, for example, the case of Florida State Senator Frank Artiles, who in 2016 jokingly remarked to colleagues that “six [n-word]s had elected him” and also referred to the state senate president using a derogatory term for female genitalia: Artiles resigned facing angry reaction.4 Or that of celebrity chef Paula Deen, who in 2013 was sued by a former employee accusing her of using this racial epithet with restaurant staff on numerous occasions: despite public apologies, Deen’s image continues to be tainted by scandal.5 Even entire crowds have been swept up in the languaging of this form and reaction to it. For instance, dozens of basketball fans chanted this during a game between rivals Vanderbilt and Mississippi State University in 2021. In the days that followed, respective administrators issued remorseful statements, but neither the teams nor their fans faced consequences more severe than a cycle of less-than-favourable new stories.6 This chapter explores the thorny question of derogatory languaging, of which the n-word is but one, albeit a particularly powerful, example. Building on concepts introduced in Chapter 2, linguistic performativity is explored in more depth, looking to the ways in which languagers accomplish things in the world, the outcome of these actions, and the inchoative links between language-as-doing and language-as-effect. It begins by reviewing the nature of hate speech, linguistic moments that have a profound effect on specific participants in a languaging community, before offering a broad overview of pragmatics and speech act theory. Discussion then turns to questions of how languaging achieves – and sometimes fails to achieve – varying objectives, notably, how linguistic performances and their content might be considered harmful or injurious. The arc of this chapter calls into question the types of transgressive languaging that are labelled as hate speech, reframing these as complex actions involving a form of imbalanced complicity between different linguistic actors, themselves having vastly different access to power and authority. Insults and Hate Speech

It is very likely that anyone reading these pages has both insulted and been insulted, that is, has been the author and the object of languaging that focuses upon some real or perceived aspect of personhood and asserts that this is somehow flawed or undesirable (Foster, 2020). Such languaging may target a person’s intelligence or competence (and this in any domain), their physical appearance (ranging from height to body size to perceived tidiness), their gender and conformity or lack thereof to gender stereotypes, their sexuality, group identity characteristics (such as race, religion

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and ethnicity), and just about anything else imaginable (Castroviejo et al., 2021; Nunberg, 2020). Insults appear to be as vast and variable as any other means of enlanguaging cultural and personal values, including descriptors of positive qualities, and are – again, like all languaging – intimately tied to individual knowledge and shared experience (see Mateo & Yus, 2013). Among the many forms that are understood as insulting and offensive among Anglophones, the n-word may well be the most powerful and controversial. Denoting Black Americans, this form activates connotations of racism and racial prejudice and is strongly associated with white supremacy, alongside historical and present-day violence. Two syllables, four phonemes and six letters that, when languaged by non-Black persons, are very likely to explode like a linguistic hydrogen bomb. Few things seem to unite Anglophones in North America and elsewhere more than the understanding that injurious forms whose semantic qualities disparage a person or group (also known as epithets) are not to be enlanguaged, at least in shared public space. Of course, that hardly means that such forms or the denotations, connotations and associations linked to them have been eradicated from linguistic life. Quite the contrary: it seems that rarely a week goes by without a prominent person being caught having violated this or a related taboo. These involve not just the n-word, as in the preceding examples, but any number of others, including – but hardly limited to – the f-word (referring to gay men, in general, and those who do not present in a normatively masculine way, more specifically), the c-word (referring either to female genitalia or to women, most often those who do not act in normatively feminine ways), and any number of others denoting a racial, sexual, religious or ethnic minority. These and others would seem to be inscribed on an unwritten list of “words that should never be spoken,” although they are indeed spoken and signed, written and texted, day in and out (see Cervone et al., 2021). There is a widely repeated adage that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me”; this manifests the mythology that language action cannot inflict harm on others, at least, not in the same way that the use of material objects may accomplish such finalities. At first glance, this would seem to be a straightforward truth: a linguistic sign cannot directly inflict injury on another, if only because a sign is nothing without the languagers who enlanguage it and those who receive and process it – all signs require linguistic actors to bring them into semiotic being (see Chapter 1). And yet, words are understood to inflict harm on audiences and are believed to be injurious, perhaps because languager-doers deploy them in order to cause pain or injury and because languager-receivers apprehend them as such (Knisely & Russell, 2024). Transgressive languaging acts such as these, ones that are undertaken with the full knowledge that they are

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injurious to others, particularly those who are now or have been historically oppressed, are frequently labelled “hate speech.” While there is no precise definition of what constitutes hate speech, the term is widely used to refer to linguistic activity that addresses or evokes a person or group of persons in a way that is understood to convey sentiments that this person or group is somehow defective, unwanted or less than, particularly when there is agreement that the person or group has been historically or is presently the object of discrimination. In other words, hate speech is understood to manifest animus and direct this toward a contextually salient target. The American Library Association offers a simultaneously concise but vague definition of hate speech as “any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin colour, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin,” distinguishing it from unpopular, unpatriotic or impolite speech and noting that it is protected under the US Constitution.7 Nevertheless, this apparently tidy divide does not correspond to contemporary debates among languagers and within languaging communities, within which hate speech or other forms of animus are much more elusive to shared denotation. For some, expressions of preference or dis-preference are labelled hate; for others, the term is so fluid as to be useless. Even those acts that are legally protected in the US or elsewhere are widely viewed as hate speech, inciting no small amount of controversy and response (see Chapter 7 for more on this topic). The lack of collective consensus surrounding what does and does not constitute hate speech should not be understood to reflect a lack of interest, especially among scholars whose research interrogates the ways in which language functions in specific sociocultural and political settings. Indeed, the past three decades have seen tremendous scholarly interest in the definition and dissection of hate speech or, more broadly, linguistically born animus, from a variety of venues. For example, Matsuda et al. (1993) use hate speech as a label referring to an action that is injurious to the psychological or emotional state of a target, as well as to their social, economic and political status (see also Langton, 1993; MacKinnon, 1993; Whillock  & Slayden, 1995). Obviously, this is a very broad definition – one that might correspond well to cultural mythologies, but one that also clashes with other widely held beliefs, not the least of which is the right to free expression. It also ignores – or perhaps simply glances over – the causal links between the languager-doer and the languager-receiver, reverting to the “language as anthropomorphized and existential force” stance that is specifically taken up in Chapter 1. Sceptical that language can be understood as the agent of injury, Judith Butler reconsiders the ways in which languaging – in her words, speech – brings about distinct states of mind and body, especially in interactions

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involving asymmetrical power and authority. Key to her understanding is how language can engender effects in interpolation, the act of calling forth and calling out another. She redefines Althusser’s understanding of interpolation, recasting those acts commonly labelled as hate speech as mechanisms that result in subjection (assujetissement), the process by one person or group becomes subordinated to another person or group (1997). From this point of view, languaging itself does not accomplish harm, but it does enact subjections that result in harm, often through the iterative or citational recitation of subjections that precede the form or utterance itself. Accordingly, offensive epithets such as the n-word “mark out a discursive place of violation” because both ends of the languaging dyad – the doer and receiver – understand that this form conjures up and opens such a space predicated by their prior experiences with and knowledge of the form and its semantic content (1997, p. 27). Building upon this view, Russell (2019) considers specific acts that are labelled homophobic to be enlanguaged manifestations of complex discursive ecologies, systems in which different participants are positioned in such a way that they are lessened or subjected, although this is not always borne out through specific or even widely recognized forms. Importantly, this ecosystem subsumes a host of different linguistic factors, ranging from semantic to syntactic structure, all of which can only be understood in situ. From this perspective, there is no such thing as an intrinsically hateful languaging act, nor are there enlanguaged forms or structures that inevitably result in harm or injury. Any and all moments of linguistic animus and their result can only be understood within a complex network of semiotic activity, manifested in a specific and dynamic linguacultural setting. Perhaps because of the difficult-to-pin-down nature of hate speech – something that languagers feel deeply but are, at times, at a loss to define or delimit – these moments are controversially subject to different layers of control, ranging from de jure proscription to the more mundane pressures of verbal hygiene (see Chapter 5). Unlike acts of physical violence or political exclusion, very few political jurisdictions around the world specifically proscribe hate speech, at least until and unless such languaging is clearly linked to physical action, and even then only in a limited manner. The Netherlands and Sweden, to offer but two examples, sanction racist, sexist and homophobic communication, but even such proscriptions are limited to public speech and cases involving actionable threat or injury. Moreover, unlike physical violence, speech is far more difficult to qualify as specifically harmful and legally punishable. After all, it is relatively easy to determine both the harmer and the harmed in the case of a fistfight or when a neoNazi calls for attacks on synagogues; it is, however, rather difficult to ascribe specific injury, and therefore agentive responsibility, to most daily cases of languaging and to their languager-authors.

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Despite all efforts to contain hateful languaging – even when these result in the sanctioning of the languager – such linguistic action continues seemingly unabated, as any of the examples mentioned in the introduction to this chapter readily demonstrate. In one time and place, it may be possible to push specific acts into the shadows of so-called decent society and to punish identifiable actors, but even then other practices eventually take hold and emerge, standing in for prior languagings in their ability to produce harmful states. Beyond the use of the n-word or other epithets that open up a space of subjection and subordination, it is readily apparent to any observer that it is not just a matter of forms: entire structures and widely circulating utterances, as well as the patterns of these, can and often do function in analogous ways, rendering any concept of what does or does not constitute hate speech or hateful languaging a slippery, elusive target (Russell, 2019, pp. 1–4). This observation requires that attention be given not only to transgressive languaging and the transgressive languagers who are its authors but to the wider context in which any such activity takes place and its meaning, particularly to the ways that all languagers – from speakers to listeners, from writers to readers, and so forth and so on – accomplish, negotiate and contest languaging on a daily basis. Languaging in Real Time

Pragmatics is a subfield that examines the interplay of languaging and linguacultural habitat: it is concerned with the specific moments in which languaging occurs, involving both actor-doer and receiver-audience, and, perhaps more importantly, the knowledge that any languager must hold in order to participate in these moments. Obviously, pragmatics is an immense subfield, one that includes formal and performative or functional approaches, as exemplified by Birner (2012) and Robinson (2006), respectively. For this reason, its treatment here is somewhat cursory, although it should be clear that pragmatic description and analysis are always at play when it comes to the analysis of transgressive languaging, and not only. Pragmatics affords greater understanding of how cultural concepts such as politeness or animosity are accomplished, how such actions are carried out successfully or unsuccessfully, how languagers understand different actions as transgressive and why any such judgement might be controversial. Echoing the discussion in Chapter  3, Sharifian brings pragmatics into dialogue with cultural linguistics (2011, 2017). He breaks down instances of language life and recasts these as pragmatic schema, epistemological structures capturing what languagers know about their world and the experiences they have had in it (e.g. being polite is seen positively). These precede and scaffold any particular action (e.g. a given salutation judged as

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polite) – moments within which languagers actuate or realize the content of schema. Importantly, both the schema and the act are steeped in cultural knowledge that far surpasses a specific moment and its participants. In the case of politeness and its manifestation, no concept or action can be considered universal: they are instead inseparable from the languaging community and community of languaging in which all actions and consequences are lived out. For example, in some cultures, it is considered polite to ask questions about one’s work and occupation in casual settings when presented with persons who are not already known, whereas this might be considered rude and invasive in another. Likewise, in some linguacultural settings, topics such as religion or politics are considered highly inappropriate for conversation among any except the closest of friends or family, whereas in another setting these very same matters might be understood as ‘fair game’ for casual conversation among new acquaintances. Politeness may well be phenomenologically universal, but it is entirely locally realized and apprehended. Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory (2001) proposes a useful distinction between two complementary facets of lived languaging: the pragmeme and the pract, concepts which Sharifian co-opts to further enhance understanding of speech acts and their consequences. According to this framework, pragmemes are scripted performances, for example, ‘greet people’ or ‘small talk at a casual gathering.’ These are not static languaging formulas but overarching meta-structures around which varying, related actions cohere. Practs or pragmatic acts, on the other hand, are the specific linguistic and paralinguistic doings that are accomplished in a given linguacultural setting: these are formulas languagers implement to accomplish a pragmeme, often to the point of becoming quasi-automatic (as in the case of many daily interactions). Like all languaging activity, pragmemes and practs are learned through experience, and the knowledge held by individuals varies enormously, even within a languaging community. For example, many North American Anglophones learn how to accomplish ‘small talk’ at parties and other gatherings, also understanding the consequences of not conforming to the accepted patterns of these apparently trivial – but in fact highly charged – scripts. At the same time, and as anyone who has experienced (either personally or vicariously) a moment of social awkwardness in such backdrops can readily attest, not everyone shares a common understanding of what constitutes appropriate manifestations of ‘small talk,’ let alone the specific practs that might correspond to this in one or another setting. In essence, not everyone shares the same pragmatic schemata, whether these be the pragmeme umbrella (e.g. ‘small talk is expected at casual gatherings’) or the contextual interpretation of momentaneous practs (e.g. ‘the weather is an appropriate focus of small talk’).

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While the study of pragmatics is far too broad to be fully attended to here, it is important to note that any description and interpretation of specific moments of language transgression, let alone the ways in which languagers come to be labelled as transgressive, depend entirely on shared – and implicitly agreed upon – pragmatic foundations. A host of pragmemes determine the domains of acceptable and unacceptable action in a particular linguacultural environment, whereas specific practs are put into play such that a languager transgresses or respects these frameworks. Languaging is already and always a pragmatic enterprise, if only because the very forms and patterns languagers use are imbued with shared cultural understandings, ranging from the denotations linked to a given form or structure to the very concept of transgression itself. They also constitute spaces of contestation, where power and ideologies come into conflict. Not all languagers will share the same meta-structural pragmemes, nor will all share the same understandings of how one or another pract respects or challenges those scripts that are shared (in part or in whole) by others in their communities. If one person understands casual comments about a politician to be an acceptable pract, for example, but their interlocutor understands this to violate the pragmeme boundaries of ‘small talk,’ it is possible that confusion and even offense will result. Similar, but far more consequential, disparities in pragmatic knowledge may well be at the heart of controversial moments involving transgressive languaging labelled hate speech. For example, the Rutgers students reading aloud from a court transcript were very likely following a relatively strict pragmemic script, specifically that of citation, within which the quoted witness (who originally languaged the n-word) was following a distinct script, that of recounting or retelling. This is not the end of the pragmatic story, however, a fact that both complexifies and attenuates the case at hand. The student and the entire class were also following at least two different scripts, each of which actuated pragmatic scaffolds: that of an in-class discussion, more specifically, and that of public languaging, more generally. While the reading of a witness statement verbatim might well present few tensions with the specific scripts assigned to a law school class (in which, presumably, such material is part-and-parcel of course material), when the citation is embedded in higher level scripts, such as that of ‘good citizen’ and ‘university community’, the possibility that this could be understood as a transgression is never far to hand. This also abuts further pragmemes, notably, those surrounding racial and ethnic identities in the US: the pract of enlanguaging the n-word by a person who identifies and/or is seen is Black versus one who is white or of another identity actuates a vastly divergent pragmatic interpretation. Except for instances in which injurious language is accomplished with the expressed intent to communicate a harmful or violent message (e.g.

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a neo-Nazi yelling antisemitic slogans), pragmatic tensions such as these likely underlie many instances of controversial languaging, especially those labelled hate speech. Leaving open the question of what languagers should or shouldn’t know, that is, overarching ideologies concerning appropriate or expected pragmatic knowledge (see Chapter 3), it is abundantly clear that they do not always share identical pragmatic competence and that they do not always agree upon identical pragmemes, let alone practs. This consideration effectively resituates the locus of controversy in the cases at hand – as well as that of any linguistically born hatred and injury – to both pragmatic and ideological spheres, that is, to that which persons and groups know and bring to bear on different real-life languaging moments, as well as to that which is ethically or morally understood to be requisite or expected knowledge and reaction to the interpolation of such knowledge through linguistic action. Speech Act Theory

As should be clear to any reader who has made it this far, language does not happen on its own, nor is it something that is undertaken in a vacuum: language is done by people, to people, for people and with people. To paraphrase Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world is given shape by the linguistic forms and structures we use to render it legible to ourselves and to others: we make our worlds by languaging our worlds (1953, but cf. 1921). His view resituates any outcome of languaging not with form or structure but with its makers – the individuals who speak, sign or write and the collective groups who receive, interpret and, ultimately, reiterate these linguistic products. In short, language cannot accomplish; it requires interaction and the communities that foster and shape interaction in order to accomplish or be understood as accomplishing anything at all (see also Knisely & Russell, 2024). The disciplinary posture formalized in Chapter 1 recaptures and rearticulates Wittgenstein’s understanding, using the terms languaging, languager and enlanguagement; it is also reflected in speech act theory. J.L. Austin’s seminal 1962 work How to do things with words reprises much of Wittgenstein’s understanding, applying this to a number of examples that continue to resonate to the present day. Contemporary speech act theory seeks to describe and explain the interplay between language events and their outcomes or effects – precisely the topics that should interest any who wish to better understand transgressive languaging and transgressive languagers. Perhaps the most important concept applicable to the situational interpretation of languaging is the utterance – a bounded action undertaken by languagers with one or more goals in mind. Utterances are inchoative verbal

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or gestural speech events, also noted in written communication through traditional textual or any other medium (e.g. Twitter). Some utterances are synchronous and are accomplished in real time, such as when chatting with a friend or giving a university lecture. Others are asynchronous and not attached to a fixed moment in time, as in a recorded lesson or TikTok video. Regardless of the temporal nature and medium used, all utterances are undertaken by an actor or actors who address an audience – those who receive the utterance and respond accordingly. Importantly, the profile of relations between different languagers – notably actor and receiver – and the mechanisms through which they are brought into contiguity have important consequences for how any utterance is interpreted, as well as any effect that this interpretation might produce. Actors and audiences may be faceto-face or separated by great distances; they may also be known to one another or entirely anonymous. At the same time, audiences may – and indeed frequently do – respond and become actors in their own right, blurring the apparently tidy division between the two sides. In the Rutgers law discussion outlined earlier, one immediate actor was the student who uttered the n-word while reading from the court transcript; their audience, at least in the first instance, consisted of the professor and fellow classmates. However, this audience became much larger with the release of the Zoom recording to a wider public, at which point many other audience members became actors in their own right, as their reactions, ranging from administrative apologies to community outrage, engendered a series of subsequent actions, each with its own actor-audience dialectic. Accordingly, a singular, relatively easily delimited speech act and linguistic moment (the reading of the court transcript) is part of a much broader ecosystem, one that is situated within a web of speech acts, both preceding (e.g. countless prior iterations of the n-word and similar racial epithets) and following it (e.g. op-eds in various media outlets). Utterances are metaphorically born of and birth utterances, all of which are bound together in a complex, rhizomatic network involving countless languaging acts, differentially positioned languagers and interleaved communities of languaging. Taken as holistic moments, these and countless other examples of linguistic activity are considered performances, or what American linguist Noam Chomsky defined as the “actual use of language in concrete situations” (1965, p. 3).8 Performance has been increasingly complexified – or, to use Judith Butler’s terminology, troubled – in contemporary speech act theory. This requires an analytical a stance that looks not only at what a languager does, the enlanguaged outcome of such doing, and the distal effect of the broader languaging moment; it also requires a careful description and interpretation of the intentional and inchoative links between act and effect, between doing and done-to, and between accomplishing and accomplishment.

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In his seminal work, Austin made key distinctions between how persons language to achieve varying goals (1962). Common to any and all performance is teleology, that is, the fact that communication doesn’t happen by accident but is undertaken to achieve one or more objectives. Austin uses the concept of locution, covering the most mundane and seemingly unscripted to the most redacted and planned, in a way that is similar to languaging in its broadest sense. He further distinguishes between two locutory subtypes: illocutionary and perlocutionary. Illocutionary acts accomplish an outcome in the moment of actuation, a classic example of which is seen in wedding ceremonies. In the US and many other countries, two persons are legally wed only at the moment when an officiant (a state official or someone authorized by the state) pronounces the phrase “I now pronounce you legally married” or some accepted variant thereof. Before this utterance is performed, the legal status of matrimony does not exist; after this moment, it does. In illocution, languaging is akin to accomplishing, and doing is more than the mere act of transmitting the mental image of one person to another. Illocutionary languaging alters a state or status – it achieves and fulfils an objective. Crucially, illocutionary acts are dependent upon de jure conventions. In the marriage ceremony example, explicit legal precepts dictate who may enter into the contract, which utterances must be performed, and in what manner. All of these are spelled out and codified in the politicolegal sphere. At the same time, a host of de facto conventions are also at play, many of which can be called into question should the illocutionary outcome be held in contempt, for example, concerns that might arise if one or both parties to the marriage were intoxicated. A sort of complement to or extension of illocution, perlocutionary acts are far more common in linguistic life. Perlocution does not describe a languaging act itself, but that which is accomplished subsequent to this act: perlocutionary languaging sets in motion a chain of events that eventually accomplishes an objective and produces an outcome. Consider the case of a person who approaches the barista at a coffee shop and says, “Could I  have an espresso, please?” This utterance does not produce the desired outcome on its own, as no person can, through merely speaking, conjure forth an espresso (as much as this might be desired). It does, at least in most instances, set in motion a series of actions that ultimately lead to a person having the desired beverage. One perlocutionary action accomplishes outcomes that lead to subsequent acts, from the barista asking additional questions (e.g. “Would you like a pastry with that?”), to the payment of an agreed-upon sum, to the production of the drink and its delivery in a prescribed manner, and so forth and so on. Rather simplistically, perlocutionary acts initiate, but do not achieve, eventual outcomes.

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Italian linguist Marina Sbisà revisits Austin and his understanding of the ways in which power is exercised through illocutionary and perlocutionary languaging, distinguishing between no fewer than eight different profiles of action and significantly blurring the illocution-perlocution divide. Firstly, she proposes that certain languaging acts change formal status, such as pledges or swearing-in ceremonies, after which a person achieves a given state (often being vested with specific authority); these correspond to classic illocutionary moments, like that discussed previously. Other acts institute rules and regulations, for example, promulgating laws that establish how power and authority, along with physical and symbolic violence, are sanctioned and applied; these are both illocutionary, as they produce effects, and also perlocutionary, as initial effects are oriented toward distal outcomes. Still more languaging acts involve the exercise of orders and commands, akin to the perlocutionary conduit noted earlier; the evaluation and recommendation of various possible outcomes, warnings or admonitions, announcements, and explanations, as well as the authority invested or claimed by such action; the exercise of exhibition, seen in asking questions, an act that puts an interlocutor in the position of response; and a host of assertions and proclamations (Sbisà, 2013). According to Sbisà, the performance of any act and its embodied reception is a tacit expression and iteration of authority, for it is through performative languaging that authority – and any claimed power – is maintained or stabilized, accommodated and tolerated, or in some instances challenged (2018, 2020). American philosopher John Searle conceives of languaging from a divergent perspective. Rather than focus on the effect of linguistic actions, he distinguishes between performances and intents, as well as the roles of actor and audience in a holistic languaging moment (1969, 1979, 1983). He outlines four primary profiles of action: expressives, assertives, commissives and directives. Expressives are used to show different emotions or states of the mind, from sadness and anger to desire and need, whereas assertives are used to state things, such as facts, opinions or descriptions. To return to the previous example of a person ordering coffee, an expressive act might be seen in the barista responding, “I’m so sorry!” should they confuse the order, here demonstrating deference or frustration. On the other hand, an assertive act might be seen in the barista stating, “We’re out of espresso beans,” proclaiming a real or imagined state of conditions. Both expressives and assertives share the goal of transmitting some representation of the world from actor to audience, although the former requires more interpretation on the part of the audience than does the latter, as it is grounded in more canonical or prima facie forms and structures. More in line with Austin’s view of perlocution, Searle’s definitions of commissives and directives go one step further, having as their basis an intent to incite subsequent

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action. Commissives include vows and pledges, linking a speaker to an action, for example, if the barista were to say, “but I’ll figure out a way to use a different blend” as a means of assuring a customer that their request will be met. On the other hand, directives order or request an audience to take action, as might be the case were the customer to respond to this situation by demanding that the barista “go find more of the coffee I asked for in the storeroom” or similar. Of course, any given moment may – and often does – include several elements falling under different subtypes, moving perhaps from expressive to directive and then to commissive. Regardless of the framework deployed, any description of how languagers accomplish different outcomes must involve intent, that is, the interpretation of a goal or rationale that motivates the languager to act. Frequently, languaging comprises a number of interleaved and even apparently competing intents, some of which can be easy and others difficult to tease apart. In the preceding example, one of the more obvious goals of the hypothetical customer is to obtain coffee (and to achieve the commensurate effects on body and consciousness): this is an explicit goal, one that is stated through conventionalized assertives and expressives, as noted earlier. However, additional intents might also be at play: they may wish to express politeness or sympathy, as could be inferred from the use of “please” (or lack thereof) and the construction deployed in the expressive ordering act. Were they to omit the rejoinder (e.g. “give me an espresso”), use a different verbal modality (e.g. “I want an espresso”) or choose a distinct structure (e.g. “Make me an espresso right now!”), the intent inferred from the languaging act might differ on the part of the barista and any others involved in this context, such as a bystander. Crucially, any inference of intent requires individual knowledge pertinent to conventionalized forms, structures and utterances, as well as consensus as to how these should be or are interpreted, reverting to questions of ideology and mythology. All participants must tacitly agree, although typically without much conscious thought, upon the rules of the languaging game, so to speak, in order for any outcome to take place. In the Rutgers case, there was clearly a breakdown of or mismatch between assumptions held by different languagers who participated in the initial discussion, let alone those who observed the recording of this later. While none disagreed about the communicative goal of the moment – to discuss different legal points that were exemplified by the case being cited – they did not concur about the ground rules of languaging, notably, those involved in citational practice. This led to a differential understanding of intent, although not at the surface level. On the one hand, there were those who focused on the intent of the student who articulated the n-word in citation, which was understood to respond to course requisites and bring the relevant legal issues into the class discussion. On the other hand, there

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were those who argued that any enlanguaging of this form, especially by a non-Black person, is linked to past and present intents to harm, reflecting Butler (1997) and the view that such languaging practices open or re-open a space of prior violation. Interpolation and Hailing

The definition of languaging introduced in Chapter  1 reflects theories of performance: language is fundamentally inchoative, goal oriented and interpersonal, involving languagers who deploy predictable scripts that are woven into shared knowledge, allowing all parties to interpret each other (see, e.g., Hall, 1999; Robinson, 2002). To this can be added the concept of performativity: the relative capacity or potentiality of a given languaging act to set in motion a chain of events that leads to one or more effects (see, e.g., Butler, 1997; Loxley, 2007; Pennycook, 2004). Performativity captures the mundane things languagers do with all sorts of language ingredients – from the forms they choose to the meanings they evoke, as well as the sentences they construct and the utterances that are addressed to them. It also allows them to apprehend what sorts of social realities are constructed by languagers through languaging, including how these serve to construct the social self and the selves of others. Performativity can thus be thought of as a wide conceptual net uniting the mythologized illocutionary and/or perlocutionary potentiality of languaging and of languagers. Importantly, this is not simply about “doing things with words” but about “making worlds with words,” to loosely paraphrase Austin’s original formulation. Reconsideration of the performative capacity of different languaging actions goes a long way to better describe and interpret moments in which there are differential views of transgression, that is, where different mental realities are achieved by a singular languaging action. When it comes to such moments of boundary crossing, it is not merely the case that certain forms or referents are off-limits, that some structures are judged negatively, or that specific utterances are viewed as offensive. Rather, transgressive languagers and their actions are judged in one or another way because of the effects they have upon others, their intent to do this, and the relative probability that these outcomes can or may be achieved. Any assessment of performativity must therefore not only take into account what is done – and not simply what happens after the initial doing – but consider the relative potentiality of one or another languaging activity to accomplish a given outcome in a specific context, on the basis of pragmatic and cultural knowledge. Consider the well-worn example of shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. Any assertion that this is transgressive depends upon the inferred intent of the languager and the probabilistic outcome of the languaging act in the

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context in which it was done. Were the languager to believe (even erroneously) that there was a real fire, they might be applauded for warning others of a danger; should they know that there was no fire and solely desire to sow panic, they will likely be held to account and subject to legal ramifications, as innocent people could be trampled and suffer grave injury, even death, as a terrified crowd rushes to exits (see Matsuda, 2019). The performativity of this languaging act is both unique and uniquely variable. Regardless of intent, it might result in injury to persons. However, it might also perform the salvation of these same persons from a raging fire. Clearly, it is important not just to examine the persons and contexts involved in a given languaging moment but to consider the knowledge that all persons possess that allows them to understand what is happening and preconditions the ways in which they may or may not react. The shared knowledge circulating within a given context allows audiences to understand why they are being addressed, what they are being asked to do or not do, how they are being asked to do it, and so forth. Importantly, this knowledge includes factors such as identity, history, sociocultural institutions and ideology. At times, audiences are able to contextually interpret performances in a relatively straightforward manner, such as in the example of a person shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. Assuming that the languager is motivated by a real fire, the audience is primed to understand this and to react in a scripted manner. The same discourses will inform all aspects of response, such as assisting children and the elderly first; they also constrain reaction sequences, for example, offering aid to persons before saving possessions. These and countless other instances of linguistic performativity are moments in which a perlocutionary act takes an interesting turn, notably when the causal lines between act and effect are not explicitly codified in social and/or legal structures but are negotiated in situ, albeit in a way that is hardly haphazard. One such profile of performativity is seen in moments of interpolation – linguistic performances that Althusser (1967, 1971) describes as “hailing acts.” Like the flagging down of a taxicab on a street, hailing acts involve one languager who calls out and calls forth another following pre-established, sometimes rigorously prescribed and enforced, scripts. The classic example associated with Althusser’s definition is one of a police officer hailing a person on the street; other examples include greeting baristas in a coffee shop (as the earlier example), calling upon a student in a discussion lesson, messaging a friend via text, and muttering “how are ya’?” as a way of greeting a co-worker. Hailing occurs throughout linguistic life, typically with little or no notice, but it does not always transpire in the same way. Indeed, some interpolative acts are highly performative and others far less so. Through languaging acts that call out and call forth, interpolation brings into being a state or status

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that facilitates the interaction of one languager with another, frequently involving imbalances of authority and power. The police officer holds de jure authority through which they are invested with vast forms of power – including physical – over others, whereas the university professor has been conferred authority to interpolate students and, through this, to enact power upon them, especially through the assignment of grades. Interpolation is thus obviously framed by preceding ideologies, themselves embodied in a host of anthropologically specific structures such as political parties, socioeconomic status and legal titles, all of which facilitate the interaction between the hailer and the hailed. In the example of a police officer saying “hey you!” to a person on the street, the officer is calling out and calling forth another, who then is subjected or subjectable to the force of law and the state-sanctioned exercise of power. Crucially, this finality can only be achieved if the other responds to the hailing, voluntarily or involuntarily, perhaps by turning around or by running away. While both individuals exist before this moment, preceding structures and discourses (e.g. police, the authority of law) establish how each may or may not interact as subjects, the power they hold or do not hold, and much more. Judith Butler revisits linguistic interpolation in her seminal work Excitable Speech (1997). She questions not only how performances might be considered injurious or harmful but also the efficacy of censorship or proscriptions of performances. She notes that most interpolative acts cannot be considered dangerous or injurious a priori, because they do not accomplish a state of aggrievement or injury. They do, however, mark off spaces in which such states are accomplished or accomplishable, in large part because similar outcomes have taken place through similar interpolations in the past. In effect, interpolation is inherently perlocutionary and performative, but this is bound to context, a key interpretive factor. To return to the example of the police officer and the passer-by, such languaging and its effect are predicted to be vastly divergent depending upon the individuals, spaces and temporal factors involved. In the US and elsewhere, young Black men are not hailed, nor do they respond to their hailing, by police in the same way as an elderly white female – notably as the latter is not accustomed to fearing for her life in such moments. A police officer hailing someone on an idyllic sidewalk in an affluent neighbourhood would be likely to be understood in a different manner than were they to do this on a bustling street in a workingclass urban environment. And the same can be said of acts occurring at different times of day, for example, midnight on a Friday or Tuesday at midday (see discussion in Russell, 2022). The performative nature of insults such as the n-word is steeped in the historical and present-day realities of anti-Black racism in the US and

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elsewhere. Re-examination of its languaging affords a greater understanding of what is happening in examples such as those mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. The student reading from a court transcript might well be understood as interpolating something more than simply the citation from case law. Crucially, some languager-receivers, particularly those whose pragmatic knowledge and anthropological experiences with similar languaging moments include their subjectification, may interpret this in a vastly different manner than it was putatively intended, particularly when the languager-doer is a white female (as in this incident). Likewise, the very same form being used in the kitchen of a celebrity chef – another white female, who is also of an older generation and from the US South – might well have been understood as not only calling out and calling forth a person whom she perceives as Black but subjectifying them within and through discursive forces that render that person much more than simply “less than,” thus situating and resituating them in a long historical and contemporary arc of racial prejudice and violence. In these and other examples, the linguistic sign itself is not accomplishing anything – it is the languager who does so using the n-word, intentionally or unintentionally, by hailing an audience who cannot not interpret this (with purposeful use of the double negative) in the light of past experiences and widely held knowledge. Tying It Together

This chapter steps into the messy, controversial space of hate speech and injurious languaging. By reconsidering examples involving the n-word from the point of view of pragmatics and speech act theory, different moments are interpretable as languaging moments that set in motion a series of events that lead to states of offense and harm, in part by evoking the ghosts of past instances in which such outcomes took place alongside physical violence. Some of these end states match the intent of the languager-doer, whereas others do not. While the same enlanguaged form can be seen as perlocutionary, opening or re-opening a space of violation and subjection, the specific pathways of performativity and the profiles of different languaging acts are far from uniform. Considering the ways in which languaging functions in given contexts, as well as the ways in which different languager profiles contribute to these functions through their inferred intent and objectives, allows a clearer view of how hate speech is accomplished and, ultimately, how it might be more effectively countered. This is yet again another act of recentring the human actor and denying linguistic anthropomorphism, as it is the languager – both as agent and as patient – who is the ultimate locus of both animus and harm.

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A Closer Look: N-Words in Context How does this chapter lend itself to a critical reconsideration of moments in which the n-word was uttered, be this by a celebrity chef or a law student? How does an understanding of linguistic performativity reframe debate around what is being accomplished and how this accomplishment occurs when the n-word appears on a university exam or is shouted by fans at a basketball match? And, given a closer examination of the contexts in which these events transpire, and taking into account the historical and present-day places of violation that for many speakers are triggered by the enlanguagement of this form, in what ways are these or similar actions to be understood as transgressive? Should these be considered as interpolative acts hailing and subjectifying a person or community, as the unintentional re-opening of wounds, as outright expressions of animus, as all of these, or as something else entirely? This chapter began with several specific examples, ones that to many likely appear clearly transgressive. And yet, upon closer examination, there is little in common about the performative content and potentiality of each instance. In the Rutgers case, one languager read a quote from a court record, something that is part and parcel of law school curricula. Some may claim that their languaging of the n-word here was akin shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and, yet, neither this nor the University of Chicago example involved a person yelling the epithet, which would be akin to the languaging of Ms. Deen, former Senator Artiles, and the university basketball fans. In the Rutgers discussion and in the case of Professor Kilburn, an overt denigratory intent appears to be lacking, even if denigration did indeed occur. In the other cases, however, specific intent can be reasonably inferred: Ms. Deen was noted as using this to castigate employees and the basketball fans were understood to have been taunting and debasing their rivals, whereas the Florida state senator claims to have been making remarks in the heat of a political discussion. The discursive forces that framed all such incidents cannot be ignored, however, as they constitute a sort of unifying meta-pragmeme: these include discursive formations of race, racial inequality and systemic injustice in the United States. Certainly, it would not be wise to take a one-size-fits-all approach to understanding how enlanguagement of the n-word plays out in contemporary US society; to do this would be to fall into the trap of wilful ignorance (or perhaps blinkered solipsism) that has coloured so much debate in the US and elsewhere around who is allowed and not allowed to enlanguage

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this form with seeming impunity.9 Much of this debate focuses upon the form itself, as do so many other controversies surrounding transgressive languaging, simultaneously ignoring most or all performative factors (while also conflating two related forms, one that ends in the rhotacized -er and the other in a low vowel, typically rendered -ah or -a in spelling). This wilful interpretive naiveté does injustice, and not only to those who are targeted by intentionally insulting languagings of the n-word but to the wider languaging community in which these events take place. By focusing on the sign and not on the wider ecosystem, languagers are frequently let off the hook or not called fully to task, a prime example of which is noted in Deen’s response. She admitted to using the n-word, but she also insisted that this was a product of her upbringing in the South, while ignoring the very context in which such past and present languagings transpired, as if there were no links between the ways in which this sign might used and received now and how it was used and received by prior generations. At the same time, such all-or-nothing views fail to attend to any nuances, as the Rutgers case demonstrates. In this example, there was widespread agreement as to the lack of intent to harm on the part of the student who read the original transcript: this was a languaging error, to be sure, and perhaps a lapse of verbal hygiene (see Chapter 5), but it could hardly be compared to former Florida State Senator Artiles’ outburst or the collective chanting of fans at the Vanderbilt-Mississippi State game. It would be difficult to consider the Rutgers example as one of intentional hailing and subjectification, just as it would be difficult to ignore the fact that Artiles, Deen and the basketball fans were anything other than naïve but in full possession of knowledge about this form, its history and its present-day effect. None of this is to say that the n-word – or any other form widely understood to open up places of subordination and subjection – should be used with abandon, or that apologies weren’t warranted by any or all involved in the examples discussed previously. Indeed, there is no such thing as neutral languaging or neutral languagers. All languaging is consequential (even if the consequences are apparently innocuous or simply go unnoticed) and all languagers have illocutionary and perlocutionary potential (even if the ability to deploy this potential, let alone any effect that this might have, is far from equally distributed). It does, however, beg a more developed and more careful view of how supposed acts of hate speech and linguistic animus are evaluated, not to mention the ways in which other languagers might react to them. The transgressive languaging act of the Rutgers class (involving the echoing

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of past languagings) might best be understood as one that requires more sensitivity and care in the handling of linguistic evidence; that of University of Illinois administrators (whose admonishments of the use of euphemisms for the n-word included this in uncensored form) as one of wilful ignorance and flagrant hypocrisy; and that of the Vanderbilt and Mississippi State fans (where there was little more than a passing acknowledgement of the repeated languaging of this form in a public space) as complicit participation in a subjectifying languaging act. Reacting in the same manner and insisting upon parallel consequences in these cases do little to mitigate real harm or address long-standing, injurious performativity by decentring the human languager and affording too much power to the enlanguaged.

Discussion Questions

• Consider the ways in which you perform politeness in an everyday interaction, such as when you order coffee. How might you perform impoliteness in a similar context? How do others, such as a barista or server, perform various stances in return? • Contemplate some of the highly scripted linguistic moments in your life, such as the ways in which you interact with close friends – especially if this is different from how you would interact with parents, professors or people with whom you’re not as close. Break down these scripts using the pragmatic model outlined earlier. • Reflect on a moment when you were offended by something a person spoke, gestured or wrote. How can you understand the performativity of your example? What mythologies and ideologies were involved in the effect this had on you? • Identify another form whose languaging is widely considered to be transgressive. Comment upon the performativity associated with this form, that is, what languagers who use it are able to accomplish through this. How does this open up spaces of prior violation and hail a previously subjectified person or group? • Peruse a newspaper or other press outlet in your community, looking specifically for recent examples of a prominent individual using (or being accused of using) the n-word or another epithet. What occurred in this instance? Using the terminology and approach of this chapter, describe this event more carefully: consider the pragmatic action of this languager, their inferred or explicitly stated goal, and the performativity that this example demonstrates.

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Further Reading

Few works have inspired more discussion of language acts than J.L. Austin’s original How to Do Things With Words, the second edition (published in 1980) of which includes many useful annotations. Additional foundational works include John Searle’s Speech Acts: Essays in the Philosophy of Language, Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, and James Loxely’s Performativity. Other useful sources include Jonathan Culler’s Performative Language and Douglas Robinson’s Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words; the latter also includes a useful discussion of cross-linguistic issues. Readers who wish to better understand the history of the n-word are pointed to Jabari Asim’s recent book The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why, which affords a solid historical background to the form and its past languaging in the American context. Somewhat more controversial, if only because of its title, is Randall Kennedy’s N ***er: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word [the original title is not censored and is presented as such in the References section of this book]. For a broad understanding of contemporary issues regarding the languaging of animus and international perspectives on legal issues arising from this, readers are pointed to Victoria Guillén-Nieto’s recent volume Hate Speech: Linguistic Approaches and Caitlin Ring Carlson’s Hate Speech. Notes 1 www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/nyregion/Rutgers-law-school-n-word.html; www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-rutgers-law-student-shouldnt-haveused-the-n-word-but-we-can-learn-from-the-controversy/2021/05/07/ cd1ba004-af67–11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html 2 www.thefire.org/lawsuit-professor-suspended-for-redacted-slurs-in-lawschool-exam-sues-university-of-illinois-chicago/ 3 www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/logical-end-language-policing/ 621500/ 4 As initially reported in the Miami Herald (www.miamiherald.com/news/ local/community/broward/article145327079.html), with additional coverage in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/ 2017/04/21/a-white-politician-used-the-n-word-in-front-of-black-colleagueshe-just-resigned/). 5 www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/showbiz/paula-deen-racial-slur/index.html 6 https://blavity.com/black-parents-of-student-athletes-called-the-n-wordduring-college-world-series-between-vanderbilt-university-and-mississippistate?category1=news 7 www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate 8 Chomsky wasn’t terribly interested in this part of linguistic life, something that has been roundly criticized in his and his followers’ work. 9 See, e.g., https://ideas.time.com/2011/10/12/can-whites-say-the-n-word/, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/06/219737467/who-canuse-the-n-word-thats-the-wrong-question

7 LANGUAGING CANCELLATION The Ecology of Discourse and Hegemony

Key Concepts

• Cancel culture, cancellation • Discourse (capital D and small d) • Hegemony In late February 2023, Scott Adams, creator of the popular Dilbert cartoon series, hosted a live YouTube podcast, during which he commented at length upon a controversial poll by the right-leaning Rasmussen agency. The data he cited from this survey suggested that only a small majority of Black Americans agreed with the assertion, “it’s okay to be white.”1 On the basis of this information, Adams argued that the Black community constitutes a “hate group” and warned white Americans to “stay away from them,” further expressing his desire to live in a society with few or no Black residents.2 This podcast was hardly unusual for Adams who, in the previous years, had publicly questioned the origins of Covid-19, dismissed public health mitigation efforts and taken a strong anti-vaccination stance. This time, however, it seemed that he had gone too far: numerous publications ceased syndicating the Dilbert series, and Adams’ distributor reportedly severed ties with him. In response, the cartoonist claimed that his freedom of expression was violated and that he was the victim of cancel culture, positioning himself within polarized ideological stances pertaining to how languagers should behave and how they might be held to account when transgressing shared norms of behaviour. DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-7

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This chapter examines cancellation and so-called cancel culture, illustrated by this and countless of other instances. It steps into the messy and controverted ways in which languaging communities and communities of languaging respond to boundary crossing, exercising counteractive forms of power and laying bare their ideological underpinnings, often with unusual frankness. The chapter begins by revisiting cancellation and its historical antecedents, as well as tensions between this and ideologies pertinent to freedom of expression. It then revisits the concept of discourse, focusing on the ways in which governing regimes canalize knowledge and power, while also facilitating the doing of knowledge and power. It then introduces the concept of hegemony, highlighting the ways in which languaging acts as both a conduit for and the output of hegemonic forces. Ultimately, the chapter calls into question the very concept of cancel culture, a contemporary cliché that is argued to act as a sort of stand-in for a competing form of hegemony, one that might be considered integrative or emergent at the community level. Cancel Culture

As exemplified by the Adams podcast incident, any understanding that one or another person can, might, should or should not be held to account for their actions has become more recognized and controversial in recent decades. The terms cancel and cancel culture have been widely used in popular press outlets and any number of social media platforms to refer to the consequences triggered by specific transgressions, whether these be viewed as merited or excessive, justifiable or oppressive. Other examples of languagers having to pay a steep price for what they have spoken, written, tweeted or otherwise enlanguaged are not hard to find – and this at any point on the political and sociocultural spectra of contemporary life.3 In March  2003, the Dixie Chicks (a female country-rock group that had been at the top of the charts, now known simply as the Chicks) were removed from radio playlists and lost myriad fans following their criticism of President George W. Bush. Following his failure to condemn insurrectionists at the US Capitol in January 2021 and his support of many of their positions, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s contract with influential publisher Simon & Schuster was voided.4 Four-time US National Football League Most Valuable Player Aaron Rodgers was fined by the league and excluded from social media following false claims regarding Covid-19 vaccination and his own status, prompting him to assert that his fundamental rights had been violated in a series of public tirades.5 Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other cases could be cited, involving languagers from any number of backgrounds. Importantly, these cancellations rarely, if ever, result in the definitive removal of

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an offending languager from public space – in fact, cancellation can actually have quite the opposite effect, at least in the long term. The very same person who is no longer able sing on a public stage or publish in widely circulating media also enjoys support from fans and gains increased publicity, perhaps even to the point where new stages are made available and different outlets are opened up to them. Despite its widespread use and cultural salience, the meaning and bounds of what does and does not constitute cancellation, rather than merely an expression of opinion, are far from agreed upon. Cancellation and cancel culture are floating signifiers, forms whose semantic content varies between communities of languaging, activating divergent, culturally emergent denotations, connotations and associations (see Chapter  2). For some, cancellation connotes ‘social justice’ and is associated with ‘activism’; for others, it connotes ‘oppression’ and is associated with ‘dictatorship’. Spanning these semantic particulars, cancel culture may best be defined as a collection of ideologies realized through coordinated social actions, a reaction to the expression of views or opinions that are considered, by some if not many, to be unpopular and offensive. These actions result in what Norris defines as “attempts to ostracize someone for violating social norms” (2020, p.  2). Cancellation is thus a response to transgression, regardless of whether opinions regarding the stimulus for reaction are a matter of consensus, let alone whether specific consequences are deemed appropriate or exaggerated. Cancellation is, however, more than just another retort of distain or disapproval: it is one that calls the original languager to task for the views that they have expressed and it results in identifiable punishment, most often ostracization. In this regard, it is not uncoincidentally unlike the ways in which those who violated a taboo, as it was originally defined, were physically removed from a community and prevented from participation in collective life. As a loosely unified signifier, cancel culture is rooted in long-standing debates concerning freedom of expression, political correctness and clashing ideologies pertinent to the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, that is, the very notion of transgression (Perry, 1992). Closely associated with US political and social debates, as well as the increasingly broad rift between those on the left (progressive, associated with the Democratic party) and the right (conservative, associated with the Republican party and, moreover, with former president Donald Trump), accusations of cancellation and assertions that cancellation is tantamount to victimization are woven into the fabric of contemporary American linguistic life (although this trope is also noted in other Anglophone linguacultures, and not only those).6 Clark retraces the origins of this label to Black Twitter, a subcommunity of the former social media platform currently known as X.

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She understands “cancelling [to be] an expression of agency,” something akin to a reactive grasping at power that stands in contrast to dominant culture (2020, p. 68). The act of cancelling or that of calling for cancellation is one in which counter-publics name a transgressor and solicit their punishment, similar to practices of boycotting in other times and spaces (2020, p. 69). Similarly, Norris understands cancel culture “as collective strategies by activists using social pressures to achieve cultural ostracism of targets (someone or something) accused of offensive words or deeds” (2021, p. 4). In other words, cancellation involves a community of languaging united by a recognition of some form of transgression and their collective desire and willingness to react in ways that they understand to be meaningful and impactful. If, on the one hand, the inchoative act of cancelling or demanding cancellation is understood to be a grasping of power, often by a minoritized or subjected population, the ways in which cancellation is viewed from a broader lens should be of equal interest, if only because the very same languaging and counter-languaging can be (and often is) understood in starkly different terms by counter-situated publics. Reviewing the case of Brendan Leipsic, a former Washington Capitals hockey player who repeatedly languaged in ways that were viewed as misogynistic and racist, Sailofsky (2021) analyzes the intersectionality of masculinity, cancel culture and so-called “woke capitalism,”7 using the frameworks laid out by Ng (2020) and Norris (2020). His analysis of Twitter data, including public reactions to Leipsic’s firing in the wake of these scandals, demonstrates the degrees to which views of cancellation are shaped by discourses of masculinity, accountability, legality and free speech, alongside group-specific discourses relevant to hockey culture and its semiotic trappings. One unified act, while perhaps condemned by all to varying degrees, is considered more or less transgressive in large part due to truths held by different individuals and sub-communities. Interrogating the ways in which power circulates in a number of highprofile cases, Thiele (2021) makes compelling observations about who is allowed to language without being held to account, despite any calls to such reaction, focusing upon the ways in which potentially cancelled languagers frame calls for their sanctioning. She highlights four messages common to those who appropriate cancellation as self-defence and who refer to themselves as having been cancelled. Firstly, they recast reaction as an unfair or unjust overreach, most often decrying this as an infringement on their fundamental rights. Secondly, they assert that others’ speaking or writing is equally or more wrong and bothersome, resituating transgression upon their accusers and not themselves. Thirdly, they contend that past practices (usually ones that align with their own) were better and that the way they act is normal, refuting that any transgression might have occurred in the

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first place. And, finally, they situate any consequential response as being tantamount to censorship, proclaiming that they are the ones who have been victimized. Cancelled or potentially cancelled languagers thus tend to focus not on their own languaging and its effects but upon threats to their individual freedom, a distaste for verbal hygiene, and assertions of their own persecution. Any such retorsio argumentis or table turning demonstrates just how uneven the playing fields of collective languaging can be in one or another linguacultural context, especially those defined by differential authorities and access to power (see Chapter 5). In subsequent work, Norris (2021) reframes the appropriation of cancellation as a conservative dog whistle, a signalling action designed to prompt political support for those targeted by reaction, while simultaneously provoking the ire of progressive opponents. From the perspective of the transgressive languager, cancellation is tantamount to silencing, and cancel culture can only be seen as an attack upon democratic ideals of freedom and inclusion. Being cancelled becomes thus both a badge of honour and a weapon with which to strike back at accusers, reifying many of the power dynamics at play in these instances. Despite surface appearances, it should be abundantly clear that cancellation is more complex than meets the eye, transcending any buzzwords or social media trends. Cancel culture and reactions to this cohere around ideologies and mythologies pertinent to any number of stakes in languaging and in the collective lives of languagers – notably, personal responsibility, free speech and civic rights – alongside questions of power and authority, as well as the perlocutionary effect of languaging as the doing of power and authority (Riley, 2021). It should also be clear that these labels are not used, let alone understood, in a uniform manner. In some moments and contexts, cancellation celebrates the marginalization of a transgressive languager as a form of social justice; in others, this amounts to accusations that a languager has been treated unfairly and a revindication of the right to free expression. Importantly, cancellation does not usually imply an immediate physical erasure, such as execution, imprisonment or banishment (this, despite some of the more hyperbolic reactions in a number of cases). Rather, persons or groups who are cancelled face a different type of exile: their deportation from sites of power (e.g. blocking on social media and lack of access to traditional media); a removal of their previously held authority, whether formally or informally expressed (e.g. firing from positions of influence); and their exile from physical contexts in which power and authority circulate, at times in a subtle manner (e.g. revoked invitations to participate in prestigious events). Cancellation is not a de jure act of punishment or reprisal but a de facto response on the part of some, but hardly all, in a relatively well defined political, economic and social community. It bears repeating that few, if any, of those who have been cancelled completely lost their ability

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to communicate with others – let alone to their supporters – and, in fact, may have actually gained more authority in such circles by virtue of their cancellation-qua-victimhood. This makes cancellation – and the even more nebulous concept of a unified cancel culture – a rather distinct manifestation of clashing powers and authorities, ideologies and mythologies, instigated by, but eventually moving beyond, languaging, one that shares some of the effective outcomes of other types of censorship and yet diverges from these in important ways. Obviously, it is not possible to fully tease apart elements that are mostly or exclusively tied to languaging from other actions that might lead to a person’s cancellation. In some examples cited previously, it is primarily or exclusively what a person spoke or wrote that led to this outcome: languaging was enough to provoke cancelling. In others, languaging co-occurred with other forms of transgression, such as in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, a British hard-right media personality who long enjoyed a reputation as a shock political commentator, only to face sanctioning after accusations that he promoted paedophilia.8 Regardless of the nature of any particular transgression that triggers reaction – the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back of social acceptability or inclusion – languaging is always involved in cancellation dynamics. Writ large, cancel culture is intimately wrapped up in linguistic life and in the lives of languagers. This implicates what is and is not legitimate speech, what counts and does not count as freedom, and what precisely the bounds of transgression are, may or should be, let alone how or why these might be challenged. As with the examples raised in other chapters, there is much more to any moment of cancellation than meets the eye, ranging from what is being performed (rather than what is merely being said), to the effects of this upon a wider cultural context, to the reaction of those who participate within this space. For this reason, it is useful to step back and reconsider a concept that is both theoretically broader and epistemologically distinct from languaging as it is used in prior chapters: discourse. Discourse Two Ways

Obviously, cancellation and cancel culture cannot be reduced to a series of words or sentences, and the transgressions that trigger cancellation or the force of reaction to these cannot be captured by simply a series of utterances and practices: these are best conceived of as discourses. This term is widely used but also widely confused, in part because of multiple meanings associated with it (Laclau, 1993; Phillips  & Jørgensen, 2002). For this reason, it is important to begin any examination of cancellation discourses by first stepping back and carefully reconsidering what is meant by the term, as well as the practical and theoretical ramifications of one or another usage.

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In what might be perhaps the broadest application of the concept, discourses can be understood as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”; in other words, discourses are the means through which ideational objects, including people and communities, are made real in the lives of linguacultural participants (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). From this point of view, a discourse constitutes a system of knowing and comprehending, reflecting Foucault’s articulation of these as regimes that govern not only the formation of knowledge but the consequential mythologies that are born of such knowledge. In other words, discourse shapes not only what we know but what it means to know anything (1971). Accordingly, the epistemological frame of a given discourse subsumes practically all experience and all possible experience, rendering it difficult to define or delimit what is and what is not discursive in an actionable way. Perhaps because of this, such uses of the term are frequently labelled “capital D discourse,” capturing its more nebulous denotative qualities. If cancellation is viewed from this perspective, it can be conceived of as a complex epistemological archaeology that is both linguistic and supralinguistic, one that forms the very concepts that it subsequently polices (pace Foucault, 1971). As such, cancellation, either as action or as phenomenal result of an action, defines and constrains both action and reaction, interpretation of any result of this action and reaction, and any ability to understand all such action and reaction as being part of a holistic cultural dynamic. A series of distinct approaches, often labelled “lowercase d discourse,” focus more on that which is evidentiary, notably as realized in specific languagings and other semiotic acts (Gee, 2014; Kingfisher, 2007). Fairclough distinguishes three levels in this regard: social practice, discursive or discoursal practice, and textual or material reality, the latter two being primary sites of description and analysis (2013, pp. 58–60). Discourse practices arise from a cohort of languaging moments that cohere around a topic or theme, involving the production and consumption of texts, a stand-in for any enlanguaged materiality. Texts, on the other hand, are the specific manifestations of these practices and need not be limited to the traditional definition of textual product, also subsuming verbal and gestural communication and forms of digital languaging such as Twitter or TikTok, alongside written manifestations of languaging common to more traditional outlets. Of course, the neat division between the two theoretical and terminological poles is not one of opposition but of complementarity: capital D and lowercase d stances may in fact be resolved by recasting the former as semiosis, or the ways in which meanings and knowledge are made and contribute to other meanings (see Fairclough, 2012). This has proven useful in many instances, as looking at both sides of the semiotic-discursive coin affords a richer understanding of not only what languagers are doing

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through discursive practices manifested in cohesive textual archives but how this doing is both preceded by and contributory to the cultural underpinnings that render any action or performance meaningful, knowable and comprehensible. One example of this is offered by Bamberg et al. (2011), who take a distinctly lowercase d discourse approach by looking at specific languaging events but also combine elements of capital D discourse, notably their understanding of how these forces contribute to identity and ideological formation (see also Wodak, 2012). One of the most prolific critical discourse scholars, Fairclough developed a multitiered model that casts discourses as both texts and practices; these are produced and are destined to be received by a languaging community and its members, a grouping that is realized in part through such praxes. Anchored within the community, discourse contributes to the conception and realization of that community, while also shaping the identities of and relations governing its constituents (Fairclough, 1992, pp. 73–81). Discourse is thus simultaneously constitutive and constituted, creating at the same time as it is created, while also facilitating the constitution and propagation of subsequent discourses. Such a chicken-and-egg dynamic is only realizable and understandable within the anthropological and linguacultural setting and cannot be attended to outside of this human reality (1992, pp. 86–96). Accordingly, discourse is both tangible (i.e. bounded to and by language form and therefore subject to observation and description) and local (i.e. bounded to and by cultural praxes and therefore interpretable only within a speech community and its cultural schemata). In effect, Fairclough’s discourse is highly compatible with the human-centred understanding of language and languaging articulated in Chapter  1. Discourse practices stand in relation to overarching discourses, that is, the social practices that subsume, but are not synonymous with, discourse practices, affording a degree of compatibility with Foucault’s and others’ stances (Fairclough, 2013, pp. 94–96, 1992, p. 73). Fairclough’s model serves as the foundation of an ecological approach to description, interpretation and analysis, labelled a discourse ecology in Russell (2019, 2021). This captures the ways in which various and interconnected enlanguaged discursive realities function symbiotically, showing how any number of participants are both framed and positioned within conceptual, ideological worlds. Discursive ecosystems are also, perhaps confusingly, supralinguistic, as their content and participants cannot be reduced to enlanguaged ephemera. Regardless of perspective, although certainly aligning more with the lowercase d discourse frame, all discourses are necessarily enlanguaged at some point and in some way. They are interactively, communally manifest through canonically linguistic and other signifying actions (e.g. gesture, visual semiosis), occurring over a relatively delimited time and

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within a relatively bounded space, and cohering around some sort of identifiable topic or theme. Ecological discursive dynamics are bound to – often to the point of constituting a delimitation or shibboleth – a linguacultural context, guiding the ways in which different participants understand themselves, others and the ideational world in which they exist. Consider, by way of example, the discourse of Sport,9 notably, how it is lived out in any number of settings and manifested in any number of specific languaging moments in contemporary society. This discourse is of course made visible in forms and their associated referents (e.g. game, player) and the metaphoric structures projected into specific utterances (e.g. “Team A  challenges Team B”), alongside the seated cultural knowledge enlanguaged through complex performances (e.g. the narrating of a match) and countless other moments. All of these govern the ways in which linguacultural participants understand Sport, their own positionality vis-à-vis the concept, the ways in which Sport ideologically canalizes their experiences, and much more. Crucially, this heuristic exists in and is bounded by shared cultural space, as well as in the individual imaginaries of its participants. Sport is both active in the mind of a person and constitutes a sort of invisible, albeit powerful, force distributed across the minds of many persons. Sport does not exist in ideational or discursive isolation, either, but stands in complex relation, at times sympathetic, at times antipathetic, with other discourses, for example, Money, Masculinity and Cultural Identity. Something very similar is at play in the case of cancel culture and at specific moments of cancellation, both of which for simplicity’s sake may be labelled Cancellation. This discursive constellation and the practices and texts that render it visible and knowable frame how different linguacultural participants understand themselves and others, subsequently constraining the ways in which different languagers and languaging communities will apprehend and interpret the actions and reactions of themselves and others. Dilbert creator Adams putatively apprehends his world – specifically, the world in which his languaging led to a loss of contracts and outlets for his cartoon strip – through the discursive lens of Cancellation, framing and positioning himself as a victim. His detractors also understand their worlds through this discursive lens, albeit with a distinct cognitive reality: his actions were framed as transgressive, and reactions that limited his power were positioned as felicitous and justified. Still other participants, for instance those who stand by Adams, understand him as yet another casualty of errant ideological forces run amok, casting his cancellation as a form of injustice. At the core of this discourse are the ecological constellations within and through which it operates, involving ideologies that precede and interact with Cancellation, notably, those labelled personal freedom, collective responsibility, propriety and civic values.

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Discursive Power and Hegemony

Discourses accomplish and precondition the accomplishment of power through semiotic pathways, including, but not limited to, languaging. However, the relationship of discourse to power is neither uniform, nor static. Summarizing Holtzscheiter, Wodak identifies three dimensions of this dialectic: power in discourse; power over discourse; and power of discourse (2012). The first of these, power in discourse, involves the ability to determine how discourses will function, that is, “specific linguistic codes, rules for interaction, rules for access to the meaning-making forum, rules for decision-making, turn-taking, opening of sessions, making contributions and interventions” (Holtzscheiter, 2005, p. 69; cited in Wodak, 2012, p. 217). This is most obviously operative in the case of cancellation, which is triggered by a violation of discursive rules. Discursive power, on the other hand, determines who will have access to discourse, such that their discourse-making will be received, as well as the extent to which this reception will impact others. Those with more power over discourse will have, mutatis mutandis, more voice or access within a given ecosystem: they will be attended to more often and more intently, reflecting the cultural and symbolic capital that they hold (see Chapter 5). Here again, instances of cancellation offer clear examples of clashing powers over discourse, as noted in both the claims for and the reactions to attempts to hold transgressive languagers to account. Finally, the power of discourse refers to the relative transitivity of conceptual discourse over others, that is, the ways in which discourses act upon individuals and communities. Accordingly, any discursive ecology can be understood to be governed by power relations, the unequal manifestation of capacity and potentiality that regulates the symbiotic relationships between different participant-actors and conceptual frames (Russell, 2019). Within the wider ecology of cancel culture, the power of discourse canalizes and constrains the very foundations that circuitously determine power in and power over discourse. This is, of course, a particularly volatile ecosystem, if only because participant groups frame any given discursive phenomena in diverging, even antagonistic ways. All such power can be understood to operate within a discursive ecology in a hegemonic manner, one that emerges from and reinforces hierarchies involving different conceptual participants, relying upon a dialectic of consent and coercion. A concept closely associated with the writings of Italian communist and anti-fascist thinker Antonio Gramsci, hegemony was originally understood as the exercise of leadership by one group over another, this being formulated along Marxist class lines (1933). Much of Gramsci’s original characterization relies on a traditionally hierarchical and an explicit understanding of power, notably, one that is materially manifested.

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It is, however, reconcilable with more contemporary views of power such as those outlined in Chapter 5, notably those that understand power as diffuse and rhizomatic, lacking precise nodes but interconnected in myriad ways and from which regulation, punishment and reward systems emerge (see, e.g., Foucault, 1973, 1980). Importantly, hegemonic power is not always or even often expressed through raw physical force, although it is perhaps more noticeable when this does occur: such power is a capacity to create and deploy knowledge, which in turn begets further power. Mouffe provides an important rearticulation of hegemony, asserting this as a “point of confluence between objectivity and power” or a way of constructing and rendering understandable different identities, including the relative affordances of power and positional authority that are ascribed to them (2000, p.  21). Hegemonic relations are “then about the ways that chains of equivalences and differences are articulated in the field of politics”; in other words, these are ways of understanding which groups or identities stand in relation to which other groups and identities and, more importantly, what these ideological frames mean in daily life (Ives, 2004, p.  159; Laclau  & Mouffe, 1985). According to Bourdieu, such positionalities and their effects become largely unseen and expressed as inevitable, often through discourses of biology and nature, all of which are framed as being merely “the way things are” or its equivalent (1995, p. 73). Examples of hegemonic configurations are never difficult to find, ranging from the socioeconomic pathways of neoliberal capitalism to gender roles to educational institutions, dynamics that may be viewed not so much as structures but as the ontological output of structures ultimately serving to reinforce themselves. Gramsci understood hegemony to account for the seemingly self-defeating dynamic of millions of powerless workers at the hands of a ruling elite; for Foucault, it makes much more sense to refer to hegemonies in the plural, going beyond political states and governmental relations; for still others, specific hegemonies are born and reborn of dominance, exerting coercive forces on both sides of the gender equation through each participant’s consent (Connell, 2005). Summarily, any hegemonic configuration requires simultaneous consent and coercion, the uneven distribution of potentiality and capacity, and buttresses that allow those with more access to power over and through discourse to shift their positionality and rearticulate such configurations in a way that naturalizes its outcome (Fox  & Alldred, 2017, p.  17; see also Deleuze  & Guattari, 1980; Massumi, 1988). Hegemonic configurations are operative in any number of dynamics in which consent and coercion operate symbiotically and semiotically (see, e.g., Daldal, 2014, for a succinct overview). Importantly, language has

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always been understood as a space of hegemonic mediation, whether this be through contestation or as means of fostering new, more integrative or “bottom-up” hegemonic dynamics (Ives, 2004). It is even feasible to view languaging as the ultimate expressions of hegemony: operating largely subor unconsciously and performed quasi-autonomically in the vast majority of instances, languaging canalizes potentiality and capacity via the continual reiteration of forms, structures and patterns that constrain that which would otherwise be a priori possible (Russell, 2021, pp.  110–112; pace Prince & Smolensky, 1993). This constraint is generally rendered invisible through acquisition and use, being propagated and repropagated from the languager-doer to the languager-receiver in a continual circuit that effectively forecloses other pathways (at least, in the vast majority of instances). The result of this dynamic is that few languagers ever question or apprehend the ways in which prior languagings constrain present and future languagings, let alone grapple with the forces that canalize and obviate other linguistic and communicative potentialities. Language behaviour is naturalized, its forms and structures are rendered inevitable and unquestionable, and those who do not acquiesce to shared standards or pathways are branded deficient, or much worse. This again reflects one of the defining – and certainly more nefarious – qualities of hegemonic dynamics: their invisibilization and their naturalization to the extent that participants (here, languagers) rarely, if ever, challenge the ways in which things are done, even when these are contrary to their own interest or potential betterment. Cancel culture and the complex interplay between transgression and cancellation are, from this perspective, rather obvious examples of hegemonically distributed accesses to power. Any capacity to affect cancellation depends upon and is manifested through the ability to remove a person from sociocultural and sociocommunicative space, limiting their ability to participate in any number of venues and outlets. This capacity is not evenly circulating and is, like all other power dynamics, highly contested. A person subject to cancellation can and often does fight the hegemonic actuation of power with a distinct actuation of power. At the same time, power is operative throughout the broader context in which cancellation takes place, pushing wider audiences and distal participants to take part in cancellation. These include students, readers, viewers and others who indirectly participate in cancellation, either as proponents or opponents. Rather than simply being an example of “us” versus “them,” or however such groupings might be defined in a given space and time (see, e.g., Wodak, 2008), cancellation is a bumping up of one hegemonic configuration against another – it is one way of expressing the power of coercion and the regulation of consent clashing with another.

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Critical Discourse Studies

Any description, let alone interpretation, of a particular discursive ecology, particularly one with distinct and contrastively framed hegemonies at play such as cancel culture, requires a set of analytical tools that supersede those of linguistics as it is more traditionally defined. Discourse analysis developed as a separate subfield in the latter decades of the twentieth century, distinguishing itself from conversation analysis, which considers interaction in situ (see, e.g., Sidnell, 2010). Rejecting the notion that the only components of human semiotic productivity and exchange that could be analyzed were those immediately present, discourse analysis specifically affords a place for those hidden or opaque elements that were introduced in Chapter 6: power, authority, prior knowledge and shared cultural schemata. Soon after this, the subfield of critical discourse analysis (CDA) – now more often, and perhaps more appropriately, labelled critical discourse studies (CDS) – emerged in its own right, quickly becoming associated with engaged scholarship looking at pressing social issues like poverty, racism and violence (Wodak, 2013; Wodak & Meyer, 2016). According to Luke (2002), CDA/CDS is “a principled and transparent shunting back and forth between the microanalysis of texts using varied tools of linguistics, semiotic, and literary analysis and the macroanalysis of social formations, institutions, and power relations that these texts index and construct” (2002, p. 100). This formalization anchors CDA/CDS and any specific line of inquiry to an anthropological frame, where discourses stand in a bivalent relationship between ideologized collectives, mediating the ways in which power and capacity are conceived and transmitted within them. In effect, the study of discourse is the study of hegemonies as they are accomplished through practice and text. Discussing how to apply CDA/CDS to real-life examples of discourse in the world, specifically instances that a critical stance understands to have negative impacts on the social order or society, Fairclough outlines four steps (2012, p. 13): Step 1: Focus on a social wrong, in its semiotic aspects Step 2: Identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong Step 3: Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong Step 4: Identify possible ways past the obstacle In the first moment, a problem or concern is identified and its semiotic or meaning-making and meaning-negotiating components are made clear. Next, attention is turned to the ways in which the social order is structured, such that the issue at hand is not normally attended to and thus persists. Subsequently, the question is asked as to whether this wrong or problem is

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inherent to the social order in question. Finally, through transdisciplinary exposition of the structuring of different aspects of this dynamic, including power and hegemonic configurations, paths of change are pointed out. From this rhythm or approach, CDA/CDS need not be simply descriptive but can also be disruptive: the dynamics of power and authority, hegemonies and ideologies are all situated as objects not just to understand but to challenge and undo. The four-step outline can be readily applied to the case of cancellation and cancel culture – and this, from either side of the ideological equation, although it should be clear at this point that the affordances of the one are not equal to those of the other (indeed, the objects of cancellation are often persons or communities who have long maintained outsized access to power, quite frequently naturalized in hegemonic configurations). Consider again the case of Dilbert creator Adams and his podcast. In a first step, the analyst might identify the social wrong as the languaging of a form that, to paraphrase Butler, re-opens a long-standing wound, one that few would deny. In this instance, the wrong can be summarized as the promotion of pro-white racism, albeit masked under a dubious cover of scientific verbiage afforded by a clumsily articulated, rather obviously biased poll. Obstacles to addressing this social wrong are, of course, numerous but also much more controverted. These include interleaved discourses (e.g. Freedom, see discussion to follow) and competing ideologies, such as resistance to political correctness. These obstacles work in such a way as to render the problem less visible to many and any structural and institutional underpinnings of the dynamic mythologically normalized, if not uncontroverted. The next step is where analysis becomes much trickier, as it requires interrogation not only of the participants in this setting but of the entire discursive system in which this setting is integrated. Does the social order require that there be differential access to the rules of languaging, such that a few can and most cannot achieve powerful ends through their own outsized transitivity? Is the disparate access to power – the conventions that govern how different languagings and languaging practices will be understood, for example, as transgressive or acceptable – a foundational hegemony of the wider system of relations active in this anthropological situation, both locally and more globally? Obviously, an answer to these questions is far beyond the scope of the present chapter, one that seeks to introduce ideas rather than to provide a full analysis. It is, however, crucial that analysis take these into account, if only to avoid blindly replacing one top-down hegemony with another. This leaves the last step, that of outlining mechanisms that might allow participants to move past these obstacles, for another work and for other researchers. By proceeding through each of the steps, a critically grounded understanding of what is happening in the moment

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of cancellation (i.e. following transgression and perhaps provoking subsequent transgression) becomes much clearer, as do the theretofore largely hidden hegemonies that are involved in the broader dynamic. The question of whether this is justified or whether this is little more than collective vigilantism also becomes clearer, as the very question of what is wrong – that is, what is transgressive – cannot be left unaddressed. Tying It Together

Through a closer examination of the discursive ecosystem in which cancellation takes place, it is possible to reconsider what is occurring in moments like those reviewed earlier. Most obviously, these begin with a languaging act, one that is judged to be transgressive and is then met with a response. All such languaging is preceded and scaffolded by discursive knowledge, ranging from Freedom, involving mythologies and ideologies pertinent to individual and collective powers as potentialities of action, to Political Correctness or those shared, but held-in-tension schemata of cultural knowledge pertaining to what is and is not considered reaction-worthy, as well as by whom it might be so understood and the scope and justification of any reaction. In sum, cancellation is one of many realizations of the internally held, widely shared, hegemonically configured ways of apprehending and interpreting languagers and their languagings, countering these when they are believed to have transgressed different ideological boundaries, while also subsequently reacting to this initial reaction. These are little more than discursive battlegrounds, ones in which surface manifestations of contestation and power belie long-standing tensions regarding who should “call the shots” when it comes to not just languaging but the very nature of languaging and its assumed effects. What is distinct – and distinctly interesting – about instances that have been subsumed under the heading of cancellation and cancel culture is not primarily the original transgression that motivates this label (regardless of what one thinks or how one feels about this moment). Rather, it is what happens next and the ways in which languagers, languaging communities and communities of languaging do power and accomplish hegemonies through these reactions. By enacting cancellation, or at least calling for such, they make both real and observable those hierarchies of power and authority, as well as their ideological underpinnings, that are normally invisible or unacknowledged. When Dilbert creator Adams crossed lines of shared decorum by labelling Black Americans a hate group, different communities enacted power by de-platforming him. When he labelled this response as cancellation, he summoned additional forces, ones that are preconditioned to discursively frame such consequentiality as victimizing. More than a simple

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confrontation of distinct perspectives as to what does or does not constitute legitimate public languaging (although such is certainly also part of the discursive ecology), this is a clash between two ideologically bounded communities and a destabilization of pre-existing hegemonies: an ecological collective within which there are two sub-ecologies, operating with their own mythological truths and ideological perspectives, through which powers and configurations of possibility are naturalized. Seeing the clash of these two discursive sub-realities for what they are – competing consequentialities of consequence and reactive reactionaries – does much to make this world more visible and, perhaps, more easily disrupted in the future.

A Closer Look: Political Correctness and Cancel Culture Cancel culture, at least as it is being lived out in much of the Anglophone world at present, can be understood as a discursive tension arising from the simultaneous proximation of different discourses and cultural actors. On the one side are discourses that might labelled under the heading Freedom, an umbrella used here to convey shared ideologies pertaining to individual liberty and rights, including the right to voice opinions contrary to mythological propriety or normativity. On the other are discourses of Responsibility and of Civility, particularly those arising from the very same ideological groundings that frame that which does and does not constitute appropriate, harmful, respectful or otherwise damaging semiotic action (see Chapter 6). Of course, these labels should be understood heuristically, as should be their discussion and representation. These are hardly new tensions, in this or any other linguacultural setting, echoing controversies of at least three decades prior, notably, those surrounding discourses more widely labelled Political Correctness (PC). Although a bit dated to present readership, many of the issues raised by Andrews (1996) continue to resonate, notably how cultural sensitivity, taboo and understandings of PC entwine and are reflected in contemporary views of cancellation. Revisiting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, American linguist Peirce notably resituates this by observing that the central concern of PC discourses is intent, notably, the intent of those promoting or resisting languaging practices labelled in this way (see also Bush, 1995, for a history of political correctness). This is similar to what Halmari (2011) makes clear in an analysis of “people-first” enlanguaged structures in print media, for example, the use of “person with a disability” versus “disabled person.” Distinguishing between people-first and -second practices, she notes that the former, cast

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as a euphemism, approximates these to positive values, whereas putatively undesirable values and connotations (e.g. applicable to prisoners) are projected through the latter. In effect, it is not only the fact of PC but its shape that demonstrates intent and contributes to broader discourses (in this case, Inclusiveness and Equality). Fairclough considers PC an enactment of cultural politics, attending to examples from the United Kingdom. He observes that controversy about PC is partly a controversy over languaging practices and enlanguagements, this given an assertion that linguistic change is frequently a precursor to cultural change. Following Williams (1981), he asserts that “culture [is] a ‘signifying system’ constituted as an articulation of representations, values and identities” (2003, p. 18). Much like consumer goods, language is “now consumed for [its] cultural or ‘sign’ value rather than just [its] ‘use’ value . . . [serving as] embodiments of cultural values and discourses, targeted with ever greater precision at culturally differentiated ‘niche markets’ ” (p. 19). Cultures thus exist as language action or what he refers to as discourses (following a small d understanding, as presented earlier), and, although culture, language and economics are analytically separate (i.e. are different but not discrete), they act collectively as a form of cultural governance. Accordingly, controversy over PC is situated within a shift in cultural politics, one that has moved beyond class structures of the past to a politics of recognition, identity and difference (what he refers to as both genre and style; p. 20). Fairclough distinguishes two forms of politicocultural action and their discursive reflexes: overt, akin to PC, at least according to those who critique it, which is illocutionary and involves asking, urging and demanding; and covert, which relies on power systems and is more aligned with neoliberalism, specifically the notion that any accomplishment can be done through individual agency (p. 21). Labelling and criticism of PC from the neoliberal right have been effective against the backdrop of other covert discursive moves, for example, the relabelling of ‘bank accounts’ as ‘financial instruments’ (pp. 21–22). Languaging and discursive representations are positioned within social practices, also giving rise to understandings of not just how things are but how they can be, at all levels. These imaginaries become enacted, often involving new discursive genres and languaging habits; they also become inculcated, involving new styles and the construction of new identities. Confrontation with the internal rigidities of structures and institutions can make discursive change difficult, thus making social change both fraught and controversial. Indeed, and taking a cue from Bourdieu, Fairclough notes that “socially constructive

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effects of discourses are contingent upon the resistances of structures and habituses” (2003, p. 24).10 In a similar vein, Thiele (2021) reconsiders the ways in which controversies surrounding language forms and their use are inherently steeped in issues of power and privilege (see previous discussion). Crucially, the question of individual or collective liberty is not uniform but is entrenched with inherited privileges and freedoms, a reconsideration of freedom as absolute and neutrally distributed that is also echoed in Nelson (2021). One person’s freedom can be seen as another’s constraint, if not outright enslavement, a tension that echoes throughout the history of the US – and certainly not only the US. Calls for freedom, whether they involve languaging or economic activity or any other domain of civic life, can thus be recast as assertions of power over those who must acquiesce to the purported freedom of another. In other words, freedom and discourses of freedom are intimately associated with symbolic power and symbolic violence and, at times, with outright physical power and violence. Freedom can never be rightly viewed as a neutral, aprioristically framed ideology applicable evenly or to all. Discourses such as PC and Freedom are intimately woven into the discursive construction of Cancellation and reactions to it. Those moments of transgressive languaging that trigger cancellation and all that this entails are not merely languagers “gone rogue,” although this is certainly part of the discursive ecosystem in question. Rather, these are moments in which a languaging community and communities of languaging are required to act and react in ways that are predicated by meta-discursive knowledge and understandings. Cancellation restricts the ability of the languager to participate in linguistic life and to be active in a social, cultural, economic and political community. These are also moments in which dynamically structured webs of symbolic violence and transitive power collide, and through which different hegemonies are laid bare. In the case of cancel culture, understood in the broadest light, languaging functions much like a double-edged sword of hegemony, being a manifestation of one dynamic (e.g. that which asserts the right to speak), while reflective of another (e.g. an assertion of reactive capacity, specifically the right to silence). It is thus possible to reconsider instances of cancellation such as the controversy surrounding Adams’ podcast and the responses it engendered as a clash not simply of antagonistic discursive powers but one of competing hegemonies. On the one hand is a power dynamic that would assert the right to speak one’s mind, even if the ideas expressed transgress widely shared boundaries of propriety and civility,

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one that is predicated on the ability (i.e. access to power) to speak to an audience that is already primed to listen and receive this message. On the other hand are assertions of the right to respond to such languagings and to reassert boundaries that have been transgressed by removing access to such audiences and the mechanisms that bring them into contiguity with the original languager (i.e. a denial of access to power). Cancellation is, in effect, a type of interpolation, pace Althusser (1967), by calling out a languager-doer who is, through this, rendered less capable of doing, while also calling forth languager-respondents. This further aligns with the ways in which other controversial languaging moments have been viewed, for example, those labelled hate speech, as discussed in Chapter 6.

Discussion Questions

• Cite another instance of cancellation – one that has been labelled this way in the press or other media sources or one that you understand in this way. What languagers and languaging acts were involved in this moment and in the reaction to it? What controversies about the original languaging event and any reactive moments arose? What broader discourses preceded this moment, allowing it to be understood (by some at least) as a justified or unjustified cancellation? • What are some additional ideologies and mythologies involved in cancel culture (accepting this as a heuristic for discussion)? Do these differ between communities of languaging and within a broader languaging community? How might these different discourses contribute to contrastive or complementary understandings of cancellation? • Consider Fairclough’s four-stage approach to CDA/CDS. Using this approach, outline a possible critical discourse project of study. In what ways might concepts evoked in this chapter – cancellation or the consequential reaction to transgressive languaging – be implicated in your project? • How can you describe and possibly attenuate the tension inherent to critical approaches to discourse and languaging with questions of your own power and position? How might a specific incident of cancellation be recast as a manifestation of symbolic violence, perhaps in reaction to a preceding act of symbolic violence? Further Reading

Those interested in more general background to cancel culture will find no end of possible readings, written from points of view spanning the sociopolitical spectrum. Examples of these include Ernest Owens’ essay The Case for

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Cancel Culture: How This Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us all and Dan Kovalik’s Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture. A  distinctly academic approach is offered by Eve Ng, whose work Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis offers particularly helpful insights into the question from a more critically grounded basis. Those who wish to explore CDA/CDS will find Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer’s edited volume, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (third edition), a particularly useful and approachable foundation to the field, as it includes many of the most prominent scholars in its table of contents. Additional foundations can be taken from Norman Fairclough’s compendium Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. For questions of hegemony, particularly as these intersect with language, Ives’ Language and Hegemony in Gramsci offers an invaluable re-reading of Gramsci’s life and work, as well as a useful connection to contemporary thinking around both the term and its historical precedents. Notes 1 https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1628460192932237313 2 www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159605012/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-adamsrant-rebuke 3 Other examples of cancellation, such as that applied to film producer Harvey Weinstein or comedian Bill Cosby, involve, in the first instance, allegations of physical transgression and, in both cases, sexual assault and rape. As important as those events are, discussion here is limited to transgressive languaging. 4 www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/books/simon-schuster-josh-hawley-book. html 5 www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/sports/football/aaron-rodgers-fined-bythe-nfl-over-vaccination-rules-says-he-will-stay-with-the-packers.html 6 See Rizzacasa d’Orsogna (2022) for a useful perspective from outside the these contexts. 7 Woke capitalism is used to refer to the practice through which corporations “purport to take stands against social injustice by removing a person from a job or releasing a statement, without making any substantial changes to the systems that allow those behaviours or beliefs to perpetuate” (Sailofsky, 2021, p. 4, see also Lewis, 2020). 8 www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516473521/after-commentson-pedophilia-breitbart-editor-milo-yiannopoulos-resigns 9 By convention, relatively bounded discourses are presented in small capitals, in this instance using Sport as shorthand referring to a broader construct that encompasses both professional and amateur competitions, athletes, indirect group participation (e.g. fan clubs) and much more. 10 Fairclough also notes that many of the issues commonly associated with political correctness arise from hard-headedness and arrogance that are commonly associated with the left, that is, with the proponents of such discursive and languaging hygienic practices (2003, p. 25).

8 LANGUAGING REBELLION When Pussy Grabs Back

Key Concepts

• • • •

Language rebellion Reclamation and reappropriation Resignification Liberation

In early August  2020, Atlantic Records released “WAP,” an acronym for Wet Ass Pussy, by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.1 The track (and its corresponding music video) was a nearly instantaneous hit and remained at the top of charts, eventually becoming one of the most popular musical numbers of the decade. Given its lyrics and frank celebration of female sexuality, it is unsurprising that the piece and its two artists were also the object of controversy, meeting stern criticism from social and political conservatives such as US Congressional hopeful Deann Lorraine, who went so far as to claim that “WAP” had set “the entire female gender back by 100 years.”2 Others, such as shock-jock and arch-conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, drew unflattering comparisons between this song and the controversies surrounding former president Trump’s use of pussy, as presented in Chapter 2.3 This chapter examines “WAP” and similar examples of wilfully transgressive, provocative languaging. These are reframed as acts of linguistic rebellion, akin to revolts taking place in the non-semiotic sphere. Alternatively labelled reclamation, re-appropriation and rehabilitation, all of these DOI: 10.4324/9781003227427-8

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actions amount to open revolt against entrenched systems of power and established authority, as well as the often-hidden hegemonies that govern the ways that doing language and doing power differentially affect languaging communities, communities of languagers and any number of persons within them. It is fitting that the last chapter of this book returns to pussy, a form that perhaps more than any other has exemplified linguistic transgression over the past decade. This nearly derailed a presidential campaign and became a powerful unifying force against its eventual administration, and yet it has resurfaced in ways that arguably have not yet been fully digested. The chapter begins by describing “WAP” and its linguacultural background, particularly how this might be interpreted as an act of rebellion against prevailing norms of conduct regulating Black female sexuality. It then turns to specific concepts allowing for the description of linguistic rebellion: reclamation and re-appropriation, resignification, and liberation. Along with other examples involving pussy, several additional contemporary cases are presented, including those centring around the use of slut and woke/wokeness. The chapter concludes by stepping into the question of successful or unsuccessful examples of linguistic rebellion, showing how “WAP” and other events can be understood as acts of defiance against deep-seated hegemonies and as attempts to disrupt established discursive ecologies. Transgression at the Top of the Charts

Already famous (or perhaps infamous) for provocative lyrics and visual performances that unashamedly challenge mainstream ideologies pertaining to female sexuality, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion did not pull any punches when it came to languaging transgression in “WAP.” From the very first line, the number presents a series of unabashedly open and celebratory representations of sexual intercourse, especially ones that situate females as agents of their own pleasure and men as tasked with providing it.4 Few, if any, proficient audience members have any doubt as to the type of activity referenced in these lyrics, let alone how the artists frame these actions. Produced and distributed within a cultural backdrop where discourses of sexual propriety intersect with those pertaining to race and gender (among much else), “WAP” centres the Black female, making nearly unmasked references to the importance of women in their own sexual gratification and the seemingly dominated, subservient role of men as instruments of this (Bahn, 2021; Mackay, 2021; Pereira, 2022). Cardi B’s fans were quick to point out that this song, like much of her opus, can be read as both feminist and anti-racist. Her work represents females and female sexuality as both empowered and empowering, candidly

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referencing bodily acceptance and desire, while also questioning the presumed supremacy of male sexual authority (see Crooks et al., 2019; Matthews, 2018). Beyond mere musical innovation, Guardian commentator Betsy Reed suggests that “WAP” constitutes a provocative transgression of masocentric and racist cultural tropes, observing that “there is something rebellious and subversive in women, especially oft-oversexualized black women, openly discussing enthusiasm and predilections for intercourse.”5 Detractors, never far to hand when it concerns this genre (let alone female artists who openly challenge status quo power dynamics) focused much of their outrage on the imagery accompanying the equally successful music video and, especially, the artists’ linguistic choices. These included dozens of dysphemisms referring to sex and genitalia, for example, fucking, king cobra and make it cream, racially loaded terms, most prominently nigga, and blunt, if somewhat euphemistically dysphemistic evocations of sexual acts, conveying frank images of oral sex and obliquely referencing mythologies pertinent to the size of Black men’s penises (Grov et  al., 2015; PoulsonBryant, 2005). Clearly, “WAP” represents a form of linguistic boundary crossing – and one that was subject to explicit control at that. It could not be played in its original, uncensored form on most radio stations and even many satellite networks, nor could journalists or critics openly cite different portions of the piece. At the same time, the very performance of “WAP” was understood by all – fans and detractors alike – as an act of purposeful provocation and a contravention of normative pressures on languaging, as if the artists were thumbing their noses at the boundaries that they crossed and, most notably, at those authorities who were understood to have drawn such lines and enforced their regulation. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion offered no apologies, not even an equivocating expression of regret similar to that provided by erstwhile candidate Trump upon the release of the Access Hollywood tape; instead, they performed the song at the 63rd annual Grammy Awards to a packed house. Linguistic Rebellion

Like more canonical forms of rebellion, such as ones that recall images of protesters defying tanks in Tiananmen Square or Black Lives Matter activists forcibly removing the statue of a Confederate general, acts of linguistic rebellion reject established authorities and seek to upend entrenched systems of governance and the hegemonies that buttress them. These can be thought of as uprisings targeting dynamics that dictate how languagers are supposed behave and that inaugurate the physical and moral institutions to which they are expected to acquiesce. When languagers refuse to

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comply with coercive pressures and reject – perhaps even eventually overturning – the authorities enforcing them, it is as if they have declared war on established discourses and hegemonies, as well as upon any languagers who stand by all that is conventional and accepted. In many ways, linguistic rebellion is not unlike more familiar insurgencies taking place in the physical realm. Rebels who burnish arms or launch pipe bombs do so with the goal of upsetting established orders, frequently inflicting physical injury on or even causing the death of their adversaries and others in their path. At times, such a rebellion is highly planned, with committees and other institutions calling the shots; at others, it takes on an ersatz quality, such as the events of 6 January, 2021, when pro-Trump insurgents storming the US capitol wielded fire extinguishers and other homemade weapons against overwhelmed police. In all cases, regardless of whether a given uprising is ultimately successful or is quelled, rebellion involves a call to and picking up of arms, identification of a target or targets, and action directed toward and upon this target with the ultimate goal of upending some facet of “the way things are.” Rebellion thus manifests and even concretizes the ideological lines between one and the other side, frequently forcing those who might otherwise wish to be neutral to align themselves in one or another manner. Unlike other forms of protest, however, linguistic rebellion takes place in the semiotic spheres of languaging and is manifested through enlanguagement. Rather than guns and fists, linguistic rebellion wields forms and structures, most often deploying these in innovative and controversial utterances and performances. Frequently, such agitation points to the underlying discrepancies and imbalances that allow some actors a greater impact, while affording others limited or even non-existent roles in languaging. Linguistic rebellion as such is far more common than physically and materially manifested acts of revolt, occurring around dinner tables and in friend groups, office meetings and social clubs, as well as across any number of other linguacultural spaces – and this on a nearly daily basis. Indeed, many of the examples of controversial transgression and reactions to this – notably instances that have prompted cancellation (see Chapter 7) – can also be considered moments of linguistic rebellion: a languager or community of languaging demands changes to the ways in which another languager or community acts, at times bringing the weight of various institutions (e.g. social media) and structures (e.g. publication contracts) to bear on those whose power or authority they wish to see diminished or eliminated (Jeshion, 2020). Most readers are already familiar with linguistic rebellion, although perhaps not under this heading. This is in part due to the inherent instability of languaging as both verbal and ideological action. The forms, structures and other patterned components of linguistic life are always changing, usually in ways that go unnoticed but at times in ways that are explicitly associated

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with power, authority and the very ideological systems in and through which languaging is accomplished. However, not all acts of linguistic rebellion are the same in either scope or content. For this reason, it is helpful to tease apart some of these differences, while also reviewing how they are presented in antecedent literature. Primary focus in this discussion is given to linguistic forms, in part because these are often the most visible instruments of rebellion and are often readily acknowledged as such by supporters and detractors alike; of course, this should not be taken to mean that other facets of languaging are not implicated in such dynamics.6 Additional distinctions are motivated by terminological conventions, as well as from a more explicit acknowledgement of the inchoative nature of rebellious acts, from which three broad tendencies can be observed: reclamation and re-appropriation, rehabilitation, and resignification. In instances of reclamation, a form or other enlanguaged element is targeted to be “taken over” or repossessed. This goal is broadly similar to that of re-appropriation, when forms are “taken back,” often involving those that are or were used to denigrate or demean a person or group (Cervone et al., 2021; Galinsky et al., 2013; Godrej, 2011; Popa-Wyatt, 2020). Reclamation and re-appropriation are actions through which languagers assert or re-assert propriety over a definable target, such as a form, a way of speaking or gesturing, or the ability to participate in discursive action. Of these, actions directed at forms are perhaps the most common. In Anglophone linguacultural spaces, for example, recent years have seen the re-appropriation of queer, once a slur deriding homosexual men and now more often used to refer to persons who celebrate their non-heteronormativity (Brontesma, 2004); slut, which retains much of its previous denotative content, while having, among some communities of languagers at least, shed several of its negative connotations (Montell, 2019; Washington, 2020); and crip, a truncation of cripple that is increasingly used as a form of positive group or self-identification (Slater & Liddiard, 2018). In each case, persons and groups once denigrated by the form stake a claim over it, one that invalidates (at least for some) its negative connotations and associations. The line between reclamation and reappropriation is hardly neat, as it is rarely, if ever, clear how or in what manner a particular form might “belong” to a particular community of languaging or how it might rightly assert or re-assert supposed “ownership” over such components of linguistic life. From a practical standpoint, it can be useful to allow this blurring to stand and, at least as a means of describing the ideological component of this rebellious act, to allow labelling to emerge from those accomplishing it. Some languagers and communities of languagers will view a particular action as “taking over” and others as “taking back.” Regardless of these tensions, what is compelling in instances of reclamation and re-appropriation is the teleology manifested by such languagings,

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a notable example of which involves yet again pussy.7 In the months that followed the election of Trump in 2016, hundreds of thousands – very likely millions – of women, as well as men and persons who do not identify within traditional gender binarities, asserted a claim on the form in a specific, simultaneously semiotic and embodied manner: they donned pussyhats, pink knit caps that stood in as an act of protest against the incipient administration and its policies. As interesting as the object and its use might be, focus can be turned to the way in which languagers both “took back” and “took over” pussy and, in so doing, asserted their right to incorporate this into what might otherwise be understood as a banal component of linguistic activity. No longer limited to the masocentric confines of locker rooms, whether literal or metaphoric, pussy was put on display for all to see. Certainly, this involved the activation of semantic denotations, notably ‘female genitalia,’ but it also very explicitly involved the form, itself, as a mix of banalization and radicalization on display in the streets of cities around the country and world, as seen in the linked image available in the endnotes.8 In these and other acts of linguistic (and, more broadly, semiotic) rebellion, pussy and snatch, with all of their semantic weight and pragmatic import (remaining at the very least connoted to femaleness, in general, and to female genitalia, specifically), exit the semiotic locker room that is restricted to only certain languagers (most often male), appearing on the street in a way that might have been considered vulgar, crass or insulting in other circumstances. Still transgressive, if only because any rebellion is a priori an act of boundary crossing, the foundations that allow the languaging of these forms to be considered taboo are undermined. Communities of languaging asserted a right to use these openly and, in so doing, to undermine power structures and established authorities that have theretofore confined them, while also asserting counter-dominant discourses aimed at Trump, his supporters and all that his movement and election represented. Something quite similar occurred in the case of slut, a form typically denoting a person of suspect sexual morality and behaviour, with strong connotative links to women and femaleness (entrenched enough, in fact, that this might actually be best considered a denotation, evidence for which includes use of the compound he-slut or male slut when referring to a man, albeit with greatly attenuated negative connotations). Given the increased attention to the ways in which women, and particularly their bodies and sexualities, are policed in contemporary society, such as the salience of acts of slut shaming, it is not surprising that this form has also been the object and instrument of linguistic rebellion. Slut shaming is not a defined legal or even moral concept, but it generally involves the overt and covert judgement, at times to the point of harassment, of an individual perceived to have transgressed sexual norms and ideologies. While not the exclusive purview

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of religious circles or conservative groups, it is closely associated with these, in part because of the relatively rigid understandings of sexuality shared by many faith leaders and adherents, as well as because of the differential association of gender to sexuality and sexual life (see, e.g., Montell, 2019; Sweeney, 2017). Reclaiming and re-appropriating the label slut thus subverts the ability of some to label women as objects of shame, a particularly powerful manifestation of linguistic rebellion in societies in which male and female sexualities are distinctly connoted and in which discourses surrounding these ideological divisions are simultaneously entrenched and powerful (see, e.g., Armstrong et al., 2014; Van Royen et al., 2018). If reclamation and re-appropriation involve the assumption of enlanguaged substance and its linguistic deployment in new ways, often taking place in spaces and at the hands of actors whose ability to do so was theretofore excluded or constrained, rehabilitation describes the realized or desired result of linguistic rebellion. Rehabilitation is thus both a distal goal and a tacit outcome. In the case of a rehabilitated person (very likely the origin of the metaphor in question), this can be thought of as the restoration of access to and participation in broader society; for enlanguagements, something similar holds true. Rehabilitating a form, for example, involves moving it from limited space into a broader, more collective one, such as the process whereby Black, denoting African American racio-ethnic identity, has emerged in broader usage in North American linguacultural contexts than in past decades (Coles, 2016). This, of course, begins with reclamation and efforts at re-appropriation specific to a linguacultural context but goes beyond it, as rehabilitation reverses some, if not most, of the taboos that might otherwise be associated with a given form. This is notably the case for queer, now widely used in a positive manner in a wide variety of settings, ranging from academic departments and disciplines (e.g. queer studies, queer theory) to slogans appearing in daily life (e.g. “queer and proud”). Pussy, for all the efforts to reclaim it, does not seem to have been fully rehabilitated, at least not to the extent seen in the case of queer. Languagers are undoubtedly using this in wider and less tightly constrained domains than before, but it would be specious to assert that (at least at the time of writing) it has been fully emancipated and broadly assimilated, such that pussy could be enlanguaged in diverse and varying circumstances (even when not referring to female genitalia). In effect, it is still a relatively taboo form, with one notable exception being ludic contexts such as stand-up comedy, where linguistic transgression is often the primary catalyst of humoristic action and reaction (Blake, 2018; Ross, 1998). It remains highly unlikely that pussy could be seen as anything but transgressive when uttered in wider society, let alone in a gynaecologist’s office, a university lecture or a family meal (see “A Closer Look,” further in this chapter).9

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If reclamation involves asserting rights to enlanguaged substances and rehabilitation the movement of these into broader or at least less negatively valued domains, resignification presents a distinct but parallel profile of linguistic rebellion, this due to the target of any such action. Resignification a priori concerns not access to or ownership of a form or structure but its meaning, including denotations, connotations and associations. Resignification occurs in fact on a daily basis, constituting one of the many changes that can be said to define the life of languagers and communities, while also arising from the understanding of language-as-verb (Chapter 1) and languageas-ideology (Chapter 4). Because languagers and languaging communities are constantly shifting and changing, the semantic qualities and properties that they deploy and to which their ideological realities are subject are also dynamic. This can be seen in several rather banal examples, such as the shifting meanings associated with douche. Borrowed from French with the meaning ‘shower,’ this form underwent resignification and currently points to two denotations: ‘vaginal cleansing technique’ and ‘person of little worth or value’ (the latter is often enlanguaged within the compound douchebag, sometimes euphemistically rendered d-bag; Moor, 2018). Of course, resignification is also seen in much more impactful examples that have or continue to be understood as transgressive, as in the example of retard. Originally ascribed to a person whose cognitive and developmental maturation was delayed vis-à-vis a fixed norm (reflecting the form’s original meaning, borrowed from Latin via French), it came to take on highly pejorative connotations, even when referring to a person whose behaviour is seen as petulant, unworthy or bothersome (Rix, 2022). All examples of resignification are necessarily examples of semantic change; however, not all semantic changes may be labelled resignification. This is because resignification involves purposeful action by languagers. Of course, and as is often the case when languagers grasp at power and confront authority, it is not always the case that these goals are explicitly acknowledged. One example that, at least as of the moment of writing this chapter, is of great interest in contemporary US political culture concerns the meaning and content of meanings linked to woke. For previous generations, this form likely signified something along the lines of ‘awakened’ or ‘no longer sleeping,’ typically as a verb (e.g. “they woke at 6 am for an early flight”). Woke underwent a collective resignification during the Obama presidency, becoming understood as referring to a person who is ‘aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)’ (as codified by The Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Saying “they’re woke” in reference to a specific person thus came to signify their cultural, political, economic and social positioning, with clear associations to progressive stances (Gil, 2023; Richardson  & Ragland, 2018). Soon

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enough – and perhaps inevitably given the neoliberal capitalist meta-frames active within US (and not only) linguacultures and related sociopolitical discourses – many prominent corporations took on wokeness as a means of demonstrating their commitment to diversity, climate sensitivity and other social concerns typically associated with the political and cultural left. As with all areas of languaging and any avenue of enlanguagement, but particularly those adjacent to symbolic capital in the domains of politics and cultural powers, the resignification of woke did not end with this moment, as such change can be and very often is cyclical, particularly when taking place in discursive ecologies characterized by polarized ideological camps and respective communities of languaging. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a distinct and distinctly antithetical resignification became layered atop that just noted, this time emerging from the political and cultural right wing in the very same linguacultural backdrop. Woke became understood to signify ‘politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme,’ again according to MerriamWebster. Politicians and other cultural pundits lament wokeism as something distinct from the prior resignification, seeing this instead as a type of tyranny. This is amply demonstrated in press conferences and other moments, such as those in which Florida governor and social conservative activist-politician Ron DeSantis appeared at podiums bedecked with overt messaging to “stop woke” as a means of preserving putative freedoms.10 Through such linguistic and visual semiotic action, the semantic content of woke and wokeness is called into question. Far from having positive connotations, these are explicitly framed as negative and dangerous, something that needs to be stopped – with codified and specific governmental intervention.11 In this and many other instances, one act of linguistic rebellion prompted an act of counterrebellion at the hands of those whose access to symbolic (alongside social, political and economic) capital was directly challenged. Transgression as Liberation

A foundational assertion taken from the beginning of this book is that languages do not exist but are done. What, then, does this have to say about the types of rebellious linguistic behaviour described here, let alone the likely infinite number of similar examples that might be cited in various and different linguacultures, spaces and times? How can any scholar conceive or reconceive of these rebellious acts and do so in a manner that coheres with the understanding of language-as-verb, taking into account the hidden dynamics and structures that are understood as being accomplished and accomplishing through languaging and by languagers, as outlined in preceding chapters?

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One possible avenue for understanding such moments and actions, like any rebellion, is to reframe these as liberatory acts that seek to free languaging and languagers from the outsized transitivity of those who hold authority and the power that they wield, as well as the hegemonic dynamics that govern and reinforce these patterns. While not all rebellious acts have defined goals – sometimes, rebellion is simply an act of defiance, without a clear vision of outcome or finality – they all come from a place of reaction and revindication: something or someone is felt to stand in the way of a person’s or a community’s ability to accomplish something. When teenagers push back against the authority of their parents, demanding more autonomy, they are rebelling against a specific institutionalization of power and authority. When languagers who do not identify within traditional manwoman gender binaries coin and promote the use of innovative forms, such as the English Mx or ze, French iel or yelle, or the Spanish elle, they are engaging in linguistic rebellion for the purpose of self-liberation, that is, for the ability to be effable and legible (Knisely, 2020; Knisely & Russell, 2024; López, 2019; Russell, 2024; Zimman, 2019). And when Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion rap the lyrics of “WAP,” they insert themselves into a discourse ecology and assert women as agents within spaces from which they – like so many others – have been excluded. Men are allowed to enlanguage pussy; men – and especially white, affluent men like former president Trump – are afforded centrality in the embodiment and enlanguagement of sexuality; men – and very notably those in positions of authority – are excused, sometimes explicitly, much more frequently implicitly, when they transgress mythological and ideological lines that scaffold sexuality and constrain its accepted enlanguagement. For proof of this, one need only recognize that former president Trump suffered precious few consequences for asserting that he could “grab [women] by the pussy,” perhaps because, in his own words, “when you’re famous, they just let you.” Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and others, on the other hand, are still branded as linguistic mercenaries, certainly famous for some and celebrated by many, but quite obviously denigrated by and infamous in the eyes of many more. It is impossible to know with any certainty whether or to what extent Trump’s languaging inspired the rebellious acts of Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and their colleagues, but it is certainly possible to interpret the proliferation of enlanguagements of pussy (and not only) that followed his election and inauguration as very explicit rebellions, having as their ultimate goal the liberation of this form and, more importantly, all that is enlanguaged by it. This is nothing less than an attempted emancipation of those who have pussies from the unquestioned grasp of male physical, semiotic and socioeconomic authority, as well as the liberation of languagers from the bounds put on languaging itself, ones that dictate that certain acts (notably, enlanguaging pussy) are reserved for certain actors (notably, powerful men who, more

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often than not, are white and straight). Of course, all of this is ideologically grounded and discursively bounded. One person’s freedom is another’s oppression, although we are often left wanting to recognize it as such, particularly when the other is someone who has long been oppressed. Maggie Nelson elegantly makes this point in her 2021 collection of essays, noting that freedom is always a tenuous signifier, perhaps what in this book might be best defined as a signifier that is more than just slippery, but elusive and always contested. Recognition of this does not deter from the ability to critically approach linguistic liberation, in its varying forms and practices, even if it does call those of us who examine languaging and enlanguagements to hold all concepts of liberation and liberatory action in a difficult tension. Linguistic rebellion – languaging activity that specifically and purposefully transgresses extant frontiers, be these of prudence, possibility or politeness – constitutes nothing less than social action through enlanguaged reaction. This is a sometimes mundane, sometimes explosive form of activism that works through the mechanisms of both language-as-verb and language-asideology. On the former end of the equation, linguistic liberation requires languaging – certainly the doing of language, but also the doing of language in certain spaces and configurations, among certain publics, and in certain manners or following certain pathways. To language rebelliously is to speak or sign, write or tweet with the goal of not just crossing boundaries but upending and eventually erasing these. In the latter sense, that of languageas-ideology, language liberation requires a boundary crossing of a different sort, one operating in the individual and social collective of schemata and patterns and one that seeks not only to disrespect these conceptual formations but to upend and even destroy them, regardless of whether it replaces them with something else or simply does away with them in the ideational spaces and places of collective and individual reality. This “burn it down” and “blow it up” component of liberation (Knisely & Russell, 2024) involves that which Halberstam and others refer to as acts of queer failure and queer destruction, doings that purposefully seek to undo and not explicitly redo (see especially 2011, 2021). This is, in effect, an upending of hegemony, a ‘de-tabooing’ and ‘re-legitimizing’ through languaging and through enlanguagement. Tying It Together

The preceding discussion centres around several signs, particularly pussy, that are normally considered to be transgressive and understood by most languagers as forms that should not be enlanguaged and referents that should not be evoked, at least, not outside of the metaphorical locker rooms of linguistic life. These strictures are of course a matter of power and authority, integrated as they are within discourses and hegemonic dynamics to which

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the vast majority of languagers consent, most often with little thought or concern. And yet, some languagers have risen up and sought to disrupt these dynamics. In many instances, languaging rebellions have been successful; in others, the entrenched ideological foundations of languaging and of languaging communities seem impervious to any such subversive action. What is clear, whether it concerns the lyrics of a prominent rap artist or the banner held by a protester on city streets, is that pussy is no longer the same linguistic sign it was in 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape was leaked to the press. Of course, it is also the case that various languagings of pussy diverge, for reasons that have been made clear throughout this book. It is not simply the form nor its denotation that counts when it comes to judging an act as transgressive, let alone the content and scope of the transgression, its effect and its affect. Pussy in the mouth of a 70-some-year-old white, conservative male whose source of power is rather conventional, deriving from money and social standing, is not the same thing as in the mouth of a 20-something female of colour, whose power emerges from a small, often marginalized, racial, ethnic and cultural community, as well as from their challenging the power of people like the aforementioned white male and his entourage. Whereas the former enlanguagement of pussy is an act that reiterates authority and power from above, the latter can be understood as an act that attempts to reclaim authority and power from below. It is no less than an act of linguistic rebellion. And like other rebellions, such as those that take place in the political or economic realm, linguistic rebellion always testifies to complex dynamics that precede and enact it, as well as to the instabilities that gird its reception. Where more familiar forms of rebellion involve hurling Molotov cocktails or smashing windows, these implicate languaging in what might be considered its purest and most agentive state – the hurling of forms and utterances, the smashing of meanings and their content. By reclaiming forms that have been subject to prior social constrictions, and by resignifying the semantic content of these, languagers are subverting largely hidden, but widely felt power structures, as well as their ideological and mythological underpinnings. They are refusing to consent to prior coercions and, in so doing, are throwing a wrench in the workings of long-standing hegemonic configurations, shifting the discursive ecology of societies through such action. After all, it is not really the form pussy or one of its meanings (be this ‘female genitalia’ or ‘cowardly person’) that appears to be the primary focus of rebellion; it is the broader and more entrenched semiotic weight of these languaging realities. When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion rap without shame – indeed, when they do this in celebration – and rise to the top of the charts around the world, they are very openly calling for the upending of an entire discursive and linguistically realized world. When feminists and their allies reappropriate slut and

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render this as connotatively linked to something other than ‘shameful,’ they are disrupting the power structures that would ensmall and diminish female sexual and physical agency. And when well-intentioned callers to a prominent podcast deny the negative connotations of pussy (see following), those that languagers use to denigrate persons suspected of a lack of bravery or tenacity, instead insisting that this form connotes ‘strength’ and ‘life,’ they are seeking to modify far more than languaging habits, but an entire world.

A Closer Look: Pussy Two Ways Obviously, reclamation, rehabilitation and resignification can all be considered transgressive languagings in their own right, albeit ones that are distinct from those transgressions examined in Chapters 2–7. When feminist activists reclaim pussy, they transgress often unseen boundaries that have long given men claim to this form. No longer simply a component of so-called locker room talk, they assert (or perhaps more pointedly, they re-assert) a form of ownership – pussy belongs to those who have pussies, not just to those who wish to grab them.12 Other actions, such as the overt insertion of these forms into the public domains of hat-wearing and slogan-brandishing, constitute a somewhat different form of transgression, one that crosses the boundary of what is and is not languaged at the same time that it inverts the power structures determining such ideological boundaries. Especially in the first area of languaging, but also in the second, the insertion and assertion of a linguistic sign that theretofore was ideologically limited to the locker room or similar domains of privacy, with its semantic connotations of vulgarity and lowbrow manners as well as its strong associations to misogyny, certainly cross many discursive and ideological confines. But has pussy undergone complete resignification, a change in its meaning or components of meaning, akin to woke or any number of other examples that might be named? That is certainly a matter that is far less clear, especially given the vast counterevidence as to the status of this form and the entrenched power structures that render it off-limits in the vast majority of languaging contexts. An interesting example of proposed resignification concerning pussy was put forth in sex and advice columnist Dan Savage’s podcast, The Savage Lovecast.13 In episode 27, originally aired on 25 April, 2007, an anonymous caller first showers Savage with praise for his program and work, and then turns their attention to the meanings activated by this:14 [caller objects to] when you are criticizing someone, often very rightfully so and you . . . instead of telling them to muster up some courage

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or, I don’t know, we have to figure out a better way of saying this you say ‘stop being such a pussy!’ and I mean pussies are this large network of really strong muscles they can clench dicks they can push . . . out babies they are very strong telling someone to not be a pussy is telling them to be strong powerful in charge life giving I mean it doesn’t get much better than that I think it’s a confused criticism And I dare you to come up with something better than calling someone a pussy Or: start calling them a pussy when you want them to be courageous Say ‘be a pussy!’ ‘be strong get it on!’ In this moment, the caller is inviting an act of resignification, challenging Savage not to simply stop calling persons he finds to be lacking in courage pussies, thus activating the meaning ‘cowardly’ (see Chapters 2 and 3; it is worth nothing that Savage denies referring to people in this way). Instead, they call for an inverted resignification of the form, based in part on one of the other polysemous denotations of pussy, specifically ‘female genitalia.’ In so doing, the connotations of this referent come into play, specifically the caller’s assertions of connotations ‘strength’ and ‘life-giving’. This moment has to do with the ideological component of language and its bases in authority, as the caller is asserting a right to language in a certain way, specifically to activate or not activate particular components of signification associated with pussy, while also inviting Savage to follow along. Is this a successful instance of resignification? Has pussy lost its semantic denotation of ‘person lacking in courage’ and concomitant connotations of ‘weakness’? Perhaps this has transpired in small circles and with a handful of languagers, but it does not seem to have taken wider hold, an assertion that is bolstered by the very instances in which pussy has been the object of reclamation and rehabilitation, as discussed previously. Were pussy to denote ‘a person of courage and strength, one who is life-giving and powerful,’ as suggested by the podcast caller, would such acts of formal reclamation and rehabilitation be necessary or even possible? These queries must remain, at least at present, unanswered. It is also unclear whether any attempts at connotative resignification might or even could mitigate the taboo associated with this sign. Regardless of whether female genitalia are connoted as strong or life-giving, broader discourses surrounding sex, sexuality and the body

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appear to preclude such finalities at present. In short, evoking genitalia, either to celebrate or denigrate it, continues to be a transgressive languaging act in the vast majority of contexts. A distinctly different example of resignification, one that can be understood as at least partially successful, even if short-lived, also finds its origins in Savage’s work. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, US political and cultural discourse was dominated by questions of LGBTQ+ rights, notably the right for same-sex couples to marry. President George W. Bush successfully used this possibility as a wedge issue in his 2004 reelection campaign, drawing on the moral panic that followed the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, as well as similar events taking place in Europe and elsewhere (Campbell & Monson, 2008; Lewis, 2005). Among the many cultural and political figures calling for marriage bans was erstwhile Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who openly derided gay and lesbian couples, drawing parallels between same-sex relations, bestiality and paedophilia, and also referred to the legal recognition of any non-heterosexual and heteronormative couple as a cause in the downfall of civilization. Outraged by these and similar remarks – Santorum is also openly retrograde as concerns women’s rights and much else – on 15 May, 2003, Savage called upon his readers to come up with a new denotation (in his words, “a new definition”) for the form Santorum.15 Among the many possibilities, Savage selected “the frothy mixture of lube and faecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex,” in a clearly transgressive and provocative act. But did this act of resignification take hold among the wider community of US Anglophones? Interestingly, it is possible to answer yes, albeit tentatively (in part because the now retired senator has faded into the sociopolitical background). For years, and including at the moment of writing this chapter, the first return in a google.com search using the input “Santorum” is the Wiktionary entry with Savage’s innovative definition.16 It should be noted, however, that the search also produces as its second return Santorum’s Wikipedia page, suggesting that rebellion is not an all-or-nothing enterprise. Of course, it may also be the case that some of the apparent importance of the resignified Santorum derives from the transgressive act itself, specifically the pleasure many on the political left took from not only changing the meaning linked to a person’s name but changing it to a referent that is presumptively anathema to this very same person. Examples such as this demonstrate just how difficult a task resignification can be, particularly when it collides with entrenched power structures and dominant discourses.

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Discussion Questions

• Think about some language forms that you and your friends use that were relatively more taboo for older generations in your languaging community, such as your parents or grandparents. What cultural changes led to their rehabilitation? Did these changes affect only you and those of your generation, or have they affected others as well? • Identify one or two meanings that were not as readily evoked – whether avoided outright or confined to euphemisms – by older generations, but that are more salient in contemporary culture. How have these been rehabilitated? Who considers this liberatory, and who considers it to be something else, perhaps problematic? How might you begin to analyze this as an expression of power and authority? • What moments of linguistic activism are operative in your speech community, perhaps on your campus or in the political arena of your communities? How is verbal hygiene involved, and how could you re-interpret this, for example, as liberatory, proscriptive or something else? Further Reading

There is, somewhat surprisingly, a dearth of literature specifically dedicated to linguistic rebellion, including acts of reclamation, resignification and rehabilitation. The sources cited throughout this chapter are some of the more important ones, especially pertaining to Anglophone contexts. Less academically oriented press outlets do, however, provide important perspectives that testify to these tendencies, particularly with regard to the topics explored here. Readers are encouraged to consult Inga Muscio’s Cunt: A  Declaration of Independence, Amanda Montell’s engaging Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, Regena Thomashauer’s thought-provoking, although only tangentially linguistically oriented, Pussy: A  Reclamation, and Karen Finley’s humorous Grabbing Pussy. For more academically framed arguments, perhaps the most informative literature on topics pertinent to these matters can be seen in feminist linguistic scholarship: excellent sources in this vein include the foundational work by Robin Tolmach Lakoff Language and Woman’s Place (rereleased in 2004 with a critical introduction by Mary Bucholtz) and Deborah Cameron’s The Feminist Critique of Language. Notes 1 Cardi B is the professional name of rapper, musician and songwriter Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar Cephus and Megan Thee Stallion is that of Megan Jovon Ruth Pete. The success of both artists represents a significant challenge to the

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music industry, both in general and more specifically to rap, in which women – and notably women of color (Cardi B is of Hispanic and Trinidadian origin, Megan Thee Stallion is Black) – have been marginalized. www.complex.com/music/2020/08/cardi-b-megan-thee-stallion-wap-essay www.billboard.com/music/rb-hip-hop/ben-shapiro-reads-censored-waplyrics-cardi-b-megan-thee-stallion-9432034/ For copyright reasons, the lyrics cannot be presented here; readers are invited to consult these at https://genius.com/Cardi-b-wap-lyrics. www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/12/cardi-b-megan-thee-stallionwap-celebrated-not-scolded; see also www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902659822/ hip-hop-that-made-the-grown-ups-uncomfortable-the-controversy-aroundwap One interesting example of which involves so-called vocal fry, closely associated with young, white female Anglophones in North America, which has engendered no end of controversy (see Chao & Bursten, 2021; Winn et al., 2022). Of course, it was not only a reaction to Trump, although this quite reasonably can be considered the conjunctural moment in which a critical mass of language rebels took up pussy in new and interesting ways. For more information and the history of the pussyhat, see: www.pussyhatproject.com/our-story For evidence of this, consider a 2016 skit featuring comedienne Amy Schumer, in which the setup involves a gynaecologist using the form pussy, along with many others, in reference to her genitalia. www.cc.com/video/m3lqh2/ inside-amy-schumer-gyno. Other comediennes have also made moves toward rehabilitation, albeit only within limited domains, a fact reflected in Netflix’ broadcasting of “Female Comedians and their Vagina jokes” (www.youtube. com/watch?v=fVot-SXNy18). www.tallahassee.com/stor y/news/politics/2022/11/17/stop-wokestopped-federal-court-ron-desantis-florida-presidential-race/10720135002/ For more on the multimodal, especially visual, description and interpretation of images such as this, readers are pointed to the work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996 and especially 2010). The “Pussy Grabs Back” movement, perhaps most famously captured in an image by Amanda Duarte and Jessica Bennett, is one prime example of this playon-linguistic signs (see www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/ pussy-grabs-back-movement). The Savage Love podcast, aired since 2006 and since rebranded the Lovecast, emerged from Savage’s column in Seattle alternative biweekly The Stranger. Each episode lasts between 45 minutes and one hour (including commercial inserts) and comprises call-in questions, comments and responses from the host and selected guests, all centering around questions of sex, sexuality, gender, politics and related cultural issues. See https://savage.love/lovecast/ The entire podcast can be accessed at https://savage.love/lovecast/2007/ 04/25/its-the-long-awaited-asshole-edition/. The portion in question begins at approximately 23:13 and ends one minute later; the transcription here is mine and begins at approximately 23:26, with boldface type showing emphasis and suspension marks indicating a pause or hesitation. www.thestranger.com/issues/14254/2003-05-15 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/santorum

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” with numbers refer to notes. Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Academic English (AE): English with an Accent (Lippi-Green) 78, 100; gender in 75–77; languaging and race 69–73; languaging rules 63–65; ideology and mythology 65–70; open questions about 73–74 accent: British 68; ideologized and mythologized 68–69 acceptable language (in private vs. in public) 7, 50, 69, 71, 135 Adams, S. 122, 130, 135–136 AE see Academic English Agar, M. 45–46 agency 7, 40, 95; and transitivity 2 Alim, H. S. 71 Allan, K. 23–24, 93 Althusser, L. 105, 115, 140 Andrews, E. 137 Anglophones 18, 49, 68 animus, linguistic 104–105 aristocracy, European 86 Artiles, F. 102, 118–119 association 38, 149; plural formmeaning 20; semantic 5, 39 Austin, J. L. 111–112, 114; How to do things with words 109 authority: de jure 116; linguistic 93; positional 132; and power 83–86; verbal hygienic 95; see also power

Bamberg, M. 129 Barthes, R. 66, 68 beliefs 61–63; collective 45; shared 30, 66, 69 Benjamin, W. xiv Bhasin, T. 82 Birner, B. J. 106 Black Americans 103, 122, 136 Boas, F. 45 boundaries/boundary crossing xiv, 50, 72, 114, 123, 144, 147, 152 Bourdieu, P. 52, 85–86, 132 Burridge, K. 23–24, 93 Bush, B. 11–12 Bush, G. W. 10n5, 123 Butler, J. 59n8, 79n2, 104, 110, 114, 135; Excitable Speech 116 Cameron, D. 93, 96–97 cancellation and cancelling 123–127; critical discourse analysis/studies CDA/CDS 134–136; clash of two ideological communities 136–137; as Discourse/discourse 126–133; and hegemony 131–133 cancel culture 123–127, 133–136; political correctness and 137–140 capitalism 73; neoliberal 132; woke 125, 141n7

176

Index

Cardi B xv, 142–144, 151, 153, 157n1 censorship: de facto 91; de jure 90–91; efficacy of 116 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 77 Chomsky, N. 110, 121n8 civility 137, 139 Clark, M. D. 124–125 Clinton, B. 29 community: African-American 86; anthropological 68; cultural 68, 153; danger 82; ethnic 153; habitual actions of 43; Hispanophone 48; languaging (see languaging communities); liberal-leaning 35; marginalized 153; of practice 34, 47, 49; racial 153; speech 34, 48, 129; university 108 communities of languaging 47–50, 110, 123–125, 145–147, 150; see also languaging communities complex signs: structure 13, 22, 42, 53; utterance 27, 29, 54, 109–110 connotation 33, 38–42, 149; negative 146, 154; of racism 103 Cooper, C. 98 critical discourse analysis/studies CDA/CDS 62, 134–135 Cuomo, A. 99 Deen, P. 102, 118–119 Deleuze, G. 46 denotation 33, 38–39, 103–104, 124, 149; canonical 38, 64; semantic 147 DeSantis, R. 150 de Saussure, F. 18 dialects 1, 7, 70 discourse/Discourse 127–129; and cancel culture as 127–133, 137–140; Fairclough model 129–130; see also critical discourse analysis/studies CDA/CDS discrimination 80; object of 104; systemic 82 Doll, J. 76 dysphemisms 23, 28, 31, 144 Ebonics 86 economics 66 education 66, 69, 71 emic perspective xvi

enlanguaging: clichéd stereotypes 34; cultural and personal values 103; female genitalia 23; name of deceased 15–16; the n-word 108; and patterened structures 25; enlanguaging and enlanguagement: and Academic English 63–65; and cancel culture 137–138; categorizing 54–55; as fighting words 26; graphological conventions 8; impossibility of being contextfree 92–93; mythologized 68–69; n-word 101–102, 118–119; pregnant people vs. pregnant women 77; relative similarity of 48; signifier-signified link 18–21; and taboos 14–16; textual and power 85; Trump’s, in Acccess Hollywood tape 24–25; utterances as 27; woke/ wokeism 150 enlanguaging and enlanguagement, definition 8 enregisterment 53–55 ethical bounds 14 ethnicity 53, 70, 73, 95 euphemisms 23, 26, 28, 31 Fairclough, N. 62, 128–129, 134, 138–139, 141n10 fighting words, definition 26 Flores, N. 71 form 17, 25; dysphemistic 24; functional 22; graphological 8; of hostile 42; of injustice 130; linguistic 20; -meaning pairing 37; orthographic 21, 64; phonetic 21–22, 64; referential 20, 32n8; -referent pairing 37, 39; of social justice 126 Foucault, M. 5–6, 84–85, 128–129, 132 freedom 139, 152; of expression 122–124 Gal, S. 92 Gámez, E. 72 gender xii, 49, 54, 73, 88, 95; binary 2; identity 104; marking 76–77 globalized/globalizing discourse xvii Goffman, E. 92 Gramsci, A. 131–132 Guattari, F. 46, 49 Gumperz, J. 48

Index

hailing 114–117 Halberstam, J. 152 Halmari, H. 137 hate speech 102–106, 108–109 Hawley, J. 123 hegemony 131–133; configurations 132, 135; double-edged sword of 139; dynamics 133, 151; forces 123; foundational 135; male 54, 75; power 132; ultimate expressions of 133 Holtzscheiter, A. 131 ideology 61, 65–70; linguistic xv, 61, 69 ideophones 20 illocution 111–112 indexing 53–55 insults 102–106 interpolation 114–117 Jones, L.A. 82 Karens 81–83; Central Park Karen 98–99; and moral panic 96–99; Pet Shop Karen 80–81, 86–89 Kilburn, J. 101, 118 Knisely, K. A. xvi, 3, 8, 9n1 knowledge: cross-cultural 72; cultural 107, 130; individual 103; pragmatic 92, 108–109, 117; semantic 37; shared 14, 23, 114–115; sociocultural 39 Kramsch, C. 86 labelling xv, 12, 70, 136, 138, 146 Labov, W, 48 Laclau, E. 5 language 3–4; ability to 84; activity 52; behaviour 133; defective 72; doing of 6–7, 44, 46, 49, 86–89, 152; ideology 70–71; liberation 152; transgression 108 language-as ideology 5, 149, 152 language-as-thing 2 language-as-verb 4–6, 149, 150, 152; assertion of xv; implications of 6–7 language, definition 7–8 languager: Anglophone 37, 40; -authors 36; co- 26–27, 38, 62; cohort of 48; communities 69, 72, 146; contemporary 62; -doer

177

17–18, 23, 103, 117, 133; English 30–31; French 21; human 6; identity of 7; Indigenous and nonwhite 72; legitimate 47; meaning and 40–42; native 62; original 124; -receiver 17–18, 23, 36, 50, 54, 103, 117, 133 languaging: act 27, 54, 112; activity 47, 52, 92, 152; beliefs and 61–63; bounds of 127; community (see languaging communities); context 50–53; controversial 109; culture 42; digital 128; of form 135; functions 54; hateful 106; ideological 6; illocutionary 111; linguistic 96, 143; meaning 35–40; neutral 92; non-conforming 72; non-normative 72; norms 48; perlocutionary 111; potential 89; putative 61; and race 70–73; in real time 106–109; rules 63–65; sole locus of 6; structured 25–28; see also race languaging communities 38–39, 43, 47–50, 69–70, 72, 93, 107, 129, 149; see also communities of languaging languaging, definition 7–8 lexicon 2, 18, 48, 64 Leyda, J. 82 LGBTQ+ rights 156 liberation 143; linguistic 152; transgression as 150–152 linguacultures 45–46, 49, 150 linguistic rebellion 144–150, 152–153; acts of 144, 146, 150, 153; powerful manifestation of 148 linguistic sign 16–21, 19, 22, 36–37, 36, 39, 69, 103, 153; function 68 Lippi-Green, R. 69 literary criticism 66 Lodge, R. A. 16 Luke, A. 134 masculinity 12, 50; aggressive 42; ideational 40; intersectionality of 125 Matsuda, M. J. 104 meaning 18–20; constitutive of 5; in the service of power 5, 67; -making 131, 134; -negotiating 134; semantic 40; social 66

178

Index

Megan Thee Stallion 142–144, 151, 153, 157n1 #MeToo movement xii, xvii Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory 107 Milroy, J. 84 Milroy, L. 84 Mouffe, C. 132 mythology 65–70, 113; linguistic xv, 61 Nagesh, A. 81 Negra, D. 82 Nelson, J. 139 Nelson, M. 152 Ng, E. 125, 141 non-binary persons 76 Norris, P. 124–126 n-word 101–103, 105–106, 108, 110, 113–114, 116–117; in context 118–120 obscenity 14–15 orthophemisms 23, 25, 28, 31 PC see political correctness performativity xv, 114; capacity 114; content 118; injurious 120; linguistic 115, 118 perlocution 111–112 political correctness (PC) 124, 135, 137–139 politics 66, 69, 107, 150 power 83–86; asymmetrical 105; of coercion 133; cultural 150; -dependent 85; in discourse 131; of discourse 131; discursive 7, 131–133; doing 86–89, 126, 143; dynamics 72, 86, 126, 133, 135; embodied 88; hegemonic 132; and language 86–89; meaning in the service of 5, 67; moral 7; over discourse 131; physical 87; socioeconomic 82; source of 153; symbolic (see symbolic power); see also authority pragmatics 106–109; enterprise 108; foundations 108; knowledge 108–109, 114, 117; scaffolds 108; tensions 109 privilege 63, 65, 139; bourgeois 81; racialized 97; white 81, 88

pronouns 75; masculine-marked 75; masculine third-person 75; non-binary 77 Puar, J. 49, 95 race xii, 53–54, 70–73, 88, 143; and class 69 radar (RAdio Detecting And Ranging) 22 re-appropriation 142–143 rebellion: languaging 153; linguistic (see linguistic rebellion) reclamation 142–143 Reed, B. 144 referent 20; taboo 21, 35 registers 1, 7, 70, 72 rehabilitation 142, 146, 148–149 religion 70, 107 resignification xv, 143, 146; antithetical 150; collective 149; successful instance of 155–156 Reyna, M. 72 Robinson, D. 106 Rosa, J. 45 Russell, E. L. xvi, 3, 5, 8, 9n1, 105, 129 Sailofsky, D. 125 Santorum, R. 156 de Saussure, F. 18 Sbisà, M. 112 Searle, J. 112 self-censorship 89–91 semantic: content 150, 153; connotation 154–155; properties 147; semantic change 149 sexuality 12–13, 148; female 142–143 Sharifian, F. 46, 52, 67, 106–107 sign: linguistic (see linguistic sign); signified 18, 21, 24; signifiers 18, 21, 24 Silverstein, M. 54, 69 socioeconomic status 54, 70, 95 sociolects 1, 7, 70 Southwest Flight 531 33–35, 38, 40–42, 44, 47, 50–52 speech act theory 109–114 Spencer-Oatey, H, 43 standard language ideologies 69, 72, 78 sterile cockpit regulations 34–35 symbolic power 70, 81, 85–87, 89, 92, 95

Index

symbolic violence 70, 86–88, 90–92, 95–96, 112 taboo xv, 13–14, 23–24, 32n4, 103, 124; forms 23, 35, 148; moral 15; referent 21, 35 Thiele, M. 125, 139 transgression: cancellation as response to 124–127, 136; as liberation 150–152; in music (Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion) 143–144; example of “Pet Store Karen” 89, 96; question of culture/context 55–57; from raciolinguistic point 72; Trump’s (Access Hollywood tape) 24–25; two-way transgression (pussy example) 154–156; unintended 34–35 transgression, definition xiv–xv transgressive languagers/languaging xiv, xviii, 21–24, 114–115, 126; describing 13–16; example of pregnant people 77 Trump, D. xv, 82, 144, 147, 151; ‘female genitalia’ 12, 17, 28; transgression (Access Hollywood tape) 24–25 truth 47, 55; consequence of 66; and falsehoods 25, 67; mythological 69, 137; straightforward 103; substantive 43; untruth 84

179

United States xvii, 37, 51, 90, 118; capitol 34, 59n9, 145; cultural contexts xvi Van Dijk, T. A. 52, 67–68, 89 verbal hygiene 35, 81, 101, 105, 126; facework and 92–95 violence: physical 67, 82, 89–90, 105, 112; sexual 12; symbolic (see symbolic violence); systemic 82 von Humboldt, W. 44–45, 52 vulgarity/obscenity 14–15 Walensky, Dr. R. 77 WAP (Wet Ass Pussy) xv, 22, 142–144, 151 Wenger, E. 49 whiteness 72; ideologies of 71, 73; mythological 71 Williams, R. 138 Wittgenstein, L. 4, 109 Wodak, R. 52–53, 131 woke/wokeness xvii, 143, 149–150 women 29, 53, 147–148; genitalia of 13; white 98 X-phemy 23–25; dysphemisms 23, 28, 31, 144; euphemisms 23, 26, 28, 31; orthophemisms 23, 25, 28, 31