This is just how sexism works: When we privilege men’s voices and perspectives over women’s, men naturally develop an inflated idea of their own intelligence or skill. They’re biking with training wheels and they think they’re winning the Tour de France. But when challenges arise, men who have not been socialized to recognize their own failings are less able to absorb the fact that they’ve screwed up. They not only make mistakes, but they also make mistakes in correcting the mistakes they’ve made.
It’s not that women’s self-confidence doesn’t need improvement. We probably do apologize too much, or at least, we apologize too often to people who don’t reciprocate the courtesy. But at least women have been forced to develop some rudimentary self-awareness, including the awareness that they are not perfect. Without that, you’re Sean Spicer, issuing his 579th statement of the day about why it was probably okay to call them “Holocaust centers.” So maybe, instead of telling women to alter their communication styles to sound more like men, we should spend more time training men in the dark arts of women. For example, the ability to say, and believe, the three apparently unthinkable words “I was wrong.”
basically anyone who really shames people for buying their kids shoes or for buying themselves a manicure while poor doesnt understand poverty
poor people often have a lot of disposable income, more than you think, cause they live on cash
they often do not have any means of transforming that cash into assets or into longterm wealth
so yes i had a lot of toys and nice things as a poor kid because you can buy toys at the dollar store too
and like you can pay a lady 10 dollars in cash to do your nails professionally
but you really cannot scrimp, at least not anymore (maybe decades ago you could) to buy yourself a house or to invest in stocks or other things that guarantee financial protection
poor people are liquid- thats why they may have material goods including nice cell phones but they broke ass will always be broke
hell, even banks and financiers EXPLOIT the liquidity of poor people; cash advance places in the hood and the proven empirical facts that cash deposits from banks in low-income neighborhood go towards major investments and are used as liquid assets by big businesses
keeping poor people in cash and banks in poor neighborhoods are major transfers of wealth in this economy
so please spare me your policing of some lady who decided to get some shoes
“i don’t judge people based on race, creed, color, or gender. i judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.”
i hate to burst your pretentious little bubble, but linguistic prejudice is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism.
ETA: don’t send me angry messages about this…at all, preferably, but at least check the tag for this post before firing off an irate screed.
no one seems to be following the directive above, so here’s the version of this post i would like all you indignant folk to read.
no, i am not saying that people of color, women, poor people, disabled people, etc, “can’t learn proper english.” what i’m saying is that how we define “proper english” is itself rooted in bigotry. aave is not bad english, it’s a marginalized dialect which is just as useful, complex, and efficient as the english you’re taught in school. “like” as a filler word, valley girl speech, and uptalk don’t indicate vapidity, they’re common verbal patterns that serve a purpose. etc.
because the point of language is to communicate, and there are many ways to go about that. different communities have different needs; different people have different habits. so if you think of certain usages as fundamentally “wrong” or “bad,” if you think there’s a “pure” form of english to which everyone should aspire, then i challenge you to justify that view. i challenge you to explain why “like” makes people sound “stupid,” while “um” doesn’t raise the same alarms. explain the problem with the habitual be. don’t appeal to popular opinion, don’t insist that it just sounds wrong. give a detailed explanation.
point being that the concept of “proper english” is culturally constructed, and carries cultural biases with it. those usages you consider wrong? they aren’t. they’re just different, and common to certain marginalized groups.
not to mention that many people who speak marginalized dialects are adept at code-switching, i.e. flipping between non-standard dialects and “standard english,” which makes them more literate than most of the people complaining about this post.
not to mention that most of the people complaining about this post do not speak/write english nearly as “perfectly” as they’d like to believe and would therefore benefit by taking my side.
not to mention that the claim i’m making in the OP is flat-out not that interesting. this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook. the only reason it sounds so outlandish is that we’ve been inundated with the idea that how people speak and write is a reflection of their worth. and that’s a joyless, elitist idea you need to abandon if you care about social justice or, frankly, the beauty of language.
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real ramifications–in employment (tossing resumes with “black-sounding names”), in the legal system (prejudice against rachel jeantel’s language in the trayvon martin trial), in education (marginalizing students due to prejudice against dialectical differences, language-related disabilities, etc), and…well, a lot.
no, this doesn’t mean that there’s never a reason to follow the conventions of “standard english.” different genres, situations, etc, have different conventions and that’s fine. what it does mean, however, is that this standard english you claim to love so much has limited usefulness, and that, while it may be better in certain situations, it is not inherently better overall. it also means that non-standard dialects can communicate complex ideas just as effectively as the english you were taught in school. and it means that, while it’s fine to have personal preferences regarding language (i have plenty myself), 1) it’s worth interrogating the source of your preferences, and 2) it’s never okay to judge people on the basis of their language use.
so spare me your self-righteous tirades, thanks.
Oh my gosh YES, this post got so much better.
this is sociolinguistics 101. this is the first chapter of your intro to linguistics textbook.
and
and yes, this issue matters. if we perceive people as lesser on the
basis of language, we treat them as lesser. and yes, it can have real
ramifications
(Also, most of what people loudly defend as “proper English” is nothing more than an adherence to one particular style guide over another–it was what they were taught, therefore it is the only way. Heh, nope. Learn some more. Linguistic descriptivism for all.)
most of what is taught isn’t even based on English but the rules for teaching latin
yes, you can split the infinitive because in English it’s two words, but in latin it’s one
so it is based on a structure designed by a very small educated elite to remind others of their place, and that place was as subhuman, the educated gentlemen who made these rules generally considered anyone who lacked in some way - no matter what it was - as subhuman and that they should be kept down by any means necessary and so created a labyrinth of traps to reveal them- including language
Lingustic prescriptivism is outdated and can be used far too easily as a tool for perpetuating classism, racism, and misogyny.
This post cleared my fucking skin up and completely hydrated me.
Check out this awesome drone shot of the Botanical Garden in Mount Lofty, Australia! The garden is situated on 240 acres on the eastern slopes of Mount Lofty in the Adelaide Hills. The garden includes plants from all around the globe, including South America, China, East Africa, New Zealand, South East Asia and North America. -34.988504, 138.718630 Found on: From Where I Drone Photo by: Bo Le
sometimes i forget how many times i’ve picked myself off the floor, how many times i’ve washed away smudgy makeup and put myself to bed. how many times i’ve said no to something unhealthy. said yes to something good. how many times i’ve treated myself with kindness and patience. i forget how many times i’ve tended to wounds and made peace with my own anger. if i was taking care of a body that was not my own, i’d believe i was doing everything i could. so here’s to remembering that i’m doing the best i can.
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
