Thoughtless contempt
Matt Richtel, "Devices Enforce Cellular Silence, Sweet But Illegal",
NYT 11/4/07, p. 1 (yes, on the
front page):
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2 -- One afternoon
in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became
a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman
who he said was "blabbing away" into her phone.
"She was using the word 'like' all the time. She souded like a
Valley Girl," said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last
name because what he did next was illegal.
The story manages to compress a lot of stereotypes into a very few
words: a young speaker, female, talkative (not just talkative, but
"blabbing away"), using variants that annoy the hearer (a professional
man, presumably older than the speaker): using the word 'like
' ALL THE TIME (my
emphasis), sounding "like a Valley Girl". And using a cellphone.
It's hard to imagine the
NYT
printing a news story (especially one on the front page) in which
someone conveys so much thoughtless contempt for, say, black people, or
gay people -- unless, of course, the contempt was the point of the
story, which it isn't here:
THIS story is about
contempt for cellphone use; the architect is about to wield a cellphone
jammer. But young women perceived to be chatty and using
youth-marked style features are fair game. (So are working-class
men and rural Southerners.)
We've noted many such cases before on Language Log. I'm inclined
to view them as upwellings of small-scale misogyny and
anti-youthism. (In somewhat less contentious terms: disdain for
women and young people. In still less contentious terms: a
devaluing of women and young people.)
It's hard to know whether there's any way to confront people who talk
like the architect: they know what they hear, so to speak, and anything
a linguist or other academic can say about who uses cellphones, or who
uses (various kinds of
like),
or who talks a lot, and so on, is just going to be seen as beside the
point. Who are we to deny their reality? "I know what I
hear", they say, "and I don't like it."
Of course, quite possibly Richtel intended to convey that the architect
was not only a cellphone vigilante but a lout as well.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 14, 2007 04:05 PM