I was really intrigued to read the chapter on the social issue. Crystal deals with social class, social standing, and gender in this chapter, and I think each is equally important when it comes to speech and how we relate to that particular person. Clearly our American society has a preferred, superior speech and that is “news talk” which so many in the public eye strive for so they do not sound like they are from a particular region of the country. It seems that so many people still associate someone’s accent to their intelligence or social standing which is obviously untrue, yet we still do it. I was appalled my first week here when I sat with a girl at lunch who, after talking to me for a few minutes, asked where I was from because she said I did “something weird” with one of my vowel sounds and added an extra syllable to it. When I told her I was from Pittsburgh she told me the vowel sound I used made me sound like a “hick.” I was so offended, especially when I try not to use “Pittsburghese” as often as possible. She, however, spent the next ten minutes or so pointing out the funny and horrific things people from Pittsburgh say. This relation between certain words and whom I was seemed very offense personally, but also made me think she clearly did not know me at all.
The association between the words someone uses and their social standing is something we dealt with for so many years, and is something we still read about in novels, especially those from 19th century Britain where authors like Austen and Dickens rely heavily on this. You can tell the “lower class” people by their dialects and how they speak in the novels, but although that is not how it is today, people still hold onto to those ingrained ideas. Today, some of the richest people in the world do not speak intelligently, say, maybe, Paris Hilton for example. I would hope and think we all are better at what we say and how we say it than she is, yet she is socially superior to us in the eyes of other Americans.
I also liked how Crystal discussed how we talk to certain people because I think we do it so unconsciously most of the time that we don’t even realize it. How you address a boss and how you address a best friend are very different, yet I never think about it while I am talking to either. It is something we learn as we grow up, just like the views we have on someone’s social standing connected with their language. As Crystal puts it, your specific roles dictate how people speak to you, which I found to be very interesting. Your role as a mother means your children speak to you differently than your parents do who speak to you as a daughter. It is something I think we can hear in other people, such as a friend addressing your parents instead of you. I can notice a change in a friends tone and the formality of their voice, yet it is something I hardly ever notice in my own speech.
Gender and its relationship to language is always so controversial. I remember my senior year of high school the topic came up in my English class when we were writing papers and the teacher told us to just use “men” to represent men and women because it was recognized to represent both, meaning God created “man” to mean men and women. I do not see a problem with using men to represent both sexes in higher levels of writing. I think children need to be taught the difference and to use both while they are younger and in school, but I think when we grow up and understand that using men does not necessarily mean we are just addressing men, but both men and women, it becomes the simpliest solution. As Crystal says, using men and women, or girls and boys is too formal and too wordy, especially if it done more than once each pararagh, and without using men and women we must restructre our senteces to create plurals in order to combine both genders into a common form. I just think that if we all recognize “men” to mean more than just “men” it would be the easiest solution, instead of creating a word to mean both genders, as some have suggested.
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