Quote of the Day
For linguistic deprivation to look at all political, as opposed to purely accidental, requires more than that someone benefits from the bias thereby introduced. Deprivation in the political context implies that someone else is responsible for imposing the limitation, for withholding that those deprived are seen as lacking. Linguistic deprivation does seem plausibly political in this sense because elites do have a more elaborate code for use in discoursing amongst themselves. Whether or not we can show that elites are responsible for denying linguistic tools to nonelites, it is at least clear that there are these various levels of discourse...
~ Goodin R.E. 1977. ‘Laying Linguistic Traps’. Political Theory. 5.4: 496-7.
“... so that’s agreed,” said someone. “As the President of the Convocation for the Preservation of Elite Domination by Means of Linguistic Deprivation, I hereby order ‘metatextuality’ to be classed among those concepts whose existence only the right sort of chaps are allowed to know about.”
Despite the deep hood and robes heavy with esoteric symbols, the yawning drawl was recognisably that of Lord Rust. ‘Metatextuality’ alone had strangled half a dozen vowels.
“Damn good thing too!” said someone else. “Don’t want any of those lower-class sorts of chaps getting to know about it! They might start wanting to read books! I mean t’say, where’d we be then, eh?”
“Unthinkable, my lord,” said the restrained, thoughtful voice of someone who sounded very much like Lord Rust’s secretary. A motion within the shadows of his lightly embroidered hood (degrees of formal status being, if anything, even more important within the anonymous ranks of elite conspiracies) suggested that he had glanced over his notes. “Just as unthinkable as allowing the concepts of... ah... ‘hermeneutics’, ‘etiquette’ and ‘gender studies’ to fall into the wrong hands, as was agreed by the Convocation only last week.”
“By Jove, yes! Ha! If my wi- if just any old chap could go about thinking about gender all the time, anything might happen!”
“Speaking of ‘gender studies’,” said someone dressed in entirely unadorned yet exceedingly fashionable black robes. A bag of humbugs sat in front of him on the table; he offered them round at the start of every Convocation without fail, although by some unaccountable coincidence all of his fellow conspirators had turned out to be allergic to humbugs and in fact one excitable gentleman had gone so far as to suggest proscribing the very concept of ‘mint’, if not the possible reality of 'arsenic'. “I was talking to a lady colleague just the other day, bless her pretty little head, and it struck me that ‘privilege’ would be a jolly good candidate for the List. And the sooner the better, if you ask me!”
“Make a note in the minutes, Mr Slant,” said Lord Rust. “Item three, discussion of ‘privilege’...”
“Yes, my lord,” came the dusty voice of Mr Slant, who wasn't at all sure why the Convocation had insisted on wearing robes and hoods, and who would have much preferred to be wearing his usual suit. What the client paid for, however, the client got. It’s de rigueur for this sort of business, don’tcha know, someone had said. Absolutely sine qua non. And put both of those on the list, can’t have ’em falling into the grubby hands of the plebs... plebs... there’s another one...
It was getting, Slant thought, to be rather a long List.