Prefabricated Decision Tree Conversations (aka "Social Grease")
I've known Rotrude since she was, oh, 8 or 10 years old. She's definitely her mother's daughter, especially in body type. And she's being having some odd conversations where people remark on her slenderness (though she calls it "skinny" which sounds more pejorative). I've noticed this stuff before ( Read more... )
> >The best piece of programming I attended at Minicon was a panel, or
> >rather a lecture, by Karyn Ashburn, Elise Mattheson's sister. She is
> >a speech therapist, with lots of initials after her name, who works
> >with adult populations, many of whom are nonverbal or barely verbal,
> >and she isn't a member of fandom. As the sister of a member of
> >fandom, however, she's had an opportunity to observe us in one of our
> >native habitats when meeting Elise at conventions. And as a non-fan
> >and a person passionately interested in speech production, she's
> >noticed some common features in the way fans verbally communicate.
> >
> >We were lucky in that she hadn't shown up for her panel at 5:00 on
> >Saturday, which would have been in a smallish function room and
> >restricted to only an hour. Instead she was rescheduled for after
> >closing ceremonies in the ballroom, so a large fraction of the
> >convention members had a chance to hear her. Because we wouldn't let
> >her leave, her talk ended up being about 2 1/2 hours long, but she
> >still left us with a lot of questions. I recommend her as a speaker
> >to any convention. The bare gist of what she said follows.
> >
> >On those occasions when she showed up at a con to meet Elise, she saw
> >lots of fans in groups talking. To her they seemed angry and rude.
> >To Elise they seemed nothing of the sort. Observing them more
> >closely, she realized that they were using different social cues,
> >different body language, different eye contact, and even different
> >ways of forming vowels than what she jokingly called "my people", or
> >what for convenience sake I'll call mundanes. She hastened to say
> >she doesn't have a theory, or even yet much of a hypothesis for why
> >this may be (or a large enough sample size across populations to
> >prove that this is so), but she does have a lot of questions.
> >
> >She also seemed quite concerned that we would feel offended by what
> >she had to say, but what she told us was so interesting, and often so
> >recognizably true, that I don't think anyone was. Of course
> >everything that I'm about to say is an overgeneralization; different
> >fans possess these traits to greater or lesser degrees.
> >
> >First, the mechanics of actual vocal production, especially vowels.
> >The phonemes in the words "him" and "meet" are produced with the
> >tounge in various positions, and the lips stretched back. The
> >phonemes "uh" and "oh" are produced with rounded lips. This, at any
> >rate, is the case in mundania. Fans, she has noticed, push the
> >vowels forward; rounding the lips somewhat even for "ee" and "ih".
> >We use our lips a lot, but at the same time, we use our cheeks and
> >our chins not as often as would be expected. We stabilize the cheeks
> >and the chin, and we "prolabialize". (When, while sitting at a table,
> >I leaned my chin on my hands while talking to her, she became
> >uncomfortable. She can't do that easily; her chin moves more when
> >she speaks.)
> >
> >Second, fans articulate more than mundanes. She had various of us
> >stand up and say things, and then repeated them in "mundane". When I
> >said the phrase "talk to", she pointed out that I had pronounced the
> >"k" on the end of "talk". Mundanes, she said, wouldn't. We
> >pronounce more of the terminal consonents in a phrase than a typical
> >mundane does. We are more likely than mundanes to pronounce the "h"
> >in "where", and the "l" in "folk". (She seemed to think it was
> >rather charming; that we were preserving old pronounciations, or
> >reinventing them from the way words are spelled.)
tbc below
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