missed connections
You know, I keep hearing all this blather in the news about trans fat, and I have to admit my first reaction is an aggrieved, "Look, they're just love handles. I'm gonna work out next week!"
But then, it doesn't hold a candle to all the time I spent last year buying a used car and wondering idly whether I was an automatic or manual tranny. Huh.
Anyhow. Repurposing of words, as the man sort of said, weirds language. I'm reminded of the Gaiman short story "Changes," where a drug that was meant to cure cancer induces total physical sex change in patients. He deftly covers, in overview, the sweeping but ultimately subtle alterations to society that result. A party scene based on black-market recreational "rebooting." A slave trade in some parts of the world that has kidnapped boys forcibly changed into young girls because they make better money. Chinese families saving up to change their daughters into sons. One of the most interesting bits, though, is where he notes in an aside that, as "change" has become the slang for the process, loose metal money is now referred to as "coinage" and moving from one state to another is more often called a "shift" to avoid sniggering schoolkids who now laugh at the way the word is used in their older textbooks.
That's where the man is spot on.
It's the same as laughing at the old Batman comics about Joker's Boner--that is, goof-up--or "don we now our gay apparel."
We shape our cognition through words, in a lot of ways. The words we have available, the words we use. What happens when your car mechanic has to find new slang to describe your busted transmission--"tranny fluid all over the floor" just doesn't ring right in a society where transgender issues become commonplace discourse--and describing death as a "transition" elicits some truly weird mental images? Is this going to happen?
There's a thing going around blogsville about considering what our desired world actually looks like, what-if-"we"-win. I'm not just interested in the big brushstrokes. What will the subtleties be? What words will be ruined for schoolkids, or at least their befuddled teachers?
What will that queer world of tomorrow have to say to us, when we've changed the tongues it has at its disposal?
But then, it doesn't hold a candle to all the time I spent last year buying a used car and wondering idly whether I was an automatic or manual tranny. Huh.
Anyhow. Repurposing of words, as the man sort of said, weirds language. I'm reminded of the Gaiman short story "Changes," where a drug that was meant to cure cancer induces total physical sex change in patients. He deftly covers, in overview, the sweeping but ultimately subtle alterations to society that result. A party scene based on black-market recreational "rebooting." A slave trade in some parts of the world that has kidnapped boys forcibly changed into young girls because they make better money. Chinese families saving up to change their daughters into sons. One of the most interesting bits, though, is where he notes in an aside that, as "change" has become the slang for the process, loose metal money is now referred to as "coinage" and moving from one state to another is more often called a "shift" to avoid sniggering schoolkids who now laugh at the way the word is used in their older textbooks.
That's where the man is spot on.
It's the same as laughing at the old Batman comics about Joker's Boner--that is, goof-up--or "don we now our gay apparel."
We shape our cognition through words, in a lot of ways. The words we have available, the words we use. What happens when your car mechanic has to find new slang to describe your busted transmission--"tranny fluid all over the floor" just doesn't ring right in a society where transgender issues become commonplace discourse--and describing death as a "transition" elicits some truly weird mental images? Is this going to happen?
There's a thing going around blogsville about considering what our desired world actually looks like, what-if-"we"-win. I'm not just interested in the big brushstrokes. What will the subtleties be? What words will be ruined for schoolkids, or at least their befuddled teachers?
What will that queer world of tomorrow have to say to us, when we've changed the tongues it has at its disposal?
Labels: building blocks, queer, trans
posted by little light | 4:46 AM
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