I wanted to start this blog as a way to round up all the interesting articles, interviews, and media about language that I come across. These are the links I save for my research, teaching, and just everyday conversations with my family and friends.
I lean toward stories that a) show that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to language and b) attend to questions of who benefits and who gets to decide. I mostly read and listen to US media.
This time: exclamation points and shibboleths.
A federal judge uses a lot of exclamation points in his opinions, much to Trump’s chagrin. Jim Puzzanghera reports in the Boston Globe: “US District Judge Richard J. Leon is a plainspoken South Natick native known in legal circles for sprinkling his rulings with exclamation points — an idiosyncrasy now getting national attention.” The article cites several instances where Leon uses 10+, 20+ exclamation points in a single document. Interestingly, Leon is politically conservative.
Exclamation points are something that writers are often advised against for being unprofessional and/or feminine, but Puzzanghera shows another way. He is at the top of his field.
The Boston Globe’s headline writer even adopts Puzzanghera’s style in the print edition: “Meet the judicial thorn in president’s side!!!”
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In a podcast interview, comedian Wil Sylvince discussed his family’s history of leaving Haiti as refugees. When considering where to flee, Sylvince explains to host Trevor Noah that the Dominican Republic was “out of the question for my dad,” because Dominicans were so “anti-Haitian.” Sylvince goes on to describe the shibboleth that gave name to the 1937 Parsley Massacre, in which the Dominican military killed Haitian civilians: “There was a word that if you couldn’t say…they would come up to dark-skinned people in the Dominican Republic and say, ‘perelil, pereril’ [parsley] something where the tongue rolls. Haitians can’t roll their tongues.” This NPR piece from a few years ago has context on this shibboleth.
I also couldn’t help but appreciate the moment when Sylvince starts to say that his dad considered moving to Boston in the 1960s, but decided against it because Boston was racist, and host Noah says, “You don’t have to explain.”
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What I’m reading: I just finished my friend Kristen Stern’s new book Performative Authorship: Contemporary Francophone African Novelists Creating Meaning Inside and Outside the Book. I’m about to order Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, after seeing her book panel at the Rhetoric Society of America. Douglas Stuart’s John of John for fun.