Day 6: Food for thought

Context:  I am currently about six months into a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher certification program.  So much more to say, but I'll leave it at that for now.

A quote from the book Science Set Free (Rupurt Sheldrake), talking about the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:

"Reality consists of moments in process, and one moment informs the next.  The distinction between moments requires the experiencer to feel the difference between the moment of now and past or future moments.  Every actuality is a moment of experience.  As it expires and becomes a past moment, it is succeeded by a new moment of "now", a new subject of experience.  Meanwhile the moment that has just expired becomes a past object for the new subject."  

That really describes one of the insights offered by meditation - that reality is just the rising and falling of right-now experience, and that the moment of now feeds into and creates the next moment of now, just as it was created by past moments of now.  Interesting...

Day 5: Twenty-five years

Twenty-five years ago today, we had a party to celebrate and to say in front of everyone all the things that we already knew about each other and our relationship.

 (All photos of photographs; who knows where the negatives now are?)

Twenty-five years later, and there are still so many things to celebrate together.  My life is so much richer and happier because of this man and our relationship.  Love you, babe.

(Credit for this last one: GerrBear Photography)

Day 4: Singular they

A propos of yesterday's post...

The New York Times recently published an interesting opinion piece about the use of singular "they".  It was especially interesting to me because the author proposes doing something that I have considered doing - using "they" for everyone, as the default singular third-person* pronoun.  (The reasons why I don't think this is an unproblematic suggestion are a post for another day.)

It's worth backing up here and saying that I naturally think about pronouns and gender.  Because a) I'm a linguist (see the title of the blog); b) I teach a language and gender class; c) my daughters both have friends who identify as gender fluid, some of whom maintain their original gendered pronouns, others of whom prefer "they"; d) to my own surprise, I find myself struggling to use "they" to refer to a specific singular human being (although I have no trouble whatsoever using "they" to refer to a non-specified singular human being, and find the arguments that "they" can only be used with a plural antecedent specious, see more below).  It's the combination of those things that attracts my attention, in the form of - hunh, I wonder what's going on there?  I have, in the past, had relatively little trouble when friends (or friends of the girls) change their preferred names.  After some mistakes, I usually settle into the new name fairly quickly.  I am definitely of the opinion that people should get to decide what they're called, whether as individuals or groups - naming is a form of power, and the protests of the dominant group that they can't keep up with the preferred names of non-dominant groups is a way of maintaining power.  Any time someone protests over something like a name change, or a particular way that language is used, it's time to start looking at power structures.  (When someone says, what's the big deal with me using X label to refer to you, instead of your preferred Y?  I always want to say, if it's not such a big deal, why not just do it?  The answer is because it is a big deal - naming is power, and the right to name is a way of asserting power.)  So what the heck is it that makes it so difficult for me to remember that my daughter's friend is "they" rather than "she"?

In response to the article, I posted the following**:
As a linguist who teaches about language and gender, I have always found the insistence that “they” shouldn’t be used to refer to a single person problematic, in the sense that such a rule doesn’t describe what many people actually do with language*** - which is to use “they/them” to refer to singular, unknown or unspecified people. We do this all the time, and to suggest that it’s confusing or ungrammatical to say “Everyone should turn in their homework now” doesn’t accurately capture reality. The place where I have unexpectedly found myself struggling is when referring to a known and specific human being as “they”. My sense is that this is difficult for me precisely because, in my mental grammar, “they” encodes a nonspecific person; I don’t think I’m alone. Nor do I think that this is immutable - we change the way we speak all the time. Grammatical elements of language (pronouns, in this case) are more difficult to change, but not impossible. As a relevant case in point, consider our second-person pronoun, “you”. Historically, “you” was our plural pronoun, while “thee/thou” was the singular. I don’t think anyone would argue now that it’s confusing to say “you should come to dinner” - even though sometimes it is (do you mean me? Or my whole family?). We negotiate those confusions in other ways [e.g., the addition of y'all to our lexicon; and when y'all, in some dialects, came to refer to singular human beings, the further addition of all y'all]. So there is no reason why our pronominal system can’t absorb a similar change in the third person. And many reasons why it should.

I've been mulling this over more since then.  Someone posted a question on my comment, saying that they thought that "thee/thou" was like Spanish "usted", that is, a formal pronoun, which caused me to confirm my assertion (I was correct; here's an interesting summary).  Basically, the pronoun "you", once simply a second-person plural pronoun, came to have a pragmatic function of also indicating respect, or of denoting a relationship between strangers (as "vous" does in French).  "Thee", over time, began to fall out of usage, except in intimate relationships in some dialects.  But it had already been encoded in the King James Bible, and in poetry, and so began to take on an additional pragmatic function as a marker of religious or poetic language, which is probably why the person who commented thought it meant the formal (when, in fact, in the Bible and poetry, it was simply marking the singular).  Summary: pronouns can come to mean more than simply first/second/third person singular/plural; they can also denote social relationships or roles.  When those additional denotations become the dominant meaning in the mental grammars of speakers, then language changes.  

The idea that we can't use "they" to refer to a specific, single, human being because it's ungrammatical or confusing just doesn't square with the evidence.  But it does square with the kinds of language ideologies that we use to police non-dominant groups.  And it does square with a strong belief that we shouldn't have to be uncomfortable when we speak - an idea that is only true for the dominant group (non-dominant groups in any given setting live with discomfort when they speak).  I tend to think that discomfort is important - it tells us when hidden norms and values are being challenged, and gives us an opportunity to look at them head-on, and to ask, whose values and norms?  To whose benefit/loss?  And, where do I stand?

*  Just for those who don't swim around in grammar all the time, some definitions.  First person refers to the speaker (in English, I/me/we/us).  Second person refers to the the addressee - the person or people being spoken to (therefore, the second people in a conversation)(in English, you).  And third person (as I always say to my students) refers to the spoken-about (she/her/he/him/they/them).
**  I am not one of those folks who leaves comments all the time - I very rarely do.  I also very rarely read comments, because they usually just annoy the crap out of me.  As my comment probably did to some other poor soul who chose to read it.
*** Linguistics is the study of what people actually do with language.  In other words, we describe real-world language use, rather than prescribing how language ought to be used.  A linguistic anthropologist, such as myself, might look at ideologies around how language "should" be used as an object of study, but our field is not focused on grammatical nitpicking.  That is not to say that we don't all have our pet peeves around language use - but when we are being professional, we know that those are ideologies/opinions, rather than true statements about grammar; the question of "good" versus "bad" language is not a linguistic one.  I often wish more people knew this, because as soon as I say I'm a linguist in any social gathering, people find some excuse to wander off and never talk in front of me again.  Little do they know that, rather than judging, I am listening carefully so I can gather data!  (mwahaha)

Day 3: Pride

My younger daughter and her friend went downtown today to celebrate in San Diego's Pride parade and festival.

Question: Why is San Diego's Pride celebration in July instead of June?
Question:  Is this a metaphor?
Question:  Or is it a kind of cool way to remind us that none of these X Month celebrations should ever be restricted to just one month?
(Or maybe both?)

By happenstance, I had the opportunity to indulge my inner magpie with an unplanned stop at a yarn store sighted in Bellingham (while taking my niece to visit WWU; no, yarn stores were not meant to be on the itinerary).  But the logo for Northwest Yarns is an octopus holding knitting needles - I had to go in, right?  I may have walked away with a few things (but not the Majacraft Little Gem that I have long coveted - good for me, right?), including (speaking of Pride) this lovely braid:

which is destined to become something warm for my daughter to wear this winter in Seattle, where she'll be a freshman at Seattle U.  I really should be working on her college blanket (ahem), but I am trying to spin a little bit each day while we watch the Tour de France.

I'm actually done with the red and orange and am into the yellow.  This will be chain-plied to preserve the nice long color changes.  Knitters out there, any recommendations for something in the neck-warming realm that would show this off suitably?

Day 2: Continuing joy in things

AKA: Is it so bad that things can make me happy?
AKA: The hedonic treadmill isn't always a thing.

Today was an errand-y sort of day.  But there came a point when I was able to put the top down on my little Beetle, and turn on the car trip playlist - one of my favorite top-down kind of songs came on, and I was driving down the coast highway looking at the ocean, and it was just perfect.  And I got to thinking - is it such a bad thing that my little convertible Beetle makes me so very happy?  And that got me to thinking - how is it that I continue to be made so very happy by my little car?  Psychological theory suggests that we tend to return to a relatively stable state of baseline happiness, regardless of major life events, positive or negative.  That theory is also often applied to the acquisition of things - we are very excited by them, and they make us very happy, until we sort of acclimate to the happy, and return to our baseline levels.  This is the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation.

I'm not going to say that that doesn't happen to me - there are certainly things that I have totally lusted after and dreamed about and wanted, that, after a while (or even pretty quickly), stop seeming so exceptionally excellent (there are several knitting projects, and yarn acquisitions, that I'm thinking of right here).

But it is also true that there are some things that I maintain a real, heart-expanding, sense of joy around.  And I'm trying to figure out what they have in common, or what it is that lets me have that deep sense of continuing joy.

A first-pass list:
- my stick-shift convertible Beetle TDI (all of that is relevant - more in a moment)
- Disco (a story for another day)
- my vision, after Lasik (fifteen years ago, maybe?)
- the fact that my leg doesn't have constant nerve pain any more
- the rugs that we got in Turkey
- my back patio (especially, but not limited to, the wisteria, jacaranda, and quiet morning coffee)

I think there's a lot more, and that list may be something I add to over time.  What I think a lot of those things have in common is that they come with a story, or a feeling-tone - and that doesn't diminish with time.  The Beetle is a case in point.  I often said to my husband, in a kind of "check out my silly dream" sort of way, that someday, when we could afford another car (read: after the girls were both out of college), I'd love to get a convertible Beetle.  Stick shift.  Diesel.  For various reasons (having to do with VW's need to buy back my husband's diesel Passat thanks to their nefarious machinations), the possibility of getting a car came sooner than I'd expected.  And then here's the thing: Rick made it happen.  He searched for, and found (in Michigan, no less), the ridiculous, impractical, fantastic, happy-making car that I now have.  (These are so hard to find that the guys at VW refer to it as a unicorn.)  And every time I put the top down, and drive along with the music playing and the wind in my face, it brings me joy.  Every.  Single.  Time.  In a year and a half, it hasn't gotten old.  And it's not just the wind in my face and the music, and the joy of the stick shift (I really love me a stick shift) - it's that all of that is also wrapped up in love.

And someday, that little car will stop working - as all things do.  And that's OK.  The joy part won't stop working, because the emotion behind it doesn't go away.

Celebrating the magpie

So, here are a few relevant bits of information about me.

1. I like to write.  I miss writing.  I often feel compelled to write, but don't seem to be able to get moving (see #2).  I admire people who make a decision to spend a year writing each day - about something that makes them happy, or a children's story, for example - but,
2. I tend to feel like I have nothing to write about, by which I mean nothing important, or big.  Nothing that is leading to something.  Nothing that is "worth" writing about for 365 days in a row.  Also,
3. I am a very undisciplined person.  I do not find myself comfortable setting a routine on the basis of some kind of invariant rule, of the "I will always write for 20 minutes a day, no matter what" sort.  In fact, any rule that starts with "I will always", or "I will never", almost inevitably leads, not to me actually getting the thing done, but rather, to all kinds of questions, like "why?", and "what if...?", and "does that really make sense?"  There is an element of laziness, and a tendency to avoid doing things I don't particularly want to do.  But I think I am also a questioner by nature.  Any idea I have (or anyone else has - fair warning) is worth questioning, examining, reexamining.  Not for nothing have I always resonated with Emerson's "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  Furthermore,
4. This inconsistency exacerbates the problem of wondering what I could possibly write about that's big enough. Or what I could find that I'm willing to commit to for 365 days.  Because in all honesty?
5.  I am a magpie.  I am both easily distracted by shiny objects (like books about how octopodes* think, or about how trees talk to each other, or about mindfulness and race, or about trauma, or...  you should see my bookshelves; and my art supplies; and my yarn stash; and my cookbook shelves; and...), and I like to take these shiny idea objects home to my nest and turn them over and about and think about them.  I like to put them next to each other and see how they interact.  Sometimes I write haikus about them in my head.  Sometimes I violently disagree with them.  It's all part of the fun.  With all of that said, I am judgmental of my inner magpie.  Or I trivialize it.  One's inner magpie, I tend to think, doesn't produce something meaningful and worthwhile.  (This begs the question - does it need to?  What about joy?  Curiosity?  The thrill of discovery?  Are these not, in themselves, worthwhile?)

I sat this morning with the idea of writing every day for a year.  And, as usual, my first response was an anguished sort of sense of:  there really isn't any one thing I feel compelled or qualified to commit to for an entire year.  All kinds of ideas arose in my mind - a haiku about aging, the endless questions I have about how the world works, my inner naturalist, mindfulness, knitting, spinning, parenting adult children.  So many things.

And then, the image of the magpie.  Fascinated by everything.  Endlessly willing to explore.  A little loud and obnoxious.  And in that moment, I decided to embrace my magpie.  I could write something every day, I think, if a question counts.  Or an etymology.  Or a description of the spider who insists upon building her web right where I walk each morning to feed the cat.  What if I commit to my magpie?

So that's the plan.  To write something each day, without determining in advance what that something will be.  Except to say that it has to be something that comes from or feeds my magpie.  I don't know who is still reading here** (although I do see a hit count when I post, so it seems that some kind people are still around - hi!).  So I don't know how anyone who is reading will feel about this new plan.  I don't even know if this is the right place to enact it.  But this blog is here, and, as I have said before, I have a real fondness for it.  I miss it.  So, the Knitting Linguist is embracing her inner magpie - welcome along for the ride.

Here we go!

* Here's a cool thing.  Years ago, when I took a fifteen-week Ancient Greek intensive summer school course (as one does), I realized that "octopus" is Greek, not Latin.  The -i plural nominal ending is Latin, not Greek.  So I did some playing and poking, and realized that the plural of "octopus" ought to be "octopodes".  I felt very pleased with myself, but also kept it kind of quiet, until one day it occurred to me to see what the Oxford English Dictionary thought about the whole thing.  And I'll be darned - it actually lists "octopodes" (stress on the antepenultimate syllable, pronounced like "antipodes") as the plural for "octopus" (alongside the later-come "octopi", and "octopuses", which has apparently been around since the beginning).  I find "octopodes" much more fun to say than the others, so "octopodes" it is. 

**  Actually, if folks are willing to do a sort of roll call, by leaving a comment to say hi, I'd love to know who's still here (and if you, too, post online, please let me know where)!  I should also say that I love to respond to comments - if your comment-leaver doesn't have a way for me to respond to you (not everyone has their email attached), but you want me to respond (or are willing), you can also email me at knittinglinguistATgmailDOTcom (replacing the capitalized words with their symbols, natch).

Reflections on Instagram and conversations about racism in the knitting community

I have been absorbed in the conversation on Instagram this week, about racism in the knitting community.  I have been reading, watching people’s stories about the precipitating event and about the responses to that event, thinking carefully. (Note: by “precipitating event”, I don’t mean “isolated incident” – I mean “one thing that looks a lot like countless other things that just haven’t happened to lead to a big important conversation, even though they should have.)  What I’ve seen has resonated with what I know to be true in academia, and with what I have been also seeing and worrying a lot about in the mindfulness community, where words like ‘forgiveness’ are bandied about without any context or discussion of what it means to tell, for example, POC to forgive without a concomitant addressing of the ongoing institutional violence and oppression that they are being asked to forgive.  That, folks, is a problem.  That is something that I’d like to talk more about in the future, when I can make better reference to the people who are on the front lines of dealing with that, and who have written and spoken wisely and thoughtfully about it. 

By the same token, I don’t want to summarize the discussion on IG or speak for the people who have done so much educating – that they shouldn’t have to do – over the past week.  I’d instead refer you to: @ggmadeit; @thecolormustard; @su.krita, who kindly gave me permission to point you in their direction.  There are many other people doing this work whom I hope you will seek out as well.

I really wasn’t sure that I’d end up saying anything about this, for a couple of reasons.  The first has to do with my own use of IG, which, until this week, has largely been to follow friends and family – in other words, it hasn’t been a place where I’ve engaged a whole lot with the knitting community.  In the last week, though, IG has become a place where I follow knitters and spinners.  In some ways, I’m not sure how I feel about that, because I’ve been trying to spend less time on social media, not more.  But at the same time, I can’t regret the inspiration I have drawn from the projects and work of so many fantastic and creative women.  So.

This blog is the space where I have done much more connecting and thinking about making and the world of makers.  And this is the space where I have to look at and think carefully about the makeup of the blogs and bloggers I follow, which are almost exclusively white women.  That is not OK, and it is not OK that I hadn’t until now taken steps to change that - to make sure that the blogs that I read and follow represent the world that I live in.  I also have to think about my disappointment in several of the well-known white women designers whose work I love and whose blogs and IG feeds I do follow, who have said absolutely nothing about the work that’s been done this week.  It’s impossible for me to imagine that they don’t know about it, so where are their voices?  Where is their work to amplify those who have spoken so clearly this week?

And that’s what finally helped me to realize that I need to say something.  I don’t have a lot of readers any more, and I don’t have very many followers on IG who are part of the knitting community.  (In fact, for those of you who aren’t knitters who followed the link from my IG feed – hi!  Yes, I have a knitting blog – who knew, right?). So, it’s not like I can do a lot of amplifying here.  And I don’t want to tell the stories that BIPOC members of the community live every day and have told so well (see those references above – there are so many more).  Instead, I want to talk about parts of the response to those stories that have disturbed me greatly, and that have done additional violence to those who exposed themselves in coming forward to talk about their experiences of racism in the knitting community. 

And I want to say this very clearly to those women who have been doing all of this work – that, I say again, they should not have to do – I hear you.  I know that you know this, but I want to say that I know that you are not crazy.  Racism and its effects in the knitting community (and academia, and the mindfulness community, and and and…) are real and corrosive.  Thank you.  Thank you for taking the time and emotional energy to talk about that.  Thank you for your continuing work in calling people out on the deeply problematic ways that they’ve responded to the initial discussion.  I can’t imagine the toll it’s taken on you and continues to take on you.

It’s those responses that I want to talk about a little more.  I can’t say that I’ve been surprised by the way that many WW have responded, nor by what they’ve said in their own posts, and in the comments on the posts I reference above.  But I have been disgusted and appalled.  There are two trends in particular that I want to call out.  First, the “I’ve been afraid to say something” (because someone might get mad at me, I might say the wrong thing, etc).  And second the “let’s get past this/I want this space to return to being my happy space/let peace begin with me/let’s level up” responses. 

OK.  “I’ve been afraid to say something because I might say the wrong thing and then someone might get mad at me.”  I hear this all the time from young men in my gender classes.  (And I, too, feel that fear.)  There they are, perhaps for the first time, sitting in a room with women who talk about the ways that sexism and violence against women inform everything that women do, every single day.  And at some point, some young man says exactly that: I’m afraid to talk because I might say the wrong thing and someone might get mad at me.  And I say – and I say this with genuine love and sympathy – good.  You should be afraid, and you should know what it’s like to have to watch every word you say because someone might take it the wrong way and police you.  Welcome to the lived experience of members of oppressed groups, who have to watch what they say all the time.  All. The. Time.  Every minute of every day.  And for whom the consequences of saying “the wrong thing” aren’t just facing the momentary discomfort of being called out for it.  The consequences are far worse and far more systematic.  Loss of jobs.  Violence.  Lack of justice for violence perpetrated against them.  All of that and more.  So, with love, I say this same thing to the women on IG who have left that comment: sit with that discomfort.  Think carefully before you speak.  And, when you have something important and useful to say, say it with care, and then listen, with care, to what people have to say to you.  If someone takes the time and energy to tell you that what you just said was problematic, think for a moment about how hard it was for them to do that – given that difficulty, assume that what they’re saying is important enough to take on board.  And that goes for what I’m saying here.  There is no way that I am getting this all right.  I am trying my best, but I live and breathe a racist system just like the rest of us.  I am sorry for what I am getting wrong, and while I don’t think it is anyone’s job to educate me, if any of you want to share with me how I can do better, I am listening.

My other response to this fear of saying the wrong thing is this: maybe we should all be careful, all the time, of our words.  I’m a linguist in no small part because I believe in my guts that words are powerful things.  They change worlds.  With Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day coming up, I can’t help but think of his famous speech – when he said he had a dream, he was speaking that dream into reality.  We are not there yet, but his words call into being the possibility of a better future.  Which is what we all need to be working towards, and what I hope the knitting community can take a step towards, thanks to the powerful words of women who spoke and speak out.

And that brings me to that other response that I’m really hating right now: Ok, we’ve said this stuff, now can we go back to our peaceful happy place?  First off, if we really read what people had to say, we’d see that, obviously, that space is neither peaceful nor happy for those folks who wrote about the problem of racism in the community.  Right?  So we can’t go back to that – we shouldn’t want to.  We should want to go forward, to something more inclusive.  How can this be my happy place if it’s someone else’s oppressive place?  This is the hard and important work for white people: to see and acknowledge and feel the pain and violence that white supremacy causes to us.  To white people.  To want to return to a happy place that we know is exclusionary to others makes us less human.  I don’t want to be less human, just because it’s easy.  And I don’t want my desire to dismantle racism to come from a place of white saviourhood, which is what happens when I think of it as something that’s happening to “them”, over there.  Racism is toxic, period.

This also highlights a thing that I’ve mulled over in both personal and social relationships for a long time: the habit that people have of wanting to take credit for the good without taking responsibility for the bad.  In personal relationships, this happens when I say, but these things you did? They were abusive and painful.  And the person I’m talking to says, why do you always want to talk about the bad things?  What about all of the good things? 

Yep, the good things are there.  But you can’t pretend that’s all that’s there just because it’s easier and more comfortable, when the bad things are making lumps under the rug where you’ve swept them.

In history, white folks want to do this.  We want credit for Lincoln without taking the responsibility for Jackson.  And responsibility doesn’t mean a quick mea culpa and then can we move on please?  I’m thinking restitution. I’m thinking dismantling structures that replicate the injustices “of the past” again and again.  Sorry and now let’s move on doesn’t cut it. 

I didn’t mean to write this much, and I think it’s time to stop and listen. A few final words.  First, if anyone reading this has responded in one of these ways, please realize that doing so, or glossing over this past week as if it didn’t happen, is another form of violence.  Please don’t do that.  The second thing is to remember to see the women who came forward to speak in all of their resilience and glory.  Their feeds are full of creativity and beauty that I find totally inspiring.  Please don’t treat their feeds as pain porn to feed some kind of white liberal guilt.  This conversation is one part of a much larger whole – a critical part, but not all that there is.

Thank you.