The Language War / Edition 1

by Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Overview

Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space—political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal—Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights."

Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power. Because language tells us how we are connected to one another, who has power and who does not, the stories reflect the language war.

We use language to analyze what we call "reality," the author argues, but we mistrust how language is used today—witness the "politics of personal destruction" following the Clinton impeachment. Yet Lakoff sees in the struggle over language a positive goal: equality in the creation of our national discourse. Her writing is accessible and witty, and her excerpts from the media are used to great effect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520232075
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/17/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Robin Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Talking Power: The Politics of Language in Our Lives (1990), Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (1984), and Language and Woman's Place (1975).

Read an Excerpt

The Language War

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By Robin Tolmach Lakoff

The University of California Press

ISBN: 0-520-23207-0

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Chapter One

Hillary Rodham Clinton: What the Sphinx Thinks

Very Funny

Bill, Hillary, and Al Gore are riding in Air Force One when it crashes and all are killed. They find themselves in heaven, and are directed to a large room, at the far end of which is God sitting on a majestic throne.

Al Gore approaches first. "And who are you?" asks God.

"I'm Al Gore, sir. I was the Vice President of the United States."

"Well, that's very impressive!" says God. "Come here and sit on the chair on my left."

Then Bill Clinton goes in. "And who are you?" "Sir, I'm William Jefferson Clinton. I was President of the United States."

"Well now, that's even more impressive! Come on over here and sit on the chair to my right."

Then Hillary comes in. "And who are you?" asks God.

"I am Hillary Rodham Clinton, and what are you doing in my seat?"

Bill and Hillary are driving around Arkansas and stop to get gas. The attendant and Hillary recognize each other and go on reminiscing together for a while.

Then Bill and Hillary drive off. "Who was that?" asks Bill.

"Oh, that was Fred, my first boyfriend in high school. We went together for a few years."

"Just think," says Bill, "if you'd married him, you'd be living behind a gas station, not in the White House."

"No, dear," says Hillary. "If I had married him, you'd be living behind agas station, and Fred and I would be living in the White House."

These jokes, in many versions, are endemic on the World Wide Web, which lists some 17,000 sites dedicated (wholly or in part) to the First Lady. The student of contemporary political discourse must explain why there are so many jokes about both Clintons, why the First Lady continues to preoccupy such a large swath of the public's attention in her own right, and why the jokes, and the attention, take the multiple and often contradictory forms they do. Why does this First Lady-and this First Couple-pass the UAT so spectacularly?

To answer that question, we have to examine the first lady's role. During most of our history the first lady's job description has been vague, if the role was thought of as a job at all. During our first century, Americans didn't have an official title for the president's spouse. Martha was called "Lady Washington." Later, as populism replaced the Hamiltonian quasi-monarchy, titles like "Presidentress" and "Mrs. President" were tried out but didn't stick. It wasn't until 1870 that the title "first lady" came into use (Caroli 1987). The role itself is more problematic than the title. It has no constitutional status, no official duties or privileges. But unofficially, over time a complex if tacit web of expectations has become connected to the role (one can hardly call it an "office"), and even more so, to the woman who inhabits it.

Telling Tales out of School

In the two previous chapters, I examined two recent cases in which language rights had come into sharp competition, provoking undue attention. In Chapter 3, the linguistic artifacts involved were small and concrete: words and phrases. In Chapter 4, there was a mixture: some of the language under dispute was like that in Chapter 3, small and concrete units: the meaning of "sexual harassment." More often the investigation had to move to higher levels: the functions of complex syntactic structures like tag questions; the interpretation of speech acts like threats; the distribution of conversational turns and its consequences; the uses of black and white traditional discourse styles. Finally the analysis moved to a still higher level: the competition over the meaning of the events of Hill/Thomas themselves: who got to make the story at the end.

In this chapter, the narrative will be my major focus. To my mind the most shocking thing about Hillary Rodham Clinton is the fact that, as a woman, she has found ways, either direct or subversive, of retaining control over her own narrative, her own meaning. But there has been from the start hot competition from many sides within the media and the Beltway for that right. We are eager for the story-making rights because we want to construct her, and through her ourselves; but she eludes our narrative grasp.

Some readers may feel a disconnect at this juncture. I have been representing myself as a linguist (I would be a card-carrying member of the LSA if they gave out cards). As long as I mind my business, keeping my attention focused on the minutiae of language (words, sentences, maybe even speech acts), I am safely within my allotted boundaries. Linguistics retains its historical definition (of great comfort to many of my colleagues). But in reaching out to the vastnesses of narrative structure, of stories and meta-stories, of narrative-making rights and their subversions, some readers may wonder if I'm still being a "linguist." Or, if I'm not, whether I retain the authority to speak.

Linguists study language; literary critics study text (including narratives). Once that division of labor made sense; once I obeyed it. But more and more that boundary seems like an artificial barrier that works to stop the flow of understanding. Language doesn't stop with the word or the sentence, or even the conversational turn; to understand its meaning, the analyst has to have the capacity to see it in its totality. Certainly the literary critic can find matter in stories that will be lost to me. Political scientists and historians will find stories here other than the ones I find worth exploring; communication theorists will look at these stories in different ways than I do, asking different questions. I think those notions are reasonable ways of drawing disciplinary boundaries nowadays: often different fields try to make sense of the same data, the same artifacts, but they do so in different ways and so arrive at different places that they call "answers." But I reject the older idea that disciplines are absolutely differentiated by the subject matter they may look at. For me, the linguist's job is understanding how language makes us human, and the answer to that question comes from looking at language in all its interlocking complexities, at every level. From each level of language-the sound, the word, the sentence, the turn-we learn something about who we are and how we work. From the higher and more abstract levels-the discourse, the narrative-alone do we learn about what we mean.

Narratives can be subjected to analytic techniques analogous to those used for lower levels of language. We can look at the choices of words, at sentence structure; at the presuppositions and frames assumed; at the speech acts that are chosen; at the levels of directness, or indirectness, the narrator chooses; at what is said, what is implied, and what is absent. All of these, and more, make the story what it is and allow maker and hearer to collaborate in a coherent meaning.

Perhaps more interesting still, at least here, is the meta-narrative: the story about or behind the story, the subtext. Why does the story exist in more than one version? What is the one that wasn't told-the other way to see a set of events? Always tellers have choices to make: in this case, how do those choices tell us what we want to make of our subject, and ourselves?

The Making of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Story

Just as presidents traditionally receive significantly more media attention than do ordinary men, first ladies get more coverage than average women (who until recently were admonished that a woman should get her name in the paper only three times in her life: when she is born, when she gets married, and when she dies). But while the amount of attention given President Bill Clinton is typical of presidents (although the quality of that coverage is not), since the start of her husband's candidacy in 1992 Hillary Rodham Clinton has faced virtually incessant media attention, much more and of a strikingly different type than have previous first ladies. Not only are her doings and sayings tirelessly reported. She is relentlessly interpreted. More significantly, she is relentlessly and deliberately misinterpreted.

Her media presence is ubiquitous: scarcely a day goes by without some report of her activities or some analysis of her psyche. And the fascination is endemic: in daily newspapers, newsmagazines, magazines of culture, Sunday supplements, radio talk shows, television magazine shows-everywhere. Images of her are remarkably diverse, ranging from strongly adulatory to ferociously critical; they represent her as a person of wildly different personalities, doing and saying what it is hard to imagine a single individual doing or saying. The coverage is unusual too for the deep psychological analysis of its target. While other first ladies have been covered largely on the basis of their observable actions, Rodham Clinton has been subjected to the ceaseless ministrations of amateur psychoanalysts: we seem more concerned with what makes her tick than with what she is doing. Also unusual is the fact that, while there are ups and downs in the level of Rodham Clinton's media attention, it has remained high. Ordinarily media coverage of first ladies has a predictable trajectory. When a man first presents himself as a candidate, there is interest in his wife, which increases when the husband becomes the party's candidate. After his electoral victory, interest in her continues for a while, turning now to the first lady's adjustment to her new role: her plans for redecoration of the White House; her moving into her White House office and selection of her staff; her family's integration into their new routine; and the selection of the First Lady Project. The latter is normally something decorative and uncontroversial: highway beautification, promoting mental health or literacy, teaching children to Just Say No to drugs. Then the first lady settles into relative obscurity, except for occasional photo-ops of her at work on her project or attending official functions with her husband, the president. Perhaps there is an occasional flurry of scandal, but it usually vanishes fast.

In Chapter 4 I described the levels of media attention given to Hill/Thomas: first the explosion of immediate impressions in the daily press and the electronic media; then the profusion of in-depth coverage in the weekly newsmagazines, followed by the more analytic commentaries of the monthlies. These had exhausted themselves by the end of 1991, a scant three months after the pivotal event. By early 1992, and continuing through that year, the more intellectual popular magazines, followed by scholarly journals, took over the business of analysis and prognostication in greater depth. By the end of 1992, the topic had retreated into obscurity, with only occasional forays back into public consciousness.

But the attention lavished on Rodham Clinton is different. Hill/Thomas was a momentary blip on the radar: the pivotal moment encompassed only the single day of October 12, 1991, the day of Hill's testimony to the Judiciary Committee (although the whole story has to include the penumbra from the resignation of Thurgood Marshall in May of 1991 to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas in late October). But the image catalogued in our minds under Hill/Thomas is one of Hill sitting before the committee, on that October day, in that turquoise suit, an image frozen at a moment in time.

Interest in Rodham Clinton, though, has extended over many years, waxing and waning. Long-term assessments and scholarly analyses of Rodham Clinton are significantly sparser than those of Hill/Thomas. While there have been a number of long analytical pieces in the intellectual popular media, scholarly journals have contained relatively little discussion of the First Lady. One reason may be that Rodham Clinton's fifteen minutes aren't over yet, and academics prefer to concentrate on completed events. They're safer-you're less likely to be contradicted by what happens next. (And we are in this business because it's safe.)

The Rodham Clinton story develops gradually. She comes into public awareness in 1991-92, as her husband debates his candidacy and decides to run. It is clear from the start that she isn't like the other candidates' wives, even as her husband isn't like the other men: a new generation has come of age. For the male half of the couple, that means that a series of World War II-generation presidents (all of whom either served or had some reason not to or, in one case, allegedly believed he had served because he was in war movies) from Kennedy to Bush gave way to the Vietnam War generation, with its very different ideals, views of war, and social attitudes. Those changes make us nervous, but nowhere near as nervous as the change on what might once have been called "the distaff side."

Because Rodham Clinton was a curiosity, media and public attention focused on her; because she quickly became, like her husband but even more strikingly so, a symbol of the New World Order-the changing roles of women, the replacement of old mores by new-that attention was polarized from the start, either passionately positive or virulently negative. Clichés and stereotypes were tested, toyed with, fitted on her. Her refusal to fit into them was exhilarating to some, infuriating to others. Because she fits no pattern, the media flounder in their treatment of her. She slithers out of the analysts' grasp, resisting definition or categorization. That both piques our interest and arouses anxiety and rage in many of us. Unlike any previous occupant of her position, she remains continually in the public eye, continually under scrutiny, examination, and reanalysis. She is the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to pass the UAT. When we examine her, we are trying to know ourselves.

The MAGS and NEWS databases provide a record of the ebb and flow of Hillariana over eight years: (through July) MAGS NEWS (816 total) (2,152 total) 1991 0 2 1992 56 159 1993 152 410 1994 197 448 1995 89 271 1996 213 538 1997 71 214 1998 38 110

High points occurred in 1993, 1994, and 1996. These dates are not random. The Clintons entered the White House in 1993, and Rodham Clinton was subjected to much more than the usual first lady scrutiny. The president soon appointed her to an unheard-of role for first ladies, the chair of a commission charged with reforming the country's health care system. The task itself was political dynamite; that a woman, and indeed a first lady, was to head it proved incendiary. The way in which she played that role attracted a great deal of media attention that continued unabated until the commission completed its task in 1995.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction. What I Am Doing Here, and How I Am Doing It	1
1	Language: The Power We Love to Hate	17
2	The Neutrality of the Status Quo	42
3	"Political Correctness" and Hate Speech: The Word as Sword	86
4	Mad, Bad, and Had: The Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Narrative(s)	118
5	Hillary Rodham Clinton: What the Sphinx Thinks	158
6	Who Framed "O.J."?	194
7	Ebonics--It's Chronic	227
8	The Story of Ugh	252
	Notes	283
	References	303
	Index	313

What People are Saying About This

John Fiske

An excellent book. Lakoff shows that if we do not understand how language is put to work in our world, we cannot understand our world, nor live in it effectively.
— (John Fiske, author of Media Matters)

Deborah Tannen

Robin Lakoff is a national treasure. She is one of the most astute and knowledgeable linguists in the country (indeed, in the world), and one of the few who turns her analytic eye to the role of language in popular and political culture. It was she who pioneered the field of gender and language. She is poised to be recognized among the general reading public as she has long been recognized in the field of linguistics.
— (Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand)

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant and imaginative linguistic analyses. . . . highly recommended."--"Choice

From the Publisher

To say simply that Lakoff is a linguist is like calling the Alps just another mountain range. In The Language War, she brilliantly applies her understanding of how language works to the major political battles of the past decade.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

A provocative collection of essays.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Often ironic, sometimes downright funny, Lakoff's book affixes the arguably intimidating lens of linguistics to recent hot topics to reveal the multilayered and often devastating power of words.
—Publishers' Row

East Bay Express

Lakoff devotes an entire chapter to the Oakland School Board's struggle with the issue of Ebonics. . .

The Oakland Tribune

In a series of provocative, dazzlingly argued essays, Lakoff charts how the media's use of language shapes both public attitudes and social policies on current events. . . . Witty and illuminating, Lakoff's analysis is an important addition to both linguistic and political studies.

Publishers Weekly

Provocative analysis.

Booklist

An intellectually stimulating probe of the nuances of social, cultural and political infighting among people who think they speak the same language.

Dallas Morning News

Lakoff devotes an entire chapter to the Oakland School Board's struggle with the issue of Ebonics . . .

Oakland Tribune

Lakoff is excellent on sexism in the job market.

Raphael Salkie

In a series of provocative, dazzlingly argued essays, Lakoff charts how the media's use of language shapes both public attitudes and social policies on current events, including the "political correctness" debate, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial and the debate over "ebonics." A professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, she discusses how specific words and linguistic constructs have adopted political meaning--such as George Will's use of an unidentified "we" in his columns, with the presumption that all readers share his ideas and values. Lakoff shines in her careful reading of how declarative sentences paraded as questions in the Hill/Thomas hearings or of how jokes about "Hebonics" (the Jewish-American language) underlined the unspoken racism in the media's attack on ebonics. She is also especially adept in her investigation of the language used in the media to "construct" the public image of Hillary Rodham Clinton, in which she exposes how subtle changes in word usage, grammatical construction and tone have helped create multiple personas for the First Lady--from a sexually predatory monster to a contemporary Eleanor Roosevelt--to suit the emotional and psychological needs of different constituencies. Witty and illuminating, Lakoff's analysis is an important addition to both linguistic and political studies. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Offering a linguist's view of big 1990s news stories, Lakoff (linguistics, Univ. of California, Berkeley) gives general readers insight into recent changes regarding language. She covers a range of topics (from politically correct phrases to the way news media influence events) to connect linguistics with politics--contributing to a trend in popular linguistics books that includes cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's latest, Words and Rules (LJ 12/99). Analyzing six news subjects (from Ebonics to the Clinton sex scandal), Lakoff applies linguistic theories and examines issues from a sociological/ political viewpoint. Overall, she successfully illustrates the importance of free speech in a democracy. Her tone is casual, and the prose is frequently laced with humor, anecdotes, and quotes from the media. For a related, more specialized treatment, look to John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr's examination of language in the operation of law in Just Words: Law, Language and Power (Univ. of Chicago, 2000). Recommended for larger public libraries.--Marianne Orme, West Lafayette, IN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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