Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Like I said yesterday, silveradept asked me for "A useful thing you have learned by studying linguistics."

They asked separately about the IPA, which is always my immediate thought when I think about useful linguistics things. I wish everybody was taught it in high school. And I've written about that before too, so I won't go into that again.

So let's see...what else have I learned that's useful? I'm going to talk about two things from pragmatics: phatic communication, and Grice's maxims.

I know a lot of neurodiverse people, and a lot of them struggle with phatic communication (link is to a Tom Scott video on the subject), finding "small talk" difficult and confusing. I think if people explicitly knew more about it, why it exists and what function it serves, it might seem less annoying and pointless, and hopefully might even be easier to navigate once people recognize its uses.

Things like greeting someone with a question that you don't expect a complex and unique answer to (like "you alright?" or "what's up?") aren't pointless. They acknowledge the other person, indicate that you're interested in starting a conversation with them, We can, even in languages like English that lack other grammatical ways of doing this, establish a hierarchy: we might not have "tu" and "vous" to do this like French, or the many ways of addressing someone in a language like Japanese, but we can indicate how we relate to somebody by whether we greet them with "hey" or "hello" or "excuse me" or whatever.

Phatic expressions also help with turn-taking in conversation: a lot of the "mmm"s and "yeah"s and so on that we say to show we're listening to someone and also, often, that they've paused or come to the end of a sentence, where we could start talking, but we've chosen to encourage them to go on. When we want to speak, there might be other "yeah"s or "oh"s we use, but they don't usually sound the same. These kinds of verbal clues are especially important to me, since I can't see facial expression or body langauge clues that somoene wants to speak or not (I do tend to talk over people because of this, which I hate and have anxiety about, so if I do it to you I'm

This reminds me of Grice's maxims. Paul Grice was a philosopher who came up with the cooperative principle, which says that we expect, and try to offer, certain kinds of cooperation from people we're in a conversation with. Grice came up with four kinds: quality, manner, relevance and quantity.

1. The maxim of quality says we don't say things we believe to be false or that we can't back up with evidence. We want to believe that people know what tbey're talking about, that they're not lying or misinformed. Otherwise we're wasting our time talking with them, and probably frustrating ourselves.
2. The maxim of manner says we talk in a way appropriate for the people we're talking to. This means
   • using words we think they'll understand (I explain, for example, my white cane much differently to toddlers than to bus drivers)
   • using only as many words as we need
   • avoiding ambiguity
   • talking about things in a sensible order -- whether that's chronological, or here where I'm talking about the four maxims one at a time, and here talking about the four things Grice says we need in order to be "appropriate."
3. The maxim of relevance has a clue in the name: be relevant. We don't expect non-sequiturs in conversation (being rare is one of the things that allows them to be funny; they're tiresome if they happen too often). Often if something seems like a non-sequitur, we'll give the person the benefit of the doubt a bit because we expect relevance and are generally willing to politely hang in there a little to see if "Twelve years ago, I got really drunk one day..." ends up being an answer to our question about someone's job. But it does put some strain on the conversation, we like nice straightforward relevance better.
4. The maxim of quantity is the last one. This says you should be as informative as you need to be, and no more so. So if someone asks me if I like where I live and I say "I like some things about it," I'm giving them the information that there are also things I don't like. But if I don't want to go into that, because it's more polite to be positive, I can offer that information without detaling my dislikes.

You certainly don't have to remember all of Grice's maxims -- when I was telling Andrew the other day that autistic people could benefit from them, not only could I only remember three of them, I was convinced that there only were three -- the point is that these aren't rules Grice is telling us to follow, but patterns he'd noticed in how people already behave.

But we're mostly not conscious of it, and that can lead us to being annoyed not just when this assumption of cooperation breaks down. Even if we can't fix the people around us, it sometimes helps to put our finger on why talking to them bugs us, and it definitely helps if we know what cooperation looks like.

Feel free to suggest more December topics for me if you like!

Somehow it's nearly December? Which means December Days! This is a meme where people can request prompts for someone to write about a particular topic on a day in December. And since I've committed myself to writing something every day, feel free to help me think of things! You can request a certain day in the month for your prompt (I like to suggest my birthday since that's in December and then it's like I get little presents if people can do it) if you want to but you don't have to.

Favourite thing(s) I ate this year, suggested by nou

I think what I'm about to suggest is what I made myself for dinner the day nou made this suggestion.

Because I remember thinking "this is my favorite thing I've eaten this year!" And then telling myself no no Holly, that's just recency bias. You love restaurants and takeaways and other people cooking for you; surely you can think of something you've eaten this year, this whole year, that's better than this.

But for some reason, this kale with tahini dressing is what has stood out. It's one of the things I missed most while I was at my parents being deprived of protein and vegetables. And I made it for myself again today. It makes at least two main-meal sized servings for me, but I ate them both up because it tasted so good.

In May, I wrote up my version of this recipe for the weekly_food_challenge here.

The thing that was most interesting to learn this [UNIT OF TIME], suggested by silveradept

We had our last proper typology lecture yesterday (the one I'll go to after I've written this is exam preparation) and it made me wonder if typology isn't going to be this semester's "thing I'm going to hate taking but be glad I've taken," like Sounds of Language was last spring.

After a rather dry semester I found yesterday's quo-vadis lecture really fascinating: it was about the new areas of study typology is heading towards (according to my lecturer anyway and to her credit she always admits to her biases).

They include overlaps with evolutionary biology, which is surprisingly relevant to linguistics in terms of methods (apparently some of the same statistical models can be used) and what they're trying to find out (the origin and development of diversity, be it in languages or biology).

Some odd correlations have already been found. Like, places with more biodiversity tend also to have more languages spoken there. Mammal diversity has been proposed as having a particular effect. Altitude correlates with linguistic diversity. As does living in a forested area. Even the prevalence of infectious diseases seems to be related to how many languages are likely to be spoken in a place.

Now as I said these are correlations, and none of them might end up being causation. There are masses of biological data in these statistical models these days and it might just be throwing false positives up. There are theories about why some of these correlations might exist though, so I don't know.

These correlations are definitely the best thing I learned yesterday, and maybe for quite some while! I know nothing about biology but it's always nice to see interdisciplinary results, and fun to think about other things after being stuck in linguistics mode so much lately.

(I'm going by date rather than number of posts I've written; I didn't do one yesterday.)

When I asked for suggestions of things to write about, marjorie_bark said she looked up the UN's International action days in December, which I think is a fantastic way of looking for topics! The two that she said I could probably come up with something to write abouit are two of the topics I feel I go on about the most, but she was confident I can find something to say. Today is the first: today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

Rather than just talk about about being a disabled person* again, I looked up a bit of information about how the UN commemorates the day. Wikipedia tells me that it started when the UN declared 1981 to be "The Year of Disabled Persons," which amuses me because that's the year I was born, a totally blind baby.

The slogan of IYDP was "a wheelchair in every home", defined as the right of persons with disabilities to take part fully in the life and development of their societies, enjoy living conditions equal to those of other citizens, and have an equal share in improved conditions resulting from socio-economic development.

A Wheelchair in Every Home! I love that. It makes a great slogan because it'll catch people off guard a little: hopefully making them think about things like "Why would there be a wheelchair in my home?" and ponder how inaccessible most of our lives and routines are, and that none of us are guaranteed to be "safe" from disability. Indeed there are theories that some of the animosity and disabling reactions we face from individual members of society stem from their internalized fear of becoming disabled themselves. The answer to why there might be a wheelchair in one's home is going to be extremely uncomfortable for a lot of people, and I am sure that's as true now as it was in 1981.

Apparently a major outcome of the International Year of Disabled Persons was the formulation of the World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1982, and this not only was a precursor to the current Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons but also kicked of an International Decade of Disabled Persons, from 1983 to 1993.

It's becuase of that Convention, to which the UK has been a signatory since 2007, that the UN was able to make the criticisms that got some press lately, about how disabled people's human rights are being violated by the way the UK government is treating us. It's nothing that any disabled person didn't already know, but it's important to have this recognized officially by prestigious organizations like the UN too because disabled people are often hugely disempowered and disprivileged.

While I like the slogan of the first International Day of etc.etc. (part of the reason I don't like person-first language is it just seems so much more cumbersome to write out!), I must admit I found the the list of the last two decades' themes pretty uninspiring. Lots about technology, inclusion, empowerment, breaking down barriers...lots of jargon about development and sustainable goals. It is in the nature of organizations like the UN to be vague and maybe kinda dry on these things, but sheesh. This year's theme is "Empowering persons with disabilities and ensuring inclusiveness and equality" which is literally just a remix of words that have appeared in previous years.

Interestingly (to me, anyway) I also learned from Wikipedia that Ian Dury was not a fan of this Day of Disabled People from the beginning, and his song "Spasticus Autisticus" was a direct comment on it (his "public response to a public gesture" according to a PDF I found in this wikihole I ended up in); he thought the day was "patronising" and "crashingly insensitive." The BBC apparently banned the song...but, oddly,

only until a 6 p.m. watershed, a decision which itself irked Dury. His record label subsequently sought to strike a defiant as well as sophisticated note regarding the record’s failure to chart, releasing a statement which said: ‘Just as nobody bans handicapped people – just makes it difficult for them to function as normal people – so “Spasticus Autisticus” was not banned, it was just made impossible to function.**

The idea that "Spasticus," a sweary song that seems to combine all the awful things a person might have shouted at them in a lifetime of being disabled (as Ian Dury, who'd had polio, experienced first-hand), wasn't worth banning altogether but only until after a watershed sends the message that disability is something unsightly, or at least that disabled people being anything other than lamenting or nobly suffering is unsightly. Dury called this song a "war-cry" and sounded quite proud of it getting banned and that "people got offended by it – everybody except the spastics." This kind of reclamation, familiar to many marginalized groups, can be so powerful.

It seems to me like the social model of disability sticking its head above the parapet and being knocked down by the prevailing medical model which says disabled people are a medical problem to be fixed and a tragedy that other members of society can safely consider themselves helpless to ameliorate -- thereby convienently absolving themselves of any responsibility to make even the tiniest improvements for disabled people.

Anyway, I've just caught myself using "thereby" and there are a ton of footnotes piling up underneath here (I did warn you guys I'd be writing this in between essays, I guess!) so I think that's enough out of me.

Again: please suggest a topic for me to write about in December Days if you like! Still plenty of days left.


* I prefer "disabled person" to "person with disabilities," but opinions on identity-first ("disabled person," "blind person," etc.) vs. person first ("person with disabilites," "person with visual impairment," etc.) vary from one country to another as well as from one condition to another: for instance, person-first language is standard in the U.S. but even there, autistic people seem to strongly prefer "autistic person" to "person with autism," to the point where the latter is sort of a shibboleth that tells clued-up autistic people that the speaker probably has ableist, mistaken or otherwise hostile views on autism.

** I'd hasten to add that we've (more or less!) moved on a lot from the dichotomy of handicapped vs. normal -- "handicapped" is now considered derogatory (in the UK; it startles me to hear it from Americans but there it's still used to describe toilets and parking spaces and similar things called either "disabled" or "accessible" in the UK), and we're better not about not defining marginalized people as distinct from "normal" people but instead from abled people, cis people, neurotypical people, straight people, white people, Christians, etc.***

*** I'm still on the lookout for a good word of this sort for non-immgrant that isn't "native" because native cannot now be separated from its connotations with indigenous people in North America...but that's a topic outside the scope of this piece! It's important to make that distinction, though: between "common" and "normal."

I forgot about this! Well, that's not actually true: I forgot that it's nearly December actually. I don't know how when it feels like it's been November for approximately forty-seven years, but there you go.

December Days is a meme where people ask for a person (here, me) to write about a particular topic. They can request either a certain day in December for it (I like to suggest my birthday since that's in December and then it's like I get little presents if people can do it) and if they don't, I'll just go through them one at a time.

I probably won't be able to write something every single day (I'll be spending two of those days flying, if nothing else!), also I have an essay due on the first of the days I'm supposed to be flying and another one due early in January, but I actually thought giving myself non-academic writing prompts might help keep me in the right frame of mind when I need breaks from the essays.