Mind your language... again!

In an earlier post we asked the question "Does it matter what we call things?". This article from today's Guardian goes some way towards answering that question - at least with regard to the language used to describe some specific medical conditions. It's only a short piece, but one of the more interesting points the writer makes is about the use of words like 'schizophrenic' as nouns labelling individuals, rather than as adjectives used to describe their condition. The writer argues that the latter is acceptable, while the former is less so, because it reduces the person concerned to nothing more than a sufferer of their condition, defining them solely in terms of their disability.

You might remember us discussing this very process in class in relation to ethnicity: we talked about the use of adjectives such as 'Chinese' - as in 'Chinese people' - as compared with the generally less acceptable noun 'Chinese', as in 'the Chinese' (or, even more contentious, the use of 'black' as a noun rather than as an adjective). You might think this is 'linguistic pedantry', but it's worth asking yourself whether these subtle differences actually make a difference to people's perceptions of the group or individual being represented. In some cases maybe not... but in other cases I think there is something to be considered here.

War of the words...

...or, more accurately, the words of war. As we begin to move on (in the AS course) to studying the language of political speeches and rhetoric in general, how much more timely could this article in yesterday's Guardian be? The article focuses on the subtle linguistic shifts that are taking place with regard to the ways in which politicians talk about the war in Afghanistan. In line with the ideas about language that we have been considering on the course, the writer comments that "terminology is important because it shapes the thinking". Indeed. And so it is that there is no longer talk of defeating the Taliban; instead the insurgency is dispelled. Have a look at the article for further linguistic nuggets, and if you want to read more on this then have a look at some previous posts on this blog here and here.

Representations of young people

With all of the AS groups currently working on Representation and Language, I thought you might find it useful if we were to gather together on this blog some links to texts that construct representations of particular social groups, individuals, issues etc. So, first up: representations of young people.

In the first of these articles, which is primarily about the new Michael Caine film Harry Brown, the writer considers the use of 'the hoodie' as a universal symbol of undesirable or even criminal elements in society. Although this is a text which more or less analyses representation (rather than creating its own representation of young people), the writer makes some interesting points about the ways in which society presents and views members of this age group. The following extract is a good example:

What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels" – in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".

The Women in Journalism article that is referred to in the quotation above contains some really interesting observations on language that relate very closely to the work we've been focusing on in class.

But are media representations of young people always as negative as this? In the first of a number of articles that appeared in the press last year, we see a number of examples of young people being labelled in precisely the way that the writer of the Harry Brown article was talking about. In this article the labels teenager and teen - which in themselves are arguably neutral - are used in collocation with descriptors such as callous and reports that these young people "casually snacked on McDonald's burgers as an 82-year-old driver lay dying with his wife critically injured beside him".

By contrast, this article uses the term teenagers in a much more neutral way, reinforcing the representation with the far more positive label young people. Similarly, in this article and this article the victims of violent attacks are given the neutral label boy, while their attackers are labelled far mroe negatively as youths and gangs.