Imagine that you belong to a category, like ?tourist.? You fit all the necessary conditions for membership in that category: you are traveling to another part of the world for recreation. But that category has a bad reputation – literally a bad name. What do you do? You split the category.
In the past I?ve talked about other kinds of category fights: watchdogging alleged bait-and-switch tactics, or gatekeeping to prevent free-riding. Tonight I?m going to talk about splitting.
I grew up in the lovely arts colony of Woodstock, New York, which is crowded every summer and fall with tourists. They never bothered me too much, and they bought lots of stuff so that the merchants could afford to hire my parents, but my family and neighbors liked to complain about them. They drove too fast on our country roads, possibly contributing to the death of some of our dogs over the years. They filled up the parking lots and caused traffic jams on Mill Hill Road. They asked annoying questions – where was Yasgur?s farm? They were demanding and unreasonable to my sister and friends who worked in retail.
In terms of non-Platonic categories, there is a wide diversity of actual tourists, but the category is dominated in people?s minds by a stereotype of the Tourist, who is entitled, disrespectful, and lacks a proper appreciation for the people they are visiting and their culture. All tourists are tainted by the stereotype of the Tourist, but some people do pride themselves on being respectful, humble, open and curious. What can they do to advertise that to others?
As Lara Week documented in a study of several blogs in 2012, and described to Laurie Taylor on his Thinking Allowed podcast, one thing you can do is to split the category. A number of people have chosen to call themselves ?travelers? instead of ?tourists.? Week reports that they distinguish themselves by ?doing what the locals do,? ?respecting local cultures? and ?being frugal,? and have added features like ?seeking authenticity? and ?going to ?untraveled? places.? She goes on to summarize critiques that argue that the self-styled travelers have ?fail to address all of the problems created by tourism,? but that is not directly relevant to the linguistic issues here.
The travelers, notably, split the category of ?tourist? so that they are outside of it. They have concluded that the category is irredeemably contaminated, and their only hope is to escape it. In contrast, as Ben Zimmer reported last year, a number of people have tried to split the category of ?pedestrian,? keeping the stereotype of pedestrians clean by placing people who text while walking into subcategories of ?petextrians,? or ?wexters.?
The cleanliness of the stereotype is one factor in determining whether people choose to split themselves off into another category or to split others off. It also determines whether people try to split themselves (or others) into a subcategory or into a completely new category. Another factor is how rigidly the category is defined. It is very hard to leave the category of ?men,? so some men who feel that the stereotype is contaminated have responded with the #notallmen hashtag, trying to reclaim it by splitting the bad men into a subcategory.