Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following: * Read the novelizations * Read books in the EU * Read new canon books * Read some comics * Watched the animated shows * Participated in SW discussion groups.

Coercing with categories

Recently some guy tweeted “Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following…”  This is a great opportunity for me to talk about a particular kind of category fight: coercion.

Over the past several years I’ve written about some things people try to do with categories: watchdogging, gatekeeping, pedantry, eclipsing and splitting.  Coercion is similar to gatekeeping, which is where someone highlights category boundaries with the goal of preventing free riders from accessing benefits that they are not entitled to: the example I gave was of Dr. Nerdlove defending the category of “socially awkward men” from incursion by genuinely abusive men.  He argues that these abusive men do not deserve the accommodation that is sometimes extended to men who are simply socially awkward.

Coercion is different from gatekeeping in that the person making the accusation is shifting the category boundaries.  Ed Powell knows quite well that most people’s definition of “Star Wars fan” includes people who have not done any of the six things he lists.  So why is he insisting that “Actual Star Wars fans” have all done some of those things? Because he wants to control the behavior of people who care about whether they are considered Star Wars fans.

Why would someone care about being considered a Star Wars fan?  Because fandom is often a communal affair. Fans go to movies and conventions together, and bond over their shared appreciation for Star wars.  As Powell says, they may participate in discussion groups. There’s a satisfaction people get in talking about Wookiees or midichlorians with people who share background knowledge and don’t have to ask what a protocol droid is.

I’ve also heard that some people get a sense of belonging from participating in these groups.  They may have been teased – and rejected from other groups – for being one of the few Star Wars fans in their high school, especially in the seventies and eighties.  There’s a satisfaction and relief in finally finding a group that you share so much with.

Of course, these groups are vulnerable to the dark side.  They contain people, and people aren’t necessarily nice just because they’ve been treated badly by other people.  Sometimes not even if they’re Star Wars fans. Sometimes people discover they can wield power within a group like that, and they’re not always interested in using that power for good.

One way to wield power is to be able to give people something they want – or to deny it to them.  And if people want the sense of belonging to a group, or the enjoyment of participating in group activities, it’s a source of power to be able to control who belongs to the group – and who doesn’t.  Some groups are arbitrary: in theory, the only person who gets to decide who belongs to “Brenda’s friends” is Brenda, and the only person who gets to decide who’s invited to Kevin’s party is Kevin.

Other groups are based on categories, like these Meetup groups that are hosting events tomorrow: the New York Haskell Users Group, Black Baby Boomers Just Want to have Fun, or First Time Upper West Side Moms.  Or like Star Wars fans. These groups are much less arbitrary: if a woman lives on the Upper West Side with her only child, it’s going to be hard to throw her out.

It’s hard to exclude people from a category-based group, but not impossible.  What if our First Time Upper West Side Mom is trans, or a stepmother? Or if she’s a stepmother and a first-time biological mother?  Or if she lives on 107th Street? Or if her kid is in college? Because categories are fuzzy, the power to draw category boundaries can be the power to exclude people from group membership.  If the group leader doesn’t like our hypothetical mom, all she has to do is draw the boundary of the Upper West Side at 106th Street. Sorry honey, there is no First Time Morningside Heights Moms?  Oh gee, what a shame.

The power to exclude doesn’t even need to be exercised.  It doesn’t even need to have any direct force to have a chilling effect.  Even if the head of your local Star Wars fan club totally owns Ed Powell on Twitter, you still may be wondering if people at the next regional convention are going to look at you funny because you haven’t read Dark Force Rising.

But if you’re not actually going to use this power to exclude people, what do you use it for?  This is where the coercion comes in. You can use the threat of exclusion to bully people into doing things.  And the easiest way to do that is simply to make doing those things the criteria for inclusion.

So here’s what I think happened: Ed Powell got tired of going to conferences and not having anyone to talk about novelizations and animated series with.  All they wanted to talk about was the movies (I can’t imagine why!). So how does Powell get people to read these books? He changes the criteria for what counts as an Actual Star Wars fan.  Now they have to read them, or watch the series, if they want to be Actual Star Wars fans.

Now as far as I can tell, Ed Powell is just some guy on Twitter, and has no authority to exclude anyone from any fan club.  And he seems to be getting owned by everyone. I doubt that his shaming will have an effect on the general population of Star Wars fans.  It may serve as advertising to encourage people who have read these books and watched the animated series to talk with him about them. If it doesn’t turn them off too.

Theories are tools for communication

I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?

The process of science starts when someone makes an observation about the world. If we don’t understand the observation, we need to explore more, make more observations. We make hypotheses and test them, trying to get to a general principle that we can apply to a whole range of situations. We may then look for ways to apply this principle to our interactions with the world.

At every step of this process there is communication. The person who makes the initial observation, the people who make the further observations, who make the hypotheses, who test them, who who generalize the findings, who apply them: these are usually multiple people. They need to communicate all these things (observations, hypotheses, applications) to each other. Even if it’s one single person who does it all end to end, that person needs to communicate with their past and future selves, in the form of notes or even just thinking aloud.

These observations, hypotheses and applications are always new, because that’s what science is for: processing new information. It’s hard to deal with new information, to integrate it with the systems we already have for dealing with the world. What helps us in this regard are finding similarities between the new information and things we already know about the world. Once we find those similarities, we need to record this for our own reference and to signal it to others: other researchers, technologists and the rest of the population.

In informal settings, we already have ways of finding and communicating similarities between different observations. We use similes and metaphors: a person’s eyes may be blue like the sky, not blue like police lights. These are not just idle observations, though: the similarities often have implications for how we respond to things. If someone is leaving a job and they say that they’re passing the baton to a new person, they are signaling a similarity between their job and a relay race, and the suggestion is that the new person will be expected to continue towards the same goal the way a relay runner continues along the racecourse.

Theories and models are just formalized versions of metaphors: saying that light is a wave is a way of noting that it can move through the air like a wave moves through water. That theory allowed scientists to predict that light would diffract around objects the way that water waves behave when they encounter objects, a testable hypothesis that has been confirmed. This in turn allowed technologists to design lasers and other devices that took advantage of those wavelike properties, applications that have proven useful.

Here’s a metaphor that will hopefully help you understand how theories are communication tools: another communication tool is a photograph. Sometimes I see a photograph of myself and I notice that I’ve recently lost weight. Let’s say that I have been cutting back on snacks and I see a photo like that. I have other tools for discovering that I’ve lost weight, like scales and measuring tape and what I can observe of my body with my own eyes, but seeing a photo can communicate it to me in a different way and suggest that if I continue cutting back on snacks I will continue to lose weight. Similarly, if I post that photo on Facebook my friends can see that I’ve lost weight and understand that I’m going to continue to cut back on snacks.

A theory is like a photograph in that there is no single best photograph. To communicate my weight loss I would want a photo that shows my full body, but to communicate my feelings about it, a close-up on my face might be more appropriate. Friends of mine who get new tattoos on their legs will take close-ups of the tattoos. We may have six different photos of the exact same thing (full body, face or leg, for example), and be satisfied with them all. Theories are similar: they depend entirely on the purpose of communication.

A theory is like a photograph in that the best level of detail depends on what is being communicated and who the target is. If a friend takes a close-up of four square inches of their calf, that may be enough to show off their new tattoo, but a close-up of four square inches of my calf will probably not tell me or anyone else how much weight I’ve lost. Similarly, if I get someone to take an aerial photograph of me, that may indicate where I am at the time, but it will not communicate much about my weight. This applies to theories: a model with too much detail will simply swamp the researchers, and one with too little will not convey anything coherent about the topic.

A theory is like a photograph in that its effectiveness depends on who is on the other end of the communication. If someone who doesn’t know me sees that picture, they will have no idea how much I weighed before, or that my weight has been affecting my health. They will just see a person, and interpret it in whatever way they can.

A photograph may not be the best way to communicate my weight loss to my doctor. Their methods depend on measurable benchmarks, and they would prefer to see actual measurements made with scales or tape. On the other hand, a photo is a better way to communicate my weight loss to my Facebook friends than posting scale and tape measurements on Facebook, because they (or some of them at least) are more concerned with the overall way I look.

A theory’s effectiveness similarly depends on its audience. Population researchers may be familiar with the theories of Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, so if I tell them that ne…pas in French follows a Lotka-Volterra model, they are likely to understand. Chemists have probably never heard of Lotka or Volterra, so if I tell them the same thing I’m likely to get a blank stare.

This means that there is no absolute standard for comparing theories. We are never going to find the best theory. We may be able to compare theories for a particular purpose, with a particular level of detail, aimed at a particular audience, but even then there may be several theories that work about as well.

When I tell people about this instrumental approach to scientific theories and models, some of them get anxious. If there’s no way for theories to be true or false, how can we ever have a complete picture of the universe? The answer is that we can’t. Kurt Gödel showed decades ago with his Incompleteness Theorem that no theory or model can ever completely capture reality, not even a mathematical or computer model. Jorge Luis Borges illustrated it with his story of the map that is the same size as the territory.

Science is not about finding out everything. It’s not about getting a complete picture. That’s because reality is too big and complex for our understanding, or for the formal systems that our computers are based on. It’s just about figuring out more than we knew before. It will never be finished. And that’s okay.

Data science and data technology

The big buzz over the past few years has been Data Science. Corporations are opening Data Science departments and staffing them with PhDs, and universities have started Data Science programs to sell credentials for these jobs. As a linguist I’m particularly interested in this new field, because it includes research practices that I’ve been using for years, like corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

As a scientist I’m a bit skeptical of this field, because frankly I don’t see much science. Sure, the practitioners have labs and cool gadgets. But I rarely see anyone asking hard questions, doing careful observations, creating theories, formulating hypotheses, testing the hypotheses and examining the results.

The lack of careful observation and skeptical questioning is what really bothers me, because that’s what’s at the core of science. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of people in Data Science doing both. But these practices should permeate a field with this name, and they don’t.

If there’s so little science, why do we call it “science”? A glance through some of the uses of the term in the Google Books archive suggests that it was first used in the late twentieth century it did include hypothesis testing. In the early 2000s people began to use it as a synonym for “big data,” and I can understand why. “Big data” was a well-known buzzword associated with Silicon Valley tech hype.

I totally get why people replaced “big data” with “data science.” I’ve spent years doing science (with observations, theories, hypothesis testing, etc.). Occasionally I’ve been paid for doing science or teaching it, but only part time. Even after getting a PhD I had to conclude that science jobs that pay a living wage are scarce and in high demand, and I was probably not going to get one.

It was kind of exciting when I got a job with Scientist in the title. It helped to impress people at parties. At first it felt like a validation of all the time I spent learning how to do science. So I completely understand why people prefer to say they’re doing “data science” instead of “big data.”

The problem with being called a Scientist in that job was that I wasn’t working on experiments. I was just helping people optimize their tools. Those tools could possibly be used for science, but that was not why we were being paid to develop them. We have a word for a practice involving labs and gadgets, without requiring any observation or skepticism. That word is not science, it’s technology.

Technology is perfectly respectable; it’s what I do all day. For many years I’ve been well paid to maintain and expand the technology that sustains banks, lawyers, real estate agents, bakeries and universities. I’m currently building tools that help instructors at Columbia University with things like memorizing the names of their students and sending them emails. It’s okay to do technology. People love it.

If you really want to do science and you’re not one of the lucky ones, you can do what I do: I found a technology job that doesn’t demand all my time. Once in a while they need me to stay late or work on a weekend, but the vast majority of my time outside of 9-5 is mine. I spend a lot of that time taking care of my family and myself, and relaxing with friends. But I have time to do science.

Othering, dehumanization and abuse

In a comment, Candy asked:

Can we also please talk about how “cis” is used as a term of abuse against feminists? As in, “shut up privileged cis bitches”? It’s the bit where trans activism begins to overlap with Men Rights Activism.

The use of “shut up” and “bitches” in Candy’s (unattested) example is definitely abuse, but in this dismissive context, “cis” is not functioning as abuse but othering. It positions the referent as an outsider who has no standing in the group, and possibly a threat. Othering can hurt, and it can often be done with malicious intent, but it is not the same as abuse, and responding to it as though it were abuse is generally not effective.

We can distinguish othering from abuse by removing the abusive terms and imagining a different context. Imagine that you have a group of army officers discussing how to attack a fort. Someone with no expertise is walking by and says, “Hey guys, you should just hit the tower with a bazooka!” The officers would be justified in saying, “Are you an army officer? What do you know?” or just “Get this civilian out of here!” “Civilian” isn’t a term of abuse here. It’s othering, but without malicious intent.

Othering is close to dehumanizing, which is a process where categories of people are reframed as enemies unworthy of common decency. This is a well-documented response to trauma, but it can also be done without trauma, when one group is framed as an existential threat to another. This framing can be done quite cynically, as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadži? did with Muslims and later with NATO troops. As I’ve discussed on my trans blog, much of the hatred against gay men, lesbians, trans people, and women who don’t obey men is often in response to a framing that portrays them as unwilling to cooperate in increasing the birth rate of the group. I’m sure any of you can think of several more examples.

Othering is connected with abuse because dehumanizing is an invitation to abuse. If someone is really The Enemy, and unworthy of common decency, then any attacks on them are allowed. Restrictions demarcating acceptable conduct like forum rules and rules against torture are seen as an inconvenience at best, and at worst a dangerous vulnerability at times when “we” can least afford it.

Othering and dehumanizing are forms of category profiling: substituting a category of people for the feature that is required. The army officers have training and experience attacking forts, and in theory they’ve been promoted because they’ve demonstrated some skill. There’s no evidence that this civilian has training, experience or skill. Similarly, German soldiers on the Western Front in World War I were under genuine mortal threat from French and British soldiers who had been ordered to kill them, but there was no evidence that, say, Mexican soldiers were a threat to them at that time.

Of course, category profiling can go wrong in decision-making. There are many examples of experts failing spectacularly, and of outsiders succeeding where the experts don’t. There’s a whole genre of stories about these, like the film Working Girl, where our heroine’s financial expertise is dismissed because she’s categorized as a secretary. When she changes her clothes and hairstyle, people classify her as a financial executive, take her recommendations seriously, and make money.

Profiling has a notorious record in connection with dehumanization. The way that the US treated Russians and Communists when I was a kid, and Arabs and Muslims now, is far out of proportion to any threat. Profiling almost invariably misses some threats, and innocent people are always caught up in the mess.

Now let’s bring in the principle of “nothing for us without us,” which is a foundation of both representative government and identity politics. The idea is that people are experts in the issues that affect them, and the best people to discuss issues affecting a category of people are members of that category. It is very common in activist movements to insist on centering members of a particular category and excluding non-members – either from participating at all, or from taking part in the discussion. This is why othering statements like Candy’s constructed example are common in activist contexts.

When the “nothing for us without us” interacts with dehumanization, it leads to fear that They are pretending to be Us, derailing our discussions within the group and misrepresenting our goals to the wider public. This is not some paranoid fantasy: there is a long history of people infiltrating enemy movements with the goal of spying and disrupting. Recent examples from the FBI include the COINTELPRO infiltration of anti-racist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, and ongoing infiltration of Islamic groups. Our interactions increasingly take place online, where it can be even more difficult to judge people’s affiliations and motives.

Of course, the idea of representation immediately bumps square up against the profiling problem. The fact that someone is affected by an issue is no guarantee that they understand that issue, or have any ability to communicate it or resolve it. It is also no guarantee that they are sane or ethical. It can also be difficult to pin down the specific category affected and center just the members of that category. For example, low-income female-presenting nonwhite transgender people working in sex industries are targets of violence and discrimination, but even if trans people are given voice to talk about it they are often white, relatively affluent, not sex workers and even male-presenting. And because categories can be messy, it is sometimes possible for people to be simultaneously (or intermittently) part of one category that needs representation and another category that some in the first see as a threat.

Several people, including myself and Third Way Trans, have observed that it is common for trans people to have a history of trauma. This leads many trans people to take an us-and-them view of the world, where all trans people are good and innocent, and all “cis” people are evil abusers – despite the fact that trans people are just as likely to be abusive as anyone else. Their trauma leads to othering and dehumanization, and that invites abuse.

So that’s the answer to Candy’s question: “cis” in this context is not used as a term of abuse. It is used for othering, and in combination with the dehumanization that many trans people practice, that justifies the abuse. I don’t see any direct connection to “Men’s Rights Activism.” Thanks for your question, Candy; I hope this helps!

Category fights: Splitting

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.

On being a public linguist

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege. They say that those of us who have undertaken in-depth study in the interest of society have a particular responsibility to share what we know with the world as “public intellectuals.” They say that we linguists need to do a better job of applying our knowledge to real-world problems and communicating solutions to the public at large.

They’re right of course, but there’s a reason more people don’t do these things. They’re hard to do, and even harder to do right. Lots of people are strongly invested in the status quo and in thinking of themselves as good people, and they don’t like to be told that what they’re doing at best ineffective and at worst harmful. Lots of people think that because they’re trans they know everything there is to know about trans issues, or that because they use language they know everything there is to know about language.

Case in point: after watching with increasing frustration for years as the word “cisgender” was invented and abused, back in December I wrote a series of blog posts about it. I know this is a controversial topic, and I was a bit apprehensive since I was on the job market, but my posts was not idle rants: as a linguist, a trans person, and someone who has observed trans politics for years, I had been trained to do this kind of analysis, and pursued these topics beyond my training.

I anticipated a number of potential objections to my argument and addressed them in the first three posts. As I published each one I was worried it would get a huge backlash, but there was barely a peep (more on that in another post). So for the title of the last one I went big: “The word “cisgender” is anti-trans.” Not much reaction.

A few weeks ago I came across a Facebook post by a gender therapist asking for opinions about “cisgender,” so I left a link to my blog post, identifying it as “my professional opinion as a linguist.” The therapist then shared my post without identifying me as either trans or a linguist.

Then there was a backlash. Several people immediately called my post “garbage” and “horse shit.” There were a handful of substantive disagreements, all of which I had anticipated in my post and previous ones that I had linked to. There was some support, but the vast majority of comments were negative. There were several similar comments made on my blog post itself, most of which I left unpublished since they were repetitive and unhelpful.

I know that plenty of people face far worse reactions to things they post. I didn’t receive any comments on my looks, rape threats or death threats. But it was still very upsetting, particularly as it was posted the same day I began my first full-time job since receiving my Ph.D. – an event that was positive on a number of levels, but upsetting on other levels.

The gender therapist, who presumably helps people with their mental states, showed no interest whatsoever in mine. They made no effort to moderate, did not intervene in the comments, and sent me no personal messages. The idea that a trans person might be losing sleep over these attacks on their page may not have even occurred to them.

The response my post has gotten from other public linguists has been minimal. A columnist who’s written about the issue and encouraged me to write gave my post a few tweets. A radical feminist whose writings about language and politics inspired me for years completely ignored it. It has not been picked up by any of the popular linguistics blogs, or by anyone talking about language, gender and sexuality.

It’s quite possible that these linguists disagree with me. There are some very specific linguistic questions at stake. But linguists love to argue, and I would welcome respectful, constructive engagement with these questions. So far there has been none.

I have also gotten very little support from other linguists. When I was first formulating these arguments a few years ago on Twitter, there were at least two linguists who explicitly denied that I had any standing to contest the arguments for “cis” that they were retweeting. They were satisfied with the flimsiest of pseudolinguistic rationales in pursuit of their political and social goals, and for whatever reasons I did not qualify as an authentic voice of the trans community in their eyes. I stopped following them on Twitter, and as far as I could tell they had no reaction whatsoever to my posts.

I know that a lot of people don’t want to get involved in flamewars on Twitter or Facebook. It’s really hard to know who’s right and who’s wrong. At first glance I look like just another white guy, and I project an image of success and confidence on social media because that’s what everyone tells me I need to do. Some people may disagree with my stance on a political basis.

I mostly came out of the Facebook flareup okay, although it’s hard to tell how much of my insomnia and touchiness relates to that as opposed to other stresses. Re-reading some of those comments just now was pretty upsetting. I made a decision to focus on the new job, and avoided reading comments, posts or links for a week or two. Now it’s blown over – but there’s no telling when it’ll get shared by someone else.

My main point is that being a public linguist isn’t easy. Speaking out isn’t easy. Fighting on your own behalf instead of some Little People somewhere isn’t easy – even if you’ve got a certain amount of privilege. If you’re wondering why people don’t fight for themselves more often, why they don’t speak up, why linguists don’t write more public posts about issues that matter – there’s your answer. It’s much easier to bury your nose in a book and write about grammaticization vs. reanalysis in Old Church Slavonic.

If we really want people to take a stand on these things, we need to support them. We need to stick up for linguists who speak out in public. We need principles that go beyond identity and political and social affiliation. And we need people who are willing to support linguists who speak out based on those principles. We need people who will make themselves available to back up other linguists on the Internet. Without real support, it’s all empty rhetoric.

On pet parents

I’m a parent. It doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, it’s just a category that reflects some facts about me: I conceived a new human with my wife, we are raising and caring for that human, and we expect to have a relationship with him for the rest of our lives. Some people don’t take parenthood seriously, so it doesn’t impact their lives very much, but their kids suffer. We take it very seriously, and it’s a lot of work for us.

I also take care of pets. We own three cats, and sometimes I walk my mom’s dog or take him to be groomed. It can be a lot of work, and the relationships can be very intimate at times. “Ownership” is kind of a funny word for it. In some ways it can be like certain stages of parenting: we buy all the food and make sure the animals don’t get into danger. It makes sense when I hear people refer to their pets as their “baby” or put words in their pets calling themselves “daddy.” I even understand when I hear them refer to themselves as “pet moms.”

I understand this usage, but I do not agree with it. I have a kid, and I have pets. The relationships are similar, but different. When someone calls themself a “pet dad,” it trivializes my relationship with my kid and infantilizes my pets. It erases the work of the actual parents, and trivializes the hard work of humans who act as surrogate parents to infant pets. I am a dad: I am not a pet dad, and I am not my pets’ dad. Or their mom.

My kid will one day be an adult, and while I may always think of him as The Kid, he will be able to function as an autonomous member of society. (Note that the term “kid” itself is an animal metaphor – referring to a juvenile goat.) Only one of my cats can still be considered a juvenile by any standard; the others are five years old and twenty years old, respectively. They are adult males, and until the last century they would have been free to come and go as they wished.

If my cats are incapable of leaving our house unaccompanied it is more likely due to the fact that we have cars everywhere than anything else. When I was a kid we lost three dogs to car culture. When I was eleven I saw a neighbor’s cat crushed beneath the wheels of a car, and arrived just in time to see him take his last breath. We have indoor cats and dog leashes in part because we have made the outdoors inhospitable.

I suspect one reason we hear more about “pet parents” is that so few of our pets are parents themselves. I support universal neutering, and have only adopted neutered cats from shelters or feral rescuers. It’s the best response to the overpopulation of feral animals, but it does make the pets neuter – and childless.

When I was a kid we had a cat who had a litter of kittens. I watched one of our dogs give birth to eleven puppies, and then found homes for the ten that lived. Our male cats were aggressive, sexual toms. Again, not wise in retrospect, but it was hard to think of any of the humans in the house as “moms” or “dads” of our pets while they were themselves moms and dads.

There is one human I know who would qualify as a “cat mom” in my mind. She is the woman who leads the feral cat helpers in our neighborhood. Six years ago someone found a baby kitten near some railroad tracks in Manhattan. My neighbor fostered this kitten in her apartment for five months, feeding him with an eyedropper until he was old enough to eat. She posted his picture on her website and we adopted him. If he has a “pet mom” it’s her.

It’s got to be deontic necessity

Gretchen McCulloch has been posting about epistemic modality on her All Things Linguistic blog recently. If you don’t know what epistemic modality is, very briefly, in many languages (including English), there are words that are ambiguous in a particular way: between saying something about our social and moral codes, and saying something about our knowledge of the world. Consider this expression of necessity:

  1. She should be there by now.

Under a deontic interpretation, this “should” is telling us that she has an obligation to be there by now, but under an epistemic interpretation it means that we expect her to be there by now. Other expressions of necessity like “must, have to, got to” have similar pairs of interpretations. Now consider this expression of possibility:

  1. She could have gone there yesterday.

Under a deontic interpretation the “could” means that she was allowed to go there yesterday, but the epistemic interpretation means we have some reason to imagine that she went there yesterday. There are other expressions of possibility like “may, can, might” that allow similar ambiguity.

There are also root modality interpretations: under root necessity, (1) means that the circumstances of the world have culminated in her being there by now, and under root possibility, (2) means simply that it was possible for her to go there yesterday.

A few years ago I noticed that the Jackson Browne song “Somebody’s Baby” had an interesting twist to it. According to Harmonov it was written in 1982 for the soundtrack to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as a theme for the character of Stacy, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

I was listening to “Somebody’s Baby” again yesterday not long after reading Gretchen’s post, and I realized that the lyric twist plays on the ambiguity between epistemic and deontic modality. In the first verse we hear “got to be” and “must be”:

Well, just, a look at that girl with the lights comin’ up in her eyes.
She’s got to be somebody’s baby.
She must be somebody’s baby.

The clear intent is the epistemic one: the girl is so fine that the narrator can only conclude she has a relationship based on this evidence. The guys on the corner don’t harass her because they come to the same conclusion and don’t want any trouble from “somebody.” But the twist comes in the second verse:

I heard her talkin’ with her friend when she thought nobody else was around.
She said she’s got to be somebody’s baby; she must be somebody’s baby.

The epistemic reading of these modals is ruled out by the fact that it is the girl who is saying them. Presumably she knows whether she’s somebody’s baby or not, and does not need to declare this epistemic relation to her friend. This leads us to the root necessity reading: she has a need to be somebody’s baby, and the deontic reading: she has an obligation to be somebody’s baby.

It’s actually very sad that this girl believes her beauty and worth are not validated unless she is in a relationship highlighted by metaphors of possession and infantilization. Not to fear, our narrator will use this overheard intelligence to approach her when all the other guys are too intimidated, and she can be his baby. Let’s hope he’s a decent guy.

But anyway, the point is: modals. The first verse is epistemic necessity, but the second verse has got to be deontic necessity. It must be deontic necessity. It’s so fine.

Eclipsing

I’ve written about default assumptions before: how for example people in different parts of the English-speaking world have different assumptions about what they’ll get when they order “tea” or a “burger.” In the southern United States, the subcategory of “iced tea” has become the default, while in the northern US it’s “hot tea,” and in England it’s “hot tea with milk.” But even though iced tea is the default “tea” in the South, everyone there will still agree that hot tea is “tea.” In other cases, though, one subcategory can be so salient, so familiar as to crowd out all the other subcategories, essentially taking over the category.

An example of this eclipsing is the category of “concentration camp.” When you read those words, you probably imagined a Nazi death camp like Auschwitz, where my cousin Dora was imprisoned. (Unlike many of her fellow prisoners she survived the ordeal, and died peacefully earlier this year at the age of 101.) Almost every time we hear those words, they have referred to camps where our enemies killed millions of innocent civilians as part of a genocidal project, so that is what we expect.

This expectation is why so many people wrote in when National Public Radio’s Neal Conan referred to the camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in World War II as “concentration camps” in 2012. NPR ombudspeople Edward Schumacher-Matos and Lori Grisham observed that the word dates back to the Boer War. Dan Carlin goes into detail about how widely the word “campos de reconcentración” was used in the Spanish-American war. Last year, Aya Katz compared the use of “concentration camp” to that of “cage,” and earlier this year, reviewed the history of the word.

In general, the “concentration camps” of the Boer War and the Spanish American War, as well as the “camps de regroupement” used by the French in the wars of independence in Algeria and Indochina, were a counter-insurgency tactic, whereby the colonial power controlled the movements of the civilian population in an effort to prevent insurgents from hiding among noncombatants, and to prevent noncombatants from being used as human shields.

As Roger Daniels writes in his great article “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans” (PDF), the concept of “internment” refers to the process of separating “alien enemies” – nationals of an enemy power – from the general population, and was first practiced with British subjects during the War of 1812. While this was done for citizens of Japan (and other enemy powers) during World War II, Daniels objects to the use of “internment” to describe the incarceration of American citizens on the basis of Japanese ancestry. He notes that President Roosevelt used the term “concentration camp” to describe them, and asks people to use that word instead of “internment.”

In the case of the colonial wars, the camps were used to isolate colonized people from suspected insurgents. In the case of the Japanese-American incarceration, the camps were used to isolate suspected spies from the general population. In neither case were they used to exterminate people, or to commit genocide. They were inhumane, but they were very different from Nazi death camps.

It is not hard to understand why the Nazi death camps have come to eclipse all other kinds of concentration camps. They were so horrific, and have been so widely discussed and taught, that the inhumanity of relocating the populations of entire towns and rounding up people based on ethnicity pales by comparison. It makes complete sense to spend so much more time on them. As a result, if we have ever heard the term “concentration camp” used outside of the context of extermination and genocide it doesn’t stick in our memory.

For most English speakers, “concentration camp” means a Nazi death camp, or one equally horrific. This is why Daniels acknowledges, following Alice Yang Murray, that “it is clearly unrealistic to expect everyone to agree to use the contested term concentration camp.”