Bulldozing Language in the Name of Urban Re-Development

What is "human-scaled design"? Not what it used to be. The connotations suggest something not massive. In terms of domestic architecture this would not mean a 46-storey building towering over any humans in the vicinity -- and containing "units" so micro you couldn't swing the proverbial cat in them (although there's room for cat-astrophe, design-wise). 

Downtown living in a commercial core is not human-scaled; it's business-scaled. (But then, maybe both renters and the units they live in are but commodities -- a renter simply a customer of the housing industry.)

What matters is that the language around this real estate "development" is dishonest. In the mid-sized west-coast city of Victoria, BC, the small downtown core once shelved off gradually into well-treed suburbia. The low-rise route leading out of downtown was christened "Antique Row" by advertisers and tourism promoters because most shops sold old furniture and collectables. 

Now that this heritage is being destroyed by growth and development and the shops replaced by towers, Antique Row is being re-christened, mendaciously, "Heritage Corridor" -- now that its heritage is being erased. 

The City pitches the coming 46-storey high-rise as a "sensitive and innovative response to the existing character" of the neighbourhood: the opposite of what it is. How can dense high-rise blocks of "units" with no parking replace rows of low shops and easy customer access and be called "human-scaled"? 

Neighbourhood history is being erased -- but that happens in growing cities. The worst destruction is to language. Describing things by words that mean the opposite is reprehensible dishonesty, not to mention illogical illiteracy. 

The foundations of language and communication are being bulldozed -- our heritage of reasoned speech, and not "sensitively". We live in a post-postmodern era when people in pursuit of real estate profit from overpopulation can apparently "innovate" new heritage, and if that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you're in the wrong "heritage corridor" in the race to urban uglification. 

I want a word with you, CBC Radio & TV

 Never mind, it's all a "First world problem" anyway -- but there's something lame indeed (sorry, but it's the best word for it) about a national broadcaster (like CBC the narrowing-caster) lecturing the public about what vocabulary they're permitted to use. Or hear. Making an actual list of terms to be censored?!?

How can there be something wrong with a phrase like "spirit animal", it being a concept embedded in almost every culture in history? No one owns concepts. Logically, it would seem aboriginal groups that object to Latin & Greek as artifacts of "Euro-centrist colonialism", shouldn't be using the words "spirit" and "animal" anyway, their roots being Latin: "spiritus" (breath) and "animus" ( moving living thing).

And "tribes" (which were simply groups settled along a river, itself a tributary of a greater river and conTRIBUTING to its flow) means everybody. Their languages flow one into another. To pick up expressions one from another is a way of giving a tribute. And (although CBC social justice warriors won't like this tool) these words are also related to 'tribunal' -- a hearing to confront governments (e.g. Roman senate) in defense of preserving citizens' liberties. CBC seems not to like liberties, like free speech, for example.

Anyone who speaks English or Romance languages speaks Latin; it's embedded in the flow, the confluence, the fluency of these language-streams. More examples among the favourite Latin woke-hates are actually their most-used: 're-conciliation', 'ap-propriate', 'geno-cide' (cidere - to kill, genus - group), 'misogyny' (from 'gynus' - Greek for woman), not to mention the Top Trio: 'diversity', 'equity', and 'inclusion' (vers, aequus, and cludere - to close).

Maybe Canada needs An Act To Defend Threatened Vocabulary, meaning words that stand for concepts we're losing, words like 'skepticism', 'satire', 'irony', 'jocosity', 'ribaldry'. Maybe there should be a contest like CBC's "Canada Reads". Call it "Canada Speaks". A panel would vote on the Worst Words of the Year -- all hysterically disagreeing on which words those were, of course. (The winner would win William Worstword's latest volume of illusional-allyship verse) and get a place on the show "This Thought Has 22 Micro-seconds". 

Worst Words would be chosen in categories, like Worst Adjective ("systemic" would be the favourite), Worst Hybrid ("BIPOC" should win that), Worst Trans-Words meaning nouns converted to verbs (e.g. 'expensing') and verbs to nouns (an 'ask'), and Worst Epithet (if anyone still learns what an epithet is). 

Meanwhile we'll have to ban Halloween and Carnivale (they're full of spooks), and replace savage (wild) with tame, black sheep with harlequin sheep, powwow with bowwow (an off-leash dog meeting), blind spot with failure-to-see spot, and brain-storm with brain-fog, the last 2 being what we've now got.

CBC has a strong objection to the existence of "black-face", but they should be experiencing red-face. It all makes us feel very jocose in anxious times, anyway ... so thank you CBC.

The Hidden Violence Around You -- Who Knew?

You think you live a quiet life, minding your own business in peaceful surroundings? No: there's hidden violence all around. Remember when there was just common-or-garden-variety violence? Violence of the street, perpetrated by criminals? Now it's perpetrated by everyone, and you probably don't even know all the names under which it rears its mystifying head:

Data violence,  Misgender violence,                                                                    Ablement violence (not to be confused with Disablement violence)            Epistemic violence (and its murderous cousin, Pernicious Ignorance)   Hermeneutic violance,  Policy violence, Symbolic violence,  Categoration violence

These are of course related to the "micros" (fleas of injustice biting the unwary in society's multiple unsafe spaces …): micro-aggression, micro-assault and micro-invalidation ... 

These are closely related to the new generation of "isms": linguicism, normism, audism, blank-slatism, colourism, technofeminism, dysconscious racism (not to be confused, presumably, with conscious racism), vaginism and Zoomism (Okay, I made the last two up; why not?)

So if you go down to the socio-linguistic woods today -- deep, dark and dangerous -- prepare for a big surprise: systemic incomprehension.

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Shakespeare For the Modern Audience

Our performance offers a medley of famous scenes from Shakespeare without any elitist non-inclusive language offensive to many diversified and marginalized communities.

We open the curtain on King Lear who is getting lost in a storm, raging against his disloyal daughters, and expressing the feelings of his Inner Child:

“Oh let me not be mad, sweet heaven” -- by which his Inner Child means “Let me not be neuro-variant, sweet safe place”

Adding that “Old fools are babes again”, he stresses that “older differently-abled adults are just as good as newborns”

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Hamlet upon seeing the ghost of his murdered father, is wondering:

“Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of this escalatory shit-storm, or whether 'tis woker in the mind to leverage against a sea of its positionality, and by un-friending, de-platform it.”

King Richard by contrast has no doubt about how to win a battle. He on his own battlefield would give up what Hamlet's uncle wouldn't, confirming that he'd prefer a horse to a crown. “My kingdom for a horse,” he assures us, meaning “my traditional territory for an electric all-terrain-vehicle in which to roar across the landscape”

From here our medley switches to a scene in Italy where the Capulet and Montague families are having an ancestral feud. “A plague on both your high-rise low-carbon urban appropriately eco-dense condos”, responds one onlooker. Meanwhile a member of one of the families, Juliet, is trying to contact a member of the other:

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though Romeo?” she texts, while muttering under her breath “why are you being such an elitist privileged misogynist?”

Miranda, after witnessing a Tempest that struck her island homeland, is having better luck with a new immigrant, Prince Ferdinand. After a life spent with only one manic-depressive father for company and one distant neighbour who was … alternative, she fell in love with this first new guy to come along. Finding he had relatives in tow plus a bunch of alcoholic mariners, she expressed wonder: "oh brave new international order," she exclaimed, "that has such multicultural intersectional identity groups in't!"

And as our play comes to an end, three omnivorous old foodies appear and stir a pot in a cooking demonstration for the benefit of Lord Macbeth who, feeling victimized by their harassment, insults them in very sexist ageist terms, even alleging they smell like filthy old people-experiencing-poverty.

Then, clearly himself a person experiencing depression (due partly to his wife tasking him with a too-actionable ask) Macbeth announces that it's time to “out out” all kinds of societal bad actors, plus the brief green-battery low-energy flashlight that lights his way to death. In an obvious fit of post traumatic stress disorder he concludes that “on the coming event-horizon (in fact, three of them) our brief green-battery flashlight will go out-out, and every poor click-baiting content-providing social media influencer too will strut but an hour of performativity upon the platform, and then be blocked".

At this the curtain falls, upon sincere pre-emptive apologies from the cast to whomever might have been offended by their speech.

Woe Is They: Pronouns in the Satirocene Age

Woe Is They

       To the ever-growing list of mental ailments the contemporary mind is heir to, we can add Pronominal Phobia. This disability means that those who selves-identify as non-binary fear non-plurality of pronouns, thinking the old-fashioned grammatical ones unsafe. It's hard to address these “two-spirit” persons however, for like Schrodinger's cat they might jump either way mid-communication, declining to be pinned down to any linguistic spot they feel you might be inequitably consigning them to.

        "Oh let myselves not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," they might cry like King Lear.

       So good-hearted inclusionists, fearing to use the wrong pro-noun about anymany, will chase after whatever handy non-nouns they can invent in a desperate attempt to anti-name the world in pursuit of equity. We must do this because we can't expect any everymany who declines binary-ness to feel unsafe just because we want to be comprehensible.

       You can't ask non-binary persons themselves about this in case it triggers their Pronominal Phobia. That much is clear to everysome, for it depends on how a person feels themself. But why, to themself, does this they-ness feel safer? It's a mystery. Don't ask me (sic). We don't know – we only know that in the face of singularity, woe is us -- and woe is they. Speaking for ourself (all my me's) we feel safest therefore inside the shelter of silence – thou too?