Once when I was complaining about having to clean my house before visitors arrived, my mother said to me, “They will notice if it’s dirty, but not if it’s clean.” The same basic principle applies to spoken English in non-standard or standard usage.
Before I elaborate, I want to clarify my terms. “Standard” does not mean “correct,” just as “non-standard” does not mean “wrong.” We all have a language wardrobe, and like we choose particular clothing for different occasions, we should tailor our word choices and language usage to fit our purpose and audience.
Standard English in speech also does not mean the absence of an accent. Eudora Welty had a highly inflected Southern drawl, but she never broke the rules of Standard English when she spoke.
If someone who knows your level of education and then hears a glaring error in your English usage, that person is very likely to lose respect for you, regardless of your insistence that English majors spend more time reading great literature than diagramming sentences. To maintain your credibility, you should make sure your speech accurately reflects your knowledge, especially when you are interviewing for a job, answering questions after a presentation, speaking to a professor that you’ve just met, testifying in court, or trying to convince the parents of your new significant other that you are the most intelligent, classy partner for their beloved spawn--that is, unless you claim the Cookie Monster as your father.
The most common slips in spoken English involve pronoun choices and conjugation of verbs. I’ll give some common examples:
1) Non-standard pronouns: “Me and Tom are going to Lexington tonight,” “Me and her decided to stay home,” or “Him and I aren’t dating anymore.”
Solution: The best way to avoid these errors is to be conscious of your pronoun choice intended for yourself. If you want to tell someone about your planned trip to drive alone to Lexington, you wouldn’t say, “Me is going.” Instead, you’d use the pronoun “I.” If you want to mention your plans with your friend, add the person’s name to your personal pronoun: “Tom and I are going to Lexington,” “She and I decided to stay home,” and “He and I aren’t dating anymore.”
2) Non-standard verb conjugation: “I seen the movie,” “I done the work,” “I have went to class every day.”
Solution: This misuse may take more practice than the pronoun habit, and the best route to prevent it might require substituted synonyms. Alternatives might include “watched” instead of “seen,” “finished” instead of “done,” and “attended” instead of “have went.” If you want to change this speech habit, you may need to memorize the rules of conjugation:
• I see, I saw, I have seen;
• I do, I did, I have done;
• I go, I went, I have gone.
When you are speaking with your peers, your speech should relax; you have surely met their criteria for friendship and do not need to impress them. If your peer group includes people who are also working on degrees in English, enlist them in your goal to improve your use of spoken English—after all, you’d surely help each other decide the right clothes to wear to your next big event, and afterward you can kick back in your most comfortable hoodie and your faded Chucks.
I need to clean my house now because even my dogs are noticing the dirt.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Native Werewolves
I've been noticing a troubling pattern in the otherwise cotton-candy books I've been reading and campy movies I've been viewing. I guess my sensitivity comes from my academic work, reading and teaching about the Other in American culture, specifically how certain groups are disenfranchised by the white hegemony and treated as animals.
I've noticed that an awful lot of werewolves in recent supernatural books and movies are Native American as humans.
In the giggly Twilight books, Jacob and his community are a group of Quileute Indians, who turn into werewolves who protect the community from vampires. Jacob's last name is Black. Black? Stephanie Meyer can never be accused of being a literary heavyweight, but didn't she realize the double Othering of her characterization? Meyer includes one female in this "pack"--a bitter, scorned, more than likely infertile woman named Leah (named for the wife of Jacob in Genesis?). The vampires like to kill the werewolves--a likely dynamic since the white guys live forever, while the red/black guys die naked and with bravery, sacrificing their noble-savage lives for the good of all humankind and diminishing their already low population.
In the Sookie Stackhouse books, which provide about half of the plot of HBO's True Blood, the werewolves are more well-rounded, but still the racist stereotypes abound. Alcide Herveaux, who hasn't yet shifted into the HBO landscape, is a rich kid who is part of the supposedly noble group of werewolves (abbreviated as "were" most of the time, suggesting their already past-tense existence, perhaps). He, of course, hates the vampires but tolerates them in the name of civility. Unlike the vampires who are publicly known, or "out of the coffin," the were have not come out of the woods yet. Alcide's pack includes females, who are more vicious and bloodthirsty than the males, suggesting that when women turn into wolves, we are even more animalistic--a double Othering. The were have as much to fear within their own "shifter" population than from outside predators, and some of the most violent scenes in Charlaine Harris's series depict one-on-one fights to gain leadership of the pack--episodes that are as ruthless as the stories of Michael Vick's torture of pit bulls. It may as well be saying that external forces don't really have to worry about saving white hegemony from being overtaken or killed by wolves or Native Americans; they will eventually decimate themselves. Finally, I'm not a French speaker, but when I looked up the translation of Herveaux, I was saddened to see the closest English word: calves. They're not only wolves, but they are also cattle, and not even full-grown cows.
Another less famous example of the sanctioned racism of the Native American as animal is in the really bad movie Skinwalkers, which happened to be on cable last weekend while I was grading papers. The two packs/tribes in the movie war against each other, intent on annihilation. The "good" group doesn't "feed" on humans, and they keep their shape-shifting secret even from the people closest to them. The women in the "bad" group are more violent than the men, and what's more, they reinforce misogynist stereotypes by manipulating men through their sexuality or their feigned vulnerability. Vagina dentatis, indeed. Both packs seek control of the son of a white woman and one of the "bad" tribe's men because the boy can somehow determine the entire future existence of the Indian-wolves, creating a living, breathing Manichean dialectic in this mixed-race child. His blood, if injected into a werewolf, can magically and permanently restore the humanity of the creature, as if racial identity is in the blood--a throwback to the physiognomists and phrenologists.
Granted, I am aware of the Native American concept of the spirit animal or the shaman-skinwalker who draped himself in a wolf's coat to perform certain rituals. However, as far as I know, none of the Native American myths of lycanthropy involve violence toward humans and especially not cannibalism.
It's no wonder that vampires and werewolves are all the rage again, and the twenty-first century has added a level of appeal by putting an ethical spin into their supernatural personalities. The Twilight Quileutes will always save the girl from her perils, the were will always be Sookie Stackhouse's hairy saviors, and the Skinwalker-types will work for humanity by eradicating the wolfen blood from one Indian at a time until each one can fully assimilate into white culture.
These twenty-first-century depictions of werewolves indeed project a romanticized view of the disappearing Native American, but in any romanticism of an entire population is a thick foundation of racism that the Twilighters and fans of blood-sucking, shapeshifting creatures will internalize. Vampires are still human in their undeadly presence, but the Native Americans who shift into wolves lose all humanity, including the power to speak. They are the subaltern of the supernatural world, and even when they are human, they are not allowed to speak of their primal nature. The recent depictions of werewolves serve as yet another example of removing the agency from the Native Americans.
I've noticed that an awful lot of werewolves in recent supernatural books and movies are Native American as humans.
In the giggly Twilight books, Jacob and his community are a group of Quileute Indians, who turn into werewolves who protect the community from vampires. Jacob's last name is Black. Black? Stephanie Meyer can never be accused of being a literary heavyweight, but didn't she realize the double Othering of her characterization? Meyer includes one female in this "pack"--a bitter, scorned, more than likely infertile woman named Leah (named for the wife of Jacob in Genesis?). The vampires like to kill the werewolves--a likely dynamic since the white guys live forever, while the red/black guys die naked and with bravery, sacrificing their noble-savage lives for the good of all humankind and diminishing their already low population.
In the Sookie Stackhouse books, which provide about half of the plot of HBO's True Blood, the werewolves are more well-rounded, but still the racist stereotypes abound. Alcide Herveaux, who hasn't yet shifted into the HBO landscape, is a rich kid who is part of the supposedly noble group of werewolves (abbreviated as "were" most of the time, suggesting their already past-tense existence, perhaps). He, of course, hates the vampires but tolerates them in the name of civility. Unlike the vampires who are publicly known, or "out of the coffin," the were have not come out of the woods yet. Alcide's pack includes females, who are more vicious and bloodthirsty than the males, suggesting that when women turn into wolves, we are even more animalistic--a double Othering. The were have as much to fear within their own "shifter" population than from outside predators, and some of the most violent scenes in Charlaine Harris's series depict one-on-one fights to gain leadership of the pack--episodes that are as ruthless as the stories of Michael Vick's torture of pit bulls. It may as well be saying that external forces don't really have to worry about saving white hegemony from being overtaken or killed by wolves or Native Americans; they will eventually decimate themselves. Finally, I'm not a French speaker, but when I looked up the translation of Herveaux, I was saddened to see the closest English word: calves. They're not only wolves, but they are also cattle, and not even full-grown cows.
Another less famous example of the sanctioned racism of the Native American as animal is in the really bad movie Skinwalkers, which happened to be on cable last weekend while I was grading papers. The two packs/tribes in the movie war against each other, intent on annihilation. The "good" group doesn't "feed" on humans, and they keep their shape-shifting secret even from the people closest to them. The women in the "bad" group are more violent than the men, and what's more, they reinforce misogynist stereotypes by manipulating men through their sexuality or their feigned vulnerability. Vagina dentatis, indeed. Both packs seek control of the son of a white woman and one of the "bad" tribe's men because the boy can somehow determine the entire future existence of the Indian-wolves, creating a living, breathing Manichean dialectic in this mixed-race child. His blood, if injected into a werewolf, can magically and permanently restore the humanity of the creature, as if racial identity is in the blood--a throwback to the physiognomists and phrenologists.
Granted, I am aware of the Native American concept of the spirit animal or the shaman-skinwalker who draped himself in a wolf's coat to perform certain rituals. However, as far as I know, none of the Native American myths of lycanthropy involve violence toward humans and especially not cannibalism.
It's no wonder that vampires and werewolves are all the rage again, and the twenty-first century has added a level of appeal by putting an ethical spin into their supernatural personalities. The Twilight Quileutes will always save the girl from her perils, the were will always be Sookie Stackhouse's hairy saviors, and the Skinwalker-types will work for humanity by eradicating the wolfen blood from one Indian at a time until each one can fully assimilate into white culture.
These twenty-first-century depictions of werewolves indeed project a romanticized view of the disappearing Native American, but in any romanticism of an entire population is a thick foundation of racism that the Twilighters and fans of blood-sucking, shapeshifting creatures will internalize. Vampires are still human in their undeadly presence, but the Native Americans who shift into wolves lose all humanity, including the power to speak. They are the subaltern of the supernatural world, and even when they are human, they are not allowed to speak of their primal nature. The recent depictions of werewolves serve as yet another example of removing the agency from the Native Americans.
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