Mr or Ms Vole?

One of the interesting exchanges at the Science into Fiction conference I attended yesterday came during the lunch break. Craig, a cheery man who writes what the Guardian calls 'harrowing' fiction, asked another chap if he knew who Plashing Vole was. I gingerly raised me hand, to which he replied that he'd always assumed PV was female.

I'm intrigued by this, and asked Twitter followers what their assumptions were. Most said male, a few said female. I realise I've never stated my sex online, but I assumed that if anyone gave it a moment's thought, they'd think I'm male. One respondent said my style is 'very male', which raises a number of fascinating questions about discourse and gender.

In terms of content, I think I fit largely into the male category, though it's a dubious claim to make. Sex and gender, we know from modern theory, is an unstable concept reinforced by performance. But I talk about football, the minutiae of indie music and politics a lot - not exclusively male, but certainly publicly more male than they should be. On the other hand, teaching is a subject and profession with many women in it (though less rarely in senior positions) and I talk about them a lot. I would reckon that I fit some stereotypical categories: the mildly autistic collector, for one.

Stylistically, I think my writing is masculine: I'm obsessive, forceful and often rude. Obviously there are plenty of women who fit these categories (hello mum) but you're more likely to find these qualities in writing by men. Certainly from my days as a literary theorist, feminist critics asserted that men write authoritarian, 'closed' 'phallic' texts, while women write 'open' or flowing, ambiguous work - informed by their respective genital and sexual characteristics. Lakoff claimed forty years ago that women's speech is marked by qualifiers, ambiguity, hesitations, redundancy and tentativeness - marking a desire for communal validation, whereas men supposedly assert things without concern for the speech community's opinions. Very baldly: some claim that men use speech as a carrier of meaning while women use it as a social glue. Interesting claim, but dependent on a lot of philosophical/ideological assumptions.

It's easy in some languages: Japanese has separate vocabularies for male and female language for some things. There's also some physiological evidence for differential communication skills between women (better) and men, from brain scans, and that women are more fluent on paper. Women apparently use language more formally or correctly, while men adopt slang more quickly - though I suspect new media and educational/social changes might erode this difference. It's also believed by some that men and women exist in differential cultures and linguistic groups, which makes sense to some extent: we often read different things, talk about different subjects and mix with different groups - though it leads too easily to the Men are from Mars bullshit. This isn't exclusive of course: most of us work and play in the same spaces, with each other. There's also an argument that linguistic difference represents the unequal distribution of power between men and women, which seems fairly convincing to me.

I quite like the idea that my sex isn't immediately obvious online. It lends a kind of freedom and lets me escape from gendered assumptions. To all the arguments noted above, I'd insist that linguistic and sexual identity is a continuum rather than a pair of opposed poles. We're all located somewhere on the scale. I hope that my interests are open and interesting to people all along the scale, but I'd have thought that my mode of expression was further to the male side. So: apart from those of you who know me, what sex did you think I am?

Update: some comments from Twitter:

@PlashingVole until I discovered your identity, I thought you were female, too! Pink background (gender construction) of the avatar [ a statue of a man reading]

I thought you were "he" because I read the profile bit where it says "he". 

 I know you and thought you were female. 

never for a second thought you were a woman - something very male about your writing style 

I did. I think it might have been discussions of child care. I know, says more about me...

I confess that I too thought you were female! Something in the (very eloquent, BTW) way you write, perhaps? 

Update: @infinitewarrior tells me about a site that claims to analyse your prose and give you a 'gender' reading. I'm a bit dubious: my writing is hugely derivative of the people I read, my academic context and the newspapers I follow, and when you look at the analysis, the decisions as to what constitutes a 'masculine' or 'feminine' word is heavily culturally dependent. But it's interesting.

My result:

Female Score: 1160Male Score: 1288The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
 

I'm feeling a little welmish today

Emma has drawn my attention to SavetheWords.org, a promotional gimmick by the OED to draw attention to itself by highlighting the rapidity with which words are falling out of use.

For instance, my friend Mark is suffering from a range of illnesses at the moment. He has also recently suffered feline bereavement. This leads me to suspect that he's contracted pilimiction - the presence of hair-like bodies in the urine, which leads me to suspect that he has eaten his cat.

My favourite words are 'fescue' (a teacher's pointer and also a generic term for a family of grasses) and 'defenestrate' (to throw someone through a window). Neither are obscure, but they're satisfying. So is 'micturate' (to urinate) and 'osculate' - to kiss. I basically like words ending in -ate. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a move to de-Latinise English in favour of Saxonification, influenced by the English sense of kinship with Germany (from where they'd acquired their royal family). Hardy, Dickens and rather late to the party, Orwell (see his 'Politics and the English Language') contributed to this effort:

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers 

Predictably enough, Wor(l)d War 1 put an end to that in any meaningful fashion, though Poul Anderson's 1989 Uncleftish Beholding tries to explain atomic theory in Germanic words only. See also Cowley's (dubious) How We'd Talk If The English Had Won In 1066 (dubious because 'England' was a series of Anglo-Saxon and Norse states, all with close ties to European nations, including the Normans. 'English' is a very retrospective term for 1066.

Your contributions please.

While you think about them, this is what Orwell has to say about writing in 1946. How I wish I could stamp this onto essays:

 As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? 

Orwell also knows that language is a disguise for atrocity - think of the current collateral damage, for instance:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.  

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. 

This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. 

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.  

 And remember, during this period of adjustment, we're all in this together. Shut up about control orders, start paying your graduate contribution and supporting the war on terror. Support the Big Society and Welfare Reform. Doesn't all that sound better than a depression in which we abandon the poor, tax students to the hilt and bomb Muslim countries into behaving?

Dear me. I really should do some work. Got a bit carried away. Do use the comments section to add your favourite obscure words and weaselly uses of language.

Despatches from the breakout meeting (ugh)

Morning. Thursday already, and the new term loom above us like a massive clunking fist - an entirely new curriculum rushed in without consultation or planning time. Students don't know what courses to take and we don't yet know what to teach. Management gaze down on us from Olympus, stepping in with the occasional smiting but otherwise engaging in less-than-benign neglect.

Phrases I'd like to ban:
'breakout room' - being forced to discuss things in smaller groups doesn't engender creative thinking. It just doesn't. Giving it a stupid name doesn't make it more spontaneous.

'going forward'. What's wrong with 'in the future' or 'next time'? It's just an attempt to fake empowerment.

'old school'. Bearable when referring to distinct artistic movements of the past. Unacceptable when used for revivals of only-just-gone musical styles. Even the bloody London Review of Books used 'old skool' (unforgiveably) in the middle of a very abstruse essay this week.

In person he cuts a strange figure, cuddly-English on the outside – born 1969 in London; Dulwich College and Oxford; nice shirts and tweedy jackets – but on the inside a roiling maelstrom of the darkest avant-gardism, both of the old-skool European variety (the Futurists are often mentioned, and Robbe-Grillet, and Bataille, and Blanchot), and more recent, less canonical movements: Neue Slowenische Kunst, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, the many activities and avatars of Stewart Home.

It's not cool. It reeks of desperation and insecurity. I wanted to get on the train, find the editor's office, break in and paint the phrase all over his/her office walls in faeces then make him lick them off, pausing only to apologise profusely. I resisted this urge.

Still - staff training day today, so perhaps we'll be enlightened. Or perhaps we won't. I bought NME today, for the second time in ten years. It's… well, just as poor as when I stopped reading it. Interestingly though, it's still talking about the bands it went on about then: Pixies, Smiths, Charlatans, Oasis etc. sprinkled with self-promotion, boastful interviews with newer bands, and very little in the way of critique. Strikingly, the house style hasn't changed at all. When I read it, there was a distinct effort being made to be light and breezy to distinguish it from the furrowed-brow music-journalism-as-revolutionary-intellectualism mode of the previous regime. Ten years later, the same glib confection rules, but it's tired now, and not overly convincing. I don't expect NME to be Cahiers du Cinéma, but nostalgia and press releases do not a magazine make. Or perhaps they do.

We're humans, this is what we do

We encounter strange new cultures and kill them.

Goodbye to another language and people. It's not the first and it sure won't be the last. Still, we've all got iPods and that's what matters.

Make a little space in your consciousness for Boa Sr and what she represented, if only for a moment.

How modern education works

We're not a university, we have an 'academic business model'.

We're not sacking people, we're instituting 'impending efficiency savings'.

Of course, given the current economic climate, we could have made the decision to freeze an Executive post and make the savings. We did consider that but felt, and Governors agreed, that the new post was necessary to help us work more effectively in the new economic climate.

This last, of course, means that teachers, technicians, porters, academic support staff and the like who are going to be dumped overboard can just go fuck themselves, if the alternative is to reduce the troughers in sharp suits who 'manage' us. 'Manage', in this context, means 'sink us with a minimum debt of £5.5 million, possibly rising to £10-12 million'. Way to go, you selfish, greedy bastards.