Escaping Derogatory References and Membership
Characterisation Devices!
DONALD J. Trump described his words spoken
over a decade ago about women as 'locker room banter'. When Kenneth Clarke in his book and later TV
program 'Civilisation' said about the historical rise of the French
salon in the 18th century, was that the nature of the saloon by a
social mixing of the sexes, was that it had a moderating effect on the
behaviour and conversation of the people involved in so far as the saloon
restrained vulgarity, obnoxious and other uncouth conduct by both men and
women. I suppose the 20th
century tap-room in the average public house by separating the sexes and
allowing the unrestrained free flow of talk, jokes, banter and gesticulations
would have had the opposite effect.
Nigel Farage, according to the current Private
Eye, has justified Donald Trump's remarks about 'feeling-up'
women as follows: 'It's
the kind of thing, if we are being honest, that men do. They sit around and have a drink and they talk like this.'
Any collectivity of either sex be it a 'Hen Party' or 'Bachelor Do' or even an ordinary workplace on the shop-floor is
likely to produce conversation and conduct which in another context would raise
eyebrows. In the same way that an
academic community of scholars has its own 'interpretive community' and special
forms of talk so the average shop-floor setting often has tribal language which
would be distinct from from other social engagements with people. In the foundry at Holcroft Castings &
Forging in Rochdale, where I worked as a
maintenance electrician in the 1980s, the terms 'split-arses', and other
derogatory expressions were often used to refer to women in general or more
specifically in referring to lasses in the machine departments.
In the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts writes: 'No
one talks like that in the locker room of the gym I use.'
That's surprising, because when |I was about
12-years-of-age I had a job as a scorer for the Tweedales & Smalley factory
second eleven cricket team, and it was there in the pavilion changing-room that
I first began to encounter how grown working-class men talk in groups on
occasions when women are not present.
Before that as an eldest child I also heard how women when they think
they alone with their own sex talk together about men: I often heard how my grandmother and mother
in private discussed men judgementally, not with foul language of course, but
with comments that judgementally loaded blame and curses on male members of the
family. In a way it sometimes amounted
to objectifying men by stereo-typing them.
In this circumstances to pretend shock or
surprise at what Donald Trump has had to say in the setting in which he was
recorded, is a little over-the-top or even naieve.
Whenever we talk about the meaning of words,
rather than reaching for some lazy feminist or a tin-pot politically correct
interpretation. perhaps we should consider what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say
in his 'Philosophical Investigations':
'Think of tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer,
pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. -- The functions of words are as diverse as
the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there similarities.)'
The meaning of a word is in its use; just as the
significance of a tool is in its use.
When I was an apprentice electrician in the late 1950s it was a common
trick of leg-pulling tradesmen to send young apprentices to the stores to get a
'rubber
hammer'. The absurdity of the 'rubber
hammer' is that it is unlikely to accomplish any utility of persuading
anything it hit to move or do the job for which a hammer is normally
intended. Wittgenstein asks in 'Philosophical
Investigations':
'Imagine someone's saying: “All tools serve to modify something. Thus the hammer modifies the position of the
nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on.” And what is modified by the rule, the
glue-pot, the nails?- “Our knowledge of a thing's length, the temperature of
the glue, and the solidity of the box.”-- Would anything be gained by this
assimilation of expressions?--'
When a wheelwright at Holcroft Castings uses the
term 'split
arses' to refer to a women or all women, the words would modify our
idea of women perhaps in the sense of the picture theory of language; just as a
hammer hitting a nail will modify the position of the nail or a screw-driver
may transform the position of a screw and if its a wood-screw it may also
modify a piece of wood.
Words are becoming ever more dangerous things
use in a world of surveillance were privacy is in short supply, perhaps we
should join Wittgenstein and resort to whistling or sign language.
I've no room to talk because besides doing journalism
now I have, in the past, been involved in anthropological investigations and conversational
analysis in which I used tape-recorders to surreptitiously record everyday talk
by union officials, and others, for the purpose of research. In a sense we are a bit hypocritical.
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