Found Money and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense

I didn't plan to be online today...until I found the money to buy the bottomless cup of coffee I'm now sipping, lying in the street. There's a story about those coins.

As I walked down this street on Monday evening, I heard a couple having an angry conversation. Classic male Blamer and female Placater Modes. (The Amazon book link below explains more about the five modes of speech people use in times of stress, and why both Blamer and Placater Modes are generally good ones to avoid.)



With editorial substitutions for words that would violate this web site's contract, it went like this:

Man: "...that lily-livered reptile..."

Woman: "X is not a lily-livered reptile."

Man: "X is! X is a flaming flipping four-flushing lily-livered REPTILE..."

Nobody wants to listen to that and I, thank goodness, didn't have to listen. I walked briskly along. However, when I walked back, it was after dark, but a street lamp was gleaming on a coin in the road. I picked up the coin, noticed other gleams in the road, but didn't take the time to investigate whether they were more coins or just pale-colored pebbles.

I walked past the same house again on Wednesday afternoon. The sun was really glittering on coins...lots of coins. Some of the coins were chipped and bent from having been run over by cars. More than half of the coins were pennies but there were enough quarters and dimes to add up to $1.69.

I suspect those coins belonged to the couple I overheard quarrelling.

I suspect that the hurricane a few hundred miles to our south had something to do with the quarrel; quite a few people in Virginia have relatives in South Carolina, and the friend who failed to connect with me on Tuesday explained yesterday that she had a lot of unexpected visitors from South Carolina.

I suspect that others suspected something similar, which could explain why the coins were left in the road all through two sunny days.

I know the couple use the Internet. So I thought I might as well use the coins with which they were so careless, in their anger, to (score off them, and also) let them know that there is a Better Way.

No matter who X was (I heard pronouns not names), in our town it's illegal to shout the words I've translated as "flaming flipping four-flushing lily-livered reptile" on the street. Even in towns that have not criminalized the words the young man actually said, it's also dangerous. A quick temper is both a symptom and an aggravating factor in classic male-type cardiovascular disease. Thirty-five, or whatever the man's age is, is older than some guys were when they had their first heart attacks. And no man should ever form a habit of yelling at, or otherwise physically intimidating, his wife and children.



No woman should ever form a habit of aggravating her husband's anger with sugary, sanctimonious counter-arguments like "X is not a lily-livered reptile," either. I winced when I heard her say that. In the sound of her voice, loudly projected, on a higher than normal pitch, but deliberately slowed down for emphasis, I could hear the phony smile on her face and the whole nonverbal communication pattern that just absolutely screams "I'm right, and you're wrong, and that's because I'm a better, nicer, more rational person than you are!" I've known women who talked to their husbands that way who got results that were worse than a mere divorce, too.

So, suppose this couple had read the two books to which I've linked and were practicing the techniques I'm here recommending they practice. (My husband and I practiced them--it's actually fun.) In that case a person walking down the street probably would not have overheard a conversation something like this, supposing (in the absence of positive evidence) that the quarrel had something to do with Hurricane Matthew evacuees.

Woman: "My cousin in Charleston has just been advised to leave her home because of the hurricane. She said some of her neighbors were coming to Gate City in a van, so of course I told her to join the car pool and get out at our house!"

Man: "Your cousin...Jane Doe? The one with the poodles? And the hyperactive two-year-old?"

Woman: "Yes, and one of the poodles is diabetic, but she said the Joneses said they could fit into the back of the van, so..."

Man: "I do not want them in our house. I do not want them around our kids."

Woman: "I don't either, actually, but what else can we do?"

Man: "Send them to a motel and live without cable television for a month or two. It's worth it. A diabetic dog! Why don't you reserve a room and I'll put some plastic in the back of the car now."

(Those who like kissing may imagine it taking place after these chores are done. Repeat: Anger Busting and Verbal Self-Defense are fun...especially for couples, although they can also be fun for teenagers and their parents.)

I do not actually know, nor would I publish the information if I did, what the couple were quarrelling about...but I will apply the $1.69 toward their purchase of the books, if they're willing to use them. If they work the programs I guarantee it'll be the best $1.69 either of them has ever spent.

Why Three-Part Messages Fail

This web site frequently refers readers to the work of a writer known as Suzette Haden Elgin (in book publishing) or Ozarque (in cyberspace), almost with reverence, as if her writing were inspired Scripture. Well, yes, actually I do believe Ozarque was mortal and fallible.

Possibly the biggest error in what she had to say to readers my age, and younger, is something that was apparently true—at one time—for her own generation.

When I first heard about “three-part messages,” or “three-part ‘I’ statements,” even as a teenager, I knew I was hearing something profoundly wrong. I asked many older people how it was possible for anyone to imagine that, in any situation that might be described as “confrontation,” words like “I feel angry” would not instantly provoke an argument, and usually an ugly argument at that. Didn’t everyone know that if you say to a child something like “When you fail to water the tomato plants, I feel sad, because the tomatoes can’t grow without water” (even assuming a climate where that makes sense), any child over about age three is going to say, either to you or as soon as you turn your back, “Well, you’re mad and I’m glad!” Didn’t everyone know that if you say to an adult something like “When you throw your trash in my back yard, I feel angry, because my back yard is not the city dump,” any self-respecting baby-boomer is going to say something like, “Oh yes, I can see that you do feel angry, but I don’t really think it has anything to do with anything like trash in your back yard. I think you really need to take this up with a doctor…”

Yet a large and vocal minority of mostly upper-middle-class members of the Greatest Generation affirm that saying things like “When your car ran over my dog, I felt sad, because it injured the dog so badly,” has enabled them to get their messages across “without argument.”

I confess, friends, I am puzzled. When someone says something like “When you step on my toe, I feel hurt, because you weigh at least 100 pounds and that’s a lot of weight on my toe,” I feel bewildered that they feel the need to go to such elaborate and unnatural lengths. If I did in fact step on your toe, under normal conditions all you’d need to say would be “Ow.” That primal sound, alone, would convince me that what I’d stepped on was your toe, which I’d step off if possible, saying “Sorry.” In any alternative situations that come to mind I’m sure that any alternative words I might think of, like “Sorry I can’t move now, because in addition to my 100-plus pounds you’re also feeling about twenty cubic feet of rubble weighing down on our feet,” would also seem unnecessary. Silly, even.

Then there’s a category of “three-part messages” that might be represented by “When you screamed out loud, ‘What’s your daughter doing these days?’ so that people all over the mall turned to look at us, and you continued to shout so that people all over the mall could hear you, ‘Well my daughter just made Phi Beta Kappa at M.I.T.!!!’, I felt sad, because I had already told you my daughter is dead.” Here we can give the person the benefit of the doubt and imagine that s/he really wanted, primarily, to be overheard bragging about her/his brilliant offspring, even if s/he had to hurt someone’s feelings to do that. 

Actually, in many cases people who say things like this are more like the “sadistic trolls” of cyberspace. They may know you personally, resent you, and want to bring unpleasant memories to the surface of your mind; although it may be against some people’s religion to admit it, people like that do exist. Or they may not know you well—they may not remember that your daughter is dead, even if they’ve been told that six times, because some of these people really do not care about anyone but themselves enough to pay attention or remember other people’s “news” items. They may just want everybody all over the mall to turn and look at them as they screech about their daughter, but, deep down, there probably is a reason why they singled out an acquaintance who has a daughter who is dead, rather than, say, waiting for an attractive member of the opposite sex to walk past, alone, and then screeching, “Let me buy you a drink, or even a pizza,’cos I’m so happy I feel like treating total strangers today, because my daughter just made Phi Beta Kappa at M.I.T.” 

It’s called one-upmanship. Their joy is complete only when they take some of the joy away from someone else. That’s the game they play; that’s what many of them understand social life and conversation to be—one big game with the objective of scoring off other people. And if you tell someone like this that s/he made you feel sad, you are encouraging him or her.

Actually, this category encompasses the people to whom we might want to say things like “When you said ‘Nobody would ever vote for a **** Jew like Joe Lieberman,’ I felt angry, because I…” (choose as many as apply) “intend to vote for a competent moderate politician like Joe Lieberman,” “voted for Lieberman, repeatedly, when I lived in his State,” “am Jewish myself,” “am a whole-Bible Christian, and my Bible tells me not to oppress anybody,” “had a grandfather who died fighting against that kind of hate,” “don’t see how a Jewish President could be worse than the Muslim or half-Muslim President we’ve had for eight years, and/or the Christian/s we had before him,” “don’t agree with Lieberman’s politics, but his religion has nothing to do with it,” “think Lieberman is far too moderate, myself, but we’ve had a lot of good lefties who were Jewish,” etc. etc. etc. (What about "am picking on Lieberman because I've not said anything good about a Democrat presidential candidate in this election"?)

Some people still hold various quaint old prejudices, but these days those are not the people who engage in public “baiting” of ethnic groups. Real bigots have already noticed that overt displays of bigotry tend to make an enormous range of people angry, for an enormous range of reasons, and create more trouble for the bigots than the bigots feel the displays are worth. Anyone still overtly spouting prejudice almost certainly wants to make you or me angry. Consider the old story about what one of the young Kennedys allegedly admitted: on seeing the Republican stickers in a taxicab, he immediately put his dirty shoes up on the seat, lighted a cigarette just to burn the upholstery, muttered nasty drunken remarks about the kind of people who drive cabs these days and their mothers, didn’t tip, short-changed the driver, and ran into a dark alley shouting “Vote for Goldwater!” So what I’d be likely to say, if I’d heard that kind of anti-Lieberman remark in real life, would be, “How much are the Democrats paying you? You don’t mean to say you’re campaigning for a candidate like that, making a real hate magnet of yourself…for free?”

But in the majority of Necessary Confrontations, when someone my age or younger is likely to stop throwing trash in your back yard if you deliver that message without distraction, it’s generally helpful to ignore the whole topic of emotions—even if the person tries to distract you by crying or swearing, it’s good to ignore that. Stick to an updated kind of three-part message: “When you throw your trash in my back yard, I have to deal with your trash, so now, as a result…”

It’s still a good idea to plan these messages carefully. What are you doing to your trashy neighbor as a result of his obnoxious habits? What rights do local laws give you to sue your neighbor for property damage, and how much does your lawyer’s name intimidate your neighbor’s lawyer? If you don’t have applicable local laws and plan just to return your neighbor’s garbage with compound interest, how far are you and your neighbor prepared to escalate the garbage war? What other consequences are likely to motivate this neighbor to stop throwing his trash in your back yard?

It is not a good idea to mention your emotional feelings when you want to focus attention on the need for someone else to change his or her behavior. Anyone who grew up in the Age of Therapy knows at least half a dozen different ways to turn any mention of any emotion into an argument that can be used against you. If you mentioned your emotions, that person is guaranteed to “win” the argument. Why should s/he even bother talking about less fascinating topics, like the veterinary expenses of a dog s/he backed a car into, or trash in someone else’s yard, or the disgusting thing s/he said about someone you happen to like, when s/he can change the subject to what is the matter with you, and why whatever you were talking about should be considered strictly as a “symptom” and not taken seriously.

I would like very much to know how Suzette Haden Elgin, who was one of the world’s experts on her generation’s techniques of what she called “cutesipation,” ever managed to hand an opponent a weapon like “I feel sad/angry/hurt, because…” and report, with a straight face, that that was a way to persuade anybody to water the tomato plants or stop throwing his trash in your yard. I would like to know that in an experiential way. I don’t believe I ever will; I’m sure anyone she was able to persuade, adult-to-adult, to do anything after saying “I feel” must be dead by now, and any child she ever persuaded to water any plants with an “I feel” speech must be an adult who’s resolved never to do anything else merely because someone in his or her generation has an emotional feeling about it. 

I’m sure that people whose sense of courtesy prevented them from quibbling with “I feel” must have been very nice people. Though I suspect they were also people who micro-oppressed others, or accepted micro-oppression by others, using that verbal technique that makes the sense of intolerable oppression so pervasive in Native Tongue—simply basing everything on the presupposition that all women (or all Black people or all people whose native language isn’t English) are feeble-minded. One habit of communication (or manipulation) does not necessarily depend on the other, but historically they do seem to have been found in the same time and place…

For my generation, the Rule of Three may still be hard-wired into our brains, but the structure of an effective three-part message is different. It’s “When you [do X], then [Y happens], and as a result, now [Z is happening or will happen].” All objective facts that are verifiable in the real world. No emotions.

Live long and prosper, Gentle Readers.

Should TV Censor the Word "Honey"?

We learn something every day. For instance, today I learned that there is a human alive, and apparently not too brain-damaged to write a coherent e-mail, who's clueless enough to say "I can't stand your 'gay'ness" and "Do not be offended" in the same e-mail.

Hello...it may be possible to say "I can't stand" [something that's altogether beyond the person's control] "but I like" [something the person makes or does where the thing beyond the person's control doesn't interfere with the speaker's enjoyment] in a wholly complimentary way. For instance, I don't know how Glenn Beck or his team may feel about this, but when I say "I can't stand Glenn Beck's TV show but I like several of his books" I mean that in a wholly complimentary way; maybe you, too, basically don't like TV and think various things about Beck's shows go over your limit, and you, too, will be pleasantly surprised by how much you like his books. Or I think back to a letter J. Vernon McGee once read in a radio broadcast, not sounding offended: "I couldn't stand your Texas accent at first, but after reading your books and getting interested in your approach to the Bible" [etc. etc. etc.] "I'm even beginning to like your accent!"

Would anybody say to Glenn Beck, "I can't stand the sight of your albino face" (bearing in mind that showing anyone's real skin color, or real hair, on TV is definitely a choice) "but do not be offended"? To the late Dr. McGee, "I can't stand the sound of your Texas accent, but do not be offended"?

If you want to bother complaining about a news reader's style, you might try, if it happens to be true, "I don't mind whatever it is that you're doing, myself, but someone else in my home or office can't stand it." Or "I suppose the way you said [whatever] is part of your style, but it came across as annoying; could you please not use that particular twirk again?" Or "I enjoy your message, but I find your accent distracting and/or hard to understand; I'd appreciate it if you could tone the accent down a little bit." Or write to someone higher up the ladder to say "I can't stand News Reader X. As long as you employ him I'll have no choice but to get my news from the other channel." Or just get your news from the other source and let the TV station that chose to shove Mr. "I'm So 'Gay'" in your face figure it out.

I can see why David Ferguson and Mitchell McCoy are angry about this. I don't know what McCoy may have done to provoke it, but that was one truly obnoxious e-mail.

But I want to highlight one particular twirk in his commentary for attention here: he addressed the reader as "Honey."

It's been pointed out to me, ever since the word got out that I had failed to collect my late husband's substantial estate and the local Trash Class started feeling a need to express their free-floating hostility by showing disrespect to me, that this word actually has several meanings.

On the surface it means "sticky stuff excreted by bees, consisting largely of super-concentrated sugar, such that its sweet taste turns the stomach of neurologically complete adults, but some people like to eat it anyway." Hence, when used to address a human being, it might be considered to mean "You are 'sweet' or pleasing."

Except that, historically, it never really did; the use of "honey" to address human beings seems to have started out among slaves, along with various other cliches that they might have succeeded in telling slavemasters they considered flattering, but they didn't. "Oh lawsy, Miss Anne, did it sound like I was saying 'maggot'? I meant 'magnolia'!" I came along too late to hear anyone actually address a child as "Pussy," although both Louisa May Alcott and Robert E. Lee did, but I did grow up hearing real Southerners address members of their family as "honey," and also "poopsie" and "old poop," once in a while. It never, ever, sounded sweet. It always, unmistakably, carried a sting. It's part of what Suzette Haden Elgin described as Placater Mode Vaps, and I've never heard it used in the South except in a vap.

(Vap = Verbal Abuse Pattern, referring specifically to one of a small group of sneaky verbal attacks where the hostility is expressed more by the intonation and context than by the bare words. "Why did you do that?" might be an honest request for an explanation; "Why did you do that?" expresses surprise; "Why did you do that?" is a vap.)


For example, perhaps because I've mentioned albinism, this vintage novel comes to mind as an example of how people use "honey" when talking to their own children. One of the characters has albinism. His mother, though not altogether unfit, has always let him know that she considers him ugly. He mentions the idea of saving something for his children. Mean-Mouthed Ma screams, "Your children? Oh my honey!" I remember reading that scene, recoiling from the unmotherliness of it, laying down the book and thinking it through. "Yes...although the fictional characters are supposed to be Northerners, they get it. This is the way someone in Virginia would call a child 'honey'."



In the North "honey" means, primarily, "bedmate." At least two Top 40 pop songs of my youth dinged that usage into our ears. It's not what Southerners actually call each other in bed, where it refers to the mess not the person, but it does seem to be what a lot of Northerners call people they're not entitled to call "wife" or "husband," after referring to those people as "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" loses even historical relevance.

(Note, also, the use of "honey" in this news story, which I read just after posting the first draft of this post:

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ )

Northerners like to believe that "honey" is a term of endearment in the South, much as the slavemasters liked to believe that it was a term of endearment the servants used to their children. They are mistaken. As a term of address to a visiting Yankee, "honey" means, and has always meant, "Oh, you're just sooo welcome as long as you're spending money foolishly! Just be sure to buy your return ticket before you've maxed out that credit card!" Whatever is said in between "honey" and "bless your heart" is probably a vap. (Anybody, North, South, West, or outside the U.S., can of course say "Sir" or "Ma'am" or "you" or "this customer" in a way that unmistakably expresses hate too, but normally those words are not used to lead into a vap; "honey" is.)

Why would "honey" be exclusively associated with verbal abuse if it meant "sweetness"? Because it doesn't always, or necessarily, mean "sweetness." Its primary meaning is still "body secretion." It has a cluster of secondary meanings, therefore, associated with the secretions of non-bee bodies. This web site's contract specifically bans displaying most of the specific synonyms of "honey," although they can include blood, sweat, tears, and saliva too. "Honey" can definitely be used--as Jack Douglas noted--to include the secretions usually referred to by the censorable S-word and P-words, but it usually means the ones those words don't cover.

There are also those who spell the vulgarism "hunny." This may indicate an effort to identify it as part of a group of British slang words that were formerly used among members of the lower feudal class to address one another, still found as "hinny" and "hen." Americans consciously rejected these words (although they may have influenced the development of "honey" as a name slaves could safely call slavemasters' children). On the other hand, in the early twentieth century, American hatespeech definitely did include "Hun" as the term of hate for a person of German ethnic origin. Germans were not officially hated by English-speaking Americans before 1914 (though their "different looks and customs" were distrusted, notably by Benjamin Franklin) but "Hun" might perhaps have influenced "honey" among speakers of slave dialect. In any case, "hunny" is unmistakably part of racist hatespeech...except when Winnie-the-Pooh is using it, always as a cutesy-wutesy misspelled label on a jar, never to address a person (or stuffed animal).



My opinion is that, even if you love all those idiotic old songs where people call their bedmates "Honey," even if you have a bedmate whom you want to call "Honey" and by whom you want to be called "Honey," it's still a good idea not to use a word that packs this much history of hate in any public place, for any purpose whatsoever. If you are capable of hearing "Honey" as a term of endearment, save it for the bedroom, please.

As a term of address for "anybody and everybody"...first of all, English doesn't need a word people can use to "call anybody and everybody," because if you're addressing anybody and everybody you don't need to "call" any individual anything. Just shout. If you want to emphasize the general nature of your shouts, you could say, "Hey! Everybody!"

But I think David Ferguson provides a good example of what people actually communicate, and intend to communicate even if they lie about it, when they call any random person "honey." The primary meaning is, "I'm angry, either about a particular thing I intend to explain" [as below] "or because I'm an angry, hostile, bitter person who hates myself, mostly, as it might be for being an adult stuck in a teenybopper's job, and deals with this self-hate by projecting it outward onto all the people I see all day." The secondary meaning is, "Because I'm such a hostile person, I want to make it loud and clear--I feel no respect for you! I want to show disrespect for you! I may be a loser who's still doing a student-labor-type job at age 50 and who's been denied visitation rights to my children, but because the boss is impatient to go home today I can get away with insulting the boss's customers! (Maybe.)"

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/25/too-gay-tv-mitchell-mccoy-arkansas?CMP=twt_gu

Some observe that "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." More perceptive observers, noting that most people don't want to attract flies, observe that you can catch fewer flies by keeping your mouth shut. To anyone who feels that that hateful "Honey" is likely to drip out of his or her mouth in a place of business, my advice would be: keep your mouth shut. If you really are on "friendly" terms with a customer who misses your conversation, vent your frustration to him or her privately, at home.

How You Said It: Sneaky Verbal Attacks in English

(Reclaimed from Bubblews. Photo from Morguefile. Topic credit: the Bubbler known as Kitkatviolet posted www.bubblews.com/news/4966478-quotit039s-not-what-you-said-but-it039s-how-you-said-itquot .)

BubbleWS is a wonderful place to study English, and even to learn about foreign languages by observing the way some Bubblers overseas write English. However, one aspect of speaking English is hard to learn from a computer: the "intonation" pattern of words in a sentence.

Everyone can hear, and every book about English as a foreign language mentions, that in a spoken English sentence some words and parts of words receive more "stress" than others. Normally, if the sentence is a statement, the heaviest stress comes near the end of the sentence. English also has "emphatic stress" placed on a word that might be unfamiliar or unexpected or otherwise more important, and "contrastive stress" placed on a word in order to remind people of the opposite idea.

"I love you" means "Never mind about other people--I love you in a special way that's different from whatever I may feel for them."

"I love you" means "I'm not just another friend," or "I'm not sending you to school or the hospital as a punishment...I love you."

"I love you" means "Someone else doesn't love you, but I do." In some situations "I love you" could be considered verbal abuse.

Many books could be written about the ways contrastive stress can be used to turn an innocent-looking sentence into a sneaky verbal attack. More than a dozen of those books *have been* written by the retired blogger known as Ozarque ( ozarque.livejournal.com ), under the name of Suzette Haden Elgin. The "Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" series was a series of slow steady sellers, and used copies are seldom hard to find online.

These books discuss exactly why "A person who really wants to make maximum money on Bubblews will keep this site on his or her computer all day, check the notifications, read all the Connections' Bubbles, and post something approximately every two hours throughout the day" is a harmless description of how people use this system...while "A person who really wanted to make money on BubbleWS would at least visit this site every day," although also true, will be heard by almost all English-speaking people as "You didn't visit this site every day, therefore you don't really want to make money on BubbleWS and you were lying when you said you did."

Although she was a full professor of linguistics and her books have been helpful to many people, Ozarque never considered her understanding of "Verbal Self-Defense" to be completed and carved in stone. Before she became a blogger, she talked and wrote to hundreds of Americans (and some Canadians) about the way we speak English, and over the years the G.A.V.S.D. books reflect the observations of all those readers. So slight changes were made, the "updated editions" of some of the older books read like completely new books, and the discussions continued at the Ozarque Blog. At her Live Journal page, Elgin even collected a few bits of information about how sneaky verbal attacks work in other languages besides English. So, no matter how many of the books you already have, it's worth reading the others...and the blog, with its links and comments.