Monthly Archives: December 2016

Christmas Is Over. Or Is It?

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Just because it’s December 26th doesn’t mean Christmas is over. Some Christmases seem to last forever. Here’s a look at some of the ways Christmas can linger.

Christmas the week after Christmas. Didn’t get the cards and packages into the mail? Oopsie! At least we can blame the Post Office or UPS. Not that that fools anyone, but if you’re skilled enough, you can pull off this excuse. Or you can give cakes, cookies, or other gifts of food and know that they will be eaten for at least a few days after the food-rich holiday celebration has worn off. And leftover Christmas cookies make great New Year’s Eve snacks, at least according to my friend Beth. Dunk them in cocoa and no one will ever know they’re stale.

Russian Christmas. All the Easter Orthodox Christians’ celebrations, really. They have Christmas on January 7th. At one office where I worked, our department included one person of Slavic heritage who celebrated Russian Christmas. Our department head decided that we all would too. I think it was supposed to be out of respect for Annie, but I suspect it was really because Carl liked to avoid the whole-office frivolities and have a quieter celebration later. Not that it got us out of the enforced jollity of the Official Office Christmas Party, but it did provide a nice P.S. to the season.

Christmas gifts that keep on giving. One year when I was a teen, my parents were plagued with medical expenses and couldn’t afford elaborate presents. The main present that year was an appropriate magazine subscription for each of us. (Mine was Sky and Telescope, if I remember correctly. It was either that or Analog Science Fiction.) Every month when an issue came, it was like Christmas all over again.

And subscriptions don’t just have to be magazines these days. Wine, fruit, and other foodstuffs can be delivered regularly throughout the year – monthly or quarterly – bringing a breath of Christmas as they arrive. And if the first package arrives in January, who’s to know whether you ordered it the day before Christmas or the day after?

Another long-term gift is the coupon book. Although a book of car wash coupons barely makes it as an adequate stocking stuffer, coupons for home-baked treats, chores (or reprieves from chores), and even erotic activities can be a big hit. Kids can get in on at least the first two of those, either as givers or recipients.

The Christmas-in-the-future strategy. One Christmas my friend Caren gave me a nicely wrapped gift. When I opened it, it proved to be a number of strands of yarn, in various shades of blue, purple, and indigo. There was no card explaining it, and she refused to tell me what it was all about. “You’ll see,” she said.

Later – much later – it was June, I think – Caren unveiled the actual present. It was a lovely knitted blanket, made of panels of the various colors of yarn I had received at Christmas. (Since she was an engineer, the panels were arranged in a specific geometrical pattern.) It was cozy, beautiful, and welcome, even if it was several more months before I could actually use it.

364 days before Christmas shopping. Nowadays, ugly holiday sweaters are the vogue – the tackier the better. But Christmas sweaters used to be badges of pride and belonging rather than objects of ridicule. Once I worked in an office where it was customary for women to wear holiday sweaters, and even sweatshirts “bedazzled” with shiny objects, iron-on appliqués, and embroidery.

Holiday clothing was not a custom I had ever practiced. I was trying desperately to fit in with the others, but I was not about to spend $20-$30  on a sweater I would wear perhaps two times per year, or a sweatshirt, glitter, glue, and sequins that would inevitably end up stuck to my hands and face.

So I started haunting the day-after-Christmas sales. Holiday sweaters were abundant and cheap. (If you wait much longer, all the holiday fashions will have disappeared into back rooms.) I managed to pick up a couple of sweaters and a festive vest at bargain prices. My favorite was a dark blue sweater with a nighttime scene of Santa landing on rooftops. (I look better in blue than red and green.) I packed the garments away in preparation for the next spate of holiday festivities.

Wouldn’t you know it – I left that job to go freelance before the next December came. Now I have all these sweaters and no place to wear them – except the Chinese buffet, where my husband and I usually spend our holidays, among the pagans, Jews, and atheists, chowing down on lo mein, crab legs, and “Happy Family.”

And we can return there, year-round, and celebrate the holidays year-round.

But I feel certain I should leave the Christmas sweaters at home in the dresser.

 

Let’s Talk: Policing My Own Voice

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Woman covering closed mouth. Speak no evil conceptn the past, I’ve posted a piece on how women’s voices are being criticized and discounted via both voice policing and tone policing. (http://wp.me/p4e9wS-sx)

Now I want to talk about another kind of voice policing – the kind I am learning to apply to myself.

Over the years, my voice has done things that I didn’t intend for it to do, principally driving away acquaintances, potential friends, and even established friends. I believe that part of this phenomenon has to do with my tone and how I express myself.

Expert linguist (and noted science fiction author) Suzette Haden Elgin described it this way: “For English, more than half of the information is not in the words but in the body language, including the intonation of the voice – the melody of the voice – that goes with the words.” 

Most people know intuitively what certain vocal intonations mean and how they can be used to alter the meaning of a sentence. In the movie My Cousin Vinny, a character responds to an accusation of murder by saying in a tone of disbelief and horror, “I shot the clerk!!!??” When this part of the interrogation is read aloud in court, in a level tone, “I shot the clerk” sounds like a confession.

The difference is in the “melody” of the two utterances.

The effects of tone or melody can even be recognized in two- or three-word sentences. Here’s an example:

“Don’t do that” simply means not to do something – give the cat a treat between meals, for example.

“DON’T do that” means “I know you think that’s what I told you to do, but you’re mistaken.”

“Don’t DO that” means “You’re annoying me.”

“Don’t do THAT” means “That idea is ridiculous, idiotic, or harmful,” and possibly “You’re an idiot.”

Or think about the shades of meaning you can convey with one syllable: “No.” “Yeah.” “Right.” They can mean exactly the opposite of their definition, along with dozens of other shades of meaning: disbelief, denial, offense, uncertainty, questioning, agreement, scorn, and “You’re an idiot.”

Vocal intonation is very difficult to convey in writing without extra punctuation or modifiers like “in a level tone.” My unfortunate inability to understand vocal melody – or to produce the correct one – is likely the reason that my statements are sometimes misunderstood. They come out sounding like sarcasm, snark, or know-it-all superiority, none of which is likely to be appreciated by the hearer.

And that’s been my problem. Unintentionally, I have been making verbal attacks on people. To quote Elgin again: “Any time you hear a lot of extra stresses and emphasis on words or parts of words, you should be on the alert.” The hearer may not be able to identify what makes the sentence an attack rather than just rude (which I am also quite capable of accidentally producing), but she or he can tell it’s not pleasant.

Every time I have said, “Don’t do THAT” instead of “Don’t do that,” I have made an impression that I am a snotty, overbearing, judgmental person.

I have a particular memory of doing just that. A person mentioned casually that she wasn’t going to get a flu shot because she had heard they contained the flu virus. “But that’s how vaccines WORK!” I replied. My tone conveyed “Everyone should know that” and “You’re an idiot.”

I shudder to think how many people I have called idiots without meaning to.

And that’s just in regular conversations. When I attempt to be amusing or humorous, I probably get the “music” wrong a lot of the time and offend. Of course, some of my friends like sarcasm and snark, but I forget that not everyone does.

Talking on the phone and in email or chat is particularly fraught with possibilities for misunderstanding and offense. On the phone, vocal melody is all. The other person can’t see your body language or facial expression – raised eyebrows, frown or smile, puzzlement, a nod of approval. Some people suggest smiling while talking on the phone even though it can’t be seen – that it makes a difference in your voice. I’ve never been able to get the hang of that, though.

In email and chat, you don’t even have vocal melody to help. Emojis and <sarcasm on> and <sarcasm off> can convey expression, but they’re clumsy and easy to forget. The internet is a place where misunderstanding and giving offense are easy to do.

There is one way I have improved my voice. I have trained myself to listen for and use strangers’ names in phone conversations with company representatives: “Here’s my problem, Jackie.” “I appreciate your help, Keanna.” (This works in person, too. Who wouldn’t rather hear, “Kevin, I have a question” than “Waiter, I have a question”? It’s right there on the name tag. I can remember that for half an hour, especially if I reinforce my memory by using it.)

Does it actually matter whether servers and customer service people are offended or encouraged by my tone? I like to think that it does matter, and that vocal melody makes a difference in the service I get and the next person’s too. And it’s a way of practicing controlling my vocal tone.

I may never have a toned body, but I’m doing my best to have a properly toned voice!

Poor? Mentally Ill? Sorry, You’re on Your Own.

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Poverty and mental illness have something in common.

There is a stigma attached to both.

Both are seen as moral failings. If only people tried harder, worked more, improved themselves, they could lift themselves out of poverty. Without relying on anyone else’s help, which would be shameful.

And if only people stopped being so negative, looked on the bright side, smiled more, thought more about others, their positive mental attitude would make all those shrinks and pills unnecessary. They wouldn’t be shooting people with assault rifles and sucking up tax dollars for disability payments, which is shameful.

Society can’t afford poverty and it can’t afford mental illness. Why should we make the effort when the poor and the mentally disturbed don’t?

Why should these two conditions both be associated with such stigma and for such similar reasons? It’s simple. People don’t want to think that poverty or mental illness could happen to them.

The truth, however, is that a vast number of Americans are living one paycheck or one illness away from poverty, and one in four or five Americans will face a mental or emotional disorder at some point in their lives. And they are afraid. So they tell themselves that the conditions only affect Other People. And those people must be stupid or lazy or unmotivated or something, or they wouldn’t be poor or mentally ill in the first place.

And that’s where stigma begins.

And what are the consequences of stigma?

Well, first of all, it means that no one wants to spend money alleviating either condition. If these Other People can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and improve, the thinking goes, why should we pay them not to? Job training programs, child care, higher minimum wage, insurance coverage, community mental health centers, treatment programs for addiction, need to be paid for some way, but not with our tax dollars, by God!

And it means we don’t want to look at the Other People for fear of seeing ourselves. Don’t put halfway houses, group homes, unemployment offices, treatment centers, psychiatric hospitals, and other reminders in our neighborhoods. Not In My Backyard!

It’s not just a failure of compassion, though it’s that too. It’s not just a failure of the social “safety net,” though it certainly is that as well. It’s also a failure of the imagination – what would it be like if poverty or mental illness should happen to me? The reality is too unpleasant to think about, so don’t.

And while we’re talking about unpleasant, let’s mention the place where poverty and mental illness intersect – homelessness. Don’t we assume that homeless people are both poor and mentally ill? As such, spending money on them is doubly wasted. Why bother? It’s not like it’s going to help. Poverty, homelessness, and mental illness are incurable, after all. (Unless a person can cure their problems without outside help, of course.)

So what’s my stake in all this? Am I a bleeding-heart liberal do-gooder who wants to cure society’s ills and make us all foot the bill for it?

Well, yeah.

But I’m also living month to month on my income. My husband makes only a bit over minimum wage. We have both, at one time or another during our lives, been on unemployment and/or food stamps. We have no nest egg or emergency fund. It wouldn’t take much in the way of reversals to wipe us out. Even at that, we’re relatively privileged.

And I have a mental illness – bipolar disorder 2. Without insurance, I could not afford to see a psychiatrist, or buy medication (one of mine costs $800 per month), or get inpatient treatment if I ever need it. Right now my condition is moderately well controlled, but if I should suffer a setback, I might not be able to work at all. And there we are, back at poverty.

These two unfortunate conditions – poverty and mental illness – affect me directly, so I can’t look away and say they only happen to Other People. I know that they affect others more severely than they do me, and I don’t know how those people make it through.

But I do know that stigma isn’t helping any of us.

Let’s Talk: Policing Women’s Voices

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Women’s voices are important. Anymore, few people deny that women have something to say.

Why, then, are so many people distracted from what women say by how they say it?

voice2There are two kinds of criticism of women’s voice: voice policing and tone policing. Note that both imply that someone is monitoring women’s speech and “policing” it – telling them what is permissible, or at least what standards they must adhere to if they want to be heard, listened to, and taken seriously.


Voice Policing. Do you find women’s voices shrill, hesitant, un-confident, not authoritative, or childish? Then you might be one of the voice police.

The voice police pay attention to the vocal characteristics of women’s speech and judge them on supposedly unattractive or ineffective qualities. Let’s be clear. There’s nothing wrong with finding an individual woman’s speech unappealing – too nasal, too soft, too pretentious. It’s when a trait is ascribed to all women – or to a broad subgroup, such as young women – that is problematic. And judging women as a group negatively based on the sounds of their voices is a form of discrimination, especially  it leads to fewer job opportunities.

Two examples of vocal characteristics that raise the hackles on many are “upspeak” or “uptalk” and “vocal fry.”

“Uptalk” is the tendency for vocal pitch to go up at the end of sentences making everything sound like a question. Many people find that this makes the speaker sound insecure. Some even find that it hurts women in their careers, since they read it as lack of confidence. It is also associated with the much-deplored “Valley Girl” speech patterns of the early 2000s. (I must confess that I personally find uptalk annoying, but not enough to “correct” someone who does it.)

“Vocal fry” is the voice pattern that has replaced uptalk as the annoyance of the moment. In some ways the opposite of uptalk, vocal fry involves lowering the voice and speaking with a creaky or gravelly sound. I am told that the Kardashian family do this, but I hear it in Mila Kunis’s whiskey commercials.

The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/30/vocal-fry-jobs-women_n_5417810.html) discussed the findings of a study that supports the idea that vocal fry harms a woman’s career (other than Mila Kunis’s, I mean).

When evaluating job candidates, participants preferred normal-voiced women 86 percent of the time, and normal-voiced men 83 percent of the time. Vocal fry also appeared to most negatively affect the trustworthiness score.

I have to wonder how many men find that vocal fry suggests untrustworthiness because they hear it as a sexual come-on inappropriate in a business setting. (Let’s also note that the authors of the study contrasted vocal friers with “normal-voiced” women, which implies that vocal fry is abnormal.)

But did you notice that the study refers to men’s vocal fry as well?

In an NPR interview (http://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices) Stanford linguistics professor Penny Eckert points out:

The complaints about female upspeak and vocal fry ignore the fact that men also engage in those habits. “People are busy policing women’s language and nobody is policing older or younger men’s language. The biggest users of vocal fry traditionally have been men, and it still is; men in the U.K, for instance. And it’s considered kind of a sign of hyper-masculinity,” Eckert notes.

She argues that “women shouldn’t have to change their voices to suit society.”

Tone Policing. Tone policing is another matter, and the more troubling of the two. The Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tone%20police) defines “tone police” as

…people who focus on (and critique) how something is said, ignoring whether or not it is true. They will discard a true statement simply because they don’t like how it was presented.

This is particularly noticeable regarding women in the public eye (or ear). During the recent election season, you often heard Hillary Clinton’s voice described as “shrill” or “nagging.” Her messages often took second place to how her voice was perceived. And protestors or those who are angry about a situation are told to “calm down,” “stop being so angry,” or “not make such a big deal of it.”

Feminists, women (and men) of color, and young people are often the objects of tone policing. In its definition of tone police, the Urban Dictionary gives this example of the underlying sentiment: “You might be right, but since I don’t like how you said it, I demand you apologize!”

An opinion piece in a tumblr blog (http://tooyoungforthelivingdead.tumblr.com/tone-policing) explains:

Tone policing is the ultimate derailing tactic. When you tone police, you automatically shift the focus of the conversation away from what you or someone else did that was wrong, and onto the other person and their reaction. … It dismisses the other person’s position by framing it as being emotional and therefore irrational.

In cases of oppression, aggression, and discounting, being calm is not the automatic response, or even the appropriate one. The post goes on to explain:

When someone says something oppressive — that can be a racist slur, an ableist stereotype, a misogynist dismissal, an invalidation of identity/experiences, being asked invasive and entitled questions, and so on – it feels like being slapped in the face…And, frankly, it’s cruel and ridiculous to expect a person to be calm and polite in response to an act of oppression.

In fact, invalidating a person’s experience by telling her or him to “calm down” or not to “get so worked up” or even “where’s your sense of humor?” will not – and should not – have the desired effect, though it may end the interaction. (As I once heard it expressed, “Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down when told to calm down.”)

Voice policing and tone policing are difficult to notice until someone points them out. Let’s try to remember that the message – the content – is the most important piece of the act of speech. Let’s try not to let the sound of speech overwhelm the substance.