Getting started.

Abstract

Words (and meaningful silences) matter enormously in our lives. They enable us to cooperate, collaborate, and ally with one another – as well as to exclude, exploit, and subordinate one another. They script our performances as certain kinds of people in certain social locations. They are politically powerful, both as dominating weapons that help oppress and as effective tools that can resist oppression. But words in and of themselves are impotent. It is the socially structured practices and historically situated circumstances constituting our social lives that pour content into words, endow them with meaning and power. This book explores how such meaning-making works. It does so by examining a number of concrete examples of linguistic practices, many of them very current. I am writing it not for specialists, although I hope some may find it useful, but for anyone willing to join me in examining critically their own ideas about language and its complicated connections to social conflict and change. As that invitation suggests, I am also writing it to help clarify my own understanding of these often complex and contentious issues. I do not expect that readers will always agree with my perspectives, either before or after reading the book. But I do hope they will, as I have tried to do, rethink familiar assumptions. Do ‘politically correct’ efforts to change or regulate language sometimes go too far? Why do people keep changing the labels they use to identify themselves? Isn’t speaking ‘grammatically’ important anymore? What does it mean to say that certain words or ways of speaking are ‘sexist’ or ‘racist’? What might be meant by ‘hate speech’ or ‘dangerous speech’? Are there words or ways of speaking that should be abandoned, maybe even