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French rule
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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This is a week analogy.. french only works as a means of communication because it has internal rules that are objective (as in different people understand the same/very similar thing when hearing/seeing a symbol/word).
Singularity of experience is cool, but anything social requires communication/synchronization.
Even though gender is used as a box or definition people are forced to fit into (and this is bad), reducing human experience to a blackbox kind of singularity is a highly individualist take.
You can work on understanding each other without forcing anyone to fit into your definition..
Language isn't objective though. It wasn't handed down from some deity.
Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It's collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.
In short, language is socially constructed.
I think it's a great analogy for gender in that respect.
Objective and socially constructed isn't a 'hard' contradiction.
Yes of course language evolves and so on, but in a given time(period) it needs to be interpretable more or less independently from the specific actor (a dictionary ensures this, even though it needs to be updated regularly).
In other words yeah sometimes language comes up with new stuff. If it would do it all the time, it wouldn't function
It does change all the time, and dictionaries don't ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn't actually work.
I could say the phrase "abso-fucking-lutely" and you understand it, even though it's not in the dictionary. That's still language, it's still English.
And I don't know what you mean by a "'hard' contradiction" or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that's the point you should be dealing with.
Well my point is just it's neither fully determined as in ahistoric rule nor random as in "changes all the time" or "everyone has their own singular definitions and concepts". And in between there is the sweet spot of understanding, interpretation and development..
Right, but nobody except grammar nazis and the sith deal in absolutes like that.
Obviously the signifiers have a level of stability otherwise nobody would understand any of it.
This is yet another way in which language and gender are analogous.