No, you are really not.
This isn't the blog I was going to write today, because there have been a few posts which have got kind of snarky (not by me, for once) about being careful about language, but then today I was Twitter-ing in my lunch break (def: Twitter-ing; lurking on or reading Twitter without actually Tweeting) and came across someone who said they were "literally lynched" over something to do with the whole Rowling issue. First of all, can I say I'm so done with the debate over this woman. I am in the group who think her views are abhorrent. I admire what she did to build her writing career, I admire her success and I know she's done wonderful things for a lot of charities with her money, but the woman herself has gone down in my estimations considerably because of what I see as poisonous views about a minority community. Agree with me or disagree with me, but I'm kind of done reading about it.
Anyway, there was a thread that seemed more positive about Jacqueline Wilson. I loved her books growing up. I used to watch Tracey Beaker on the TV when I got home from school and I thought it was fabulous. Girls In Love was amazing because of the issues it dealt with. The fact that during part of the series it talked about young women being pressured into sex was probably the first time in my young life I had ever heard of that as an issue and it made me more aware and, in some ways, I think that kept me safer. Then there was this tweet from someone who said they were "literally lynched" and I'm wondering how a ghost is operating Twitter. Maybe I'm being a bit oversensitive to the use of the phrase because this morning I read the account of a black man who was attacked in America and the white supremacists who attacked him tried to lynch him, and the detail with which he described it shook me, but I would hope that on any day I would tell that person to stop being an idiot. Literally is not an adjective to say something is more extreme. Literally means this is the purely factual account of something which happened. The word means using the original meaning of a word. Lynching does not mean having your ass handed to you on Twitter, but it is the hanging of a person. It's a mob rule punishment, and very often, the only crime is being seen as less than another person or being black. Sometimes, lynching is because a person is presumed to have committed a crime, but that's not what is happening today.
I have read that black men are being found hanging in trees in America and it's being deemed as a suicide far too quickly, with little investigation as to whether this was lynch mob activity. The account I read this morning stated that the police had attended, spoken to the white supremacist attacker first and then told the black man who was attacked and obviously injured by the attacks on him that they would not be arresting the men, despite many witnesses being present and filming the moments when the white supremacists shouted to one another for a noose, threatened to kill him, said they would break his arms and called him multiple racial slurs on the basis on his skin colour.
Whilst the author of that tweet may not have read that account, it's completely ignorant to say you were "literally lynched" from the comfort of your computer. There are certain words we must be more careful about using. Literally is a big one. Lynched is another. I've spoken before about stepping away from using the word commit when we talk about suicide and tweeted about stepping away from Aspergus when we talk about Autism.
This is not about a prohibition of language. There is space for their use within society, but that use must be careful and it must be considered. When people say things like, please be mindful, they're just asking you to try and think about what you are saying. If someone prompts you to remind you, it's not meant to be malicious and they're not saying it believing you are being malicious, most of the time anyway. It's really hard to remember that certain language is really hurtful. Six months on from becoming an ASIST Life Saving Caregiver (Suicide First Aider) I still slip into saying "committed suicide" because, for twenty-six years of my life, that's how these things were said, but correct yourself and, kindly, prompt others. No one is asking anyone to be perfect, but I will ask you to try. I want to ask everyone to do better and the step that you take towards that is to try. Your efforts might not feel important, but they really are.
And yes, I was fuming when I wrote this.
Charlieswrite
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