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Languages of marginal communities
Aug. 2nd, 2014 08:50 amPreliminary context: Here, I mean "marginal" in the sense of lurking around the margins of the mainstream, not sketchy in any way or unsustainable/fading away.
Every group (what linguists call a "discourse community") tends to develop its own subset of a language. This ranges from the differences in slang between major roots and branches of a language such as English (e.g., compare British and American slang) to the technical jargon developed by specialists (e.g., linguists, geneticists) to describe things that they talk about among themselves, possibly because nobody else is interested.
One of the fascinating discourse communities I belong to is science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) fandom. (Specifically, the literary sub-community. Nothing against the media SF/F fans, among whom I sometimes number myself; it's just not where I spend my time these days.) At a higher level, hierarchically speaking, our jargon relates to the subject matter we love, and often focuses on the trappings of our literary genre: we talk about things like black holes, time travel paradoxes, and interstellar colonization (the SF component*) or the mechanics of magic systems and the politics of the Faery court/vampires/other things that go bump in the night (the F component) that few outside our community recognize as legitimate topics of discussion.
* Real-world scientists sometimes share our language, but generally don't share our crazed desire to look for loopholes and unraveling threads in what they see as a tidy little teleological structure.
At a lower hierarchical level, there are the specific words we use. Even if you're not a fan, you may still be familiar with words such as "ee-tee" (ET, popularized by the Steven Spielberg movie ET, the Extraterrestrial) or nanotech (really, really small technology, popularized by cell phones and a surprising number of consumer products) or "muggle" (from the Harry Potter series). But you're probably not familiar with fanspeak, a collection of obscure terminology that fans of SF/F have evolved over the years as our own private language, full of cultural in-jokes and shared references.
Like any other jargon, many of these terms communicate quickly and elegantly to those who understand them; anyone else just raises an eyebrow or asks for an explanation, which is usually granted. (Fen -- look it up -- love to share.) Also like any jargon, it's been developing its own generation gap. The fanspeak of older fans (probably 55 years or older) and younger fans (everyone younger) is beginning to diverge. Older fans tend to be at least noddingly familiar with younger terminology (e.g., mansplain, furry, race fail), but the reverse is rarely true in my experience. It's not that we use this language exclusively or even frequently when we gather at conventions or parties; more like that we often invoke the terms to explain things that would take much longer to communicate in conventional English. And isn't that precisely what good jargon is about?
On the one hand, it's sad to see a community begin to be separated by language. But on the other hand, the language of both sub-communities evolves as words inevitably bleed from one discourse community into another, building bridges that enrich both communities. It's fun to watch and to participate in.
On a related note, you can see how some of this language evolves from or into a shared culture. Arthur Hlavaty, a fan of "a certain age" as we say here in Québec, writes with erudition, empathy, and humor about a great many interesting things in his Nice Distinctions newsletter. Related to today's topic, I can recommend his recent discussion of The Island of Doctor Gernsback, which is exactly the kind of humor that SF/F fans love: intellectual wordplay, riffing on an old novel and often obscure in-jokes and cultural references, while also communicating concepts of the fannish culture that even some fans need to be reminded of (e.g., the fact that someone who dresses in a sexy costume is not advertising their sexual availability).
Every group (what linguists call a "discourse community") tends to develop its own subset of a language. This ranges from the differences in slang between major roots and branches of a language such as English (e.g., compare British and American slang) to the technical jargon developed by specialists (e.g., linguists, geneticists) to describe things that they talk about among themselves, possibly because nobody else is interested.
One of the fascinating discourse communities I belong to is science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) fandom. (Specifically, the literary sub-community. Nothing against the media SF/F fans, among whom I sometimes number myself; it's just not where I spend my time these days.) At a higher level, hierarchically speaking, our jargon relates to the subject matter we love, and often focuses on the trappings of our literary genre: we talk about things like black holes, time travel paradoxes, and interstellar colonization (the SF component*) or the mechanics of magic systems and the politics of the Faery court/vampires/other things that go bump in the night (the F component) that few outside our community recognize as legitimate topics of discussion.
* Real-world scientists sometimes share our language, but generally don't share our crazed desire to look for loopholes and unraveling threads in what they see as a tidy little teleological structure.
At a lower hierarchical level, there are the specific words we use. Even if you're not a fan, you may still be familiar with words such as "ee-tee" (ET, popularized by the Steven Spielberg movie ET, the Extraterrestrial) or nanotech (really, really small technology, popularized by cell phones and a surprising number of consumer products) or "muggle" (from the Harry Potter series). But you're probably not familiar with fanspeak, a collection of obscure terminology that fans of SF/F have evolved over the years as our own private language, full of cultural in-jokes and shared references.
Like any other jargon, many of these terms communicate quickly and elegantly to those who understand them; anyone else just raises an eyebrow or asks for an explanation, which is usually granted. (Fen -- look it up -- love to share.) Also like any jargon, it's been developing its own generation gap. The fanspeak of older fans (probably 55 years or older) and younger fans (everyone younger) is beginning to diverge. Older fans tend to be at least noddingly familiar with younger terminology (e.g., mansplain, furry, race fail), but the reverse is rarely true in my experience. It's not that we use this language exclusively or even frequently when we gather at conventions or parties; more like that we often invoke the terms to explain things that would take much longer to communicate in conventional English. And isn't that precisely what good jargon is about?
On the one hand, it's sad to see a community begin to be separated by language. But on the other hand, the language of both sub-communities evolves as words inevitably bleed from one discourse community into another, building bridges that enrich both communities. It's fun to watch and to participate in.
On a related note, you can see how some of this language evolves from or into a shared culture. Arthur Hlavaty, a fan of "a certain age" as we say here in Québec, writes with erudition, empathy, and humor about a great many interesting things in his Nice Distinctions newsletter. Related to today's topic, I can recommend his recent discussion of The Island of Doctor Gernsback, which is exactly the kind of humor that SF/F fans love: intellectual wordplay, riffing on an old novel and often obscure in-jokes and cultural references, while also communicating concepts of the fannish culture that even some fans need to be reminded of (e.g., the fact that someone who dresses in a sexy costume is not advertising their sexual availability).