Jingo-Lingo: Doublespeak, Fanfiction Vocabulary, and the limits of language

Noam Chomsky is trying to take over my life.

No, I am completely serious! He has shown up in every single one of my classes this semester, and that is an accomplishment, considering every single class I'm taking is from a different department. He's a linguist, which meant we read his thoughts for Linguistics (duh) on how languages are structured, in my Human Development class on how children acquire language, and in my Communications class on how we use language in advertising. Today he came up in Peace Studies because he is a political activist and theorist as well and we were reading an article of his on terrorism.

But today in Peace Studies we discussed something else that Mr. Chomsky would probably have a few thoughts about-- doublespeak, or the particular brand of language used by the government and by other various bureaucracies to make whatever they intend to say unintelligible to the average joe. And of course, I thought back to linguistics and my research project, which is on another type of lingo -- the vocabulary of fanfiction.

Just like doublespeak or the less confusing academic language of, say, chemistry, fanfiction vocabulary is an attempt to make what we do as authors seem like legitimate discourse as well as create the same barrier as doublespeak does, veiling us in our own elite little world of Mary sues and crossovers and canon 'shipping. By using these terms, we establish our experience level and our authority within our discipline the same way a chemist uses terms like valence electrons, hydrogen bonds and heterogenous solutions to show that he, too, knows what he is talking about rather than referring vaguely to the structures of atoms or mixtures of liquids that have differing properties. And chemists and goverment officials aren't the only ones using confusing langauge -- English speakers employ euphemisms, those phrases that drive translators wild with annoyance, every day of the week.

This is from my introduction so far:

The scene is a familiar one to anyone who reads on a regular basis – it is the last page of the novel you’ve been dying for months to read since you heard your favorite author was publishing again, and as you finish the final words, you can’t help feeling a sense of disappointment. That wasn’t the way you wanted the book to end at all! The hero was flat, the love interest was transparent, and there were entire scenes that needed to be explained! If you were writing the book, you would have definitely included more, like a chapter explaining how all the characters met each other. Most people never follow up on these notions of re-writing or filling in their favorite novels, but for a small community of writers, that idea forms the basis of their entire creative output. It’s called fanfiction, and it’s been around for hundreds of years, almost since the printing press created a mass market for books. These authors use texts ranging from Jane Austen to the latest comic book series as their source material, and their aim is simple – to write stories based on characters people already connect with for the purpose of improving their own writing and filling in gaps in the original stories. Since the advent of the Internet and sites that allow readers and writers around the globe to establish communities, fanfiction has grown dramatically, and as this style has grown in popularity, it has developed its own unique language, a codified and agreed-upon set of terms and vocabulary to help connect within the community and establish legitimacy among its members. Fanfiction is written with the aim of creating agency, space, and identity for its writers, and these three motives help explain why the vocabulary of fanfiction exists as well as why it is structured the way it is.

As you can see, it's going to be a riveting paper. But one of the other things the movie we watched in Peace Studies today discussed was how language, as well as how people use language, significantly impacts how we view the world. Jacques Derrida discusses this in one of his writings, talking about how using our language to discuss the way we use language is by the very nature of the proposition a play doomed to failure. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that different languages formulate different trains of thought, that if a language has more than one word for snow the people speaking the language will, of course, be more aware of snow.

Certainly this could be true with doublespeak. By using a disconnected doublespeak, we in turn disconnect ourselves from war, rearrange our thought process and make war more palatable -- an enemy solidier is easier to kill if he remains nameless and becomes Jerry, Gook, or Victor Charlie, a manufactured propaganda face with a leering grin and beady little eyes set on destroying the American way of life. We're not fighting a war, we're peacekeeping, and don't even think about calling them casulties. Talk about the body count instead, or the butcher's bill, if you're fighting in the South Pacific on a 19th century ship of the line. Using doublespeak can hinder our ability to look objectively at war.

But fanfiction vocabulary does the opposite of doublespeak-- it seeks to open up and delve further into an artistic endeavor by making new words (or rearranging old ones) to better explain the unique animal of fanfiction writing. Mainstream writing doesn't need a word for the advocacy of a relationship between these two people or those two people, but fanfiction does, so we have shipping, a clipping of 'relationship' that's been turned into a verb, an appropriative vocab word for an appropriative art. My thought process is shaped by those words, but the very fact that they are new and that I have allowed them into my vocabulary speaks to my ability to influence by own thought process. It's not that we're more aware of snow becuase we have more words for it -- it's because we needed to be more aware that we came up with more words.

Fascinating world we live in, isn't it?