Deixis

[pooka]

I was skimming the "Currently Reading" thread and came across this statement of mine from early 2009:
"But here's the thing about the words empathy and sympathy.  If I'm using either one, it is not a time to be bringing up the semantic differences between the two.  Mostly the tendency of people to do this caused me to develop an aversion to either word. " 

And it reminded me of something we learned in a communications seminar the Relief Society put on end of last month, which is how people should avoid indulging in the need to correct others.  They were marriage and family therapists (two of them!  Married to each other!  How weird would that be?) who were related a case someone related in their literature of a wife saying something like "I can't hardly believe that happened" (or some such thing) and the husband replying "Is it can't or hardly?  Or do you mean you actually do believe it happened?" 

I have to admit, deixis is not my strong suit in linguistics since it's all kind of mushy and subjective.  I just thought that was very funny, that anyone would do that.  I guess I'm lucky that I married someone where such a situation would pretty much never arise, but I guess it's going to be something I'll have to watch for communicating with my maturing children.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Warning: this comment is about to veer drastically from linguistics into my own little world

I've been thinking about this too. I think I need to start laying off the correcting. I mostly do it to my mother - and not just with language. Any time I see a fact that needs to be brought up, I do so, not realizing that it didn't so much actually need to be brought up.

And I also made a decision this weekend not to make fun of people's names. I was a little irked after the conversation here when I talked about my new nephew and we launched into a discussion of what kind of names were our pet peeves. I was thinking about this dear little baby and then we were talking about how his name was dumb (I know that nobody said that, but that's how my emotions reacted). But then I found myself thinking the same thing about someone else - one of my friends was cheering about her nephew's soccer team and the first thing I thought was that his name sounded like one of those trendy names that people make up and how dumb that was. But this is a little boy and who am I to be thinking his name is stupid? His name isn't stupid, it's him, and there is absolutely no constructive reason for me feeling that his name should be something else. So I've made that resolution now - there is never a reason to scoff at a person's name because that is a person's name and it's dehumanizing to look at it like that.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Veering back into linguistics:

And when I thought about the names, it made me realize that it's just something we should be linguistic descriptivists about. For example, African American names can sound silly to white people and they are prone to being made up rather than coming from any sort of real etymology. But this is where the descriptivist steps in and says "so what?" If people are making up names instead of using names from some centuries-old fount of sophistication, it doesn't matter - that's just the way a particular culture is coming up with names; there's nothing right about naming your children after Bible characters or dead European aristocrats, and there's nothing wrong with making up a name with arbitrary apostrophes and too many Js. That's just how some people name their babies and those babies are human beings with dignity.

[Jonathon]

I don't know what any of this has to do with deixis.

[pooka]

My original thought was that correcting grammar doesn't have a place interpersonal communications.  Annie was saying that someone sharing a baby's name with you is not a time to demonstrated how smart and sophisticated you think you are.  But like I said, I don't grok deixis. 

[Annie Subjunctive]

I take full responsibility for the tangentiality of my comments. The original post sent me to the dictionary in the first place.

Speaking of which, did you know that when you read short stories on eastoftheweb.com all you have to do is highlight a word in the text and it pops open Merriam Webster in a new tab? Also, you should all go read that story about Captain Eli's Best Ear, it was great.

Are we talking about deixis yet?

(Chinese has ruined my ability to read and pronounce the letter X)

[Jonathon]

Are we talking about deixis yet?

No.

Deixis is the phenomenon of pointing to something that can only be understood with context. For example, if I say, "He left the keys over there," you need context to decode what is meant by "he" and "there".

[pooka]

No you don't.  The only reason anyone would say that is to describe the more ridiculous part of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

[Jonathon]

You might have just lost me there.

[pooka]

Throughout the movie Ted's father can't find his keys.  Toward the end, when they are busting the historical dudes out of the lockup, they keep saying "we need to go back in time and set up [improvised item] to get us out of this jam".  One of these was to hide Ted's dad's keys behind the police station sign so they would have them to open the cells.  Then he realized he was responsible for the missing keys all along.

One thing I kind of didn't like in Doctor Who Season 5 was frequent resort to this kind of shenanigan.  It was the central focus of Blink, sure, but they went to a lot of trouble and it relied on people who had lost something in the present when they got sent back to the past.