Episode 112 Love language

Hello, welcome to the second one hundred and twelve of structured visions. Structured visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about language, selfhood, and social structure. My name is Jody Clark and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here.

Just a few quick words about me. I'm a linguist. I am a lecturer at Shafeltau University. I am also a fiction writer.

You can find my fiction on JodyClark.com. All of my fiction is about what I call the mysteries of language. I believe that language is a mystery hidden in plain sight and the more we learn about it, the more we learn about our experience of being human. How being human is different from being anything else in the world.

How our consciousness is restricted by language. And how by exploring that restriction we can understand the mysteries of the rest of the world that isn't constrained by language. I love to write and think about the intimacy that's embedded in the structure of language. I have also, I'm very excited to tell you, I've got a brand new course out called Grammar for Dreamers.

And you can find it on my website JodyClark.com.com. Grammar for Dreamers course, GFD course. And I have achieved something that I've been trying to achieve for years and never quite getting it. Which is I've managed to get my whole way of doing grammar in this relaxed, easy going way.

A way to help people understand the real basics of grammar in ways that will perfectly make sense for them. I've done it in 30 minutes and I'm so proud of myself for that. And so I want to make that available to you. It's completely free.

If you go to JodyClark.com, you can just click on the course there, JodyClark.com.GFD course. And you can get back completely free, 30 minutes of me explaining my entire way approach to doing grammar in a way that you can sort of do it by drawing on what's called your linguistic intuition. So in that you're going to find ways to identify the four elements of the class, subject of our complement adjunct, how you use probes to do that. And then you'll also find out a little bit about what I mean when I think of grammar as a mystery for dreamers to delight in.

So I hope that you have a look at that course and enjoy it. So I always start the episode with a couple of questions. And so I actually have three questions today. The first question is a question that's reminiscent of a question that I've asked a number of different times.

In fact, I tried to sort of scroll through all of my 111 episodes of structured visions to see when I've asked you this question because I do a lot of... I do only solo episodes. And I wonder sometimes how much I'm repeating myself. So I'm about to ask you a question that you might have heard before.

Also, the other places you might have heard it would be episode 109, what makes you so special, and episode 98, Linguistic Singularity. So if you're in love with this question, you can go back to those. And I also realized that years ago I produced another free course called Writing through the Lens of Language, which I kind of forgot about, but it's actually a really good course. So I'm going to actually make that.

I'm going to put the link to that in the show notes if you want to get that course too. So in writing through the lens of language, I asked you to sort of look around you and I think it was complete the clause I am looking at and then fill in the blank. Well, I'm going to ask a different question now. I'm just going to ask you to look around you and just tell me what you see.

So you can say it out loud, you can write it down, you can just think it, you can just notice it. You could, if you want, write me, just go to JodieClark.com and sort of contact or hit the contact button and just tell me what it was that you saw because that would be so interesting and that might show up in a different podcast if you do that podcast episode. So what do you see? I'm just going to give you a second look around.

A second ago I saw a dragonfly which I was very excited about and I was like, oh, that can be my answer to what do you see a dragonfly. And just as an aside, yesterday we were watching a dragonfly laying eggs all around our pond. So soon we will have dragonfly in the center pond and maybe next year we'll have a whole bunch of southern hawker dragonflies. So that's exciting.

Hopefully you will be able to do a round or phase me out while you're thinking about what you were saying. Okay, so presumably you've got the answer to what do you see. And the next question is, no question, I will try to ask about singing it. Who do you love?

So that's the next question. Give you a second to think about that. And the third question is how much of a grammar geek are you? Okay, so if you are a grammar geek and then you will understand the difference between questions, the link between questions two and three.

Because if you're a grammar geek, you might have thought, it shouldn't be who do you love, Jody, it should be whom do you love? And don't worry if you didn't think that because it's perfectly fine not to be a prescriptivist. In fact, I prefer people not to be a prescriptivist because it leads to grammar shame. But it's also perfectly fine if you thought, I'm strictly speaking, it should be whom do you love?

If you're not entirely sure as to why it should be whom do you love when it sounds totally weird, when you really should say who do you love? And often people chuck in the word whom, just to make themselves sound sort of more academic or scholarly or intelligent or intellectual. And sometimes they chuck in places that doesn't belong. So in order to get the distinction between whom and whom, we're going to do a little fill in the blank exercise here.

So what I want you to do, I'm going to do a set of clauses. And I want you to fill in the blank with the subjects. For example, I love blank. And since I said, I want you to love yourself, so I love me.

I love me. And so you just want to fill in with whoever is the person doing the loving you want them to be the person who's also loved. And since I love me, the next one will be you love you. Right?

So the next one will be he loves. And the answer would be him. She loves her. It loves it.

We love us. And they love them. If you didn't overthink that, which you might have done, if you didn't overthink that, you would have found it relatively easy to say, I love me. She loves her.

It loves it. We love us. They love them. Finding those pronouns was probably pretty easy.

The question is, since I told you it was exactly the same person, why didn't you say, I love I. He loves he. I just don't even say it. She loves she.

We love we. They love they. Why was that hard? Why didn't you think to do that when it's exactly the same person?

And the answer is that there are syntactic constraints. In English, there aren't huge numbers of them as compared to other types of languages, but in English, they show up with the pronouns sometimes. So like I is a subject pronoun. So if you're talking about I meaning the person speaking, then if that person speaking shows up in the subject position, it's I.

And if it shows up in the object position, it's me. And for some of them, there isn't a distinction between subject and object, which is why you say you love you. And they love. It loves it.

And so for something like it and you, they're exactly the same, but for the other pronouns, they're different. I means I. Me means me. There's no difference in what they mean, but there's a difference in where they show up in the syntax.

And the syntax is just the order of components in a clause. So if you say who loves, then the object pronoun would be whom. Who loves whom? I know that doesn't make any sense.

And so when you say whom do you love, then you're actually saying, you could say that instead of you, you could say that instead you love whom. And the thing that comes after love is the object pronoun. So you would say you love her, for instance, that's an object pronoun. And the object pronoun of who is whom.

Now, it's changing. So there will come a time in the English language I presume that whom will be so archaic that no one's using it at all. So please don't start using whom because you'll be at a texture if you're not using it already. It will become a word like you were, because both the subject and the object.

So who will just be the default because language is changing evolve. But the reason that I brought that up is because the syntax is not going to be the same. The syntax constrains how we say things in whatever language we're talking about. And so if we take the question, what do you see?

So we have who do you love. And now we have what do you see when you ask that question. The subject of what do you see is you. And the object of what you see is what.

And the reason why the object comes first is because it's a question. So when I ask you what did you see, what do you see, the question is did you respond with a noun phrase? And I respond with a noun phrase because I said a dragonfly. So that's a noun phrase.

So a noun phrase is really anything that can be replaced with a pronoun. So I could have said I see it instead of saw I see a dragonfly. And I'd be curious to know what whether you replaced it with a noun phrase. So I see my partner.

If I were listening to this, I'd probably be doing the washing up. I see the dishes in front of me. I see the soapy water. Maybe you're jogging.

And you say I see the trees going past. Maybe you're in your car. I see traffic. And so chances are you respond with a noun phrase.

And I talked a lot just a few episodes ago and I said one of nine what makes you so special about the English language and how the English is quite a noun focused language, or at least it's an analytic language where the words are separate. And other languages are synthetic or poly synthetic and many indigenous languages are poly synthetic. And the words aren't separate. And there also can be very verb based languages.

And so it's possible that if you are a speaker say a Seneca, then you might have responded with a verb rather than a noun. But it's more likely that you would have responded in a whole clause that would have been one word that would have included a verb and possibly a noun and possibly a pronoun, etc. But the question is, is there any way in English that we can phrase the question to produce a verb? So if I say what do you see, can you think of a way of responding in a verb rather than a noun phrase or we could say in a verb phrase rather than a noun phrase?

I'm just going to give a second to think how you might do that. And the answer is you kind of can and you kind of can't. So when you say what do you see, you're treating, we already have the verb. And the verb is C.

So it's very, very sort of highly programmed for you to produce the noun phrase that is the object of C. C is a transitive verb which means it doesn't have to be a transitive verb. But in this case, I was making a transitive verb. So that meaning that it produces an object requires an object.

I see a hazelnut tree. No, it's not called a hazelnut tree. It's called a hazel tree. I see a hazel tree.

We had this world burying hazelnut in our garden and our garden is soon going to turn into a hazelnut cups or hazel cups. So that's also one of my own. We've got a lot of natural world stuff going on in our garden right now. I'm looking at that in the garden.

I'm looking at it from our window. But in any case, yeah, you're producing an object which is going to be a noun phrase. However, an object doesn't have to only be a noun phrase. It could also be another clause.

So you could say something like, I see that that squirrel is burying nuts in our garden again. And in which case you've got a whole clause and the whole clause, if it's a clause, if it's a clause, it requires a verb. So it's going to have a verb in it. You could say another thing like, I see that the sun is shining and there you've got the verb is shining.

You've also got the subject of that. But the thing is you've responded with a whole clause. So I'd be curious to know whether you've responded with a clause. I see that rather than with a noun phrase.

So that's kind of a way of getting a verbiness in there. Another thing you could do would be to use a non-finite verb that we can treat as a noun. So an example of that is a gerund. So gerund is like an ing word that we're actually treating as a noun.

So if I'm talking about the dragonfly, instead of focusing on the body of the dragonfly, if I focus on its action, I could say I see flying, which sounds a little bit weird, but it's still grammatically okay, so grammatically well formed. It just might not necessarily, might not be clear what it's signaling or referring to what it means. But I could say I see flying. You can imagine teachers doing that.

I see, I hear whispering, I see scuffling, I don't know what's that. I just imagine teachers saying that to a group of pre-sullers. You can also say something like, you could also try using a dummy subject. So in episode 109 I spoke about Spanish, how you don't say in Spanish, to say it's raining, you use one verb, you way they.

And that is one word, it's just a verb that means it's raining. And so in English we require there to be an explicit subject. So we have to say it's raining, but it is a dummy subject. It doesn't actually refer to anything.

So we could say something like, it's shining. Right, so what do you see? It's shining. It would be a kind of a dispreferred response, it would be a strange thing to say, but in theory you could try it.

You could try something like using the gerund with your noun. So I see a dragonfly flying, it's still an outphrase, but you can manage the other verb in there. I see a hazel tree growing. So you're kind of getting the verb in there.

So again, still an outphrase, but you can manage it. If you want to respond with a verb, you potentially have to ask a different question. Like you could trust, rather than what do you see, which is kind of programming you towards a noun phrase, you could try instead what's happening. And then you could say, I'm listening to a podcast.

So you've got the whole clause there, but you do have the verb. What's happening? Gerald's getting ready to go to school, something like that, or it could be what's going on, or what are you doing. And those all are sort of probing for a complete clause.

And the clause will always have a verb in them. Now the interesting thing there is even those clauses will produce particular responses. And in this case, they'll produce particular types of verb. So what's happening, or what's going on, or what are you doing?

All of those will produce a private type of verb called a material process. So those are verbs of doing or happening. So they're not likely to produce something like what's happening. I love Jimmy, because love is not an action, it's not a sort of happening action.

So in order to produce, you know, I love Jimmy, you would have to be something like who do you love? The point of all of this, it's not like it matters whether you produce a noun phrase or a verb, et cetera. The point of all of this is that the linguistic structure of the question sets the parameters for a specific type of answer, so it constrains your answer. And it forecloses any other type of answer.

So it doesn't matter whether you respond with a verb or a noun. The point is you are sort of going to be constrained towards reducing a particular type of thing by the question that you ask. And this is just because of linguistics, it's just because of the kind of what's called what how, what any, how they cause the lexical grammar of our languages. They produce particular ways of response and also experience.

And so the question, what do you see who you love, et cetera, will produce particular types of answers. If any of you do teaching, you know that there's, or parenting, you know there are particular types of question that you kind of need to ask in order to get an answer more or less like what you want. And I think this exercise of the question producing a particular constrained type of answer is a small scale analogy of a bigger question or a bigger query, which is our experience as human beings, as human beings, we are language users, almost all human beings are language users. And so I think that's the way that we experience the world through language.

And I believe that's a restriction of our consciousness because of what I just was explaining about how language constrains your experiences. It constrains the types of responses. It constrains your focus. And in doing so, it excludes other possible ways of experiencing the world.

And I was trying to share that with the nouns and your verbs, but it's actually quite difficult to think outside of nouns and verbs, even if we're not using the words nouns and verbs, we describe them. So I've written a very, very short story about this flashpiece called a glimpse. Available on grammarfordreamers.com, you can also find it on JodieKlerk.com, or you can just listen to me read it now. It is very, very short.

A glimpse. When God visits the Earth, which isn't that often, he tries to avoid human populations. They're flooded with language which he never bothered to learn. But last Tuesday, someone spotted him under a railway bridge in southern, getting some homeless drunk to translate the graffiti.

The deity having no concept of subjects and objects struggled at first to make sense of Jimmy Love's page. But a swig of the tramp's special brood dimmed the exalted one's consciousness just enough to see the point. They see themselves as separate, he used, and they're trying to come back together. He placed his finger on the concrete, tracing the heart-shaped line that circumscribed the message.

Nope! said the tramp, no stranger to setting divinity straight. Then, I know who they are at all, and in the other, they catch a glimpse. A tear slipped onto the omniscient cheek.

Never before had he known, not knowing, the bewilderling plunge into chaos that dropped him now unswardingly into love. So thanks for listening to that. I love to write God as a character in my stories because God is personified in most religions, and often in the way we sort of think about him, even giving him the pronoun he and him as an active personification. And if you kind of go all in with a personification, it ends up creating a pretty quirky character because how can a consciousness that's all knowing also be personified?

How can it be a person? Because a person knows what it's like not to know. And as I've said, I think that that's the experience of language, is not knowing the world beyond language. And so that question of how can an all knowing being know what it's like not to know, the answer is us, human beings.

That's our experience. The rest of the consciousness, the rest of the conscious world, which is all of the world that are humans, is all knowing. At least we can play with the idea that they are. They have access to this consciousness beyond what humans can access.

And so what would be the experiment if all of consciousness suddenly was closed off from all of that consciousness? And what if the thing that closed it off was language? And so here's God under the railway bridge talking to a triumph, trying to dim his consciousness by drinking alcohol. He's initiating himself into language.

He never really bothered to learn language before the moment under the railway bridge. And he's starting to see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, subjects and objects. And this is us, right? This is human beings.

All of our consciousness is dimmed when we earn happening language and we start to see the world in terms of subject, verbs and objects. And love becomes this syntactical arrangement, which requires a subject that's separate from an object. And so who do you love? Jimmy loves Paige.

It creates and reifies that separation between Jimmy and Paige. And it keeps them separate as well from the verb. It keeps those two noun phrases separate from the verb phrases. It keeps them from being love instead.

Love is the thing that separates the two of them. And it goes from one direction to another, which is another thing language, which does. It goes in sort of a unidimensional way. So Jimmy loves Paige.

All of those three things are separate. And from a kind of God consciousness, which is where we would be if we didn't have language, then you wouldn't be able to separate those things out. So God consciousness is omniscient with the exception of it doesn't know what it's like not to know. So you are in a privileged position of not of knowing what it's like not to know because you didn't have a language.

So let's make this a little bit more grounded. Let's return to the question, who do you love or whom do you love if you're going with that. The answer to that is you might have had a whole list of people that you loved. But interestingly, your answer is likely going to be constrained not just by the fact that you've got to see yourself as separate from the other people that you love, but also that human societies which are based upon human language, which is based upon our experience of inhabiting language, and based upon our idea that things have to be restricted and things have to be separated and that there has to be a right and a wrong and there has to be duality.

And so our societies are kind of built out of that idea, which is originated in language. And so when you think about who you love, which should be the most spontaneous experience, not constrained by anything, instead it will be constrained by societal norms. And one of the questions I always used to ask, I still ask in my module on gender and language, when did you first know who you were supposed to be attracted to or what type of person you were supposed to be attracted to or what type of person you were supposed to romantically love? And everybody knows what I'm trying to get at.

They know that there's a point where they were aware that if they were born as a girl, they were supposed to love boys and if they were born as a boy or they were assigned their gender at birth as male, that they're supposed to love people who was gender when that was assigned at birth as female. So I have this story as well. It was even been very, very early for me growing up in the 70s and 80s. And I just remember in first grade, so that would be about when we were six years old, five or six years old, there was this kind of whole playground romance going on.

I think this is probably relatively common. It might not be as common now, but it certainly was common in the early 80s. And it was like, who loves who and who's going to get married to who. I think there might have been little marriages.

And then who's, who I can't remember whether it was going with or going out with, but people would kind of like be partners and be boyfriend girlfriend. But this is before anybody had any kind of sex drive. You know what I mean? So there wasn't any sort of sexual attraction happening.

It was just as kind of replicating the things we had seen with our families on television and films and that type of thing. And I found years back, I don't still have it, but I found a diary that I kept when I was about six. And I had written something like, I love Jeff, but I don't know if he loves me or something like that. And the thing, the reason I remember it is because later I must have crossed out the word love and replaced it with like, because it must have been clear that we weren't supposed to say love, as a friendship group, as a peer group.

It was cooler to say that you liked somebody, to say that you loved them. It was too intense. And so I went back and corrected it and changed it to like. But it meant the same thing, which was, you know, I'm going to sort of pretend that I'm in this sort of relationship, this romantic relationship, even though I don't necessarily know what that means yet.

And there's a story that my aunt used to tell about how the, I used to tell the story about this little boy, Jeff, and how he said he'd give me all the gumdrops in his pocket if I would kiss him. And this business of trying to get the girls to kiss the boys, et cetera. And I always said, all those gumdrops were stale. And so my aunt used to love to tell that story, because here I am outraged that, you know, he's asked me to do this thing.

But how did I know the gumdrops were stale? Well, the thing that I never told my aunt is that I didn't actually kiss him. I didn't get the gumdrops. I used my powers of deduction to know that the gumdrops would be stale because they'd been sitting in his pocket for a long time.

I used to get the gumdrops as prizes for being well behaved. And so I knew, and we only got like one a day. And I knew he had a stack of them sitting in his pocket. It was like five days worth of them.

I knew they would be stale. So it was, I didn't kiss him. I honestly just be aware that I didn't kiss him. I also knew that he didn't like gumdrops.

That was another thing. And I was like, well, I'm not taking something from somebody. It's not a big gift for him to give me these gumdrops. Also, you know, I didn't want to kiss him.

This is why conversations about consent are so important at a young age, but we'll leave that for another day. But in any case, all of these things, all of these practices are sort of built up in this world of language in which things are separate and there are norms and there are expectations. So in the same way that there's like the expectation that after a transitive verb you'll have an object, similarly there are expectations at the societal level that if you're assigned to him on earth, you'll be attracted, sexually attracted to somebody who's assigned male at birth. And so the study and the language that is important because it can show us where the constraints are.

It can show us where the kind of like bars around our consciousness are. I think it's impossible to get beyond them, but I think we can imagine what it would look like to be beyond them. We can sort of reach our minds out for it, but we can also look at what's here and think, ah, there could be something different. Let's see how the constraints are set up.

And I also think, or I love to play with this idea, that this constraining possibility of language, this constraining move of language is on purpose. I think this is part of the RC evolution. I think the earth created the human language that keeps us separate, perhaps as an experiment. But I also think that if you look carefully at the grammar of a language, you can see what I call in one of my books, a desire.

And I think this is the desire of the earth for new ways of thinking, new possibilities. So just to give you an example, I'm sure I've spoken about this before, but in the early 2000s I did research on a women's university hockey team, I did an ethnographic study, and I was curious to see how they created their particular norms, because any society has its norms, but then through sort of many societies or your small communities, what we can call communities of practice, they also have their norms. And they yet reproduced over and over again just in our kind of banal talkings to each other. And so what I focused on was them talking about sex, and they talked about sex a lot, but they didn't talk about it as if it was something pleasurable or enjoyable, or something that they wanted.

A few of them talked about it that way, but they were kind of quickly silenced. Most of the talk was like, puritanical, and it wasn't so much you shouldn't have sex. But instead, it was like they were carefully charting a specific thing about sex, which was what members of the team, or what women in their larger group, which might be like the groups of all of the people who were in sports teams in this university, how many of them were experimenting sexually with other women? So there was a massive, massive, homophobic strain in the discourse and the things they were talking about.

And there was this kind of, there was homophobic in the actual sense of fearing it, because there was this fear that the hockey team was going to be considered to be a gay team, that people were going to look at them and think they were gay, there's that fear that they would be considered to be gay. And they were distancing themselves from that identity, or at least a lot of the people that I spoke to were distancing themselves from that identity. And so what I did was I invited them to my flat-out head. I was a warden on a hall of residence.

I had a flat-out on campus, so I'd invite them over in friendship groups, so they'd have a really big elaborate meal. And I would put the tape recorder in the middle, and then they would just talk about whatever they want to talk about. They'd explain to me some aspects of their community or their team, and they would talk to each other. And the conversations that centered around the gayness in the team was around like, why?

Why? There was this particular set of friends, Emma and Sullivan, who talked about this a lot, like, why are they gay? Why are they doing this? Why are women kissing women on nights out?

Why is this happening? And so they were, so there was a pressure group, Emma, Sullivan, and Speedo, and they were all housemates. They were good friends, these are students, by the way. And they were supposed to come to my house twice to have dinner and to be recorded.

Well, the first time it was just Emma and Sullivan, and Speedo couldn't come to some kind of drama with their boyfriends, so it was just Emma and Sullivan. And again, they spent all their time talking about the hockey team's reputation for being gay and their negative feelings about that. And they came up with all these, like, they were kind of theorizing. What's going on?

We know they're not really gay. When you talk about children, they've got this glimmer in their eyes, so they're kind of assumptions which says if they're gay, that means they're not gay. They're just assumptions which says if they're gay, that means they can't have children, or they're gay people don't love children or something like that. And then they kind of came up with a couple of ideas like it's an environment.

It's a really weird environment that kind of makes people be gay, or it's peer pressure, they're pressured by their peer and to be in gay. So they kind of theorized why is this happening? And of course, the assumption is that it's not normal, that it's wrong. Now, the second time they came, their friend Anna came up, came with them.

And it was this time she that brought up the gay question, and she told a story. And the story is about how she was traveling home on the bus after a match, match and the women's and the men's football teams were in the best with them. And the football boys were trying to get the football girls to kiss them. Okay, so this is like, this reminds me of the story with Jeff in the gumdrops, you know me, it's just like these environments where we're playing this silly game in the article that I read about this, I called this an example of compulsory heterosexuality, like we're requiring people to kiss us to prove that they're straight.

And the football girls refused to kiss them and then decided that the reason they wouldn't kiss them is because they were gay. The idea that they might not be kissing them because they don't want to kiss them didn't pop into their head. And then the next thing they said is the football boys then decided that speedo was gay. And the way to speedo tells this and I'll include a link to the transcript in the show notes, but the way she describes it is she says, all the boys got going on, how many of the girls are lesbians in the bus?

And I was just like, oh, and they eventually came and they were like, you clearly are. She starts laughing. I was like, what? I've got a boyfriend.

You've done it. And I was like, yeah. And then there's a little bit more. Okay, so here's the interesting thing.

The I've got a boyfriend. That was not Speedo saying that. I was like, oh, I'm not going to say that. The I've got a boyfriend.

That was not Speedo saying that. That was Emma saying that. Emma came in right away to say, I've got a boyfriend. So Emma was voicing Speedo's response.

Like Emma felt the need to kind of come in and say, I've got a boyfriend. And of course the implication is that if somebody has a boyfriend that means they are straight, which of course doesn't mean that. But she could very leave you by your pain or any number of things. But for Emma, she needed to jump in to reaffirm Speedo's identity.

But Speedo in her retelling of it never does that. She never affirms her identity as a straight person. Instead, the answers she gives are, oh, what? And yeah.

Because those are her responses. And then yeah is interesting because it's like a combination of no. And yes, it's utterly ambiguous. And when we look into this a little bit more closely, we realize that Speedo has a good reason to resist being labeled in a particular way because she experimented sexually with women earlier in her career as a hockey player and at the university.

And so she's talking later about the time that she quote unquote tried it. And the implications that tried it means sexually experimented with women. I guess that's not them. That's not them.

I don't know. But what she says is, a lot of the time I tried it was because the other people were. And then Emma comes in with everybody did it. It's peer pressure.

I understand that. And Speedo resists that. She says it wasn't peer pressure. It was just what I was seeing.

Emma gets a bit lively here. They're kind of talking over each other. Emma says, it's not peer pressure. It's just you're in that environment, aren't you?

And so Emma's bringing up all of the things that they said before that she said before with Sullivan is peer pressure. It's an environment that's weird. This is the reason people are just, she's kind of trying it out with somebody who's actually had, you know, some gay experiences. And then Emma says, yeah, but it's not wrong if it's a, and then Speedo jumps and that's the thing.

If everyone else did it, it wasn't wrong. It didn't matter who cares. If somebody did it now in front of like half my friends, they'd be like, oh my God. So there's a really interesting, something happening, really interesting here, which is that Emma says, yeah, but it's not wrong.

Well, whoever thought that it was wrong. Emma thinks it's wrong. And she thinks that Speedo's coming through with this big confession. That Speedo's not confessing because Speedo doesn't think it's wrong.

And so Speedo is trying to sort of open up the possibility that what if it was okay to love who you love or experiment sexually with who you want to experience, experiment sexually? What if that was okay in this environment? And so if you remember back when we were saying that the linguistic structure of the question sets the parameters for specific type of answer, Speedo here has to find a way to break the parameters of the type of answer that Emma and Sullivan want. So if we were doing this from conversation else, this is called a dispreferred response.

She has to do it overtly. She has to raise her voice and interrupt a little bit. Emma and say it wasn't peer pressure. And then she has to say, Emma says it's not wrong where Emma's like, okay, well I want you to know you don't have to confess.

And Speedo's like, if everyone else did it, it wasn't wrong, it didn't matter who cares. And that is exactly the opposite position that Emma and Sullivan were having. They think it's wrong. They think it's weird.

They care a lot. It matters a lot to them. But Speedo is trying to create a world in which maybe it wouldn't matter. Maybe it would be okay to love who you love.

And then she does it. Then what she does now, if somebody did it now in front of our friends, they'd be like, oh my God, well, she's kind of blaming half of the friends who are being such a mentor. Well, she's actually blaming Emma and Sullivan because they are like, oh my God. So Speedo doesn't feel ashamed about what she did.

She's resisting the implication that she should. And she's also creating a window of what would it look like if we could just sort of experiment and enjoy and love each other and sometimes do that sexually and sometimes not. And it didn't matter what our assigned gender was. So what we have, what we can see in these conversations is not just this sort of abstract way in which language constrains.

We can also see the way societal norms through language constrain and these moments of possibility that come through. And here, the Speedo's possibility, which is what if we were to break through all of your assumptions. I don't think it worked. I don't think it worked that Emma and Sullivan were suddenly not transphobic anymore.

Sorry, homophobic anymore. But it does give us a little sense of how these little spaces of possibility of new types of social structure can come through through these little pockets of language. So language does constrain us, but it also creates new possibilities. And I think you can see this by looking closely at language.

So if you're interested in that chapter that I wrote, it's called, yay, aren't they an ethnographic approach to compulsory heterosexuality? It's in the relatively ten book of language gender and sexuality. And you can actually get a PDF of that from the Chef at Halberts-Trey. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

And I just want to now return to the question, one of the questions we asked at the beginning, what do you see? And let's think about the ways that you could create spaces for new possibilities and the answer to that question, what do you see? And you might have your own ideas as well. But you could try something like adding the noun phrase, a world without human language.

I see a world without human language. So when I look out around the world around me, and I see a coffee mug, I see the hazel trees, I see some of these conservatory, I see my balls of wool, all of those things, I feel pretty confident that they don't have human language. So the language separations that exist for me do not exist for them. So the material world that I see that I can label that I can put language to, the material world does not have those constraints because it doesn't live within human language.

And so what I can say is that I'm seeing the world through a lens. And I'm seeing the world through the lens of my human language, or a veil, I sometimes say it. So I'm seeing a shadow world. And that allows me to recognize that if I'm not seeing the whole thing, then what might the whole thing look like?

What might it look like to live beyond language? I can't answer it, but I can live in the question. And another thing that I could do once I've decided that the world beyond language has more consciousness than me, I could say, what if I decided to make a world without language? What if I decided to give it a verb?

What if I, and we're going to use the word love because we've talked about love so much already and we talked about the constraints of human love and human language love. But what if the world without language were capable of loving? And so what if it's like, well, what do you see? Well, I see the world loving.

And even if I decided to, because love is a trans-reverb, to put the object there, what if the world were loving me? What if I decided to use that personal pronoun as the object of what the world was loving? And here we get this feeling of this magnificent conscious, highly highly conscious world focusing its attention on this tiny, tiny language in wrapped language-bounded being and sort of making its way through, like seeing it as a vessel and almost like filling it up, making its way through those language bonds. And if you kind of have an experience of that, the world is loving me.

The world loves me. It loves me. Then what you get is potentially a pleasure of separation. Like you get to experience love in the way the rest of the world doesn't get to experience it because you get to experience it as new and new-maness and mystical and surprising.

So that moment at the end of the story that I read to you where God suddenly gets a glimpse of separateness, I write a tear slipped onto the omniscient cheek never before had he known not knowing the will-wielding plunge into chaos that dropped him now unswervingly into love. For me, that's the intimacy that's embedded in the structure of language is this sense of you are separate from the world when the world loves you, you have the experience of the intimacy of separateness and coming together and that back and forth and the dance. So thank you so much for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode.

So you can leave a comment or you can go over to JodieClark.com and hit the contact button in some email. Make sure you get the grammar for Dreamers course, JodieClark.com slash D&D course up in that link in the show notes. I'll also put the link to the lines of language course in the show notes if you want mega free courses from Jodie and I can't wait to speak to you again.