20131104.0604

Somehow, I have made it to see my thirty-first birthday.  Somehow, today is the first time I have blogged on my birthday (at least in this space; I have had other things that have counted as blogs, although they are gone, and I might have made a note in one of them on an earlier birthday).  I can report that my beard is growing back, if a bit more slowly than I had expected; my cheeks and chin no longer feel like sandpaper, but more like the hook-side of hook-and-eye closure materials (e.g., Velcro).  And that provokes a thought in me, something to follow for another few hundred words in today's note: the making-generic of what are brand-name words.

The phenomenon is far from new to me.  I grew up (if I can be said to have done so even now) in the Texas Hill Country, where all sodas are Coke (except for Dr Pepper, which, being Texan, is in a different category), even if they are for some strange and foolish reason Pepsi.  Similarly, corn chips are Fritos (again, a Texan product in Texas can be expected to get special treatment).  But all copy machines are Xerox (except for the few holdouts for mimeography), even if they are not.  Facial tissues are Kleenex.  And, yes, hook-and-eye fabric is Velcro.

In such formations, we betray the extent to which we have been infiltrated by advertising over generations, as I am sure has been argued by people more aware of it than I am.  The case could be made that something of the emphatic force of the terms has been stripped away by their having been made the generic terms; as the go-to words, they would seem at some level to be less specific, less important, than their more distinct synonyms.  Yet this is not actually the case, because by becoming the unmarked term, the default standard by which others are judged, the terms (and, perhaps, the things with which the terms are linked) become privileged as the "normal," making all else abnormal--and what is abnormal is too often regarded as wrong.*

This is true even for things which are nominally considered beneficial.  Returning to myself for a moment (and, since it is my birthday, I think I may safely do so), the issue of being "too smart for [my] own good" comes to mind.  Many times, I have been told that to be smart is a blessing, a gift, one that should be cultivated and which ought to be celebrated as a means for doing good in the world.  Yet far more frequently and systematically have I been derided for having and exercising intellect, physically in my earlier life, verbally and in too many cases culturally in my more recent (as I have noted, I think--here, here, and here, among others).  The derision has, at times, prompted me to state the fervent wish (one I no longer have, mind) that I were not so smart as I happen to be.  (One or two other things have done so, as well, but they are less pertinent.)  My own exclusion for being outside the "norm" has been minor; I fall into the unmarked in a number of ways, so that the effects of my lone "abnormality" are mitigated by all of the ways I am "normal."  I can only dimly imagine what others--perhaps many of my former fellow congregants at the United Methodist Church of the Village--have had to endure for being outside the "norm" as they are, and many of them are damned fine people.

Normally (heh), some call to action would need to go here, some cry into the ether for a change to come.  I would be far from the first to make it, and the call has yet to be heeded in earnest; I will add my voice to those that prompt for careful reconsideration of such normalization, as I have already done, but I am not sure how many are willing to hear.  The message is a bit...unusual, after all.

*A similar chain of reasoning underlies part of the ongoing objection to the use of the masculine pronoun as a catch-all, something I have had to discuss with my students.  By accepting "mankind" as the default for "humanity," or by saying "men" for a mixed-gender group, we tacitly position the male as the norm and what is not male as somehow deficient or wrong--and that is not right.  Anyway, biologically, female is the default setting, so if language is going to take a gender as a default, it ought to be that one.