Horror #1: Public Speaking

Early this week in class we gave presentations on our analysis of certain consumer advertisements. During this presentation we were to give a speech that lasted longer than four minutes.  I chose the Old Spice ad: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. Now I did the research and I connected what happened in the ad to what we learned in class, and I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what the ad was trying to say, and how they were getting their information across. However as soon as I stood in front of the class it was like all my knowledge fled out the window. I became an instant epileptic with how much I was shaking. My whole body was vibrating and because I was standing in front of the podium, everyone saw it. When all their eyes focused on me it was like I froze and all my smoothness went out the window. Now normally I am, while not very calm, a smooth talker, with fast ideas and even faster words. I like to get my ideas out there and have people tell me I am right. But as soon as I am put in front of a class all of my smoothness goes out of the window. It only happens when I stand up in front of the class, if I could do the presentation sitting down I would be fine.

When we are publicly speaking we are putting ourselves on display, leaving ourselves open to the criticism of others. When we are just talking to others in our peer group on less serious occasions we do not think on the judgment they are paying to us only what we are saying. But when we are told we are being graded on what we say and how we say it, it adds a level of stress that is not there normally. This is because we put so much weight on how people speak. When learning other languages we first learn that there is a formal and informal version. When we are talking to friends we unknowingly use the informal version of English, but when we publicly speak we are forced to use the formal version.  We get so stressed out because this is not a version that we use often and so it does not come as naturally.

Bottom line, I think either we should began learning about publicly speaking in second grade so that by the time it matters we are desensitized to it; or we should just get rid of it all together.

Stick to papers people!

Gone but Never Forgotten

The past five years have been ones of loss. It seems as if all the greats are dropping one by one, but this post is not to comment on their loss, but more the public’s reaction to their loss. This past week we have lost Whitney Houston, a devastating blow to the R&B genre. With 475 awards she has won more accolades for her voice than any other artist. She has gone on free tours for the troops so that for just an hour they could forget about the fighting and death. She has sold over 175 million albums, and overcame many hardships in her life, including drugs and domestic abuse. She was on her way back to the limelight when she passed away.

Despite the accomplishments that she has made in her life people still only focus on the negative. They only see that she used to be a crack addict, they don’t see that she overcame her addiction, or raised a beautiful daughter. They only see the bad and none of the good. Why is it that in times when we are supposed to come together, do we stand apart the most? When her death was announced many people put up facebook statuses saying RIP or “gone but not forgotten”. These are the people who want their grief acknowledge, or want to show that they have respect for the lost person. Then you have the facebook statuses saying about how they don’t care, or how they are sick of people posting about the subject. Just tonight I read a status about how someone thinks it’s disgusting that Jersey is putting their flags at half mast for her, how they don’t think she deserves it because she was just a “crack head” and how the troops die all the time and nobody cares. I thought this statement was very uninformed. Whitney Houston did plenty for America; even if it was just helping people get through their day with her music. Everyone that dies for their country be it a police officer or a soldier is given their due and are honored accordingly. We even have whole national holidays for them! It is the people who help their countries in less obvious ways that get ignored, and I believe that they should be remembered as well; like Whitney Houston.

So for all those unsung heroes out there, even if the only thing they ever did was put a smile on someone else’s face, remember: You May Be Gone, But You Will Never Be Forgotten. 

No Offence But....

“No offence but", “I don't mean to be rude" etc.... These are just some of the sayings that we attach to the heads of our sentences before we say something that is in fact very rude or offensive. We say them to somehow head off the retribution that whatever we are saying incurs. We refuse to own up the hurt and offense that what we say incurs. This line of thought goes against rhetoric’s logos and ethos, and is almost purely pathological. We have something rude to say, we don’t want to be perceived as rude, so we then we make a statement that is a contradiction to what we are going to say; as if saying I don’t mean to be rude stops you from being rude.

“Anything said via vocal communication, is public information”. This means that anytime we speak to be heard, whatever we say is no longer just between you and whoever you are talking to. It becomes public property, so that anyone who can hear it is now privy to that knowledge. To countermand that we have created a host of social niceties and norm so that we can use our voices in privacy: “Its rude to eavesdrop”, “whisper it to me”, or the famous “no offense but”, or we add “lol” to make a serious comment not so serious. All of these things that we have created for one reason only, to save our reputations. No one wants to be known as the “bitch” or the person who is always talking about others. So we enact punishments on those who are listening, we call them “nosy”, or “eavesdroppers”. Anything that we can do to save the way people look upon us and still be popular.

The moral of this story is, if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say it out loud.

This I Believe....

Oh The Places We Go

Language is Arbitrary

Today in my Anthropology class, it was my turn to present a chapter of the Origin of Communication by Tomasello. My part of the chapter had to do with the development of language in infants. Basically infants can communicate but until they develop the mental facilities to understand that other people have goals and intentions different from themselves that they can share, they can’t put their thoughts and actions into a legible language. They can only point, gesture, and pantomime. Tomasello also said that “If association or “mapping” were all that is involved in acquiring a linguistic convention, the language would be everywhere in the animal kingdom, and it would start at three months of age in humans instead of nine. The reason is that arbitrary linguistic conventions can be acquired only in the context of some kind of conceptual common ground with mature speakers.”

 This stood out to me because it made me realize that we only have spoken word because as individual persons we all agree that words mean what they do. Words themselves have no meaning, they are only empty puffs of air, but because we associate them with a material object and agree that the word means the object, we have language. That’s why there are so many different languages because different “cultures” of people agreed on a different set of sounds. It just amazed me because the thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, our ability to work together as a group to make the best of situations, depends completely upon the majority ruling of meanings. If I decided that I wanted to call cats dogs, and created a following and we petitioned and got the words switched, I could. It doesn’t stop the cats from being cats or turn them into dogs; I just changed what the animal is called. It just drove home the fact that words themselves are empty. It shocked me.

“Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on Intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when.” (Quine)