A Boston Marriage

The Backstory:

A few months ago, I found a copy of Cosmo lying open on my living room coffee table. In an article’s subtitle, emblazoned beside Megan Fox’s slinky form, was the word natch. Natch? I have a pretty crackerjack vocabulary, if I do say so myself, so when I saw this unrecognizable word, I wondered if natch was the latest euphemism for vagina. I figured that was likely—it was Cosmo after all, the magazine that manages to essentially reprint the same article on how-to best blow your man issue-by-issue, if not every fourth article. But then as I muttered the full headline out loud, “Now that [Megan’s] acting in her first true starring role—as a hellacious man-eater, natch—blah blah blah” I realized that natch is an abbreviation of naturally, spelled phonetically. (I also felt really slow on the uptake.)

Years ago, when I was in university, abbreviating certain common words in speech came into fashion: obviously became obvs, totally became tots, serious became sers, hilarious became hilare, etc.. I realize that abbreviations have always been a part of our vocabulary, but this was different—they were in every sentence, they sometimes made speech near incoherent, and seemed to be employed near-exclusively by young women and young queer men who express themselves through traditionally feminine speech and gestures (and, of course, by straight men disparaging women or gay men through imitation).

I thought that this trend had died away and been replaced with people (of all gender expressions) uttering msn-speak (lol!). Cosmo has proven me wrong—abbrevs are still going strong. I recognize that Cosmo is not exactly the final bastion of refined linguistic thought—but that’s why it’s alarming. If it’s in Cosmo, it’s part of the mainstream vernacular and has considerable cultural traction. I’ve also caught abbrevs being employed by my beloved lady-blogs Broadsheet and Jezebel (which, for me, is counter-intuitive given my feeling that this is a gendered language phenomenon).

Since abbreves are apparently still very much in use—and by some of my favorite  feminist and pseudo-feminist online watering holes, no less—I’m going to share my thoughts on them. I’m also going to focus on women’s use of abbrevs, not because I think that (somewhat gender non-conforming) gay men unimportant or interchangeable with women, but because I’m still working through my thoughts on this and it’s easiest for me to offer a coherent argument if I focus on the women-folk.

On Abbrevs:

Abbrevs are not problematic because they offend grammatical sensibilities. I’m not linguistically rigid—I’m all for frabjous word play—but this isn’t creative wordsmithing at work, it’s the pointless shortening of words by people whose speech the world is already cutting off.

When people speak in abbreviations, their speech literally takes up less space—they condense what they have to say into a smaller space—and women intentionally taking up less space is always a red flag. Here is why:

In the 1990’s, an understanding of the body as socially constructed and political broke into the mainstream consciousness. Feminist thinker Naomi Woolf attacked beauty standards in The Beauty Myth, in which she argued that beauty standards don’t actually demand looks, but docile behavior; behaviors that keep women oppressed. She argued that the more power women gain in society, the more heavily images of beauty weigh on us.  Basically, it’s argued that the more figurative space that women as a whole claim in the world, the smaller the world demands our individual bodies be. Think of the stereotype of the restrictive-eating, obsessive exercising, stiletto clad female CEO—to balance the space she’s taking up in the world, she’s keeping herself physically small and teetering. Think that’s horseshit? Here’s one fact that Woolf shares in her book: “Reproductive rights gave Western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23 percent below that of ordinary women, eating disorders rose exponentially, and a mass neurosis was promoted that used food and weight to strip women of that sense of control.”

And we all know that being thin isn’t a matter of, well, simply being—for a lot of women, it involves a lot of work. Susan Bordo, a feminist philosopher who helped pioneer “body studies,” argues that all bodily practices women engage in—dieting and waxing and dying—aren’t innocuous, they’re teaching us to focus inward, on self-modification of our oh-so-insufficient selves, instead of asserting our existence in the social world through, say political involvement (Woolf flat-out refers to dieting as a sedative). From my own experience, I’ve worked residentially with at-risk youth who refuse to eat not only as a way of exerting control, but because they view being painfully thin and “almost able to disappear” as a real accomplishment—a bizarre point of pride that ties in with their very low sense of self-worth.

So, women making themselves physically small is a problem. But small speech doesn’t involve cutting calories and feeling the burn, does it? No—but I think that the point that Bordo and Woolf‘s make, that fads that affect the way women occupy space aren’t innocuous, is applicable here.

Abbrevs do make women’s speech literally take up less space. Now that we’re in the Twitter age of 140-characters or less, abbreviating might seem to be simply practical. But keep in mind, it’s a word trend that I’ve only noted young women partaking in. Is it so far fetched to allege that as women are allowed to talk about more, we’re shortening our words to atone for the space we’re expanding into? I don’t think so.

Now, on a less theoretical note, I’m also concerned that when a woman speaks with abbrevs, it’s damn near impossible to take her seriously because she sounds like she’s 12. Adolescents using abbrevs is irritating but reasonable, since they’re going through a phase in which they experiment with mind-blowingly juvenile expessions in order to, ideally, ultimately gain a greater command of language. Grown women who intentionally sound like pre-teens whose control of language still has to undergo a lot of maturation are infantilizing themselves.

Now, of course, you might point out that Hillary Clinton isn’t delivering abbrev-laden speeches as Secretary of State—if it’s just in casual conversation, what’s the damage? But explicitly political public utterances aren’t the only speech acts that have power. The way everyday women speak in the everyday world is powerful—not only does it tell the world what to think of us, but what we think of ourselves. And if the younger generation of girls  overhears us speaking in half-words, how are they going to learn they need to speak up, in full sentences, if they want to be taken seriously?