From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I just posted this on a Burning Man mailing list in response to a document encouraging use of "person-first language" in the context of mental health. It collects some thoughts I've had for awhile, and I think are worth sharing more broadly.


I feel that using a term like "my neighbor who has autism" rather than "my autistic neighbor" creates a sense that autism is a temporary condition—similar to "my neighbor who has a sports car"—or is somehow separate from their identity as a person, similar to "my neighbor who walks with a limp." As someone who may be on the autism spectrum[1], being an aspie is a pretty core piece of my identity. No matter what I do in my life, I'm never not going to be on the autism spectrum[2]; there's no drug or therapy that will cure me of Asperger's syndrome. And for me it's not even a "side trait" like the fact that I have brown hair or am "kinda tall". Autistic traits like spatial-symbolic thought, deep interest in narrow topics, complex language use, and detailed rule systems are some of the things about *me* that I'm likely to emphasize if I'm writing my own biographic blurb.

(Also, autism isn't a mental illness, any more than being left-handed is a physical illness. It's a different way of processing stimuli and thinking about the world. Autistic people's brains work differently, but they're not sick.)

As someone who loves the nuances of language, I share the interest in adopting terminology which uplifts people facing challenges and moving away from insulting language. Unfortunately, I find the position of person-first language to be frequently underwhelming and counterproductive. A couple examples:

The document that D shared encouraged the use of "person who experiences substance abuse challenges" instead of the term "alcoholic." The former is fifteen syllables long and sounds very clinical, even sterile. "Alcoholic" is four syllables long and has a rhythm to it: two syllables end in "L" and the other two have a hard "C". The double hard "C" gives the word punch: hearing someone say "My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic" has an impact in our auditory pathways in a way that "My name is Chris and I experience substance abuse challenges" does not. And a statement like, "My name is Chris and I have a problem with alcohol" sounds to me like a weasel word that avoids the full impact of what's going on; it suggests that "If I could just solve this one problem, I could drink like a normal person."

At a different event, some friends of mine run a Phoenix Circle for people in recovery. They identify as alcoholics and use that term, because they see it as a key piece of who they are: their brain responds differently to alcohol than typical people do, and they need to keep that awareness in place in order to avoid doing themselves harm by relapsing. And they were able to make significant progress in overcoming this challenge by recognizing their alcoholism and how it's something that's always going to be part of them. They're not going to stop being an alcoholic, but they CAN (and did) stop drinking alcohol. This way of framing things might not be the solution for everybody, but there are a lot of folks that it has worked for.

Perhaps the first time I heard about people-first language was a campaign to use the term "people experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless people." The former is a mouthful to say (ten syllables versus four), and yet it still "others" the people in question. We don't use the phrase "people experiencing homeownership," we say "homeowners." We don't say "people experiencing wealth", we say "rich people." We don't say "people with high physical strength", we say "strong people." Despite a goal of changing language to remove stigma, this creates a lexicon of phrases which are said out loud only used when referring to marginalized people.

The document starts by saying "We have all heard derogatory terms used to describe
someone who has a mental illness. Here are a few to jog your memory: Cuckoo; Mad as a hatter; Screwy–having a screw loose; Bananas; Loopy; Crackers; Wacko (whacko); Loony; Nuts; Freak; Crazy; Weirdo." In my lexicon, several of those words are descriptive, not derogatory, and they have nuanced meanings. I will often self-identify as a weirdo; I've never thought of the word as being about mental illness and more about having interests and behaviors that are outside the mainstream. (Black Rock City is a place full of weirdos, and that's what makes it so fun.) Likewise, "freak" is often used as a term of self-identity, particularly when prefixed with a classifier like "music freak" or "climbing freak." To my ear, it's only derogatory if the speaker has a negative opinion of the thing the freak is into. I use "loopy" to describe a specific set of cognitive behaviors, which can be brought on by lack of sleep, independent of cognitive ailments. In my family, "crazy" is used as a judgement-free descriptive term for many of our good friends. In our house, "Bob is crazy" isn't a positive or negative sentiment; it's just a non-awkward way of saying "Bob has some significant mental health illnesses." And an interesting note on "Mad as a hatter:" the association between hatters and mental illness stems from the 19th Century use of mercury in hat making; it's a physical neurologic illness that manifests like a mental illness.

The way I think about social language, the goal should be to *change the negative perceptions of mental illness and substance use,* not to change the words we use to describe them. We can keep the psychoacoustic power of a word like "alcoholic" or "crazy" while speaking positively about the person. (My family thinks highly of many of our crazy friends.) The document says "Person-first language separates the individual from the symptoms they experience." This strikes me as striving for a sort of Cartesian dualism, that there's a self which is somehow independent of mental and physical sensations[3]. When I've had physical illnesses, I don't want to separate and compartmentalize those experiences: my body hurts, my body's not working the way I want it to, but by gosh it's happening to *my* body, not some avatar in the metaverse. Some of those physical ailments are temporary, and can be overcome through action, medical intervention, or the passage of time. Others will be with me the rest of my life: I have achalasia (a physical illness) and it's important that I remain in touch with my body when I experience trouble swallowing: the symptom isn't separate from me, it's part of me[4].

It strikes me that mental illness is even more personal in this regard: many physical illnesses are available to our normal senses: we can look at a broken arm or an arthritic joint and understand the physics of how it works, or compare it to other arms and joints to see how it's different. But our mental experiences are in a rich inner world that's not easily accessible to other people, and difficult to measure with our usual sensory apparatuses. A person may be able to overcome a mental illness, but that illness isn't something that's happening separate from the person: it's going on in their mind, in their brain, in their body, and in their daily life. And I want to honor that experience with a word that carries the power of the challenge that they're facing, not a long phrase that sounds like it's from a clinical research paper. The more short syllables with hard consonants the better. If there are words with negative connotations that we want to move away from, let's make sure to pick words that have a similar strength when we hear them out loud. I tend to find words with a germanic root carry more power than polysyllabic words that came from Latin during the Renaissance. And if a word is easy to say and has a good ring to it, people are likely to actually use it in the course of normal conversation.

Acknowledgement: my focus on syllables and phonemes here was inspired in large part by George Carlin's excellent piece on soft language.

[1] By the time I learned what the autism spectrum was I'd learned enough about my own peculiarities and how to interface with the world that I've never pursued a clinical diagnosis. I hear people talk about their experiences with autism and read descriptions of Asperger's syndrome and think "That sounds a lot like the way I think and behave."
[2] Depending on where one draws the edge of the spectrum, I suppose.
[3] The phrase "mental and physical" is also a sort of dualism, and I think we often forget that mental sensations are often closely linked with our physical bodies. One thing we learn as Green Dots is that giving someone water and a snack may help tremendously with what presents as a major mental challenge.
[4] If I disassociate from the sensation in my esophagus, I'm just going to have a worse physical experience in a few minutes.

Any progressive activist and anyone involved in the Democratic Party who has not read Don't Think of an Elephant! should put it very near the top of their to-do list, above any political action that's longer-term than "this week." It's short and practical, so it can be read in a day or you can read an essay-chapter each day and be done in two weeks. Many of the key insights also appear in articles on the author's blog, so you can start there.

George Lakoff is a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley. I first encountered his work in Metaphors We Live By, a fairly academic book which argued that metaphors aren't just manners of speech, they actually provide structure to how we think and form a framework through which we perceive the world. This led him to research on frames, "mental structures that shape the way we see the world" and investigations on how liberals and conservatives think and the frames they use. He published Don't Think of an Elephant in 2004 as an accessible and practical guide for progressives to understand how people make political choices, why conservatives are much better at framing than progressives are, and what the left needs to do in order to activate progressive frames in the minds of voters. The All New Don't Think of an Elephant! is a 2014 edition which adds chapters and updates many of the essays to cover political developments during the second Bush term and the Obama presidency.

Frames help us make sense of the information we receive. For instance, the frame "Countries are rational actors" provides us tools for interpreting international relations and actions of governments. Given that frame, a speech by a particular politician or an attack by an army is evaluated as though it's a single person (the country) following a considered strategy. An alternate frame, say "Countries are herds of animals," would lead to a different conceptualization of the same presented facts, like an assumption of acting on instinct and a focus on the power dynamics within a government.

Frames are wired into our brains: the more often the language associated with a frame gets activated, the stronger the neural linkages become. When information is presented which doesn't jive with the frames in our brain, cognitive dissonance results. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, so we tend to resolve the situation by rejecting the information or selectively reinterpreting it so that it can form a narrative supported by the frame.

The most important insight in the book is that people don't vote based on a list of policies and they don't necessarily even vote for their rational self-interest. They vote for candidates whose message activates the frames that drive their values. People aren't swayed by facts, they're swayed by narratives that resonate.

Lakoff identifies the major frames for political values as the "strict father model" and the "nurturant parent model." The former leads to values like law-and-order policing, military power, and "tough love" economic policies. The latter leads to values like restorative justice, soft power diplomacy, and opportunity-focused economics. Everyone has both frames in their brain to some degree, and political ideology reflects the frame which is stronger, or is present in more aspects of their life. He also talks about "biconceptuals," folks that have a balance of both models, the cognitive version of "swing voters."

The family models do a great deal to explain why positions which seem to be logically unrelated are so correlated in the political sphere. Why do so many folks both oppose gay marriage and support use of military force to achieve foreign policy objectives? Corporal punishment (or the threat thereof) is how order is established in a strict-father family, and gay marriage violates the whole premise of a strict-father family, because there's either no father (two women) or no single father figure (two men). Why do so many folks oppose firearm ownership and support public education? In a nurturative-parent family, providing opportunity to kids has a very high value (free public school provides opportunity even to kids whose parents don't have any resources) and guns represent violence, which is anathema to the protection and nurture values.

Conservative elites, starting with Barry Goldwater and the Powell Memo, have spent several decades carefully experimenting with ways to frame their policy goals so that they will resonate with the values frames of American voters. Progressives and liberals, on the other hand, have not had an organized approach to framing and tend to run on a set of specific policies, not on a set of values. Since the left haven't developed language to activate frames, they tend to use the frames provided by conservatives. This is self-defeating, because repeating the conservative framing of an issue activates the same neural pathways, even if the idea is negated (hence the title of the book). For instance, conservatives developed the phrase "tax relief," which activates a metaphor of taxes as a burden. If a liberal says "I'm against tax relief," it reinforces the idea that taxes are burdensome and the voter is left wondering why the politician is in favor of burdens. If the liberal instead recast the issue in their own frame–"I think the wealthy should contribute their fair share"–it would activate the frame that tax is a shared investment in society.

Lakoff advocates for progressives to rethink how they present their ideas. He urges the left to shift from talking about facts and policies to talking about values, principles, and policy directions. He instructs people to affirm the progressive world view rather than use the negated language of the conservative world view. He tells politicians to stop focusing on policy polls and start presenting a coherent narrative. And he recommends the left invest–intellectually and financially–in creating organizations (think tanks and so on) devoted to finding ways to frame progressive values in ways that resonate with American voters. This is a long-term investment: the right has spent over four decades building their current ideological power position and the left can't suddenly adjust the neural circuitry of the public next month or even this year. But the longer progressives wait, the more they'll lose ground and the harder it will be to make progress.

The book's final chapter, "How to Respond to Conservatives," has some solid tactical advice, including showing respect, remaining calm, and positively reframing the issue. It ends with the crystalized guidelines: "Show respect; Respond by reframing; Think and talk at the level of values; Say what you believe." His approach is good for spreading the progressive world view, but I think there is occasion to use the frames of the "other side." When you're working on a specific policy measure like climate change or health care, it's important to have allies on both sides of the spectrum–this eases passage of an initiative and makes it less likely it will be repealed when the legislative balance of power shifts. Shifting a Republican member of congress from a strict-father model to a nurturative-parent model is a long game indeed, but convincing the same representative that climate change is a threat to national security or that it will create an undue burden on business might get an important piece of legislation passed. This is also communication that can be more focused: a letter to a legislator can be tailored to resonate with the specific framing a person has demonstrated whereas a letter to the editor tries to activate the framing of thousands of different people.

My goal in reading this book was to improve my ability to communicate with people who don't share my worldview, and it definitely helped. I'm someone who's immersed in facts and tend to overcommunicate details. This is important when figuring out how to create software or working with scientists to learn how the world works. But it's a hopeless technique for reaching non-experts, and by necessity most politicians, and certainly most voters, are not experts on a vast majority of subjects. I intend to do work to verbalize my own values and organize them into a coherent story, one which I hope can inspire folks who are already on my side, resonate with folks who aren't there yet, and help folks with a strict-father model empathize with the nurturative values.

Comment on this post and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

A month and a half ago, vvvexation participated in this meme and I said "I'd love some prime subjects." I just recently noticed that I have this draft sitting around that I should post.

prime rib

I'm not particularly picky about which part of the animal my meat comes from. I usually cook sausage and stir fry when I make dinner for myself. Lengua plus onions and cilantro is my favorite taco filling. I enjoy ordering pho with bible tripe, partly because the name sounds funny.

prime numbers

I remember reading that 37 was the "most random" number. It's prime, it's not a number that turns up naturally very often, it's bigger than ten but less than a hundred, and it kind of rolls off the tongue. In other words, it seems like a great choice when people are asked to "pick a random number."
Really big prime numbers are cool too. They're a crucial part of digital encryption. They can also have questionable legal status.

primary colors

At lunch one day, some of us observed that Google is kind of like preschool: there are lots of toys around, you can have a snack in the middle of the afternoon if your blood sugar is low, you're free to take a nap, and everyone eats lunch together in a cafeteria in primary-colored chairs.
I like primary colors and other colors that are easy to express in the RGB color space. Partly this is because I'm much more of a symbol-processing geek than an artist. I'm aware that using more subtle colors provides a more appealing visual experience, which is why I let other people be in charge of how things look.

primal scream therapy

It can be very cathartic to yell when you're as mad as hell. I'm not sure it would be a good practice for a 50-minute therapy session, since after the first two minutes or so you typically run out of things to be mad about or you've gone horse. 50 minutes staring at a Munch painting might be pretty therapeutic, though.

lexical priming

Lexical priming is the effect of word and grammar associations such that when we hear or read a particular word, we expect another word or grammatical construct. Conversely, if one is present but the other is missing, the phrase may sound weird. For instance, if a maw were described as anything but gaping would seem off.
I suppose lexical priming might help explain why most people have trouble understanding legalese. They don't have much priming for the words and structures used, so understanding the text is a bit like reading in a foreign language, even though you know the meaning of most of the words.

the genus Primula

I'm not a big fan of flowers (he said, sitting naked in the back yard enjoying the smell of dandelions, bluebells, and columbines). As noted on my LJ profile, I'm the only user interested in genus allium. Perhaps the layers of onion, garlic, leek, shallot, chive, and scallion appeal to my software engineering side. Among eudicots, I'm a big fan of family Cactaceae and other succulents. (He says, sitting naked in the sun.)

Optimus Prime

I haven't watched more than a couple minutes of Transformers since I was four or five, but I remember enjoying the show, particularly the noise they made when they switched form. The action figures (of which I owned none) were pretty cool too. Four years ago, I mused that a Transformers RPG could be pretty fun. And now that self driving cars are a real thing, it wouldn't have to seem too futuristic.

In most of Latin America, "chevere" is a word that means "great" or "awesome," e.g., "¿Como estas?" "Chevere!" ("How are you?" "Awesome!")

In Guatemalan lingo, "chevere" also means "hot dog," and is written on all the hot dog stands. While this means you can ask for a "Chevere chevere" ("great hot dog"), you can also have this conversation:

"¿Como es?" ("How is it?")
"Chevere." ("Awesome.")
"¿Chevere como un chevere?" ("Awesome like a hot dog?")
"Chevere como millon cheveres." ("Awesome like a million hot dogs.")

(See: Eddie Izzard, "Circle")

Is there a sensible syntax tree for A rose is a rose is a rose? The parse that makes most sense to me is
{a rose is [a rose} is (a rose])
which is not a tree. But the parse
((a rose) is ((a rose) is (a rose)))
is NP is VP at the top level, and that's not generally grammatical (e.g., "Obama is the president lives in the White House").

If I ever wonder why I don't get around to reading my books, it's because my nights go something like this:

"I should finish my tea and then read a book in my hammock."
"Huh, iTunes has the wrong art for Depeche Mode - 101."
"Wikipedia's article 101 is about the year, not a disambiguation."
"Wow, that's a lot of random facts about the number 101."
"What the hell is a strobogrammatic prime? Wow, who creates a word for a property of a number which depends on both base and script?"
"Ooh, what do Devanagari digits look like?"
"Huh. I guess I can't infer that the line at the top implies the language is Hindi. Distinguishing it from Nepali is like distinguishing English from Spanish."
"But I might be able to infer Gujarati by the lack of a line."
"There's a special writing system for indigenous Canadian languages? That's cool, the rotation of the consonant indicates the vowel."
"I didn't realize these weren't technically alphabets. All those crazy curly-cue languages are abugidas."
"... and Arabic, Hebrew, and other vowel-free writing systems are abjads (or perhaps "bjds" if you're using an abjad)."
"OMG. The list of writing systems has a map of scripts. Typogeography! Goetypography! I might cream my pants if I was wearing any."
"In the obscurity department, a script used only by women. With graphemes chosen so they'd work well in embroidery."
"Tengwar characters have phonetic features embedded, unlike most alphabets where there's no indication that 'f' and 'v' are pronounced similarly. It can therefore be used to write more than just imaginary languages. If you want a badge of obscurity and utter linguistic geekery, you can write Esperanto in Tengwar."
"kakos should make a shirt of Jabberwocky in Lojban."
"Let's not get into MovementWriting, but somehow I doubt DanceWriting can adequately transcribe the way I dance."
"Well, at least I have an adequate LJ icon to indicate how I spent my evening."

I received in the mail today a blurry photo of some flowers or weeds. On the back was an Irish stamp, my address, and nine lines of Japanese. I quickly deduced the sender to be my brother, even though he didn't know any Japanese last I checked. The following is my attempted transcription of the message using Apple's Japanese Kana Palette. I'm sure some letters are wrong, but they're the closest I could glean.

よ はようごぢいまよ, トレ-バ-さん!
うま は, ろなしは フ-イ-ランドに
いまよ。 てんきは よごい きしい
でよ。 火旧目 でよ。 ねご の こぇ
は よ'もしロい でよ ね？ ちょぅと
さ?しい でよ カ？ だいじよづでよ。
フ-イ-ランドに ホて 下さい！ ねーコ
ケー?は よごい よいしい でよ ね？
づよーね、 きすつけて ね トレーバーさん！
ハーパー

Between Harper writing in Japanese, Trevor reading in Japanese, and Google translating from Japanese to English, the following tangle arises. Anyone have a better guess? If something would make more sense by changing a few lines in a character above, that's probably the right thing to do.

Now it's DZI HAYOU how the trailer - Va -!
Skill, without the filter off - Lee - Land
Now. If it is TENKI Disc KISHI
OK? Old fire in the eyes. NEGO saw sir
It is' If I DEYO LOT? UTO CHO
That? Wristed it to me one? DAIJI DZUDEYO it.
Hu - Lee - Land Ho please! KO.
Kay? It will be nice and good, right?
DZU, boy, I know it KISU tray bar!
Harper

( Scan )

Monotheism is the belief that "God" is a proper noun.

Polytheism is the belief that "God" is a count noun.

Pantheism is the belief that "God" is a mass noun.

Polyatheism is the belief that "God" can be any part of speech as long as it helps communicate.

At yesterday's party, Joe said "I often wonder why languages have some words but not others. For instance, 'orgasm' is when one of the people having sex has an intensely pleasurable sensation. But why don't we have the word 'andgasm' for when both people have that feeling?"

I immediately picked up: "Or 'xorgasm:' when one but not both people experience it. A 'nandgasm' is when neither or one (but not both) get it. A 'norgasm' (related to 'snoregasm') is when nobody gets off." Some of the logical operators don't have a word that flows as well: "Ifgasm" (or "conditionalgasm") can be applied in all situations except when person A hits the peak and person B does not. "Iffgasm" (or "biconditionalgasm" or "xnorgasm") is when both come or both don't come (leave?). "Notgasm" is a unary (not binary) operator: it means someone got tired of masturbating.

I leave n-adic versions of the gasmic operators as an exercise to the reader.

George Carlin's compiled list of dirty words and euphemisms.

Edit - IM discussion of the foregoing:
Me: Haha. I've never heard breasts referred to as "umlauts"
Them: me neither.
Me: we can extrapolate that and use "cedilla" for penis
Them: lol. punctuation and genitals. have fun with that
Me: "Accents turn me on..."
Them: acute, grave or circumflex?
Me: Circumflex can stand for vagina...
Them: or a bendy penis
Me: the dot (like Sanskrit... is there a more proper name?) can be the rectum...
Them: o.O
Me: or maybe that's Ø

At the recommendation of Savage Love, I filled out sex survey from the University of British Columbia. Questions are standardized from the '70s and '80s, so some of the are a little odd for liberal-minded folks today. But what really bothers me is the BIDR section asking general questions about my personality. The answers are fuzzy with 1 as "Not True," 4 as "Somewhat True," and 7 as "Very True." Normally, I like fuzziness in surveys because I often have fuzzy answers. But whose idea was it to seek fuzzy results to absolute questions?

9. I am fully in control of my own fate.
11. I never regret my decisions.
15. I am a completely rational person.
21. I sometimes tell lies if I have to.
22. I never cover up my mistakes.
24. I never swear.
29. I have received too much change from a salesperson without telling him or her.
30. I always declare everything at customs.

Words like "fully," "never," "completely," and "always" turn fuzzy questions into bivalent ones. Maybe they assume you're lying in the fuzzy section if you answer 7 to question 15.

( My Results )

Homophobia makes adult Jesus cry.

"I think it's so sexy when a word circumflexes its vowels."

ô.ô


I think I need a sexy letter icon. Like that Thai end-of-section character. Or a snake on roller skates.

Ahoy mateys! I be here to whip you land lubbin' code monkeys into shape. As soon as we find a worthy vesel from Sea Vee Ess, we'll set out upon the C. Our goal be to plunder booty from the island of Java which is far superior to the sharp C. We'll store our booty in the Sea Quell Server in our home base. If we be getin' lost, we'll ask directions on Aye Arrr Sea. We'll cast an Object as a Net and catch some Illegal Arrrrrgument Exceptions. All production booty must be bug-free. We gotta keep down the scurvy from our customer base. If any oppose us, we'll execute ot terminate! Yar.

It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day and I expect all ye scallywags to comply or ye'll be keelhauled and sent to Davey Jones's Source Repository. Arrrrrrr!


[Aye. I be talkin' like a pirate and wearin' an aye patch, shark hat, poets' shirt, and plastic cutlas at work. I love this place.]

[In a meeting this morning, the project manager (who lives in rural Kansas) asked why I was talking like a pirate. I mentioned the holiday and she said "Oh yeah... I heard about that... in church." I guess it's mainstream now!]

[Apparently LiveJournalers are talkin' like pirates too. I'm about to click on "Update Captain's Log." Look closely at the icon for flwyd. And Frank's getting in the spirit.]

[This entry shall be updated throughout the day as I think of clever pie rat phrases.]