The Great Australian Adjective

I love that the word ‘bloody’ has been deemed ‘the great Australian adjective’ (Wiezerbicka 2002, p1172).

It was interesting to discover that the use of bloody could be adopted to make a sentence good, bad or true (Wiezerbicka 2002). A prime example of the use of this word is my amazing Greek-Cypriot Grandfather: who came to Australia in his twenties. He continues to this day to use the word ‘bloody’ (which he picked up working as a chef with lots of other migrants at the time) to describe almost everything. Common expressions such as ‘it was bloody good’, or ‘I can’t believe he bloody did that!’ have been a normal part of the Australian cultural script for my grandfather. But we don’t even bat an eyelash in my family anymore when someone uses the word.

This in itself is interesting because I am a self-confessed non-swearer and so are my family. So do we lose face when we say ‘bloody’? I definitely did in England because it is totally unacceptable to use that word. Turbado distinguishes between the semantics of language and choices of words within a sentence such as ‘cause, trigger, provoke, or effect’ a sentence rather than a pragmatic approach which positions the appropriateness of the constructed sentence in the mind of both the hearer and the speaker (2006, p568). Semantically and pragmatically, the use of the word ‘bloody’ as opposed to other swear words are a discourse marker of our own cultural script - one that is accepted in everyday interactions! So losing face (as Goffman would refer to it) does not occur in our culture but may in others (like England).

We always have to be able to explain an action – an action can never in our own minds be independent from rationalisation (as Garfinkel points out). I needed to be able to explain and put a label on my grandfather’s use of the word ‘bloody’ in every second sentence. It was after reading this article that I realised how entrenched this saying was in our culture. It is not considered to be rude but very much part of our cultural script (Wiezerbicka 2002).



References
Taboada, M 2006, 'Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations', Journal of Pragmatics, vol.38, no.4, pp567 – 592.

Wierzbicka, A 2002, ‘Australian cultural scripts –bloody revisited’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol.34, no.1, pp1167-1209.

Group Presentation: Telling The Code

This is my groups Prezi from our presentation this week. We were meant to present last week but due to technical difficulties this could not happen. Our topic was still: The social and moral order of talk.
Enjoy!

http://prezi.com/bfh1v4kvnnuf/social-and-moral-order-in-talk/

The Code

This week my wonderful Tutor got my thoughts rolling on the relevancy of ‘telling of the code’ in the 21st century. Wieder was writing this in the 70s when social networking sites did not exist yet a lot of the order of talk that occurs is now more public and written down as well. For example there has been a change in what is acceptable to write on Facebook. Most people don’t care about the menial everyday status updates, yet we continue to do them (and complain about them). But then, if we post narcissistic or gossipy comments they’re totally unacceptable as well (and we again complain). Yet all of these are a part of ‘facework’ (as Goffman would like to say) and the creation of a code (Davies 2012). These codes have been written down plain for all to see so the subversive and inside knowledge of the code has altered the way the code can be used. Another example is THE GAME (haha you just lost!).

NB: Rules of The Game are:

1. Each person in the whole world is part of the game and playing
2. As soon as you think about The Game, you lose
3. Losses must be declared through the statement ‘I just lost The Game’
(The Metro 2012)

We speak about The Game in terms of understanding that we’re all actually only ever going to lose the game but try to get people to lose anyway. The question becomes: is this a code if everyone knows about it? In our day and age, rules are published online and obviously stated everywhere so is there any room left for a theory in which information is rife and these codes are well known? I found this links with the recipe of knowledge of ethnomethodology: we don’t technically know the game (unless someone tells us that we are actually playing the game). Yet – we have access to the sites on which we can find out about these ‘secret codes’. Interesting? I think so.


References
Davies, J 2012, ‘Facework on Facebook as a new literacy practice’, Computers & Education, vol.59, no.1, pp19 – 29.

Wieder, L, 1974, 'Telling the code', in R Turner (ed), Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings , Pengiun Education, Harmondsworth, pp144-172.

Unknown 2012, ‘Three rules of The Game’, accessed 10/9/2012, http://www.metro.co.uk/news/430704-three-rules-of-the-game.

'Garfinkel your life away'

‘Garfinkel your life away’ (Tumblr 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb2WawuV4g

The vibe that I get from this reading is that Garfinkel is challenging the ‘institutionalised norms of conduct’ and the formula of ‘recipe knowledge’. This video shows a teacher who is trying to encourage his students to ‘Carpe Diem’ or ‘Seize the day!’. Do we each need to undertake Garfinkel experiments and indeed ‘seize the day’ by changing the rules in order to understand the rules? I did.

In class today we were part of a secret experiment of causing ‘interactional breakdowns’ (Heritage 1984, p 81) through specifically performing an action that broke the rules of a game by which we live: it took form in the tapping of a pen – constantly. It was through being a rule-breaker that I understood how strongly the rules are embedded within each of us. One girl who was sitting next to me kept glancing between the pen and my face, back and forth, but said nothing. Another girl did not say anything until she was told that the experiment took place and it was after this that she admitted she was going crazy when the pen was being tapped. Interestingly enough, she became the ‘lay functionalist’ who continued to perpetually create the continuance of an ‘existing symbolic order’ (Heritage 1984, p 97).

I personally think Garfinkel was not all too kind on his subjects through his experiments: Heritage refers to the ‘victims’ of the experiment (1884, p 80). Victims, they certainly were, as I discovered through my role in the class experiment.

Consequently, we can clearly see why the rules of ‘seizing the day’ and of challenging institutionalised norms of conduct are often created – things will break sometimes. However, sometimes the rules of the game need to be broken in order to expose the ‘presupposed underlying patterns’ (Heritage 1984, p 84) that we interact within.



References:

GreenDaleDaily 2009, Community: Stand On Your Desk!, accessed 05/09/2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb2WawuV4g.

Heritage, J 1984, ‘The morality of cognition’, in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp75-102.

Unknown 2012 ‘Stand backwards in an elevator’, weblog post, Betty Louise Plotnick, April, accessed 05/09/2012, http://maraglen.tumblr.com/post/19358031575/stand-backwards-in-an-elevator.