Show Manuscripted, Ep Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in 'craft beer talk' - Jun 2, 2022
Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in 'craft beer talk'
Manuscript author: Lex Konnelly
Read aloud by Mx. Vagrant Gautam.
Abstract
Building on Silverstein's (2003, 2016) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper argues for a closely related genre: brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as ‘elite’ and ‘classy.’ The ‘specialist’ lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse provide the higher order of indexicality through which the emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. Together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer.
Manuscript link: https://tinyurl.com/brutoglossia
Citation: Konnelly, L. (2020). Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in 'craft beer talk'. Language & Communication, 75, 69-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2020.09.001
Social media: The author can be found on Twitter at @lexicondk. Read by @DippedRusk on Twitter.
