#language dickery

Please just say "bottled water"--at the very broadest!--if what you really mean to convey is commercially available water from particular sources of consistent qualities. And preferably specifying a bit more about what qualities you are looking for.

I grew up in an area previously chock full of mineral spring spas and resorts, where people would travel and pay pretty big bucks to take the waters. Precisely because it is so freaking packed with various combinations of minerals!

All the delicious mineral water you care to bottle up and haul--and we regularly did at home!--is readily available on tap, for free. In the form of mountain springs gushing straight out of the rocks, sometimes conveniently right by the side of the road. (With some of the larger ones regularly state tested, for anyone who is concerned about the quality/safety of whichever generally small aquifer it might be coming from. You can also send off water samples to a local university lab on your own.)

Anyway, the one major factor in common there? All that mineral water is chock full of...minerals! Often largely calcium and/or magnesium--i.e. "hardness"--because karst! And the balance of that mineral content is most of what determines the flavor of any specific source.

You probably won't be happy with coffee brewed at Salt Sulphur Springs! (Used to be popular to treat certain skin conditions, though.) Some of it could be dangerous. I wouldn't necessarily feel great about drinking from any sources in the vicinity of Lead Mine Road, offhand. Not aware of any arsenic, etc., locally, but that's mineral content!

At my Nana's house, they needed a settling tank to let some of the iron oxides fall out of their own local water before it was piped into the house, and that mineral water leaves deep freaking rust stains on all the plumbing fixtures. The little spring pool just up the hill keeps a weird oil slick-looking iron film on the surface, and I used to get fussed at for messing around with it because that shit will stain your clothes and shoes. Minerals!

(Not from there, but a heavier accumulation of similar-looking stuff. Lack of water flowing through probably helps there. But, what kid could resist? 😁)

I can't even shower at one aunt and uncle's house, the sulphur-and-magnesium rotten egg stench off their unfiltered water is so overwhelming. Their well is on the same aquifer as a nearby old springs resort. Anything that vile has got to be good for you, right?! Minerals! 😒

Hard to describe the liquid chalk coming out of the tap in London as anything BUT mineral water, for that matter. Because it is coming straight out of extremely soluble calcium carbonate, and almost seems like more mineral than water! (Even to someone accustomed to limestone karst.) With the particular writer who prompted the little digression this time being based in London.

Main point here: the actual composition of spring--so-called "mineral" water--is necessarily going to depend VERY HEAVILY on the rocks at the source. Less aggressively soluble aquifer geology is going to produce less mineral-tastic water. Which more often gets bottled commercially, since it's much harder to go too wrong there in terms of drinking quality!

Content note: This is a response to a hostile anon. (I normally don’t post hostile asks. When I make an exception, I post a content note so that people who avoid hostility can skip the post if they want.)

Anonymous said to realsocialskills: That awkward moment when a social skills blog calls people of the jewish faith "jews"

realsocialskills said:

I’m about to be ordained as a rabbi in a few weeks. 

I’ve been in an intense graduate program for the past five years, I went to yeshiva before that, and I majored in Jewish history undergrad. I think I’ve earned the right to an opinion on this.

And since I’d rather procrastinate than work on cleaning my apartment for Pesach, I’m writing a long reply to this about why I have the language preferences I have:

I’m not a big fan of ideological commitment to person-first language in any case. I identify as disabled and autistic rather than as a person with autism. For similar reasons, historically-popular euphemisms like “people of the Hebrew persuasion” and “people of the Mosaic faith” make me really uncomfortable, and insistence on “Jewish people” over “Jews” makes me mildly uncomfortable. 

That said, I try not to get too fussed over language disputes, for reasons that are captured well in Amorpha’s “On Language Dickery”. I think that what matters most is respect, and also respecting the language used by members of the group you’re talking about. (Including respecting a legitimate range of preferences within groups you’re part of.)

I don’t know anyone who refers to themself as a “person of the Jewish faith”. I'm sure there are some people who identify that way, but it’s very much not the norm in any communities I’m part of. There are people who have strong preferences about “Jewish” vs “Jews” as ways of referring to themselves — personally, I use the terms interchangeably. (Depending on which words make for the most clearly understandable sentences.)

In my experience, Jews do not define ourselves solely as a religious group, and it’s pretty weird to insist on referring to us as “people of the Jewish faith”. There’s a reason why “Jewish studies” is its own subject and generally speaking not a subset of “religious studies”.  Judaism is a religion, and that’s an important part of Jewishness and Jewish culture, but it’s not the *only* important part.

One way I’ve encountered this in my work is that when I did a chaplaincy rotation, when I’d introduce myself to Jewish patients, they’d usually start the conversation by saying “I’m not religious” — and we’d still have a lot to talk about. People who come from minority cultures have all kinds of experiences and perspectives relevant to that, regardless of what they believe about God and religion.

You can also see this on the level of Jewish organizations and Jewish movements:

For instance, BBYO is a Jewish youth organization that has much more to do with being part of a minority culture and learning to be a strong leader than it does with religion. 

Similarly, the National Yiddish Book Center is a Jewish organization, but it’s not a religious organization. It’s an organization dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish and Yiddish literature, a language which is endangered because a high percentage of its speakers were murdered by Nazis, and a high percentage of speakers in other countries were forced to stop speaking it.

Similarly, Zionism was initially an avowedly secular movement, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken language was not religiously motivated. (And in fact met fierce religious opposition.) Jewish literature in Modern Hebrew is not an intrinsically religious thing. It runs the whole range of perspectives, just like any other language. 

There’s even a Secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv, which has the mission of giving secular Jews access to the skills to read traditional Jewish texts *as secular Jews*. I don’t think “people of the Jewish faith” describes this group particularly accurately. 

Nationality and language aside, there’s also a strong tradition of Jewish humor (some of which is pretty dark, because our experiences over the centuries have been really dark and sometimes laughing is better than crying). Here’s a page with a large collection of it. Some of the jokes have to do with religion, some do not. One iconic Jewish joke is:

A violent antisemite stops a Jew in the street and demands: Who is responsible for the war?

The Jew replies: The Jews and the bicyclists.”

The antisemite replies: “Why the bicyclists?” 

The Jew replies: “Why the Jews?” 

And many of the Jewish jokes that address religion are decidedly irreverent:

So it seems that these four rabbis had a series of theologicalarguments, and three were always in accord against the fourth.   One day, the odd rabbi out, after the usual "3 to 1, majority rules" statement that signified that he had lost again, decided to appeal to a higher authority.

"Oh, God!" he cried. "I know in my heart that I am right andthey are wrong! Please give me a sign to prove it to them!"  It was a beautiful, sunny day. As soon as the rabbi finished his prayer, a storm cloud moved across the sky above the four. Itrumbled once and dissolved. "A sign from God! See, I'm right, Iknew it!" But the other three disagreed, pointing out that stormclouds form on hot days.  So the rabbi prayed again: "Oh, God, I need a bigger sign to show that I am right and they are wrong. So please, God, abigger sign!" This time four storm clouds appeared, rushed toward each other to form one big cloud, and a bolt of lightning slammed into a tree on a nearby hill.  "I told you I was right!" cried the rabbi, but his friends insisted that nothing had happened that could not be explained bynatural causes.  The rabbi was getting ready to ask for a *very big* sign, but just as he said, "Oh God...," the sky turned pitch black, the earth shook, and a deep, booming voice intoned, "HEEEEEEEE'SRIIIIIIIGHT!"  The rabbi put his hands on his hips, turned to the other three,and said, "Well?"

"So," shrugged one of the other rabbis, "now it's 3 to 2."

That joke is actually based on a story in the Talmud.

Every rabbi I know makes jokes like this; nearly every Jewish person I know makes jokes like this. 

I could go on, but I have a thesis about Jewish liturgy and Jewish ritual to write, so I think I’ll stop here.

In short, I think that insisting that we should refer to ourselves as solely as “people of the Jewish faith” amounts to erasure of every aspect of Jewishness and Jewish culture other than religion. I think it also amounts to erasure of our history in which people have responded to us as a racial and ethnic group in ways that had very little to do with religious. These things are vitally important components of who we are, and I am not ok with erasing them.

“Just because I happen to use the nearest available set of translation tools does not mean I have, in picking up those tools, agreed to the entire worldview of the people who built the tools. […] I use these tools because the alternative is silence, not because I have picked up an entire set of beliefs about the world with every phrase I use.”

And we’ve become very aware recently that we use a lot of words, because they happen to be the closest shorthand to make our thoughts understandable to the largest number of people, that are apparently associated with some abstract, wordy, labyrinthine ideologies. Or commonly used by people who subscribe to those ideologies and think that you can’t really understand the world if you can’t juggle a lot of them in your head. And where use of those words is considered, by both people who agree with those ideologies and those who disagree with them, to mean that you “belong to” those ideologies in a way we’ve never really been able to belong to any at all.

[…]. Just, no. We do NOT necessarily come with these giant tangled philosophies attached just because we used a few words or word-sets in common with them.

[…] If you are a person who is strongly inclined to forming/choosing among/tinkering with various sorts of ideology, don’t assume that everyone’s brain works just like yours. Don’t assume that every single person in the world picks and chooses from elaborate ideology sets and language sets and writes everything from a deep-rooted belief in every last principle of them. Or is even necessarily aware that a word they have reached for is supposed to have a huge list of principles attached to it in the first place.

A lot of the ones trying to pull that stuff now do not seem to fully appreciate that a lot of us have been IDing that way for a long time now precisely because we are those “pissed-off cockroach motherfuckers”.

As some other people have also pointed out, trying to talk about certain similarities and differences in experience is only hurt by assumptions that literally everything must automatically be about simple oppositional binaries. And that even making a distinction automatically implies that one group must be directly under the boot of the other. That’s not how anything works, and it makes my brain hurt.

Especially with my awkward tag commentary on why a moose (Alces alces–“elk elk”!) is an elk in German.

For “European explorers” there, read “British explorers who had never seen either kind of animal before, because they just don’t have them at home”.

Seeing the kind that’s more like a big red deer: “Whoa, that’s a strange huge deer. Must be one of them elk!”

Going further north, and seeing an actual “elk”: “Whoa, wtf is that thing? Never saw anything remotely like it before! What do you Narragansett/Abenaki fellas call that thing? Moos, moz? [Manglicizing time…] ‘Moose’ it is!” (Probably half the party gets trampled.)

There aren’t a lot of moose/elk/whatever in France either, so I got curious. Québécois went in some different directions there. Couldn’t find much on Acadian/New Brunswick French terms quickly.

But yeah, an awful lot of “exotic” animal naming by colonizers went about like that. Plenty of animals and plants around the world that these people had never seen anything like before, so they grabbed and usually mangled names from indigenous languages.

I also had to get amused again, with the German/frequently similar to other Germanic language terms there. It’s impressive how many kinds of animals have gotten compared to bears, pigs, and dogs. Even when I can’t imagine why that reminded anyone of the familiar animal in question.

Then again, unfamiliar pigs got named after possums in Tsalagi:

The Cherokee had never seen hogs before the Spanish explorers came, so they used the word for opossum (si’qua) as a name for them. That left them with the necessity to distinguish ‘possums from pigs, so the ‘possum came to be called “siqua utsetsidi,” the “grinning pig,” a short form of which is “siqua-utsets.” Nowadays, only the grin is left, and the possum is just “utsetsidi” [pronounced roughly “oo-chets’-dee,” depending on the dialect]. Sigwetsi is merely a shortened form of “siqua utsetsidi.” Such shortenings are common in Cherokee.

(Beyond the fact that they’re both kind of snouty and low slung, I don’t see a lot of resemblance there, either. But, there you go.)

BTW, Sequoyah is also “pig’s foot”, either from being born with a club foot or a later injury. Possibly both. So I have to get amused at Euro-Americans in particular grabbing onto that name without knowing what it means.

Bringing me around to the point I was reminded of again. I start rolling my eyes anytime people start arguing that the “opossum” common name applies properly to the kind in the Americas, while “possum” is only correct for the little marsupials in/around Australia.

Which were even called that by English speakers who didn’t know what else to compare the Australian ones to. They’re vaguely like those weird Virginia (o)possum critters, so (o)possum it is!

And when they’re basing that distinction on a manglicized Virginia coastal Algonquian word, in the first place. Anglophones drop syllables a lot, so words work better to their ears. Especially dealing with unfamiliar polysynthetic languages. Pocahontas would no doubt wonder what the hell they were trying to say anyway, with a lot of words that got snagged. The same with speakers of the other indigenous languages that gave words into modern English.

English speakers in both colonial settings dropped the first syllable a lot, and continue to do so.

So, yeah, that seems like a really silly distinction to keep trying to make. Much less the people who keep trying to police usage there, and prescriptively tell American English speakers that they’re WRONG in shortening the word to possum.

Opossum wasn’t even the original form, so far as you can even tell from English speakers trying to do phonetic transcriptions of unfamiliar languages, back when English didn’t have any formalized spelling system.