[phatic to attempt to convey that I appreciate and think I understand what the article is trying to say] Thanks for taking the time and effort to lay it all out in writing!
I particularly appreciated reading part/chapter 4; many of your statements resonate with my own lived/subjective experience.
[with the phatic niceties covered, here is the meat of my comment:]
There is a phrase that I am uncertain how exactly to interpret:
Even more so because English speakers appear to have a second brain to scrutinize language for microscopic signs of alignment.
Is this more of a throwaway joke, or a serious expression of something you notice? I wonder, notably, about how particular this is to English speakers (and I realize as I write this that I may just be re-enacting the behavior you deplore in your ice cream example). I am French/English bilingual and have lived in both the USA and France; in my experience, the determining factor in whether someone exhibits this “second brain” behavior/characteristic is their degree of preoccupation with politics (and to an extent, their familiarity with the history of politics and propaganda).
Something about seeing what arguments have been used to prepare, enact, and justify atrocities in the past makes those arguments very hard to take at face value the next times they are encountered. Consider the “states’ rights” rhetoric used to justify and rehabilitate the Confederacy’s succession after they lost the Civil War; that specific wording triggers immediate wariness in me today, and I’m willing to wager it also triggers it for most people that:
- have learned a certain amount about that period and/or the “Lost Cause” movement, and
- are ostensibly against slavery and racism (in principle, if not in practice).
Yet the term “states’ rights” did not have that effect on me the first time I encountered it - I developed that reaction as I learned more about who was using that term, where and when it came from, and what was effectively being said when that term got employed.
Similarly: McCarthyism, the red scare(s), and the apparent failure of self-proclaimed communist revolutions over the past century to effectively bring about “free and egalitarian societies”, have together trained many English speakers to deeply mistrust anything that could be the start of a “slippery slope” to communism - even when they readily agree that “something must be done” to reign in the damages of severe inequality. This seems to me to be a product of specific events in world history rather than anything intrinsic about the English language and/or the cultures that speak it.
On the other hand, English is (to my understanding) somewhat uniquely a mishmash of other languages’ grammars and vocabulary, with notably so many synonyms that can imply slight and subtle nuances. Perhaps it lends itself to a higher level of scrutinizing seemingly innocuous phrasings (to the point that a human brain develops mechanisms and habits for it) because there are more choices available for articulating an idea.
I do believe that the USA is a special case. It would be difficult for me to provide sufficient justification for that statement at the moment, but life in the USA seems particularly complex in terms of the amount of brain power dedicated to scrutinizing language and other features of human behavior to determine familiarity, allegiance, and opposition. Communicating in English-speaking environments is, at once, stimulating and terrifying. My personal impression is that, because Americans are trained from an early age to observe a highly complex set of delicate constraints that become automatic for them, they expect everyone to have the same degree of sophistication, and will often react with outrage to anyone who fails to do so.
Essentially, because in some places Americans often talk amongst Americans, they sometimes attribute intent to what is simply a cultural difference. In those places, of which some subreddits are good examples, the rest of the English-speaking worlds will try to conform to American sensibilities.
The “hidden meaning” of expressions such “state’s rights” is a problem for me, because, being a non-native speaker, I will often use expressions and phrasing that leads the reader to think I am defending some kind of hidden agenda that I myself know nothing about.
Those are just my guesses, though. I wouldn’t write a post specifically about this because that requires real research. It’s best for a real linguist or sociologist to comment on.
And oh, I forget about phatic expressions all the time! I often have to edit my comments to add words that will make me sound respectful and “a human”. It’s a little tiresome to me, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t feel bad about someone not using those expressions when talking to me, but I must remember to use them myself all the time! :P
100% agree that the USA is a special case. The country’s geography (occupies a significant, contiguous portion of the continent) and legacy as the “last remaining superpower” basically requires a non-trivial amount of effort for most Americans to be exposed to non-American anything, let alone people. On top of that, the two-party duopoly is so entrenched in (and fabricated by) the ossified voting & election system that it becomes very hard to separate “fighting for what you believe in” from “fighting against the ‘other half’ of the country”.
