The Rhetoric of Xenophobia

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa. 

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: Well, Carrie, congratulations. I heard you had a book deal.

Carrie: Right back at you. Yeah. 

Megan: So exciting. 

Carrie: Yes. So for people who are not on Twitter, we got a book contract. 

Megan: Yeah. The Vocal Fries are going to come at you in book form. It's very exciting. We're following the footsteps of two other groups of ladies that I love, My Favorite Murderer. They made their podcast into a book. And then Call Your Girlfriend, Anne Friedman. I mean, not too sure, are working on a book that's going to come out soon. 

Carrie: Oh, cool. 

Megan: Yeah. They're co-writing a book on friendships.

Carrie: Oh, that's nice. 

Megan: Yeah. It's very exciting. 

Carrie: If you feel like there's a topic that we absolutely need to talk about, you can send us a message. Or a piece of research that's come out recently that you think we might not know about, please do send it our way because they're just related.

Megan: Yeah. Especially if it's yours. 

Carrie: Yes, especially if it's yours.

Megan: You'll definitely get mentioned in the book, obviously, because just like our podcast, we rely on you all and your lived experiences and your research because we can't speak to all of them. 

Carrie: Right. And we can't possibly do all that research even if we wanted to.

Megan: Exactly. So yeah, I am excited. 

Carrie: Yes, me too. 

Megan: Well, I hear we have to write it now. 

Carrie: Yep, we do. That's the next step. 

Megan: Anyway, that's great. And so, yeah, we get a book contract. And you just turned a year older, and we got a bunch of love for it on Patreon. 

Carrie: Yes, yes. Chris, my husband, had done the similar thing for his film Collective here in Phoenix. He asked for Patreon subscriptions for his birthday, and I thought, "Oh, wow, that's such a great idea. Why didn't I think of that?" So I did the same thing. 

Megan: Thank you everyone who was inspired by Carrie's growing age.

Carrie: One more cycle around the sun. 

Megan: Yes. 

Carrie: And, yeah, we'll obviously give everyone a proper shout out next month, but we just wanted to thank everybody. We're $35 away from hitting our goal of being able to pay for a transcriptionist. So if that impels you to help us out, please join us at patreon.com/vocalfriespod. 

Megan: Another thing. Wow, Carrie, you're just all over the place. You are going to be in Boston in a couple weeks.

Carrie: Three weeks, I think. Yeah. Yes, I am. I'm going to be at the Sound Education Podcast Convention Conference, whatever you want to call it. And there's going to be all kinds of people there. WBUR Boston is part of it. But most relevantly, I'm going to be on the Linguistics Panel on October the 11th. So if you're in the Boston area and you want to come find us, you can look up www.soundeducation.fm/schedule. And on the panel that I'm on, it's a bunch of people. Mark Sundaram, from The Endless Knot, who interviewed us once, I think last year, he's going to be on it. Gretchen McCulloch from Lingthusiasm, we interviewed her a couple years ago now, almost. And Ray Belli, from Words for Granted, and Helen Zaltzman, from The Allusionist. So it's going to be a great panel. 

Megan: Yeah. Just all the names that I always see. Just fellow podcasts, linguist podcasts, language podcasters. Yes. 

Carrie: It's a growing subfield. There's, I think I have a list of 26 now, although not all of them are currently being made. But there are 26 linguistic podcasts that you can listen to now, which is amazing. 

Megan: It's amazing. And what a great teaching resource. I'm just thinking about when I taught and I'm like, "Oh." Obviously, we started our podcast after, but I guess I might have felt a little bit weird to give my own podcast as homework, but still I would've done it because there were some great interviews. Got to go beyond myself and realize that, a lot of the meat of it or the great guests we have. Oh, I wanted to mention something because the news is always happening. There's new things and there's always things that are relevant to episodes that we've had or that we want to eventually do. And people were talking about how Merriam Webster just added they, non-binary pronoun they to the dictionary. And we have an episode about that with Kirby Conrod, and we called it They/Them/Theirs, right?

Carrie: That's right. 

Megan: Yeah. But also I wanted to mention, and I think that you get that from that episode with Kirby, but in all the other things that we talk about here is that just because it made to dictionary doesn't mean it wasn't legitimate before. 

Carrie: No. All it means is that enough people are using it, that people who are curators of the dictionary have decided it needs to be in there. 

Megan: Exactly. Exactly. 

Carrie: But they could have decided years ago or last year or whatever, because people had been using it for quite some time. I mean, probably longer, but at least 20 years. 

Megan: Yeah. That's the case with things like Latinx was just added recently, but that's been used for years. Hangry. We're thinking about all these words, we're like, "Well, that's been around for years." So we love lexicographers here, they do good work. And they will tell you the first thing that they're not the ones that legitimize language. They're just looking at trends and stuff. 

Carrie: Right. They're descriptivists just like us. They describe what's happening in language. But there's always a lag because they have to make sure that it really is sticking around. 

Megan: And so, I think this goes back to our whole thing of don't be an asshole because people have been telling you their pronouns are they/them/theirs, you don't need, or you shouldn't need the dictionary to tell you that's legitimate. You listen to people when they tell you.

Carrie: You shouldn't. Some people do, and hopefully, the fact that it's in the dictionary now will help them get over themselves. I only have faith that that will work in a small percentage of cases, anyway. 

Megan: I guess it can only be a net positive, right? 

Carrie: Right. Yeah. The fact that it's in the dictionary is a good thing because it does lend legitimacy, even though it shouldn't.

Megan: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: Speaking of episodes that from our past, last night I watched Ad Astra, which is a movie about space. This isn't really a spoiler. So there's a character in the movie who is born on Mars and has spent all of her life out in space and only has been to earth one time. Chris noted that her accent was vaguely Texan. And it made both of us think about the fact that we have this episode on how language change would work in space.

Megan: Yeah. Yeah, we do. And it was a fun episode. 

Carrie: Was a super fun episode. What was it called, again? 

Megan: The Final Frontier?

Carrie: The Final Frontier. You think I'd remember that. Anyway, so the Final Frontier is all about how maybe language might change if you're separated for from earth for a long, long time. Now, there's constant contact between earth and mars and the moon. The moon is colonized in this movie. Anyway, so there wouldn't be vast changes, but there should be some change because they are quite separate, especially mars. But anyway, it just made me think of that episode and the possibilities of language change. 

Megan: Well, I can't think of nothing better than going to see a movie and then being like, "I got to listen to The Vocal Fries now."

Carrie: That is so true.

Megan: There's an episode on that.

Carrie: There's almost always an episode that somehow relates.

Megan: Oh, I'm feeling a very Elizabeth Warren vibe right now. I have a plan for that. We have an episode for that.

Carrie: That is so true. Awesome. This episode is interesting because we talk with a lexicographer.

Megan: Yes. Oh.

Carrie: Lexicographer or adjacent, I guess, but he does work with lexicography and lexicographers. 

Megan: Yeah. I'm just going to go ahead and call him a friend of the pod, because I love this guy. He's great. He does such good work for linguistic communication, science communication. 

Carrie: Yes. He does a lot. A lot. He's been doing it for a long time too, so he might be one of the first... Yeah, definitely one of the first who's spreading the good word about linguistics, and lexicography, and why words matter, and the power the words have, and all kinds of things. And today we talk to him, Ben Zimmer, about two words. 

Megan: Two words. Enjoy. I'm really excited to have Ben Zimmer with us today. He is a linguist, lexicographer, and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Thank you so much, Ben, for coming onto the pod. 

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.

Ben Zimmer: Oh, thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Megan: I think we both really wanted to have you on since we started. Because we always see you at the LSA, which is the linguists conference, every year, or you're always around. You're one of my favorite public linguists. So happy to have you here. 

Ben: Thank you. 

Megan: You wrote two articles recently that I wanted to talk about specifically. But first I just want to talk a little bit about writing for the public as a linguist, as a word person. Obviously, someone at the Wall Street Journal thought it was a great idea to give you a language column. Why do you think it's so important to write for a wider audience about words?

Ben: Well, I think it's important that we have linguistically informed voices that are talking about issues of the day where language so often becomes a crucial matter. And as every linguist knows, there's a lot of linguistically uninformed talk out there that can be very, very frustrating. That just relies on folk understandings of language and the way it works. And so, there's definitely value in having people from a background from linguistics and allied fields to be speaking out, to serve as public intellectuals. And I'm happy to see that there's a growing number of voices like that. The LSA started its linguistics journalism award to recognize that in the field of journalism, you can bring linguistics into it and do it in a way that reaches far larger audiences than academics normally would if they were just writing for their particular field.

Megan: Locked in the ivory tower, right?

Ben: Exactly. My background was in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. That's what I studied as a graduate student in University of Chicago. And I reached a point where I realized I wanted to reach wider audiences with what I was writing about. I ended up shifting out of academia into language commentary and also lexicography, so working on dictionary projects at Oxford University Press and other places. And so, I moved from a kind of academic or scholarly writing that I was doing in grad school and tried to learn to write in a more accessible manner for a mainstream audience. 

One thing that helped me in that regard was actually getting involved in Language Log back in the mid aughts. That was, for me, it was a halfway house, or a way to learn how to react quickly to stories that were in the news, that had some sort of linguistic angle. And do it in a way that could reach a wider audience. At the same time, not abandoning the scholarship that I had come up with in linguistics and linguistic anthropology, trying to smuggle that in, in various ways. And so, I continue to try to do that for various venues. Sometimes what I'm doing is more lexicographical than anything else. 

And so, my weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, for instance, is really taking a look at a particular word or phrase in the news, and then doing a deep dive into its history and trying to understand where it came from. That's really a kind of historical lexicography done in narrative form. Those are smaller pieces than what I might write in the Atlantic or Politico or other places that where I'm spreading out a bit more. I might bring in, again, more linguistic scholarship in what I'm writing or relate it to larger cultural issues. And so, different venues have different expectations or requirements for the type of writing that you might do about language. And so, I've been trying to write in various places and do so in the same way that I was doing for Language Log, would be a way to respond quickly to linguistic issues of the day.

Megan: Yeah, the Wall Street Journal column you have, I feel like it's just you're way more interesting OED, Oxford English Dictionary, right? You're giving us the etymology. And Carrie, I feel like at least 50/50 chance I say entomology even though I'm a linguist. You give us the etymology of a word that is important for that week. But I think it's really important how interesting you make it, because only hardcore word nerds are going to be going to the OED and finding those in-depth etymological background that you can find there. Interesting. So I applaud you for what you do there.

Ben: Thank you. Also, I'm not content with simply just taking an OED entry and turning it into a narrative. I always want to find more than you could just find from looking it up in the OED. So even for the hardcore dictionary nerds who do consult the OED entries, what I try to do with that Wall Street Journal column is provide even more than you would simply get from looking at a list of citations to see how something changed historically. But really, really dig deep into the context, the historical and cultural context that a word or phrase travels through from the past to the present.

Carrie: Is that your favorite thing to do, or do you like doing the other columns more?

Ben: I like doing both. In some ways it's maybe using different parts of my brain or something, but I think they're both important. And if I just did the Wall Street Journal column, I mean, that would be fine. But there are definitely times when I want a different kind of canvas, I guess. And so, for The Atlantic, since I've been writing for them regularly, since I was made a regular contributor, I've been writing basically once or twice a month. Very often when just things come up in the news, my editors will say, "Hey, could you take a look at this?" It could be something that's coming out of political rhetoric or other things that people might be focusing on at a particular time. 

I guess because I've been doing this long enough, I'm able to get things together quickly enough so that I can write a reasonable take on a particular issue or item in the news relatively quickly. And so, in this culture of hot takes, that's a valuable commodity, to be able to turn that around quickly. And so, I try to do that, again, by doing what I can to have a story that might appear, for instance, in the Atlantic within a day or two of something newsworthy happening allowing me enough time to at least dig deeper into the history of a particular word or phrase that might become important for some political or cultural reason. And also try to bring in some of that scholarship, like I said. 

Just as an example, back in June, I wrote a thing for The Atlantic where Trump was talking about how the Democrats were going loco. Of course, Trump had previously talked about bad hombres back in 2016. And so, that was an opportunity to talk about Trump's use of mock Spanish. And because I was trained in linguistic anthropology, I knew the work of Jane Hill on mock Spanish and was able to bring in things from her book, The Everyday Language of White Racism. Jane Hill's no longer with us, of course, but if she were, she would be, I'm sure, speaking out on these things. And so, it allowed me to tie in that very important work that she did directly with these new instances of mock Spanish that we were getting from Trump. 

Carrie: Do you feel like you've gotten more opportunities in the era of Trump, or does it just feel overwhelming for the rest of us that there's so much to talk about?

Ben: It is overwhelming, to be sure. I remember after Trump was elected in 2016, I was being interviewed on the radio and I was asked, "Oh, so this is going to give you so much more to work with, so much fodder for what you're writing, well, now that Trump is going to be president?" I thought, "Well, this is true." It is often daunting work just trying to keep up with it. And sometimes I wish I could just turn off Trump, as I guess we all wish. But I still think it's really important to put a spotlight on the types of rhetoric that have been coming up in the Trump era, digging into the history, the historical resonances of things that come up, especially when there are words being weaponized against various marginalized groups. And so, a lot of my recent columns for the Atlantic have been looking at that type of thing. Yeah, I find it overwhelming and frustrating sometimes, but it's still what people are talking about, and it's something that we can't just ignore.

Megan: Actually, one of your Atlantic pieces, this is a perfect transition, is about this weaponization of language against marginalized groups, is why we really wanted to talk to you. It's timely, but also this could have been timely anytime, but it's particularly timely given what happened in El Paso. The Atlantic article is called Where Does Trump's Invasion Rhetoric Come From? And it was from August 6th. I think that you did such a good job. I learned so much from this article for one thing. But I wanted to point out, say for the readers, that this has been around a long time and you pulled a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1873, "The Chinese invasion, they are coming, 900,000 strong." Were you surprised that it went back that far, or did you think it'd go further back than that?

Ben: Well, writing this article or this column was a learning experience for me as well. I was not fully steeped in US immigration history. I knew about things like the Chinese Exclusion Act. And I knew about the yellow peril metaphors that had been used in the late 19th century in that exclusion era. But that one I needed to go back and really look at some primary sources, like you mentioned that thing in the San Francisco Chronicle. That item in the Chronicle was actually promoting a book that was about to come out in 1873, called The Chinese Invasion. 

One of the joys of doing this kind of research now is that there are newspaper databases. There are so many resources available for doing that kind of primary source research. So I was able to pull all of this up pretty quickly by looking for certain key terms. Again, I wanted to look at the invasion rhetoric, and it turned out that that time period in the 1870s in California was really the focal point, and it set the template in many ways for the invasion rhetoric to come. That rhetorical trope that continued to get used not just against Chinese immigrants coming in the late 19th century, but pretty much every immigrant group since.

Megan: Yeah, exactly. So then in 1928, there was Star-Gazette of Elmira, in New York. The editorial ends by asking, "Now what are we to do with this Mexican invasion?" So it seems like we keep repeating ourselves, right? 

Ben: Yes, absolutely. And I should mention that for this research, I relied on the work of historians who focus on immigration, again, people who spent their careers looking at this stuff and writing books about it. And so, in this case Erika Lee, who's at the University of Minnesota, she's the director of the Immigration History Research Center there, she has looked into this. She has a great book called At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era. And she makes that very point that the whole idea of this invading hoard and talking about immigrant groups in that way really starts in a serious way in American history with this anti-Chinese rhetoric of the late 19th century. 

And then even after that Chinese Exclusion Act passes in 1882, thanks in large part to the hyperbolic rhetoric that had been spread in California, that Chinese immigration is restricted, but then that invasion rhetoric just carries over, as you say, to other immigrant groups. Even talking about a Mexican invasion in parts of the west or southwest, which of course, historically, it's the European Americans who are the ones who came in and settled there. But that kind of hypocrisy was lost on people in the 1920s, in particular, when there was this very strong nativist streak which led to further immigration restrictions.

Carrie: Well, I feel like it's still lost on people now. 

Ben: Yeah. 

Megan: And so, the reason why you wrote this on August 6th is because of what happened in El Paso, Texas, with the mass shooting that was targeted against Latinx people. The shooter had what... You actually have a column about manifesto too, right? 

Ben: Yes. 

Megan: I was going to say, "So he wrote this manifesto, and he was talking about this invasion of Hispanics." And so, again, we're going back to seeing how we keep repeating ourselves and history repeats itself through words.

Ben: Yeah. And that's a very interesting thing. You can get this entire cultural history, in this case a very dark history, through the lens of one particular word. And so, yeah, when that manifesto, screed, whatever you want to call it, the anti-immigrant rant was put on online, people right away saw that he was talking about an invasion in the same way that Trump and others had been using that very term. 

And so, it was clear that this was a term that through repetition on Fox News, or in Trump's tweets, or in the various places had become cultural touchstone, or keyword you could say, for someone like the El Paso shooter. So then, yeah, to do that kind of historical analysis, the archeology of the term, does require going back to these chapters in history that a lot of people now have just completely forgotten.

So, yeah, most people don't know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That's not a common thing that people are talking about, but as soon as you look at the rhetoric around that, it's like, what has changed? I mean, we're still using those exact same tropes, or seeing them appear, these same metaphors of invasion, infection, pollution. Of course, this ties into something else I talked about in the Atlantic piece, the work that's done in a metaphor theory, where we see these conceptual metaphors getting played out again and again in political rhetoric.

Megan: And so, can we just switch over, because you said infect. So this reminds me of the other article that you wrote about infestation, which was for Politico. The headline is what Trump talks about when he talks about infestations. And I thought you did a really good job here, and I'm not surprised what I read, but you were able to track just the history of Trump himself using this word.

Ben: Right. That's what you also get with someone like Trump, is basically a ready-made corpus of everything that he has said. He has tens of thousands of tweets. And then there are various other public discourse that he's been involved in going back quite a ways. And so, as a very public figure, as a real estate developer in the '80s and '90s, it was quite easy to find him talking about rat infested buildings. And the infestations at the time that he was concerned about had to do with rodents. He would come back to that very often when he was talking about some rundown property and that sort of thing. As I said in the Politico piece, the idea of infestation that he originally became a bit fixated with as a real estate developer has transferred onto what he says about his political foes. And, of course, as we've seen lately very often, that is involving people of color. It became newsworthy enough for me to write about for Politico after he started going after Elijah Cummings and talking about Baltimore back in... What month was that? I've forgotten already. That was July?

Megan: That one came out in July 29th. It's July 29th. Yeah.

Ben: Right. Because there was going after Elijah Cummings in July, but then a bit before that, he had been using that for other targets basically. This was something that, again, was pointed out in the mass media. And so there were people who were commenting on this in the same way, both the word infest or infested and that word invasion. In both cases, those were words in the news, to be sure, but they required, in both cases, a deeper dive into understanding, where does this rhetoric come from? What are the historical resonances? What are the metaphorical structures that support these kinds of rhetorical moves? And how do they dehumanize people in marginalized groups, people of color and others that have been so frequently targeted?

Carrie: As you point out in this piece, this one's much older than the infestation rhetoric, which seems to come from the 1800s, but the infestation thing seems to be much older than that. So where does that one come from?

Ben: Well, it's funny. That's a case where if you pull out the... If you pull out the OED people, don't do that anymore. If you go to the online OED...

Carrie: I did that one time when I was an undergrad. I haven't done it since. I've only used online.

Megan: Yep. Yeah.

Ben: Well, I still have my 2-Volume Compact Edition of the OED, which requires the magnifying glass, but I don't really use that anymore. You go to the OED entry for infest, and you get these chronicles from, there's something from 1602, talking about how early England was infested by plundering, Saxons and Danes. So this is certainly that idea of infestation has been associated with humans, not simply with animals or pathogens. And that connection has been made for a long time from different perspectives for people feeling, somehow, they're being overrun by some group. And so, yeah, again, infesting and invading, these types of metaphors go hand in hand, along with various other metaphors having to do with pollution and contamination.

Carrie: Yeah, I was surprised to see that the Saxons were in there in the 1600s, because by then they were the English, right?

Ben: There was a chronicle going back to the earlier times. It was written in 1600, about events that obviously happened before the Norman Invasion. It was a chronicle. They weren't talking in 1600 about that happening. They were talking about how these groups came to England in the old days. 

Carrie: But it's still interesting to me because that would still be the ancestors of people writing it, right? So it's interesting that they were, I don't know, situating themselves as the ones who were being invaded, even though really they were the invaders, you know?

Ben: Yeah. Again, it's, yeah, who is the invader? It's all a matter of perspective. That's another case where obviously, yeah, the history of the settlement of Great Britain involves all these different groups coming together. And it's hard to say who's invading whom exactly, or who's infesting whom. I use that example just to show that a word like infest, for instance, is not necessarily a new thing. That it's being applied to a group of human beings rather than a group of animals, or a pathogen, or something like that. It would take longer for that to become more fixed in a rhetorical structure of the type that we get from the anti-immigration rhetoric in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that's where it all goes hand in hand. And then obviously, it's not just in the US that's happening, and there's the obvious parallel that can be drawn to the way that Jews were depicted in Nazi ideology using these kinds of infestation metaphors being analogized to parasites and tapeworms and termites and so forth.

Megan: Well, yeah. And that's what's scaring a lot of people, right? Because these words, if you're doing like a, what word does this remind you of? You think of extermination. 

Ben: Exactly. 

Megan: If you have an infestation, you need to exterminate, and that's scary. Yeah, scary words

Carrie: Often that does lead to extermination. I mean, yes, obviously the Holocaust, Rwanda, other places as well, where you have people calling other people insects, cockroaches, et cetera, and then the next step, yeah, it's extermination.

Ben: I mean, again, I'm not the only one to make this observation, and I quote a couple of other commentators in the Politico piece, Charles M. Blow. I think just at the same time I was writing my piece, Charles M. Blow came out with a column in the New York Times, when he talked about how infestations justify exterminations. There was also Jamil Smith from Rolling Stone made a very similar point, where he talked about how Trump was providing himself a license to be an exterminator. And we know that story.

Megan: Yeah. I got chills. Actually, I highlighted that. Those were really good pull quotes that you did for people that were also talking about in the context. And to have two black men bringing in people of color, I thought was also really great too. But all really great points about how we're dehumanizing people with our words and that that's not innocent. That's what I really wanted to have you on too, is because these two pieces are really important. Because they're in Politico and they're in The Atlantic, and they're getting to a wider audience. Why do you think it's important that people know that their words have power?

Ben: I think we can see the way that words have power often to a very detrimental effect. Again, we can laugh off the latest tweet from Trump, and just think, "Well, he's just pandering to his base." But when we see something, again, like with the El Paso shooter, who even though in this manifesto, or whatever you want to call it, he basically tried to say, "Oh, this isn't Trump's fault." At the same time, he's using those exact terms, like invasion. And so, in a time when it takes a mass shooting to get people to wake up and see how words can be weaponized to such an extent that they lead to violent acts. 

I mean, unfortunately, we've come to this point where it takes it being right in our face like that with another mass shooting, another manifesto or screed, and looking at the language that is being used to justify this violence. Obviously, it's extremely important to be able to put a spotlight on that and understand the inner workings of that rhetoric. What compels it, what sorts of metaphorical leaps are people making that allow them to dehumanize others, to use a kind of language that treats immigrants or some other group as just something to be gotten rid of. Again, it's in our face a lot these days. Again, thanks to Trump and the institutions that support him. 

But we have to continue to shine that spotlight in order to really understand it. And as I was saying, having people who have a background in linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, it really helps. It's important to be talking about this in a public way. I'm trying to do my part. Try to bring in other voices, like scholars who are working on this. One other Atlantic piece I wanted to mention was another piece I wrote for them in July, where Trump was going after the squad, as you'll recall, and telling them to go back to their countries. And then that seemed to be a breaking point for many news outlets to just go ahead and call it racist. And to use that word rather than dancing around it and talking about language being racially charged or racially insensitive.

Carrie: Racially tinged. 

Ben: Racially tinged. Right.

Megan: Yeah, tinged is my favorite.

Ben: Right. This, of course, came up in the American dialect societies voting on words of the Year for 2018. Racially charged was selected as Euphemism of the Year as people may recall, if they were at the LSA last January. That was an interesting choice. And when I wrote the piece in July, talking about this, and talking about how the words racist or racism becomes such a taboo term that we end up seeing these euphemisms like racially charged, I was able to go back and think about the discussions that happened when we did Word of the Year about that very topic. And so, then I was able to call on Jessi Grieser, and Nicole Holliday, who you've had on to...

Megan: Friend of the pod.

Ben: Right, friend of the pod. Because both of them had spoken about this at the time. And I was able to go back and talk to them, "Well, what do you think now about how this has developed?" And the way that perhaps people are recognizing that these terms are euphemistic, and just stripping that away a bit more. And so, again, I'm doing what I can in terms of trying to foreground the work of others as well, who do work on race and ethnicity and these other important topics, and make sure their voices are being heard. Obviously, someone like Nicole Holliday is another type of public intellectual that we get to hear more and more on NPR and other places, and that's great. I'm so happy that that's happening and that sociolinguists and others who have important things to say on these topics are being heard.

Carrie: Why do you think it was that that finally broke the dam for calling what he is saying racist?

Ben: Well, again, it feels like it has to be in your face. It reaches a point where there's no plausible deniability or no kind of rationalization when Trump is talking about how these four women of color should go back to where they came from. And that's followed up by a Trump rally with the chants of, "Send her back."

Carrie: Yeah, that was brutal,

Ben: Right. Again, unfortunately, and in many cases, it seems it has to be totally blatant and explicit in order for people to recognize exactly how potent this language has become in terms of racist rhetoric, and it becomes indefensible. And that's what I was trying to write about in that Atlantic piece. Again, even after that though, there were endless debates about whether it was appropriate to call the president racist himself, or whether we could say that his language is racist, et cetera, et cetera. This hand wringing about the appropriateness of using these terms. 

So yeah, again, in this Trump era, all of us as language observers have faced new challenges in how to confront all of this, how to contextualize it properly. Sometimes it feels like what's happening has never happened before. On some level that's true, we haven't had a president who talks like this, but on the same level as I've tried to show in these Atlantic pieces where I bring the history of this rhetoric into it, that you can, again, see lots and lots of resonances with other moments in American history. And Trump may be a very blatant instantiation of it, but he's not coming up with it out of nowhere.

Carrie: No. And he is certainly not the first super racist president. Andrew Jackson is up there, but yeah, he's maybe the most crass.

Ben: Right? Again, in other cases where sometimes people have talked about dog whistles, for instance, dog whistle politics, the idea that you're able to use certain words and phrases that your base will recognize as talking about those people or whatever, it's like you don't even have to say who they are, and that dog whistle will be understood. The way that that has been used to support racially biased approaches as well. The whole idea of the dog whistle almost seems quaint now because, again, Trump is just saying these things out in the open. He is dispensing with dog whistles. 

And so, again, it can be very in your face. We are left wondering what can we say when time after time there is a tweet or a speech or a rally or something that happens, that makes us wonder, how have we reached this point where this has become something that people note, but then they just move on to the next thing, you know? And so, that's frustrating for me as well, again, since I'm trying to react quickly to things that are in the news and whether it's involving Trump or someone else. And what I write may get some attention, but generally just for that week until the next thing happens. I appreciate the opportunity here to be able to go back to some of the things I've written, even if it does feel like a blur. And it's hard to remember when these things actually happened in our recent memory. 

I think we just have to be keeping in mind that we can't just move on to the next thing. We have to really think about the effects that this language is having over time not just to when there's a mass shooting, but how it informs policy. Again, we've got plenty of historical parallels that we can draw. Like with what we were saying about invasion, as Erika Lee and others have argued, it was really that invasion rhetoric that was coming out of California at the time that got lawmakers in Congress to say, "Okay, we're going to pass these very restrictive acts against Chinese immigrants." And that was the first time any particular national group had been targeted in that way.

Carrie: Wow. I didn't know that, that there was such a direct connection. It makes total sense though.

Megan: Yeah. And you noted in 1928, in talking about the Mexican invasion, they were also trying to push for some restrictive policies. 

Ben: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. 

Megan: Regarding Mexican immigrants. Yeah. So, really, these two things are going hand in hand.

Ben: I mean, obviously, in the 1920s, there were general restrictions that were placed on US immigration, that went far beyond. But again, if you look at the particular groups that were being targeted, and the way that they were portrayed, whether they were coming from Southern Europe or other places that were deemed somehow dangerous and perilous to accept people in large numbers. And then that carries on and continues into more recent history. 

One other work that I cited in that invasion piece was the book Brown Tide Rising by Otto Santa Ana, who's a sociolinguist at UCLA. Looking at these debates over immigration in the 1990s, all of the controversy around Proposition 187, which was the initiative that was trying to curtail benefits for undocumented immigrants, all of the language of invasion and takeover and so forth was in there quite strongly. 

And so, that that was something that Otto Santa Ana was able to bring out by just taking a particular set of texts, in that case things that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, or whatever, talking about Latinx issues of various kinds. A lot of it was centered around whether this Proposition 187 should pass or not. But yeah, you just see that same carryover of those same metaphors in that as well. And, obviously, you can see the connections from what people were saying in the '90s, to what's happening now in terms of specifically about Mexico or Latin America.

Megan: And so, what do you ultimately think can be learned in all of this? What can we take away from learning about words, and how we use them, and where they come from?

Ben: Well, if there's one thing I've tried to convey in the different kinds of writing I've done is that these stories are never straightforward. Again, you could just think, "Oh, this word comes from this source." Just think of it as a straightforward etymology. But then once you get into a richer cultural understanding of the different worlds that a word or phrase comes through on its way to current usage, that raises different things to think about basically, in terms of the way that we use language. I try to be careful in what I write, not to ever fall back on the etymological fallacy, the idea that we can understand a word or phrase's true meaning by going back to how it was used at some earlier point. Or, "It comes from this Latin root, and so therefore..." The silly arguments that people get it into about how decimate should mean to reduce by one-tenth. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Ben: I never want to fall into that trap. At the same time, by charting a particular history of a word or phrase, you can see how these semantic shifts that happen, and the ways that that might reflect the people's shifting understandings of the world. If it's a particularly politically charged word or phrase, then yeah, obviously it's going to reflect the politics of the time. If people are getting upset about Chinese immigration in the 1870s, or whatever, you have to be able to situate the language in the cultural frame in which it appears.

So again, that can be a very complex story. It's often very enlightening though to follow that path, follow that strand, and see where it comes from, even if that history has been forgotten. One thing with Trump is sometimes he'll use a term with a lot of historical baggage. He might say, "America first." Obviously that slogan has history in these isolationist groups, and things like that. And then people will say, "Oh, well, does he know about that history?" It doesn't matter, on some level. The same thing with what I've been writing about, I'm talking about invasion or infestation. It's not necessarily the case that we're just walking around with all of this cultural history in our heads. 

Very often, that's not the case. Each generation forgets or erases what came before. But that makes it even all the more important to be able to highlight that history so that erasure doesn't happen. And so, we're not just dealing with this as, "Oh, this is some new phenomenon that we're dealing with." But looking at those times in history where whether words are getting weaponized or serving some other kind of rhetorical power, that's really important to look at. Even just more generally, understanding the way that words work in the world does require this more nuanced approach and really getting into the history and cultural framing that it might have over time. Again, that's what I try to convey in the things that I write. 

Also, allowing people to see that talking about words and where they come from doesn't simply have to be a superficial exercise in talking about pet peeves. Because, unfortunately, so much of linguistic commentary of any kind falls back on this very small subset of words and phrases that people get upset about because they feel like they're being misused. And I write about that from time to time. I'll write about literally, or hopefully, or whatever people are complaining about. Again, we mentioned the idea that decimate, that came up recently as well, people were talking about that. 

That is such a small, small percentage of our lexicon in terms of what we are using when we communicate. And I find, when I dig deep into whatever word or phrase I'm talking about, this rich cultural history is there, and it's available to us. It's available to find, especially these days, again, with these digitized databases that allow us to chart this kind of history in a way that might have been difficult before. Those stories are there for the telling, and I'm just trying to show exactly how rich this history is in terms of not just our language, but any language.

Carrie: This brings up a question in my mind that I had never really thought of before. Is there anything that is new, rhetorically, going on, do you think? This might be a really hard question. The invasion rhetoric did seem to be new in the 1800s, is there anything going on now that doesn't have a precursor?

Ben: That's a good question, and one that might be hard to answer or might require a bit more thinking about it in hindsight. Sometimes these things are more obvious in retrospect. I don't know. I would have to think about that some more. Nothing is ever entirely new, obviously. It is very often just the ways of expressing it change according to the kinds of technologies and communication channels that we're using. So, obviously, how Trump expresses something on Twitter is new in the sense that no president has ever used that vehicle of expression before. And the way that he does things, yeah, in a sense has never been done. But once you get beyond that and, again, look at the usage of these keywords and phrases beyond whatever medium they might be appearing in, that's where you get those deep historical continuities as you can dig into.

Megan: Very cool. Yeah, you just gave him a hard question to end with.

Carrie: You can give him an easier question to end on if you want.

Megan: No, I think that was great. I think we hit the points that I really wanted to talk to you about. Yeah. Do you have any last comments? 

Carrie: What do you want to leave our listeners with?

Ben: Yeah, ultimately what I'm trying to do in my writing is even if we're just looking at a particular word or phrase, understanding the power that can be invested in it, particularly if it's something that's politically charged and used for rhetorical purposes. But really, any word or phrase can have a deep cultural history to it that is available to us to uncover. And so, I'm trying to tell those stories in a way that show that there are historical resonances in the past with what we're talking about right now. Whatever word or phrase might be in the news, there's always going to be something to say. There's some backstory that we can find. It may involve history that we remember, it may involve history that's been forgotten. But in any case, language and how it evolves is endlessly fascinating. And so, there's no shortage of these stories to tell.

Carrie: That's great. Thank you.

Megan: Thank you so much. 

Ben: Sure. 

Megan: Thanks for coming on the show. And we leave our listeners with one final message, don't be an asshole.

Carrie: Don't be an asshole. Thank you.

Megan: Thank you. 

Carrie: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio. Theme music by Nick Granam. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram  @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected], and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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