This morning, I was listening to a news story on narcocorridos, the ballads that celebrate and extol the lives and adventures of Mexican drug dealers. There are other kinds of corridos, such as those that tell the mostly bitter tales of migrants who cross the Sonoran Desert in a clandestine and desperate attempt to enter the United States undetected, corridos migrantes.
The convention of rendering such phenomena in italics marks them as strange and exotic. We do not have narcocorridos in the United States. They are a Mexican thing. Or at least, that is what we are supposed to believe given the mode in which we are introduced to them, with the italicized font signaling that the idea is of another world, or at least of another culture, in any case, something that is beyond our understanding or at least our complete understanding. Italicized words, and concepts, live in a middle ground, a neutral zone, a purgatory, a bardo.
A great example of the fetishization that such renderings impart upon words and ideas comes from the development of Sigmund Freud's concept of the id and its subsequent adoption into other languages. Freud took it originally from Latin, the third person pronoun meaning 'that', as a translation of the German Es, which translates into English as 'it'. Freud and his translators must have sensed a general and elemental earthiness and simplicity in the third person pronoun, taken from Western Civilization's proto language, that captured and communicated the sense of a basic human instinct.
What might the word have been had Freud spoken English as his mother tongue? The 'it', the 'pit' the 'core'? In any case, had the word originated in English, which is just as apt as German to go to Latin for its technical terminology, or should I say nomenclature, and had it been rendered in English, would Freud's ideas have carried the same weight and rhetorical force, or was the exotic nature of the terms, id, ego, superego, with 'id' being the sexiest, key to their power and popularity?
Although I appreciate the sentiment that lies behind the practice of using foreign language terms in a news story that is otherwise produced in English, I wonder if in fact the fetishization that is an unfortunate part of the linguistic and cultural preservation that is being privileged does not in fact do more harm than good. After all, if the story had spoken about 'drug dealer songs' instead of 'narcocorridos', might the English-language listener might be more likely to feel that the story was a part of his or her world rather than something happening in another place? Is not the more mundane 'migrant songs' more likely to root the problem of illegal migration in domestic rather than foreign soil, and souls?
And so when we speak of plants, do not the special terms of the botanist, gardener and arborist - stamen, pistil and corona, for example - lead humans to believe that plants are stranger than they really are? Is not bark just a kind of skin, after all? Chickens and pigs have skin, but cows and horses have hide, and it seems valuable to make this distinction, but does not this focus on difference obscure a similarity that is equally present and evident, if not more so? What effect would there be, for instance, if we were to speak of a plant's eyes and ears, of its brain, and of its soul? Or indeed, about its life?
The convention of rendering such phenomena in italics marks them as strange and exotic. We do not have narcocorridos in the United States. They are a Mexican thing. Or at least, that is what we are supposed to believe given the mode in which we are introduced to them, with the italicized font signaling that the idea is of another world, or at least of another culture, in any case, something that is beyond our understanding or at least our complete understanding. Italicized words, and concepts, live in a middle ground, a neutral zone, a purgatory, a bardo.
A great example of the fetishization that such renderings impart upon words and ideas comes from the development of Sigmund Freud's concept of the id and its subsequent adoption into other languages. Freud took it originally from Latin, the third person pronoun meaning 'that', as a translation of the German Es, which translates into English as 'it'. Freud and his translators must have sensed a general and elemental earthiness and simplicity in the third person pronoun, taken from Western Civilization's proto language, that captured and communicated the sense of a basic human instinct.
What might the word have been had Freud spoken English as his mother tongue? The 'it', the 'pit' the 'core'? In any case, had the word originated in English, which is just as apt as German to go to Latin for its technical terminology, or should I say nomenclature, and had it been rendered in English, would Freud's ideas have carried the same weight and rhetorical force, or was the exotic nature of the terms, id, ego, superego, with 'id' being the sexiest, key to their power and popularity?
Although I appreciate the sentiment that lies behind the practice of using foreign language terms in a news story that is otherwise produced in English, I wonder if in fact the fetishization that is an unfortunate part of the linguistic and cultural preservation that is being privileged does not in fact do more harm than good. After all, if the story had spoken about 'drug dealer songs' instead of 'narcocorridos', might the English-language listener might be more likely to feel that the story was a part of his or her world rather than something happening in another place? Is not the more mundane 'migrant songs' more likely to root the problem of illegal migration in domestic rather than foreign soil, and souls?
And so when we speak of plants, do not the special terms of the botanist, gardener and arborist - stamen, pistil and corona, for example - lead humans to believe that plants are stranger than they really are? Is not bark just a kind of skin, after all? Chickens and pigs have skin, but cows and horses have hide, and it seems valuable to make this distinction, but does not this focus on difference obscure a similarity that is equally present and evident, if not more so? What effect would there be, for instance, if we were to speak of a plant's eyes and ears, of its brain, and of its soul? Or indeed, about its life?
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