In one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, Homer -- after having a fortuitous run-in with an inflatable cow -- joins the music festival "Hullabalooza," where he tours as a sideshow act. His talent: taking cannonball shots to the stomach. At one point in the episode, two teenagers are watching the festival, when they notice Homer:
Teen 1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Teen 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen 1: I don't even know anymore.
Ours is the generation of irony. Whereas punning was once in vogue, we now get off by saying exactly what we don't mean (okay, maybe puns aren't completely out of vogue, but they definitely tend to be followed by apologies). Especially in an intellectual environment like Dartmouth, where students are constantly trying to make a point of just how metacognitive they are, irony is used on many levels, for many ends.
Still, whether we're making snide comments about "awesome" Hanover winters, or self-awarely adopting all the stereotypical mannerisms of the "sweet frat dude," there seems to be a shared, underlying assumption: if I say it ironically, I don't actually believe it; or, my "real" thoughts are safe from the influence of my "fake" language.
I admit that such an assumption is probably safe if we're talking about Dartmouth weather; no amount of "awesomes" is going to make you believe that the November-May slush has been lifted from the ground. But if we're dealing with more involved, elaborate and prolonged displays of irony, I'm not so sure the rule applies -- I think it's possible we could end up like Teen 1 from The Simpsons, unable to fully discriminate between our "true" thoughts and our ironic ones.
I understand that the notion of our language influencing our thought might not be popular with most Dartmouth students; as I mention above, we pride ourselves on being self-aware, self-legislating individuals. And, I'm by no means trying to argue that the causal relationship is unidirectional. That said, there are good reasons for believing that the kinds of language we use do, to some degree, shape how we think.
A Stanford study found that the way in which people conceived of time varied according to the way their native language talked about time-related concepts. Whereas Mandarin speakers tended to think of time intervals as organized on a vertical axis, English speakers thought of time horizontally. In another study, Russian speakers -- who have separate words for light blue and dark blue -- demonstrated an advantage over English speakers at discriminating between lighter and darker blues. And while some might dismiss these cases as being removed from, and irrelevant to, our everyday use of language, I believe they gesture towards a wider phenomenon that many of us have experienced.
In a previous column ("Appropriate Frattiness," May 19), I referred to a group of kids from my high school who thought themselves defiant because they would make flagrantly racist, sexist and homophobic comments, followed by: "Just kidding." At first, these guys didn't mean what they were saying -- I believe that -- but they repeated their "jokes" so often that, by the time graduation rolled around, many of them had come to hold legitimately bigoted attitudes. I even remember having a conversation with one of them, during the Democratic primary, in which he basically admitted to me that he wouldn't vote for Obama, for racial reasons alone.
Now, maybe there were ulterior reasons for the intensification of prejudice in my classmates; I don't know any of them well enough to discard all potentially confounding variables. Still, it seems probable that their habitual language patterns took a measurable toll on the nature of their beliefs and desires.
This problem also occurs at Dartmouth. Once behind closed doors, many of our fellow students delight in saying and doing things that are commonly held to be offensive and demeaning. And, although these comments and actions are almost always veiled in irony, such a veil is delicate at best. Under the right conditions, the behind-closed-doors behavior of even the most self-aware person can emerge into the public. The result is a display of bigotry.
So, if we want to eliminate such damaging displays (as I'm sure most of us do), I think a good place to start would be to sacrifice a few of our ironic pleasures, and refrain from saying things that we would be afraid to believe.
