You have heard, I am sure, as I have, that language influences the way we think. That is true, I believe, in ways that are even more complicated and subconscious than we'd like to admit.
I'm thinking about this because I just had a thought reading this highly interesting post from my friend Helen's blog. (You should read it. It has cool pictures from a museum. And if you go to her home page, the post just before this one is about monkey poop and highly interesting.)
Anyway, she has this picture of whales carved out of ivory from walruses. And here's the thing. I realized that because we call ivory "ivory" and not, say, tusk, I think of it as a substance unto itself. Not that we call the stuff that grows off elephants' and walruses' face ivory, but more that they have tusks made of ivory. In my head, ivory is like something you mine and then the elephants and walruses have their tusks made of it.
This is, of course, ludicrous, but it's reflective, I believe, of how we relate to ivory. That is, we don't see it from the elephant's perspective (my big tooth), but rather, in giving it a name, we were already commodifying it and thinking of it as a raw material. I find this disturbing.
If I were industrious, I would research whether cultures indigenous to the habitats of elephants or walruses have names for ivory that better reflect its existence as a body part more than a raw material. I hope they do.
In the meantime, we must keep questioning the perspective that our language dictates to us. It may be enforcing values we don't really believe in.
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When I was in grad school, I worked the Saturday morning breakfast shift in the dorm cafeteria, serving up the hot foods to my classmates. When folks would come through the line, I would ask if they wanted "sliced pig" (bacon), "shredded cow" (corned beef), or "ground turkey" (sausage) with their eggs. People complained that I had grossed them out, and my manager asked me to stop.
I don't know about ivory, but I know some languages name their meat like Rachel did - in Japanese, for example, buta is pig and buta-niku is pig meat.
I actually thought about discussing the meat thing. I was fascinated to learn that our food words are from French and our animal words are from English. (I learned this from some book about the history of English, which was quite fascinating.)
Lately, I've been wondering if certain other animal foods will never really get a chance to become mainstream because they don't have a separate food name. Lovely meats such as rabbit and duck. It's my sense that if someone wanted to give them food names now, they would be relentlessly mocked and accused of "white-washing" the eating of animals.
Oh, and I should have said that the origins of the meat words are because the English people were the ones tending the animals and the French people were the ones eating them. So it's a class thing, back to post-Norman invasion period of English's development.
(Which you probably both knew, but I include anyway to complete the thought.)
That is totally cool and I didn't know it, so there you go. :) I'm slow at getting back to check on these comments. Sorry. Hi!
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