One of the features of my job as a university professor is that I am always in an environment of young people: my classes are populated mostly by teenagers and twenty-somethings, and throughout the campus community, whether in the dining halls, library, department workroom, bookstore, or computer labs, UW-W students are at the counters.\u00a0 One of my favorite places to go on campus is the Williams-Katchel fitness complex.\u00a0 I have a year\u2019s membership and work out in the spacious, well-appointed weight room nearly every day.\u00a0\u00a0 Every time I arrive, hand over my faculty ID to a student at the counter, who then files it away.\u00a0 My customary encounter when I finish my work out and need to retrieve my ID card is to approach the desk . . .<\/p>\n
Me: \u201cHi!\u201d<\/p>\n
Student: (Looks at me in anticipation, though without any verbal response)<\/p>\n
Me: \u201cLencho\u201d . . . . with an \u201cL\u201d . . . .\u00a0 L-E-N-C-H-O . . .<\/p>\n
Student: (Finds\u00a0my\u00a0ID\u00a0card in the card file\u00a0and hands it to me)<\/p>\n
Me: \u201cThanks, you have a nice day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Student (optionally): \u201cYou too.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is something mildly disconcerting to me about this exchange, as it seems that it is hard for the student to actually play a verbal role in the conversation.\u00a0\u00a0 Although some of my colleagues think that students on our campus and across the nation are increasingly disrespectful and rude, I am reluctant to agree, and am more inclined to think that there is a linguistic explanation for this behavior: \u00a0in English, we have no simple grammatical program to allow different social classes to interact.\u00a0 \u00a0Like many European languages, Slovak has \u201cT\u201d forms and \u201cV\u201d forms, corresponding to when speakers are talking within their social network (= \u201cT\u201d form) or across the social divide (= \u201cV\u201d form). \u00a0Customarily, these distinctions are said to reflect the hierarchical relationship between speaker and audience, but my experience with American students makes me wonder if the honorific distinction in other languages not only instructs the nature of hierarchical conversation, but also in some crucial manner actually encourages it to take place.<\/p>\n
My Slovak students could pop their heads into my office with the engaging yet deferential . . .<\/p>\n
Slovak: \u201cDobr\u00fd de\u0148, pan profesor, m\u00f4\u017eem vas vyru\u0161ova\u0165?\u201d<\/p>\n
English: \u201cExcuse me, sir, but may I disturb you for a second?\u201d<\/p>\n
Deference in English is not obligatorily displayed throughout the inflectional system of the language, as it is in Slovak (in the passage above, \u201cvas\u201d would be expressed \u201cta\u201d in a conversation of \u201cin-group\u201d participants).\u00a0 Instead, English requires \u00a0the use of titles and various rhetorical devices, leaving \u00a0an obsequious, groveling aftertaste that young people in the land where \u201call\u00a0men are created equal\u201d just naturally avoid. \u00a0In Slovak, class distinction is simply registered as it must simply to establish the full speaking context; there is nothing intentional or designing about it, hence no self-diminishing overtones.<\/p>\n
Risking a certain amount of overstatement, Americans seem to live without role models or a sense of history.\u00a0 This here-and-know, nobody-is-any-better-than-me, \u201czen\u201d aspect of the American sensibility may have something to do with American can-do spirit, a sense of limitless possibilities, of personal innocence leading to a sense of entitlement.\u00a0 However, knowing your place, and having a language which can readily express it in every act of communication is no small thing. There is an element of . . . . if not friendliness, maybe something akin to connectedness . . . that allows Slovaks across the age divide to talk to one another naturally, in fact, spurring them on to do so, and in the process, nurturing a kind of social involvement that I can only envy as a \u201cSlovak living abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the features of my job as a university professor is that I am always in an environment of young people: my classes are populated mostly by teenagers and twenty-somethings, and throughout the campus community, whether in the dining … Continue reading