Robert May

speaker

328 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2015 last heard Jun 2015

Robert May’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Elucidations · Episode 72: Robert May discusses pejorative expressions · 25 Jun 2015 podcast

Uh in fact you had to be told, you know, Limey was a bad word for British people, you know, who knew.

Let me be clear, you know, again because going back to the point you made earlier, Emily, uh that these words you know, there there's a great gradation in their charge and those are just reflective of how different kinds of histories of societies and nations and people and cultural issues.

You know, we take nigger to be really just absolutely super powerful.

We take

type to be pretty powerful.

We take WAP, uh Limey not really very much at all.

From our point of view, I don't have any particular explanation of that from the point of view of the analysis of what these words mean.

Okay, all I'm saying is there's this particular semantic space these words occupy.

I think it's an anthropological question, it's just a question of social psychology, it's a question of personal psychology and so on, why there is this gradation.

I don't think that's a particularly philosophical question.

I just say the same thing if I said, you know, I'm a man.

Or I'm a Jew.

I mean it let me let I mean people understand are very reflective about language.

They have a very sensitive

grasp of word meaning, of how words change their meaning, of the force of words, of you know, all sorts of things.

We are very sensitive about the nature of our surroundings and the nature of our behaviors in those surroundings.

So sure, if I say I am queer, I may be doing that evoking what I take to be a common understanding of the fact this word has recently changed from being pejorative to non pejorative.

And that might be part of the underlying, you know, overall content in the broad sense that I'm trying to get across when I make my utterance.

So other words which never had any pejorative association may not carry that.

But from taking that queer is not a pejorative term, when I say I am queer, I'm not saying anything different than I'm a Jew or I'm a man or anything like that.

Showing 261–280 of 328 · page 14 of 17