Why I Love To Blog: Reason #45 -- The Language Continues To Evolve -- Nothing About The Bakken -- September 8, 2021

If you want to maintain your sense of humor and/or your sanity, do not read this post. It has nothing to do with the Bakken except one slight connecting dot. 

So, here goes. 

I'm reading / re-reading David Abulafia's 700+ page opus on the history of the Mediterranean Sea: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, c. 2011.

I came across a term I did not recall seeing before, "Sublime Porte." I will let readers google it. One hint: it's a metonym. [And that's the one connecting-dot to the "Bakken," also a metonym.]

I have rarely used the term "metonym" on the blog. After seeing "Sublime Porte" I wanted to link one of the posts in which I used the word, metonym.

I happened across several posts on the blog in which I used "metonym," but this post I do not recall, from September 19, 2018:

From buzzfeednews:

In the essay, Ghomeshi wrote about his name becoming a "metonym for everything from male privilege to the need for due process" and about being shamed and humiliated in the wake of the sexual assault allegations against him.

Does anyone recall Ghomeshi? 

I had completely forgotten all about Ghomeshi.

I misspelled Ghomeshi's name while googling and was immediately confused. There are two "Ghomeshis," Jila and Jian, brother and sister, and both with same / similar interests. 

One was accused of sexual assault some years ago, and when googling the back story, I found myself reading about Jila. I thought it strange a woman was accused of sexually assaulting several women .... and then realized I was reading about the XX individual, the "sister" of the XY individual, the "brother" who was actually accused of sexual assault. 

Googling Jila Ghomeshi, I came across this article, near the top if not the top, suggesting it has widespread "appeal":

BIPOC or IBPOC? LGBTQ or LGBTQ2S+? Who decides which terms we should use?

This article was fascinating, mostly because of this:

It is incumbent on us to use the level of granularity that fits the context and when unsure, ask the people we are introducing or speaking about how they want to be identified. Where group membership is contested (for example, should women include people who do not menstruate? Should people who menstruate be called women?) opting for a superordinate term (adults, humans, people) is one way for non-members to avoid taking a side.

That paragraph fascinated me because not less than thirty-five minutes earlier I read a Fox article, "Person-A Non Grata: AOC mercilessly mocked for using gender-neutral term to describe women."

Link here: https://www.foxnews.com/media/aoc-mocked-term-menstruating-person-describe-women.

In case that link breaks, the lede:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was roundly mocked on Twitter for using the term "menstruating person" instead of women in a recent interview. 

On Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez appeared on CNN’s "Anderson Cooper 360" to discuss Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s statements on the Texas Heartbeat Act which prohibits abortions after six weeks. 

She claimed that the law was actually not "about supporting life" and instead was about controlling "women’s bodies" as well as "any menstruating person." 

"None of this is about supporting life. What this is about is controlling women’s bodies, & controlling people who are not cisgender men. This is about making sure that someone like me as a woman or any menstruating person in this country cannot make decisions over their own body," she said.

Why is this important?

Jila Ghomeshi's article was dated May 25, 2021, just a few months ago. It's hard to believe AOC did not read that article.

It is risky to "blow-off" AOC as an idiot. I don't know if she is well-read or not, but my hunch is she is well-read, and she is meeting a lot of folks and holding strategic meetings with well-read folks, even if she is not well-read. I've always maintained that folks who get "to the top" are not dumb. They get to the top for a reason.

On another note, good, bad, or indifferent, language continues to evolve. 

Whether you like her or hate her, or somewhere in between, perhaps agnostic, I wouldn't blow off AOC as an idiot. She knows what she is doing and each day she becomes a more formidable politician. Fox can write disparaging articles about her but my hunch is she will be in office (if she wants) longer than I will be alive. 

Think Cher. 

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Metonym

Later: I should have added this to the original post above ....

Originally posted January 19, 2015.

Trope: A literary trope is the use of figurative language – via word, phrase, or even an image – for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. Kenneth Burke has called metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony the "four master tropes."

I think we all "know" irony and metaphor even if we don't always use the former correctly. The word "metonym" is less well known but used all the time, such as "Wall Street" to refer to the US financial sector, or "Hollywood" to refer to the US film industry.

I see "synecdoche" often but never seem to remember what it means. Very similar to synonym but a bit more imaginative, such as "hired hands" for workers; "bread" for food; "cat" for lion, and so forth.

Early on with the blogging I discussed how "the Bakken" was used in at least three different contexts. I began using "the Bakken" as a literary trope for US unconventional oil some years ago.

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Barrel of Monkeys One