languagehat.com

In the Aug. 5 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating article, “The Naked Face,” about a psychologist named Paul Ekman and his studies of facial expressions. It turns out that, despite what Margaret Mead thought, people all over the world, whatever their culture, interpret facial expressions the same way; furthermore, with sufficient training we can learn to interpret not just the obvious smiles and grimaces but every fleeting “microexpression” that reveals what another person is trying to hide. In fact, we can learn to tell whether someone is lying, and pretty much what they’re thinking.

But it’s not just that our expressions reflect our feelings; they also cause our feelings. Ekman and a colleague began noticing that when they practiced moving their facial muscles into expressions of anger and distress, they felt terrible. They did a study in which one group was told to “remember and relive a particularly stressful experience” while the other “was told to simply produce a series of facial movements…. The second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first.” In another experiment, people who were holding a pen between their lips (making it impossible to smile) did not find cartoons as funny as people who were holding a pen between their teeth (forcing them to smile).

So do we want to learn to read faces? What would be the effect? Ekman quotes Erving Goffman, who “said that part of what it means to be civilized is not to ‘steal’ information that is not freely given to us.” Goffman wrote:

When the secretary who is miserable about a fight with her husband the previous night answers, “Just fine,” when her boss asks, “How are you this morning?”—that false message may be the one relevant to the boss’s interactions with her. It tells him that she is going to do her job. The true message—that she is miserable—he may not care to know about at all as long as she does not intend to let it impair her job performance.

Would it be better for him to take note of her sadness? Would we benefit by recognizing the constant play of emotions that surrounds us, or would it make it impossible for us to function? Read the article — I’ve barely scratched the surface. And reflect on what language is, and what it’s not.

In the July 22 issue of The New Republic, Margaret Talbot demolishes Carol Gilligan and her latest book, The Birth of Pleasure, at considerable length; in the course of so doing, she produces the following impeccable definition of what it is to grow up, mentally and spiritually:

“But the cult of the young, the reverence for spontaneity, the romance of incomplete socialization: all this is itself a kind of immaturity. As most people get older, they realize that the first thing that they say or think is not always the truest thing; that their first thoughts are not usually their best thoughts; that what they write in a diary is not necessarily betrayed by what they say out loud; that the edited self, or the polished thought, is not an inferior or corrupted copy of a deeper, truer, better self. They realize that the truth that a child knows about divorce, say, or more generally about the social conventions of adults, is not a superior truth but a partial one, important to know and to credit, but necessarily occluded, like a glimpse through a crack in a door. The Catcher in the Rye is no longer their favorite book.”

Of course, many people get older without ever growing up.

Yesterday evening I saw I Live in Fear at the Film Forum (not a great movie, but an amazing performance by a young Toshiro Mifune as an aged factory owner who wants to drag his unwilling family off to Brazil to escape the H-bomb). Afterwards I stopped off at Kati Roll for a chicken-and-egg-roll dinner (delicious, but I kept wondering which came first), walked across Washington Square Park where I listened to a salsa band play to a good-sized, appreciative crowd, and continued on to Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway, where I stopped in before hitting the subway home. I went down to the basement and found it set up for a reading, with rows of empty metal chairs; the reading seemed to be over, but people were still milling around. I looked towards the back of the room to see if the featured author was still there. A man wearing nothing but black racing shorts was standing talking to people; encasing his head was what looked like a large fishbowl attached to a white plastic neck ring. He may well have been the featured author; I didn’t sully the purity of the moment by staying to ask questions. I hit the subway home.

The start of a Robert Irwin review (intriguingly titled “Arabian Antwerp”) in the June 28, 2002 Times Literary Supplement:

“In his Origines Antwerpianae (1569), Goropius Becanus argued that not only was language divine in origin, but that its original form was Dutch. More specifically, he identified the Primal Language as a dialect of Antwerp. The ancestry of the burghers of that city could be traced back to the sons of Japeth, and the latter were folk who had not become linguistically confused by working on the Tower of Babel.”

There you have human egomania and illogic in a nutshell: My language is the best language, and the original language to boot! There are many examples, but I like the obscure specificity of this one.

Irwin continues: “Becanus’s thesis commanded more support in the sixteenth century than it is likely to receive today.” I love the TLS. (Wearing my editor’s hat, however, I must point out that the second “that” in the quoted paragraph would have been better omitted.)