The Business of Words

Wordsmiths, Linguists, and Other Language Workers

Crispin Thurlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138485242
• eBook ISBN: 9781351041768
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Business of Words examines the practices of 'high-end' language workers or wordsmiths where we find words being professionally designed, institutionally managed, and, inevitably, objectified for status and profit.

Aligned with existing work on language and political economy in critical sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the volume offers a novel, complementary insight into the relatively elite practices of language workers such as advertisers, dialect coaches, publishers, judges, translators, public relations officers, fine artists, journalists, and linguists themselves. In fact, the book considers what academics might learn about language from other wordsmiths, opening a space for 'dialogue' between those researching language and those who also stake a claim to linguistic expertise and a way with words.

Bringing together an array of leading international scholars from the cognate fields of discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, this book is an essential resource for researchers, advanced undergraduate, and postgraduate students of English language, linguistics and applied linguistics, communication and media studies, and anthropology.

1

The (grubby) business of words

What ‘George Clooney’ tells us

Crispin Thurlow

Figure 1.1Selling the cosmopolitan glamour of ‘wordsmith’ (author’s photo)

Arriving in Johannesburg some months ago, my attention was drawn to this large commercial billboard (Figure 1.1) suspended over one of the arrival halls. Hailed by repeated images of the same hip, smoothly attired young man, four one-word captions invited us to understand that this man embodied four quintessentially modern ways of being in the world: technologist, pioneer, wordsmith, cosmopolitan. The inherent relation of equivalence established between these four zeitgeisty styles or virtues was immediately striking to me. There was also something in the way they were compositionally linked to this particular personification of fashionable Africa as well as their emplacement in the continent’s busiest international airport. This was a spectacular instantiation of the global semioscape (Thurlow & Aiello 2007) with all its aspirational and elitist mythologies. Beyond this, however, the collocation of these four labels – technologist, pioneer, wordsmith, cosmopolitan – seemed to be saying something important about the social meanings of ‘wordsmith’ and about the cultural politics of language work at the heart of our book here. This otherwise light-hearted commercial framing of ‘wordsmith’ certainly exposes some of the ways in which language work is undoubtedly gendered but also classed.

To unravel the significance of ‘wordsmith’ in this South African advertisement, I will start by unpicking the other three labels a little; and I can do this with reference to what I already know. In earlier work, for example, I have commented on the often strategic ways in which technology – as in ‘technologist’ – may be taken up as a meta-level or symbolic resource for institutional elites to perform their status as ‘in-touch’ social agents (Thurlow 2013). Invariably, these kinds of synthetic or pseudo-social uses of technology obscure pure self-interest and privilege. Meanwhile, in other work, Adam Jaworski and I have examined the endless ways cosmopolitanism – as in the advert’s nominal ‘cosmopolitan’ – continues to be much a sought-after, highly profitable ideal in the tourist imagination (Thurlow & Jaworski 2010). As with all travel-by-choice, however, tourism is inevitably structured and sustained by privilege/inequality; it is also underpinned everywhere by a bourgeois romanticization of ‘being in the world’ (cf Beck 2002, on normative cosmopolitanism). And then there is the ‘pioneer’ identity. In this regard, I turn to the recent work of Gwynne Mapes (2018) whose study of elitism in food discourse reveals the decidedly neoliberal rhetoric of ‘pioneer spirit’. In her analysis, much like the airport advert, entrepreneurialism is celebrated as a story of individual innovation and effort, one which invariably erases or denies cultural capitals and structural advantages. It is all the essence of post-class ideology (Thurlow 2016) – that disingenuous discourse about opportunity, inclusivity and access in a world where class, apparently, no longer matters.

Within this wider cultural-political context, as well as in the immediate setting of the Johannesburg billboard, ‘wordsmith’ is embedded and emerges as both global citizen and neoliberal subject. Rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, wordsmith seems to bear the trendy cachet of cosmopolitan lifestyle as well as the politics of (dis)avowed privilege. Evidently, this is not just any kind of language work. It is actually unclear if ‘wordsmith’ here entails much work at all; in fact, all four labels index work but only in the most leisurely, care-free way. I will leave these resonances hanging for the time being, except to say that the Johannesburg advertisement paints a telling but not wholly fair image of wordsmithery – and certainly not the kinds which we examine in The Business of Words. As I propose at the end of this introduction, the world of work ostensibly apprehended by the label ‘wordsmith’ is a lot more variable and insecure. And this, I think, has much to do with the sometimes capricious ways language itself is variably appraised and (de)valued.

Generally speaking, the current volume is centred on the ‘working life of language’ which entails the professional design and institutional management of words, as well as their ideologically-structured commodification and regulation. In this sense, the book inevitably orients to scholarship in critical discourse studies which has long been concerned with the central, powerful role of language under advanced, neoliberal, or global capitalism (e.g. Fairclough 1999; Cameron 2000a; Blommaert 2005). The book is likewise aligned with work in critical sociolinguistics addressing the language work of often low-status, sometimes unrewarded or exploited language workers – most notably, Monica Heller, Alexandre Duchêne, and their colleagues (e.g. Monica Heller 2003; Duchêne & Heller 2012; Duchêne et al. 2013). In this case, however, we approach language work from a different but complementary angle by looking at often professionalized, relatively ‘elite’ domains, many of which have received little or no attention in discourse studies or sociolinguistics.¹ To distinguish these language workers from the ones Duchêne (2009) characterises as parole d’oeuvre, I prefer to use wordsmiths for labelling the more privileged kinds of professional language work at the heart of this volume – and this also includes academic linguists. I have elsewhere been using the term ‘language worker’ for some time to characterise the work of journalists and their heavy investment in, and aggressive policing of, other people’s linguistic practices (Thurlow 2007; see also Moshin & Thurlow’s chapter here; cf also Boutet 2001, on ‘travailleurs de la communication’). Duchêne’s chapter in the current volume offers a fuller reflection on these issues of labelling – simultaneously important and unimportant – and on the political-economic entanglements of these very different worlds of language work. Regardless of the blue-collar connotations of smithery (as in blacksmith), and even if their own status varies greatly, wordsmiths are at least relatively privileged vis-à-vis many other language workers.

It would be quite wrong – in theory or practice – to lump all wordsmiths together as being uniformly more highly regarded and/or better remunerated. Generally speaking, however, the different language worker covered in The Business of Words have much in common, not least of which they have either been completely overlooked in discourse studies (e.g. dialect coaches, PR officers, fine artists) or have never or seldom been attended to for their behind-the-scenes or taken-for-granted wordsmithery (e.g. judges, police officers). While some of these wordsmiths enjoy relatively high status and the outcomes of their work can be influential, the success of their language work often hinges on its being ‘unnoticed’ – in other words, being heard but not seen. (This, I will show later, is precisely what makes their position vulnerable and their work expendable.) In Goffman’s (1981) classic terms, wordsmiths are typically the authors of language, but only partially the principals, and never the animators. Well, almost never (see Innes’ judges or Jaworski’s artist). The often backstage nature of their work also means that their influence is partially obscured and their role often misrecognized by lay people. This ‘hidden’ influence may not always be such a good thing. One side-effect of the current volume is that we are visibilizing these wordsmiths and their work in at least some way.

For all their relative or apparent invisibility, wordsmiths’ work is in other ways arguably some of the most high-profile language work insofar as they are at least named (e.g. ‘dialect coach’, ‘PR officer’). This is quite unlike the impromptu language work done by, say, baggage-handlers (see Duchêne 2011). There are also any number of instances where even relatively privileged forms of language work are concealed and/or taken for granted. In this regard, I was reminded by Maame Nikabs (personal correspondence) of career counsellors at universities who spend so much of their time refining and polishing CVs and letters of application. This is also what makes Bronwen Innes’ chapter here particularly interesting, highlighting as it does the behind-the-scenes but core language work done by judges. In addition, titular recognition – as I show towards the end of my introduction – does not necessarily guarantee recognition of the linguistic skill or craft involved. Dialect coaching is definitely a profession rooted in linguistic expertise but, as dialect coaches sometimes complain, their work is often obscured in the credit lines of movies (see the opening of Thurlow & Britain chapter). Like many wordsmiths, it seems, the success of a dialect coach or PR Officer’s work is also marked by its being unnoticeable. Once again, questions of terminology – such as ‘wordsmith’ – are only partially helpful for analytic clarity; in other ways the labels obfuscate or erase important sociological variability.

In this same spirit of disclosure, The Business of Words seeks also to surface another domain of professional language workers who are often ignored or conveniently overlooked in discourse studies: linguists and/as academic wordsmiths. Indeed, the worlds of wordsmithery are worth studying not only for revealing processes of language commodification or for documenting the wider political economies of language. Rather, an investigation of these allied fields of elite/professional language work can help reveal our own no-less-elite investments in language, particularly in moments where scholarly ways of ‘doing language’ come into direct contact with others experts’ ways of doing things. In the current volume, these revealing, often fraught encounters happen in the context of school textbook publishing, the vetting of asylum seekers, the translation of minority languages, and the application of language policy in schools. Invoking bell hook’s (1989: 16) earlier observation that ‘language is also a place of struggle’, Felicitas Macgilchrist points nicely to the challenge linguists – broadly conceived – have in regarding (and respecting) the work of other wordsmiths.

In what remains of this introduction, I will fulfil a little more of my scholarly duty in the way of some further theoretical framing (after Thurlow 2018), before offering an overview of the book itself. I will then return to matters related to the wider political-economic and cultural-political ramifications of language work and wordsmithery with a reflection on the value of language, all stimulated by ‘George Clooney’.

Why language work? Why wordsmiths? Why linguists?

Language in late capitalism remains a fraught terrain, with high stakes for increasing numbers of players.

(Heller & Duchêne 2012: 19)

The social theory that undergirds much discourse studies (inclusively conceived) has come up with many terms for characterising the nature of large-scale economic shifts in rich post-industrial countries over the last fifty years or more: ‘post-Fordism’, ‘information society’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘liquid modernity’, ‘neoliberalism’, and ‘network society’ are well-recognized examples. Generally speaking, all of these terms are aligned with the idea that certain previously manufacture-based economies which centred around the production of goods have been transformed into economies now predominantly rooted in the provision of services and in the commoditization of knowledge. (To be clear, the kind of manufacturing and industrial labour that capitalism depends on has not been simply replaced, but rather displaced – located elsewhere; see Soja 1989; also Harvey 2006.) These far-reaching economic changes have inevitably had a transformative impact on, and emerged in conjunction with, the reorganization of cultural and social life. Specifically, and notably, much of this has centred around the rise of communication as a site of, and resource for, economic exchange in what has sometimes been characterized as the semioticization of contemporary life (e.g. Lash and Urry 1994; Baudrillard 1994[1981]; Boltanski & Chiapello 2007). In other terms, these processes are what Fairclough (1999) refers to as the ‘textual mediation’ of social reality which, in turn, entails what Iedema and Scheeres (2003: 318) refer to as the ‘new textualization of work’.

Given the central importance of communication, we find more and more workers turning to – or being obliged into – language as part or all of their working practice. Indeed, a number of critical language scholars like Norman Fairclough (1993, 1999), Deborah Cameron (2000a, 2000b, 2012) and Monica Heller (2003, 2010, 2011) are well known for tracking the ways language has been centred and affected as part of the broader post-industrial commodification of knowledge and communication. (See Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013 for an impressive review.) For many, like Heller and Cameron, the iconic example of these new forms of labouring – the poster children, if you will – are call-centre workers. (See also Woydack’s work referenced later in this chapter.) Here we find an industry, an entire workforce, of deterritorialized, ‘disembodied’ (i.e. on the other end of a phone) speakers wholly reliant on talk for a living (see also Boutet 2008). Notwithstanding, at the heart of Monica Heller’s research is an interest in understanding how many other, very different working contexts have likewise come to depend on language as both a process or vehicle and a product or outcome of labouring, what she dubs the ‘wordforce’. In fact, we live in a world where factory workers and medical doctors alike are no longer simply doing their work – making things or fixing people – but must also be able to reflexively account for their labour (Iedema & Scheeres 2003). In other words, they must be able to document it, discuss it and generally put it into words. This is, it has to be said, also a world where a range of low-paid workers are additionally exploited (and typically unremunerated and/or unrecognized) for their linguistic and, specifically, multilingual abilities (see Duchêne & Flubacher 2015; Piller & Takakashi 2013; and more generally, Duchêne et al. 2013). As Heller and Duchêne note (quote earlier) language working is ‘fraught’ business where the stakes are high. Having said which, the stakes are inevitably higher for some than for others.

Beyond these critical traditions, the academic literature is awash with research on language in the workplace, and there are hundreds of studies that examine any number of institutional and professional contexts.² With surprisingly few exceptions, however, discourse analysts, applied linguists and other language scholars tend to write about the same general domains. Examples of this are to be found in large anthologies and handbooks in these allied fields; for example, chapters falling under the rubric of ‘Institutional Settings’ (Gee & Handfor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 The (grubby) business of words: What ‘George Clooney’ tells us
• Part I Language work and the business of words
• Part II Wordsmiths and professional language work
• Part III Linguists and political economies of expertise
• Index