as small as a world and as large as alone

11:02pm September 15, 2014

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

squidids:

madeofpatterns:

lichgem:

dreamylupin:

reminder: don’t ever make fun of someone with a stutter, lisp, or any other speech problem.

Also wait patiently for people with speech problems to finish their sentences. Don’t try to finish it for them, or tap your foot and sigh, or just exclude them from the conversation

Also: Making fun of George W Bush’s speech patterns doesn’t make you an awesome liberal; it makes you an ableist. Don’t do it.

One thing though is that they’re actually not his natural speech pattern. There’s evidence that he deliberately exaggerated it to sound like an “ordinary American.” Sometimes people are making fun of him for consciously appropriating someone else’s accent, which is different from making fun of actual people who have that accent (especially since the accent has class connotations, so making fun of everyone who has that accent is not-okay). And also different from making fun of his other speech patterns (like stuttering or using weird word/sentence structure).

Yeah but the thing is most people aren’t making fun of him for appropriating an accent.  They’re making fun of the way he talks.  It’s different.  I’ve seen it.  It’s just totally and completely different.  If he talked that way naturally they’d still make fun of him.  And they still make fun of the people who talk the way he tries to sound as if he talks.  So, no, I’m not buying that it’s okay to make fun of his speech just because he puts on an accent.  Because that’s not the actual reason people are making fun of his speech.  They’re making fun of his speech because they think that talking a certain way makes you stupid, and they do not care whether or not it was his natural speech pattern.  Like, I remember when it became common knowledge that he was faking this speech pattern, and the way people made fun of his speech didn’t suddenly change at that point, people just suddenly had a ready-made excuse.

Exactly. I have very low tolerance for the pseudo-folksy acts that a number of politicians think will help them. I am also a legit speaker of a highly stigmatized dialect, with a legit speech problem. And I have yet to see anything good about this man’s policies and actions.

But that is not what this was about. We’re talking about open mockery that is both ableist and generally classist in intent. (Bizarre as that classist element may be in this particular case.) If you want to criticize his actual harmful behavior, that’s fine; that could indeed include the weird pseudo-populist act which does flow over into affected speech. Making fun of the way someone talks so that you can feel superior is a totally different matter. That’s the problem being addressed here.

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