Feb
4
D’son Dialect
February 4, 2013 | Tagged cooperj, Dickinson, literacy, slang | 2 Comments
“I’ll meet you at the cushies after I finish up at the lib, then we could do the Caf or the Snar, and I may need to stop at the D.Den.”
See to me, I heard that message loud and clear. But I’ve used those terms in front of non-Dickinsonian’s, like my boyfriend when he comes to visit, and I lose him. There is definitely a suite of Dickinson vocabulary that one must acquire to communicate with other Dickinsonians. Even as I am writing, I am realizing that “Dickinsonian” is one of those vocabulary words that are definitely not recognized outside of Carlisle.
We pride ourselves as being a prestigious and selective institution of higher education. With that comes a certain level of exclusivity. As a student here, you belong to a special club, united around the shared Dickinson experience. And as such, this exclusive club has developed a language and a required level of literacy to filter out the outsiders.
As a freshman, you could be mistaken for one of these aforementioned outsiders if you don’t pick up the learning curve quickly enough. Fortunately, it shouldn’t take too long or too many interactions with upperclassmen to get a hang of where and what the “cushies” are, or that we are all fans of abbreviations.
In reflecting upon or own brand of Dickinson literacy, it is making me realize more clearly that while literacy can help raise people up through the metaphors of adaptation, power and grace, it can also be socially divisive. Our previous reading on the three girls from Galveston, TX started to illuminate how people can be left out of different aspects of American life due to their differing levels of literacy. But now I understand that it happens on even smaller social scales. The selectiveness of Dickinson literacy creates in-groups and out-groups, people who are “in the know” and then those who feel excluded.
We can see this within organizations and social groups on campus. There’s a certain lingo that the people involved with Greek Life utilize that can exclude others at times. There’s even a discernable difference between English major and biology major literacy. And while I think literacy is a gift and a powerful tool for people, the difficulties in making it universal is striking me as a sad fact of society.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Jessy, the penultimate paragraph of this strong post makes a solid connection–on a kind of scale model–between last week’s reading and D’son lingo. If universal literacy itself is not a reasonable goal (Scribner and Brice would say we never could have ONE literacy…), then would it offset the “sadness” of that “fact” to aim for broader, more inclusive education about the power and politics of literacy?
… and: what are cushies?
Jessy, I really like how mentioned that the vocabulary we use at Dickinson can come and go and then that there is an exclusivity to it. Do you think that the reason we turn the vocabulary on and off is because we want to keep it exclusive and special to our Dickinson community? Or are we simply aware of the fact that others will not actually know what we are talking about and we will look like freaks if we talk to them in our own little language? When I went home, there was a moment when I asked a co-worker if she wanted to go the the caf. At this moment, I questioned whether it was weird to call it that outside of the dickinson walls and it felt really weird to say when I was not on campus.