IRRATIONALITY IN LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
Surely language and communication, like just about any other between-people (anthropological?) subject, has its share of certain topics which deserve to be labelled as irrational (reserving judgement), and it’s only to fair to expect that someone in my position i.e. as a freelance translator / professional linguist be able to address and discuss them with some sort of confidence. But first we have to know what these things are and recognise them when we see them.
Google defines “irrational” as “not logical or reasonable”, and I won’t dispute the accuracy of that, but I imagine that, to many, that’s just too vague and over-generalising, and it could lead to confusion: something that cannot be explained is not necessarily irrational by default. I believe that understanding of conclusions in this domain can be arrived at easily enough from a perspective of cognitive bias and stuff. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/16-british-photos-that-just-cant-be-explained In this link, number 1 is my favourite. Number 2 most likely features some bloke who wanted to take his pet pig for a flight; note also the sign saying “I am the first pig to fly”, which he would have wanted people to notice and read, or do you think it’s an accident? Like, he fully expected that it would become a “human interest story”, because people are like that sometimes. Number 7 can only be two neighbours going about their daily business during wartime – it’s a black and white photo, after all, isn’t it? In Number 9, I don’t know how the duck and ducklings got there either, but the policeman can only be holding the gate open as he persuades them out of the place, where they don’t belong. Number 12 is probably just three people going to a fancy dress party or returning from one. But if it could be definitively proven that I am wrong about any of this, go ahead and enlighten me.
But if I may, I would now like to discuss the first thing I labelled as irrational based on nothing but my own independent thought/reasoning (no external suggestion or anything)… even if I have my theories. I’m talking about how talking about sports at work has now been labelled “sexist” by some; newspapers have started writing about this, with some essentially, and quite reasonably, being like, “Has the world gone mad?” This could only come from the so-called “woke” generation; someone should ask Katie Hopkins what she thinks about these pretentious stuck-up losers. And yet, if you ask me, I wonder if it all basically started with women relating sports (certainly from the perspective of their popularity in society at large) in general to laddish types (the kind of blokes whose lives pretty much revolve around three things: beer, football and page 3 girls’ tits), and the admittedly credible hypothetical claim that such people, even if it were obvious enough that they are well-intended, tend to be insensitive, and in the case of women in particular. Indeed, if I upset or offend anyone by suggesting this speak right away, but it seems to me that if there’s one thing women accuse men (all men in general) of being too insensitive toward, it’s women. But seriously, when you’re talking about sports, you’re talking about sports, which is a very different subject from sexism and what it really means, and in general people would not be inclined to believe that men would knowingly try to impede women from talking about sports just as they do – and this is the first thing I labelled as irrational based on nothing but my own independent thought/reasoning. Capisce?