“RULES FOR RITUALS AND INSULTS” (LABOV, 1972)

by Adonis Enricuso

RELATED STUDIES:

Sounding (Dollard 1939 and Abrahams 1962) Sounding in Chicago (Kochman, 1970) The Dozens (Abrahams 1962: fn. 1)

TERMS FOR THE SPEECH EVENTMost common terms: the dozens; sounding;

signifying

sounding -favored in Philadelphiawoofing - common in Philadelphia and elsewherejoining-used in Washingtonsignifying - used in Chicagoscreaming - used in Harrisburgcutting, capping and chopping - used in West Coast

Shifts of meaning:Chicago: sounding for initial exchanges

signifying for personal insultsthe dozens for insults on relatives

New York:The dozens seem to be more specialized, referring to rhymed

couplets of the form.playing the dozens for ritualized insults directed against relativessounding for ritualized insults

including personal insults of a simpler form

 

THE SHAPE OF SOUNDS

Favorite opening:I hate to talk about your mother, she’s good old soul.She got a ten-ton pussy and a rubber asshole.

General style:I fucked your mother on top of the piano.When she came out she was singin’ the Star Spangled Banner

The couplet with the greatest effect:Iron is iron, and steel don’t rust,But your momma got a pussy like a Greyhound Bus.

 

AIM OF THE STUDY:

to describe the basic formulas in terms of syntactic structures, especially with an eye to the mode of sentence embedding.

METHODOLOGY

Samples were drawn from two extended sounding sessions in which sounds were used rather than simply quoted.1. On a return trip from an outing with the

Jets: 13 members were crowded in a microbus; 180 sounds were deciphered

from the recording made in a 35-minute ride.2. A group of session with five Thunderbirds in which Boot, Money, David, and Roger sounded against each other at great length. For those 60 sounds the record is complete and exact identification is possible.

DATA ANALYSISYour mother is (like) ____. The Comparison or identification

of the mother with something old, ugly, or bizarre: a simple equative prediction (the simplest)

Your mother got ____. The series of sounds with the form Your mother got so and so (simple from a syntactic point of view)

Your mother so ___ she ___. More complex comparisons with a quantifier, an adjective, and an embedded sentence of the type b or other prediction

Your mother eat ____. Does not involve similes or metaphors, but portrays direct action with simple verbs

Your mother raised you on ____. The pattern with simple syntax, particularly effective in striking at both the opponent and his mother

I went to your house… Sounds directed against the household and the state of poverty that exists there

Other anecdotal forms Some are quite long and include the kind of extra detail which can give the illusion, at the outset, that an actual story is being told.

Portraits The sounds that demand syntactic complexity. The most common are those which place someone’s mother on the street as a whore.

Absurd and bizarre forms Sounds which locate some profoundly absurd or memorable point by a mechanism not easy to analyze.

Response forms: puns and metaphors One formal feature of a sound which is essentially made for responses: ‘At least my mother ain’t…’

 Attributes and Persons Sounded on: 

A wide but fairly well-defined range of attributes is sounded on.

 Mother, grandmother, etc. - may be cited for her age, weight (fat or skinny), ugliness, blackness, smell, the food she eats, the clothes she wears, he poverty, and of course her sexual activity

 Sounding as talking about someone’s relatives (mother, father, uncle, grandmother, aunt) follows an order of popularity.

FINDINGS/RESULTS

Such insults can be general or traditional, or it can be local andparticular

The presence of commercial trade names in the sound is verystriking; Bosco, Applejacks, Wonder Bread, Dog Yummies,Gainesburgers, Gravy Train

Included are the names of the popular figures in the mass media: JamesBond, Pussy Galore, Flipper

The street culture is highly local, and local humor is a very large part of thesounds.

Local humor is omnipresent and overpowering in every group – it is difficultto explain in any case, but its importance cannot be ignored.

Obscenity does not play as large a part as one would expect from thecharacter of the original dozens.

Many sounds are obscene in the full sense of the word.

The speaker uses as many ‘bad’ words and images as possible– that is, subject to taboo and moral reprimand in adultmiddleclass society.

Many sounds are ‘good’ because they are ‘bad’ – because thespeakers know that they would arouse disgust and revulsionamong those committed to the ‘good’ standards of middleclass society.

The rhymed dozens are all uniformly sexual in character;they aim at the sexual degradation of the object sounded on. Butthe body of sounds cited departs widely from this model: lessthan half of them could be considered obscene, in any sense.

Many sounds depend upon the whimsical juxtaposition of avariety of images, upon original and unpredictable humor whichis for the moment quite beyond our analysis.

But it can be noted that the content has departed very far fromthe original model of uniform sexual insult.

EVALUATION OF SOUNDS

Most sounds are evaluated overtly and immediately by theaudience.

The primary mark of positive evaluation is laughter (thenumber of persons laughing).

A really successful sound will be evaluated by overtcomments like: ‘Oh!’, ‘Oh shit!’(most common), ‘God damn!’,or ‘Oh lord!’.

Intonation is also important; when approval is to be signaledthe vowel of each word is quite long, with a high sustainedinitial pitch and a slow-falling contour. The same words canbe used to express negative reaction, or disgust, but then thepitch is low and sustained.

A more forceful more of approving sound is to repeat thestriking part of the sound oneself.

Negative reactions to sounds are common and equallyovert. The most frequent is ‘That’s phony!’ or ‘Phonyshit!’, but sounds are also disapproved as corny, weak,or lame.

In general, sounding is an activity very much in theforefront of social consciousness: members talk a greatdeal about it, try to make up new sounds themselves,and talk about each other’s success.

Sounding practices are open to intuitive inspection.

Members take very sharp notice of the end result of asounding contest.

The rules and patterning of this particular speech eventare therefore open for our inspection.

THE RULES FOR RITUAL SOUNDING 

Sounding, as a speech event has a wellarticulated structure.

These rules can be broken: to hurl personalinsults and to join in a mass attack on oneperson.

But there is always a cost in stepping out ofthe expected pattern; in the kind ofuncontrolled and angry response whichoccurs or in the confusion as to who is doingwhat to whom.

Ritual insults vs. Personal insults

A personal insult is answered by a denial, excuse,

or mitigation.

A sound or ritual insult is answered by longersequences, since a sound and its response areessentially the same kind of thing, and a

responsecalls for a further response…

 

FOUR GENERAL FORMULATION OF THE INTERACTIONAL STRUCTURE OF SOUNDING (BASED UPON THE SUGGESTIONS OF ERVING GOFFMAN):1. A sound opens a field, which is meant to be

sustained. A sound is presented with the exception that another sound will be offered in response, and that this second sound may be built formally upon it. The player who presents an initial sound is thus offering others the opportunity to display their ingenuity at his expense.

2. Besides the initial two players, a third-person role is necessary.

3. Any third person can become a player, especially ifthere is a failure by one of the two players then engaged.

4. Considerable symbolic distance is maintained and serves to insulate the event from other kinds of verbal interaction.

Note: When a sound becomes too ordinary – too possible – we can then observe a sudden switch in the pattern of response to that appropriate for personal insult. This can happen by accident, when a sound is particularly weak. For example, in the Jet session:I went in Junior’s house ‘n’ sat in a chair that caved in.You’s a damn liar; ‘n’ you was eatin’ in my house, right?

CONCLUSION

Sounds are directed as targets very close to the opponent (or at himself) but by social convention it is accepted that they do not denote attributes which persons actually possess: in Goffman’s formulation, symbolic distance maintained serves to insulate this exchange from further consequences.

The ritual convention can break down with younger speakers or in strange situations – and the dangers of such a collapse of ritual safeguard are very great.

Rituals are sanctuaries; in ritual we are freed from personal responsibility for the acts we are engaged in.

Any of these moves to depersonalize the situation may succeed in removing the dangers of a face-to-face confrontation and defiance of authority. Ritual insults are used in the same way to manage challenges within the peer group, and an understanding of ritual behavior must therefore be an important element in constructing a general theory of discourse.

ASSESSMENT The study has not only come up with adequate

findings on the syntactic features of the sounds themselves but also some relevant patterns concerning how these sounds operate. For instance, it is very informative of the study to categorize the addressees of the insult, the content from which the sounds are based on and most especially how the speech event itself culminates (either with approval or disapproval coming from the member-listeners. However, it partly fell short of discussion on the mode of sentence embedding. Limited to the description of the syntax of the sounds, this study does not involve any explanation on how certain sounds came to be or developed. It would then be interesting to consider further exploration of the syntactic attributes.

The method used by the research is naturalistic, and its use of two data gathering procedures further validates its validity. Hence, it would be possible for future researchers to replicate such approach.

A kind of breakthrough, this study manages to support its claims with related studies and a strong reference point (that of Goffman). It also provides a comprehensive set of samples in order to analyze the data. In effect, it becomes easy for the readers or other researchers to read and study. Lastly, the categorization of sounds (from the data) is of a wide range. Hence, the researcher has contributed a great deal of reference for succeeding researchers under the same or related discipline.

The conclusions are indeed reasonable and logical. The remaining issue to argue about is on the syntactic aspect of the study itself. It can be observed that the findings and conclusions mainly focus on the semantic interpretations. It would have been more interesting if the mode of sentence embedding or certain syntactic characteristics had been made some analysis of as well.

To me, the methodology and the data analysis both paved way to a kind of standard for studies in Sociolinguistics. The extracting of sample data (from recordings) and the categorizing are of great value. It sets the bar for future researchers that realities in our society are indeed eligible for scrutiny and academic analysis. I also think some statistical analysis and support could still strengthen this study. On the other hand, the study is limited in terms of how the findings correlate but did not lead to further interpretation of the linguistic feature i.e. sentence embedding. The researcher surely had reasons and protocols behind. This side I understand and respect. My only concern is on some possibility of exploring the study more deeply and bringing it to another level of analysis with the current social and linguistic conditions.

Finally, this study is very helpful to the students of Applied Linguistics who wish to understand how studies in Sociolinguistics are done. This is very enlightening since Sociolinguistics itself remains a controversial issue in the academic world especially when scientific validity is being considered. Nevertheless, it is actually more worthwhile to see how this study provides knowledge and experience to the students of the field. After all, we only know something until we do, experience, or live with it.