All hail the czarina

I always wondered why people whose job descriptions entailed overseeing somewhat impossible projects came to be called "czars" (or "tsars"). Johnson, the language blog at The Economist, considers the issue, and proposes an alternative.

Over at The New York Times, science writer Natalie Angier offers these thoughts on why not ma'am.

What the frak

StraightMan and I lag behind the curve when it comes to TV - and no doubt other things, but the point that I am making here is that we just became hooked on the reimagined "Battlestar Galactica."

Striking is (what I perceive as) the constant use of the word "frak."

Jesse Sheidlower, in his book, The F Word (Oxford University Press 2009), includes frak as "(a partial euphemism for) FUCK, in various senses and parts of speech":

Coined on, and chiefly associated with, the television show Battlestar Galactica. In the Original Series (1978), used exclusively as an interjection; in the Reimagined Series (2003-2009), used more broadly as a euphemism for many forms of FUCK, both figurative and literal. Spelled frack in Original Series scripts, frak in the Reimagined Series, apparently because the producers wanted it to literally be a four-letter word (Sheidlower 2009:55).

A more complete explanation on the uses of frak in the Twelve Colonies is available at the Battlestar Wiki on the topic, which explains also that the reason for the invention of the term had been to get around FCC regulations concerning language.

Which demonstrates, again, the cultural and social process that is language. The focus on the FCC is on policing particular words, which is based on (and promotes) esp. narrow understanding of language. The funny thing is that we absolutely know what Starbuck and the rest of the crew mean when they utter such phrases as "frak me."

BTW, StraightMan and I just started watching Season 2, but I am not sure that I have heard "frak you" - or possibly that crosses a kind of line? "Frak me," like "fuck me," is what one says to acknowledge one's own predicament - somewhat self-deprecating, it can be played to comic effect (esp. when the word is "frak"...) In contrast, "frak you" is hostile and possibly not funny at all.

***

Frack has been on my mind, too, because we live in an area where hydraulic fracturing, aka hydro fracking or fracking, are esp. live wire issues. Drive around, and you will spot "No Drill, No Spill" signs cropping up on lawns aplenty.

It might seem "obvious" that fracking comes from fracturing, but it seems also to me that there might have been a bit of deliberate wordplay involved in coining the term. Ground penetration, drilling, the pumping of fracturing fluids: We hardly need Dr. Freud to interpret for us the kinds of metaphors and images that frequently become used to describe human interactions with their environments, esp. when those interactions are intended to extract resources from the environments.

Language matters

StraightMan was devasted by the following post on The Chicago Manual of Style's Facebook wall:

CMOS 16 Sneak Peek: In author-date citations in reference lists, put article titles in quotation marks and use headline capitalization. With this change, the two systems of Chicago documentation (author-date and notes-bibliography) become easier to learn and use, since the stylings of elements will be the same in both systems. Only the order of the elements varies, as before.

In fact, he just had spent part of his morning "fixing" the citations in an article that he has been writing. We have a CMOS 15 on our shelf. The purchase of which we invested $55 during the writing of my dissertation. It is a little disconcerting to think that it might be obsolete: I thought good style never went out of fashion?

***

Is it just me or does there seem to be a growing interest in linguistic concerns? Arguably, language and all its uses and effects matter all the more with the use of technologies and social media, like the Internet and Facebook. The fact that the folks at CMOS are hip on Facebook seems to prove this point. Also, the point that a lot of people who engage in writing for at least some part of their day are spending too much time on Facebook - 9,508 people "like" CMOS.

In addition to the revival of the On Language column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, a blog on language has been introduced on The Economist's Web site. It is called "Johnson," which no doubt causes much snickering in certain quarters, but which the blogger helpfully reminds us is named for dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson. Were The Economist based in the U.S., it might have been called "Webster." (See above.) I esp. like Johnson's reaction to Sarah Palin's "refudiation" of critics of her inventing the term "refudiate."

Much as I enjoy them, however, these erudite essays cannot be all there is to press coverage of language matters.

Language is the news. In the early days of the Iraq invasion, the need for Arabic specialists was much discussed - the college where I teach is in the process now of developing a minor in Arabic, which students themselves are demanding. The proposition to make English the nation's "official" language has been afoot for some time, but there seems to be renewed attention to the English-only movement, esp. with anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona.

A critical point that I tried to make in my linguistic anthropology class is that no language is inherently better or worse than any other for human communication: French is not more beautiful than German. Arabic and Chinese are not in any objective sense the hardest to learn in the world. The dominance of English results not from some kind of linguistic superiority - for example, it is argued that it is more efficient and therefore a better language for science and technology - but from processes of standardization and planning, which continue today.

It is interesting to consider how the "policing" of language works. It is for this reason that I feel as half-hearted about so much talk about Palin or George W. Bush before her: You say plain talk, I say linguistic gaffe. Is plain talk really plain? Or is it the appearance of being plain? Who among us does not commit such gaffes? Can a person's proper or improper use of language really tell us all that about him or her? What is proper and improper use of language in the first place?

More important, what are the stakes involved here? Now we have ventured into assumptions about what language is all about - and they need to be examined.

I wonder whether or not leaving language matters in the hands of the pointy heads in fact might trivialize their significance and more importantly, deflect attention from the consequences for We the People in our everyday lives.

There seems to be a need today for linguistic journalism, along the lines of science journalism, to help interpret what everyone is talking about, from so-called political correctness to Palinisms and back again.

***

On a related note, Lexington's column in the July 15th issue of The Economist offers the immodest proposal of banning the use of "great" and "exceptional" (and their variants) in political speeches in the U.S.:

Just think what a relief it will be, once Lexington’s ban comes into force, to be able to debate the role of government on its merits, without bringing providence into it.

The ban will also liberate America’s politicians to speak like normal people. At present, failing to lard their speeches with God and greatness can get them into serious trouble.

For me, another reason to like Lexington - aside from the quaint and lovely practice of having an individual assume the column's identity (versus the column assuming an individual's identity - is his? / her? assessment of David Brooks, a columnist whom I love to dislike:

In 1997 David Brooks, writing then for the Weekly Standard and now at the New York Times, wrote an essay called “A Return to National Greatness”, complaining that America had abandoned high public aspiration and become preoccupied with “the narrower concerns of private life”. It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, Mr Brooks said, “as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness”.

If that was ever good advice, it is rotten advice now. Americans are not unhappy because they lack an energetic government; many think Mr Obama’s administration too energetic by half. The last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness. Put such language away, says Lexington. America is indeed a great and exceptional country. But it isn’t talking about it that makes it so.

Talking like a spook

It was a question nagging at me ever since I heard about the FBI's arrest of a network of alleged Russian spies earlier this month - but, like, how could you not know? Did they use speech coaches?

Apparently, this has been baffling also to linguists and phonologists, as an item in the July 12 & 19th issue of The New Yorker reports - b/c in fact, the alleged spies did not use speech coaches. Instead, they claimed to be from Belgium or from Quebec.

Which sociolinguist Joshua Fishman described as rather a smart move: "Being a spy, all you have to do is count on American ignorance," Fishman said. "They were trying to use something the Americans don't know how to pigeonhole."

Belgium plays well into this blindspot. Arguably, Flemish (a variation of Dutch) would sound like Greek to most Americans. Canadian French, too, in that it has the reputation among American speakers of French as being "different" and "harder" to understand than the kind of French, so-called Parisian, that is taught in U.S. schools as "correct."

Societal monolingualism and linguistic stereotypes: Threats to national security, ce n'est vrai?

Linguistic parenthropology

I confess: Sometimes when I ought to be just a parent, I find myself drifting off and looking at the situation like a parenthropologist. Frankly, it is probably to Beanie and Bubbie's benefit b/c detaching like this prevents me from screaming (at least more than I already do - I admit that I am not a paragon of gentle talk and placidity 24 / 7), walking away without looking back, or cackling demonically as I charge my head over and over into the side of the house. Which is having its cedar shakes restained and the window and porch trim repainted, so I might need to charge into something else that is tattier. Like our neighbor's house.

The particular field of study in linguistic anthropology that interests me is language socialization, which describes the ways in which caregivers treat language as both the end and means of "teaching" their children appropriate / proper behavior. Think about the intense interest of American parents in the development of their children's ability to talk. Think also about what parents consider important to teach their children to say - like "please" and "thank you."

A lot of parenting simply is talk. Parenting books offer as much coaching on what to say as on what to "do." For example, StraightMan was raised in a household where "stupid" could refer to actions or things, but not people, including oneself, which is advice I have read elsewhere, and which I find sensible and sensitive, and try to follow. The same goes for "bad": I can say that I do not like Bubbie's behavior, I can tell him that he will eat his supper or else I am putting him to bed right now, I can tell him that he is upsetting, irritating, or annoying me. That is the point, I guess: To raise his awareness about the effects that his behavior has on my (or another person's) perceptions of him and as a result, behavior towards him as well. It all might sound a bit precious, but I think the significance of talk ought not be underestimated in parenting. To sound grandiose for a moment, it might be that we can model in how we talk and listen with our children the kind of social world that is possible to create.

I think a lot about the importance of parents and talk because whatever it is that we teach children, they take with them as they interact with other children and create (or recreate) a social world. Linguistic anthropologist Marjorie Harness Goodwin has written two books on girls' talk among themselves, He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (1990) and more recently, The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (2006), which I recently started skimming.

Here is a passage that especially caught me:

Dispute is an interactional accomplishment, and one of the most important loci for the development of friendships and peer relationships. Neither an aberration nor something to be avoided at all costs, it is, rather, constitutive of children's dealings with one another, establishes group cohesiveness, and provides a primary way that activities are constituted. Despite such recognition of the importance of conflict in everyday life, and in particular among peers, most contemporary feminist scholarship has not only avoided analyzing conflicts between women, but actively promoted a view of women as essentially cooperative (Goodwin 2006:33).

This prompted me to recall an exchange that I overheard during a play date at our house a few months ago. "I'm not mean," I overheard Beanie tell her friend. "You always want to make the rules." Her friend said, "You're hurting my feelings." Beanie said, "You always say that." Then her friend said, "I'm the guest so you have to let me." Stormy silence. I think at this point, I intervened with a snack.

At the time, I think I thought something like, are you playing together, or are you just going to goad each other the whole time? (Probably also something like, this was a mistake...) In fact, Goodwin notes, "Children observed in multiparty participant frameworks display an orientation toward sustaining and promoting rather than dissipating dispute" (33). Goodwin suggests, "Dispute for children provides a way for playing with language, asserting one's position, for displaying affective stance, and consequently, character, sanctioning violators, and rearranging the social order" (33).

Looking, as a parenthropologist, at the exchange I described above as an interactional accomplishment, it is clear that the girls indeed were sustaining and promoting their dispute (neither backing off) to assert their positions (whose rules would guide their play), and making their assertions on the basis of character (being mean) and affective stance (hurt feelings).

That said, I probably could do with less interaction and more accomplishment when I am the parent supervising the play date.

Still, I appreciate the reminder, from Goodwin, that after all, children get along differently than grown-ups do. In part, they still are learning how to get along: Even when they are as interactionally accomplished as Beanie and her friend, they remain novices. As such, they test some of the proprieties that they hear their grown-ups reference. In particular, what I think is interesting is that the idea of "the guest" ends the exchange (along with juice and Goldfish, which I guess could be read as an enactment of hospitality in this context).

Just the other day, during a play date with a different friend, the idea of "the guest" became referenced again, with different effects: This time, the two girls were talking about what their game should be. They had been playing "hamsters," but Bubbie came home and wanted his hamster, which the friend had been holding. The friend suggested that she could find a different stuffed animal for the game. Beanie offered to let her play with her hamster, and she herself would play with another animal. The friend said no. Beanie said, "You're the guest, so you should have it."

Eventually, they agreed that they both would play with other animals. Thus ended the game of "hamsters," and began the game of "puppies." We are talking, after all, about two six-year-old girls.

I guess they learn, these children of ours - and they can learn from each other.

Cursing and swearing

Although it could, the title of today's post is not necessarily intended to describe my current state of mind or being.

Rather, it is referring to the class that I am preparing to teach. For Friday, I plan to have students in Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology read an excerpt from Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word, which is a dictionary (published by Oxford University Press) of f-words, beginning with absofuckinglutely and ending with zipless fuck.

"The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think," Sheidlower writes. So much for what you might have heard about the f-word's purported origins as "fornication under consent of the King" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge," which I think I remember hearing from, believe it or not, a CCD teacher. "In reality, fuck is a word of Germanic origin," Sheidlower tells us. "It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings such as 'to strike' or 'to move back and forth.'"

Why is it that the f-word has come to be considered "cursing" or "swearing"?

Linguist Timothy Jay, in his book, Why We Curse: A Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech (2000), reminds us that cursing "refers to several uses of offensive speech. Technically speaking, [however,] cursing is wishing harm on a person (e.g., eat shit and die). But the term cursing is used comprehensively here to include categories such as: swearing, obscenity, profanity, blasphemy, name calling, insulting, verbal aggression, taboo speech, ethnic-racial slurs, vulgarity, slang, and scatology" (9).

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in The Anatomy of Swearing (1968), reminds us: "Swearing serves clearly definable social as well as personal purposes. A social purpose? But has not swearing always been socially condemned and proscribed? It has. And that is precisely the point. Because the early forms of swearing were often of a nature regarded as subversive of social and religious institutions, as when the names of the gods were profanely invoked, their use in such a manner was strictly forbidden" (1).

Fan-fucking-tastic, no?

Parenting like an anthropologist

For me, parenting is like being an academic in that it all feels like almost a fraud at times. One day soon, the person in charge will realize that I am just passing at being competent.

I hear myself teaching a class and I am surprised that I sound like I know what I am doing. The same goes with the raising and rearing of my children.

Aside from my academic interest in parenting advice literature, I typically disdain it. I might not always know exactly what to do, but I also am not convinced that anybody knows that much better.

That said, a book that I like is Betsy Brown Braun's Just Tell Me What to Say: Sensible Tips and Scripts for Perplexed Parents (2008).

For starters, I can relate to the title.

What I like is that this book starts with the recognition that so much of parenting involves talking with and listening to children. In other words, skills that we have learned - and that we need continually to hone.

Braun's advice is based on recognizing the strategies and tactics of conversation that both parents and children use. For example, in a discussion about telling truths and lies, Braun offers specific suggestions:

Set your child up to tell the truth. If you are quite sure that your child has committed a misdeed, don't ask him if he has.

Never ask a question to which you already know the answer. If you know who spilled the milk, don't call out, "Who spilled the milk?"

We need no training in anthropology to recognize the importance and meaning of language in parenting. Yet, I think we parents could take more time to consider. This kind of reflection comes too often to me as an after-thought about what I should have said.

Anti-anti-gay talk?

There have been classes that I loved teaching despite the students in them. I have clung desperately to my own interest in the material to carry me to the calm and gentle waters of the semester’s end – or at least dumped me on its sands. In such situations, StraightMan and I have come home and told each other: “If only the students would get out of the way of my teaching…”

Sometimes, however, the stars and the planets align: This semester, I am teaching a class on linguistic anthropology. This is the class that I spend all of my time obsessively preparing because I’m lovin’ it.

The students in linguistic anthropology seem to like to talk about talk. They also have a lot to say. I think this is in no small part due to the fact that they want, even need, meaningful opportunities to reflect on the importance of ordinary behaviors – which is part of “popularizing” anthropology.

Last Friday, we talked about the use of the phrase: “No homo.”

Students in my class explained that “no homo” becomes attached to guys’ comments, like compliments, to each other. As in: “Nice shirt.” A pause. Then: “No homo.”

The Wiki on “no homo” traces the origins of this phrase to hip hop music, in which “it parenthetically asserts that the (male) speaker is not a man who has sex with men, whether identified as gay or otherwise, after an utterance that might give that impression.”

Wikipedia also notes: “A parallel term is ‘pause’, which has the same meaning and is often used by Jay-Z, among others.”

Is this just a joke, as some students in my class claimed? Or is it an example either of undisguised gay bashing or of homophobia veiled as humor, as other students suggested?

Both the phrase itself and the extent to which it apparently is used were news to me. I still recoil when I hear students say "that's so gay," which I recall from my own high school days. So, as a college professor today, I have been surprised to hear "that's so gay" used so blithely and so often. (For the sake of being able to situate me, you could call me a Gen Xer.) I remember, in college, having a gay friend call to my attention how thoughtless and careless it was for me to use "that's so gay" as a way to say "that's so stupid."

A generous reading of the use of phrases like “no homo” and “that’s so gay” among college students today is that it is “ironic” – that is, it can be just a joke or it can be an intentional and in-your-face playing on expectations and pushing of boundaries. In this reading, “no homo” is not quite the same as gays and lesbians reclaiming “queer” for themselves, but it shares a certain sensibility, especially when we take seriously the language ideology of hip hop, from which “no homo” has been adopted, as a form of “speaking truth to power.” If opinion polls can be trusted to tell us something about what people think and believe, and if support for gay marriage can be read as some kind of marker of at least recognizing the rights and humanity of gays and lesbians, then my students belong to the generation of Americans who could make a claim for being “post-hate.” I can see the possibility, then, that my students could argue that “no homo” is anti-anti-gay.

However.

During the discussion, I suggested comparisons between the use of “no homo” and Mock Spanish, which I discussed in an earlier post. If “no homo” is intended to be just a joke, then like Mock Spanish, “getting it” depends on what linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill called “instant, unreflecting access to a cultural model” that carries a “negative residue of meaning.” In this case, getting the joke means accessing a cultural model of gay men - and accessing a cultural model of gay men also means accessing cultural models about gender, sex, and sexuality more generally.

This discussion of “no homo” emerged from consideration of Deborah Cameron’s “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity” (1997), which describes Cameron’s re-reading of a male college student’s paper about “men’s talk.” My students agreed with Cameron that “gay” talk (like “no homo” or “that’s so gay”) is not uncommon in conversations among male college students.

The talk is not so much about “actual” gays or gayness, but guys (i.e., other male college students) “being gay” – or in Cameron’s words, “failing to measure up to the group’s standards of masculinity or femininity.” For example, she considers why a group of male college students described another individual as “being gay” based on their observation of his continual “hitting on” a particular woman – whom they also evaluated in extremely uncomplimentary terms. “I think this is because the deviance indicated for this group by the term ‘ gay’ is not so much sexual deviance,” Cameron writes, “as gender deviance.”

So, another reading of “no homo” is this: When male college students remark on a nice shirt or a new haircut or so on, their own understanding of why they then might add, “No homo,” is not necessarily that they are disavowing their comments as “hitting on” other guys – that is, they do not fear being misrecognized as “actually” gay. Instead, they are calling attention to the fact that they know, as guys, that they are not supposed to care or notice, let alone comment upon, shirts and haircuts. In general, caring, noticing, and commenting are not masculine behaviors.

In addition, I think it is telling that the examples that my students used were compliments about shirts and haircuts, which are seen as particularly “gay” concerns.

"Gay" talk, then, is not only about gay men in "actuality," but about sex and sexuality more generally. That is, the use of "no homo" seems to be about talk that might be charged with the possibility of sexual meaning. It is not just that men today are not supposed to care or notice physical appearance or attractiveness in other men, but that they also are not supposed to comment on women's shirts, haircuts, and so on - lest they themselves become labeled as lecherous and / or their compliments become construed as harassment.

Of course, uttering "no homo" also allows "actual" lechery and harassment to continue, but masquerading as sarcasm, even wit - and the joke is on the person who apparently does not have enough of a sense of humor to laugh at it.

Keeping up with The Times

The pep talk that anthropology ABDs receive when, for example, they do not receive an invitation for a job talk (or they happen to glance at a bleak report in The Chronicle of Higher Education) is that academia is not your only option: More than half of PhD's work "outside" the ivory tower. To be frank, it did not always make you feel peppy to hear this.

I was filled with thrill and envy, however, to learn that a linguistic anthropologist has become the new columnist for "On Language." I like that he starts with a consideration of "no." He even talks about anthropologists and kinship to boot! (Not in connection to "no.")

What a nerd am I.

The problema with Skippyjon Jones

Then using his very best Spanish accent, he said, ‘My ears are too beeg for my head. My head ees too beeg for my body. I am not a Siamese cat…. I am a chihuahua!
-- Skippyjon Jones (2003)

As an anthropologist, I have two words to describe the above passage: Mock Spanish.

You know Mock Spanish. If you are born-and/or-bred American - English-speaking and monolingual - then you have heard it on the playground and even in the classroom as well as at the supermarket or at the water cooler. You might be able to recall recent instances of speaking it. For example, said without ambivalence or ambiguity as a flat denial to requests for candy, car, or casual sex: "No way, Jose." Or, delivered in a comparable dead pan, part cyborg and part Austrian: "Hasta la vista, baby."

Mock Spanish is not necessarily a direct mockery of Spanish or of speakers of Spanish.

"Speakers of Mock Spanish are likely to view their use of Spanish as indexing positive personal qualities," writes Rusty Barrett, a linguistic anthropologist, in a 2006 article, "Language Ideology and Racial Inequality: Competing Functions of Spanish in an Anglo-Owned Mexican Restaurant." In other words, when Anglos (a term that is meant to contrast with Latinos) use Mock Spanish, they are "just joking" or even exhibiting their easy familiarity with another language and culture.

This is why the suggestion that Mock Spanish might be "racist" inspires insistent objections, including accusations about "political correctness." For Anglos, Mock Spanish is a sign of education and open-mindedness - the opposite of the ignorance and closed-mindedness associated with "racism."

Even more important, Mock Spanish is a sign of having a sense of humor. There is no meanness intended here, the reasoning goes - just a bit of fun.

Yet, the yuks of Mock Spanish derive from stereotypes about Latinos that circulate among Anglos. Familiar uses of Mock Spanish include the "borrowing" of words like manana, which for Spanish speakers refers simply to "tomorrow," but for Anglos connotes procrastination. In other instances, borrowings include obscene or vulgar terms like "cojones" or "caca."

Or consider this equation for constructing Mock Spanish: "el" + English word + "o" - which yields such formulations as "el cheapo" or "el stupido."

Stereotypes about Latinos might not be referenced directly in Mock Spanish, but linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill noted that "the negative residue of meaning" remains attached to its uses. "Those who hear Mock Spanish jokes, for instance, cannot possibly 'get' them - that is, the jokes will not be funny - unless the hearer has instant, unreflecting access to a cultural model of 'Spanish speakers' that includes the negative residue," Hill wrote in her 1995 article, "Mock Spanish: A Site for the Indexical Reproduction of Racism in American English," which introduced the term and the concept to scholars.

Here is where we need to consider "racism." Again, I quote from Hill's 1995 article: "To find an action or utterance is 'racist,' one does not have to demonstrate that the racism is consciously intended. Racism is judged, instead, by its effects: of successful discrimination and exclusion of members of the racialized group from goods and resources enjoyed by the racializing group."

We need to consider that racism is not now, and in fact might never have been, only about "hate." Hill suggests that a significant reason for why we need to pay attention to Mock Spanish is this: "In a society where for at least the last 20 years to be called a 'racist' is a dire insult, and where opinion leaders almost universally concur that 'racism' is unacceptable, how is racism continually reproduced?"

At this point, let us return to Exhibit A: Skippyjon Jones.

"Yip, Yippee, Yippito!
It's the end of Alfredo Buzzito!
Skippito is here,
We have nothing to fear.
Adios to the bad Bumblebeeto!"

Then all of the Chimichangos went crazy loco.
First they had a fiesta.
Then they took a siesta.
But after waking up, the Chimichangos got down to serious bees-ness.
-- Skippyjon Jones

On the one hand, the rhymes here are catchy and to be honest, clever. For example, the use of "bees-ness" not only references a "Spanish accent," but also the character of Alfredo Buzzito, the bad Bumblebeeto.

On the other hand, Skippyjon Jones not only (indirectly) references well worn stereotypes that are instantly and unreflectingly accessible to the grown-up's reading the book to their children, but it also reproduces them for another generation - in the form of what might be experienced otherwise as an entertaining, gentle, and sweet little story.

I think it proves Hill's point that parents, writing reviews on amazon, will praise this book because it "introduces" Spanish words to their children - and that the critics become accused of missing the point of the story and being self-righteous and having no sense of humor. In fact, the expectation that a children's book must be innocent seems to be used as itself a defense of Mock Spanish. That is, because this is "just" a children's book, it cannot possibly contain "racism."

It is exactly because I find the book, with its use of Mock Spanish, to be catchy and clever and cute that I also find it concerning.