Today, words and expressions from psychotherapy are so popular in speech that they have even become the subject of jokes and memes. We talked with a linguist, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Higher School of Economics and the Russian State University for the Humanities Maxim Krongauz about the reasons for this popularity and how competent constructions like "How are you with that?" from the point of view of the Russian language.
https://medium.com/@PeterDruker/top-10-accounting-homework-help-sites-894724045184
Today in speech you can often hear the phrases “Not in the resource”, “It responds to me”, “Toxic environment”. Do you think it is possible to connect their penetration into live speech with the fact that now more and more people are turning to psychologists?
It is important to understand what we are talking about here. The terms from psychology sometimes became fashionable and took possession of the masses, however, not all, but cultured and educated ones. For example, "libido" at the time of the fashion for psychoanalysis or the relatively recent "Close Gestalt". Recently, literally 5-10 years, a whole stream of words related to the theory of trauma gushed forth.
https://medium.com/@PeterDruker/top-10-economics-homework-help-sites-88c4d8f1e412
And yet it seems to me that in this case it is more accurate to speak not about the language of psychology, but about the language of psychotherapy, and yes, one of the main reasons is the fashion for psychotherapy and visits to psychotherapists. This phenomenon, apparently, is a metropolitan one, which has engulfed Moscow, St. Petersburg and to some extent other large cities of Russia. I definitely cannot date it, but, in my opinion, it is still the 21st century.
I do not know any linguistic works about this in Russian material, although I would not be surprised if I suddenly find such a thesis or even dissertation work, this vocabulary is very noticeable. On Facebook, for example, discussions and discussions of individual psychotherapeutic words are constantly erupting. I myself initiated discussions on the words "toxic", "depreciation" and several others. It is extremely interesting that initially this is the vocabulary of a private conversation between two people in a psychotherapist's office.
https://medium.com/@PeterDruker/top-10-chemistry-homework-help-sites-ec14209d632a
The specialist with the help of these words explains to his patient (now, by the way, they say to the “client”) what is happening to him and how he is arranged. And only then the words break out into the public space, where they are used in conversations about oneself, and about other people and their actions. Who carries them around the world? First of all, the patients themselves. After all, visiting a psychotherapist has already become prestigious, which is easily transferred to words. But psychologists and psychotherapists themselves are becoming more and more public, appear on radio and television, in video blogs and podcasts, and speak the same language not with an individual patient, but with the public.
And how correct, from the point of view of the Russian language, phrases like "What is this for you?", "How are you with that?" and "Not in the resource"? Is this tracing paper from English?
I don't really understand what you mean by correctness. Such expressions do not refer to the written literary language, but to everyday Russian speech. At one time it was a great discovery and a big surprise that oral speech both lexically and syntactically differs from written and exists according to its own laws. In particular, oral speech is characterized by ellipsis (omission of words) and compression (compression of a phrase).
The question "How are you with that?" it seems to me in oral speech completely natural. The "what" question is less natural, but quite understandable. In Mikhail Segal's film "Stories", a forty-year-old man cannot find common topics for conversation with his young mistress and utters a wonderful phrase that is quoted in almost every review of the film: "What to fuck with you?" “About what” very clearly sets the idea of verbal communication, and in this case “discommunication”, so both grammatical and semantic incorrectness highlight the author's idea very clearly: sex without communication is not needed. Most likely, the expression "Not in the resource" is a tracing-paper, but to be sure of this, you need to know English psychotherapeutic discourse well. In general, it is impossible to talk about tracing paper in advance, it is necessary to check each individual expression, that is, it is necessary to find the corresponding English expression, the literal translation of which it is, and show that there was no such thing in the Russian language before.
In your opinion, what is the strong penetration of phrases into speech that does not sound very correct in Russian? Maybe that now the society is easier about changes in the language?
Perhaps about that too, although I'm not at all sure about that. There is always something in our oral speech that is fashionable and wrong from the point of view of linguistic purists. I think that in this case it is interesting to pay attention not to the correctness or incorrectness of expressions, but to really deep things. We have already discussed the fashion for psychotherapists, but this is not the main thing.
Today, all private topics cease to be such and their discussion is carried out into a common space. It is believed that one can and should talk about everything and with everyone. In fact, we are losing private and even intimate space. Accordingly, the language that was previously used in private space becomes public. In public communication, everything that seemed embarrassing and very personal is discussed. Communicative taboos are being destroyed. The famous Me Too movement began in 2017, and a year earlier there was an I Am Not Afraid to Say campaign, also dedicated to violence against women. For almost ten years, the topic of psychological trauma has become one of the main topics in our communication space, and there was no suitable language for this. But psychologists and psychotherapists had it. One of its important properties is an emphasized unemotionality, and one of its main techniques is a physical metaphor.
To describe the inner world of a person, such "material" words with a physically tangible meaning are used, such as "resource", "boundaries", "container", "channel", "toxic" (that is, "poisonous"), well, and "trauma", finally.
How long do you think such phrases will stay in the language?
Prediction is a pretty bad business, but so far I do not see any prerequisites for their departure. The topic of trauma remains central, psychotherapy is in demand, psychotherapists are doing their job.
And if we go back thirty years - how did we talk about it then? What words and phrases did you use to express your emotions and reflect?
Thirty years ago, we didn't talk about it at all. We haven't spoken publicly about sex, violence, trauma and breakdowns. Many topics were taboo, many were looked at differently. As they say now, we had different optics. To express the inner world, there were words expressing emotions: "love", "hatred", "anger", "fear" ... They were rather haphazard, a physical metaphor was almost never used (although, of course, expressions like "I have a stone in my heart" existed before).
Perhaps linguists have noted the penetration of words into speech from other areas besides psychology and psychotherapy? Which ones?
Of course, the field of psychotherapy is not unique in this sense. In the book "The Russian Language on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown", published in 2007, I described several lexical waves. One of the brightest was the "criminal wave" of the 90s, that is, the injection of gangster vocabulary into the general communicative space: "roof", "hitting", "racketeering", "killer", "filtering the bazaar", "hammering the arrow", "Lads", etc.
Of the recent waves, I would name a not very powerful, but also bright youth music associated with rap and other new directions. It was she who brought such a non-musical, but important word as "hype" to the Russian language.
No comments:
Post a Comment