Words matter
Me, yesterday morning, in the post titled It’s all because she said no:
The people in charge of news headlines and first paragraphs and the like really need to stop doing this:
Spurned advances provoked Texas school shooting, victim’s mother says
“She provoked me so I killed her and nine other people.”
Also? Simply saying no to a guy’s invitation or request is not “spurning” anything. It’s just not accepting an offer you don’t want. Women are allowed to do that. Women are allowed to say no. Women are allowed to say no without being killed or raped or beaten up or blamed for it. Women are not walking talking merchandise that is there for the use of other, more important people called “men” – women are themselves people, and they are allowed to determine for themselves whether they want to be friends or lovers with Mr X.
Occasional drive-by commenter Skeletor commenting on the post:
Ophelia, I’m not actually sure what your objection to the specific word “spurned” is. I thought maybe my understanding of the word was incorrect, so I looked it up, and the first definition (“to reject with disdain”) seems to fit the mother’s description of what happened.
In general, spurning is definitely a thing. I’d guess most people know someone who asked someone out and got laughed at or ridiculed.
To be absolutely clear, even the worst spurning does not justify a mass shooting. And this guy sounds like he had a spurning coming if he couldn’t take a polite no for an answer.
And I certainly agree with your sentiment that writers should be careful not to blame others for inciting the killer.
Phil Plait on Twitter yesterday afternoon:
This headline/tweet is literally blaming women for men killing them. Words matter. Phrasing matters. This headline twists agency into a topological nightmare of social injustice.
This headline/tweet is literally blaming women for men killing them.
Words matter. Phrasing matters. This headline twists agency into a topological nightmare of social injustice. https://t.co/zPXTgRGBZG
— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) May 20, 2018
It’s not just me, ok? It’s not some funny eccentric womany quirk of mine to have seen that headline as obnoxiously blaming the murdered high school girl for having turned down a boy’s advances. Even manly science men can see it. And they’re right. Thank you Phil Plait.
Exactly. Spurned advances did not provoke anything. This kind of headlining is rampant in a media that chooses sensationalism over accuracy in an understanding of the nature of cause and effect. It’s the consequential version of the way stories, for some reason have to be presented with puns.
I agree entirely with you and Phil Plait.
And once again, Skeletor did not return to the thread (or to this one) to acknowledge your response.
I get that the real world intrudes from time to time and sometimes online conversations have to go unanswered, but when you’ve repeatedly been called out on such behavior, maybe it’s time to stop “asking questions” the answers to which you’re not going to acknowledge.
Yes obviously no one is ever obliged to comment on anyone’s blog, but if you repeatedly pop in to “correct” the blogger and then ignore replies in favor of “correcting” the blogger again, it can get annoying. That’s all the more the case when the “corrections” are wrong or point-missing or both.
It’s not just you.
I notice that men are ‘spurned’, while women are ‘scorned’, and the latter of which have a fury which outrivals any on Hell whole the former are due every sympathy even unto a murderous rampage.
These messages exist, and the lazy writers of headlines are not doing anything to change them.
“Occasional drive-by commenter?” I find that very hurtful!
(Seriously, sorry for not replying. I have limited free time and sometimes can’t get get back to threads where I’ve commented. I shall try to do better.)
All right, I had started a long response in the other thread in reply to your comments, but then I read comments from some others which made me realize people were coming at it from a different angle, so I thought I’d start over and put it in this more recent thread.
(Also, I don’t want to crimp my drive-by style by adding a second comment to that earlier thread.)
OK, first, I think some people were arguing that the victim perhaps embarrassed the killer for some other reason than his advances. I think that is a very unlikely interpretation of the text, so I’m just going to leave that to the side.
Accepting as a given that she publicly rejected his advances in an embarrassing way, my interpretation was that was pretty much the definition of spurning — rejecting with disdain. I was surprised to read some people accepted that sequence of events but didn’t think disdain was necessarily involved. She just wanted him to stop, told him publicly, and it was embarrassing to him.
OK, point taken. I suppose it’s possible the embarrassment could have been a side effect of a rejection that contained no disdain. I guess it comes down to how this sentence came to be:
If the mother knew the motivation and characterized it as spurning, then it probably was, and I don’t see how it’s a problem to use the word. If the mother was vague and the reporter jumped to conclusions, then it’s obviously another story.
(Also, some of you must be much more saintly than me, as if I had been rejecting someone for 4 months I’d be absolutely loaded with disdain for them, and I’d totally spurn their continued advances.)
The problem to me is saying the spurning provoked the shooting. Yes, words matter, and saying someone provoked murder by spurning is an outrageous use of the word “provoked”. That may (or may not!) be what Phil Plait is saying.
But, OK, drop “spurned”. She embarrassed him in class. Would “being embarrassed in class by classmate provoked Texas school shooting, victim’s mother says” be better? I don’t think so. Maybe you do.
One last bit of nitpicking: I was accused of nitpicking words, but I see it as I was arguing against nitpicking the word “spurned” when the real outrage was “provoked”. I don’t care if she spurned the holy hell out of him, he doesn’t have any right to kill her and 9 other people.
OK, you can criticize me for not replying to past threads, but…
“Or to this one”? Seriously? This was posted today, and this is the first free time I’ve had since getting home from work.
I don’t think “Scorned advances provoked Texas school shooting, victim’s mother says” would have made anybody any happier.
Skeletor @ 7 – thanks. I really mean it that no one is required to comment on a blog! But at the same time drive-bys can get irritating, no matter how unreasonable that is.
The reporting doesn’t say she scorned or spurned anything all along; the in front of classmates thing came after weeks of harassment, not at the beginning. It’s just lazy headline-writer jargon, probably because it sounds more lively than “declined” or “said no to.” It’s not that I think they do it on purpose out of malice, it’s that I think they need to think more about it and pay attention and do better.
And we can’t assume that the mother said “spurned” because the reporter’s paraphrase included the word. Paraphrases are inexact by definition.
For what it’s worth, Skeletor, I wasn’t trying to put any words in your mouth, just noting the frequency of usage of those two words when applied to men versus women, and the attendant attitudes rife throughout cultural depictions. And it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a woman perpetrator being characterised far less sympathetically as a scorned, crazy bitch, were the genders reversed.
I agree with you that in an ideal world, it would be a non-sequitur that a spurning supposedly incited a mass murder. But that is not the world we live in, and pretending it is will not stop thoughtless headline-writers from continually reinforcing the spurious connection.
Skeletor,
Oh be serious. I included “or to this one” meaning “or, for that matter, in this thread” because I recognized that with the discussion moving on you might have chosen to reply here instead — as you later did. I was not claiming that it was a separate offense, so to speak, and I find it difficult to believe that you genuinely interpreted it that way.
I have issues with using ’embarrass’ as a transitive verb, especially in a case like this where it comes off as an accusation. We can be embarrassed by something, but other people don’t ’embarrass’ us. I was just having this conversation with someone a while back–I pointed out that I am embarrassed if I discover, having dressed in the dark, that my socks are two different colours; I doubt anyone during the course of my day ever notices this fact, but I still feel embarrassment. The person I was talking with says she often wears two different coloured socks deliberately!
Spurning clearly implies something active on the part of the spurner and some sympathy on behalf of the spurnee.
That’s the impression it invokes and it doesn’t seem as though either was appropriate here. The man was (at best) a nuisance and the woman (at ‘worst’) caused him to feel humiliated as a result of his own actions. The phrasing makes it seem as though she had a responsibility to deal with his abuse differently. To be nice. And then maybe this wouldn’t have happened… You know, exactly what Jordan Peterson advocates.
That’s why the word is a poor choice, Skeletor, regardless of the dictionary definition. It’s the stuff our brains hoover up unconsciously and unquestioningly that causes much of the damage. It’s really important to call out lazy language by journalists because for fuck’s sake, communication is what they do. It’s the same reason Ophelia gets cross when they say “but” instead of “and”.
Anyway, now I’m imagining you leaning out of a car window driving past a desk trying to type on the keyboard. Or rather, I’m imagining the actual Skeletor doing that.
Believe it, because it’s 100% true. I’m not necessarily saying it was reasonable for me to believe it, but I did.
I’m spurning further discussion of the subtle implications of the word spurned. Apparently we have different experiences that cause us to react to that word differently. I certainly won’t use the word to describe anything any of you have done.
Moving on to see if there are any posts after this one (Trump probably did something, right?)…