Another meaning of “Freeze you” is: “Please put some water in the ice tray and put it in the ice box so we can have some ice cubes.”
Distinction among meanings, in actual signing, is a matter of — what shall I call it? — muscular and gestural inflection in the arms, face, and the rest of the body. And, of course, the situation.
I remember getting the note: “Come down freeze you whiskey have want, chess.” I suspect this would be baffling without some knowledge of the sign language context, though the words “mean” pretty much the same as they do in English. One informal translation of this note into written English would be: “Come downstairs and play chess with me. You bring the ice cubes. I have some whiskey — if you want?” And an equally good translation: “Do you want to come down, bring some ice cubes, have a drink, and play chess?” And another: “Why not come on down? You make ice cubes up there; bring them. I have some whiskey. It’s all for a chess game.”
But it would be a great mistake to try and “transform” the original into any of my English translations, either by some Chomskyan method, or by filling in suspected ellipses, understood subjects, and the like:
“… have want…” is a single verb phrase, for example, whose translation I could spend pages on. It has at least three modulating duals (in our language context, at any rate) so that its translation tends to be some arrangement from the matrix: moving both backwards and forwards, and up or down. It is regularly interrogative. (So a written question mark, in the deaf-and-dumb language, when you use “have want” is superfluous. The phrase “have need” works by a similar matrix and is regularly imperative. The equally frequent “want need,” however, works through an entirely different matrix.) It may have several “direct objects,” each requiring a different path through the matrix to make “sense” in our language. A literal translation of Horace’s sentence, up to the comma, might read: “If you want to come down, I will have you down; if you have frozen (made) some (ice cubes), I will want some (that you have frozen); if you want whiskey, I have some whiskey…” And “chess” at the sentence’s end is something like a noun absolute in Latin, the topic of the whole sentence, casting back its resonances on all that has gone before.
46. In the same language in which we still say “I see…,” only fifty years before Russell’s theory of “singular description,” in America one person could meaningfully refer to another as “my slave…“at which point the other person was constrained by the language to refer to the first as “my master…”—as if the bond of possession were somehow mutual and reciprocal.
Rebellion begins when the slave realizes that in no sense whatsoever is the master “hers/his.” The slave cannot sell the master, give the master away, or keep the master should the master wish to go. This realization is the knowledge that the situation, which includes the language, exploits the slave and furthers the exploitation.
47. Possible insight into the “Cocktail Party Effect”: Last evening, with David Warren at Professor Fodor’s lecture on the mental representation of sentences, at the London School of Economics, I had a chance to observe the Cocktail Party Effect at work. David and I were sitting on the ground floor of the Old Theatre, near the door. Outside, a mass of students was gathering, presumably for the next event in the auditorium. The general rumble of their voices finally grew loud enough to make a dozen people around us look back towards the exit with consternation.
Professor Fodor’s delivery, while audible, was certainly not loud; and he wandered over the stage, to the blackboard, to the apron, to the podium, so that only part of the time was he near enough to the microphone for his voice to carry.
The sound outside was definitely interfering with our hearing his lecture, and we all had to strain…
The next time I was aware of the crowd noise outside, I realized that if I kept my aural concentration fixed on Fodor’s words, the crowd noise would begin to undergo a definite pulsing (I estimated the frequency to be between two pulses per second and three pulses in two seconds) while the professor’s voice stayed more or less clear through the peaks and troughs. If, however, I listened consciously to the crowd, the pulsing ceased and the Professor’s words became practically unintelligible, lost in the rush of sound.
Is this how the “Cocktail Party Effect,” or some aspect of it, works?
48. R. E. Geis in The Alien Critic defending himself against Joanna Russ’s and Vonda McIntyre’s accusations of sexism, cites a string of incorrect facts, half-facts, and facts implying a nonexistent context, beginning with the statement:
I have never made a sexist editorial decision in my life.
The form of the sentence itself implies that “making” a “sexist decision” or, for that matter, making an antisexist decision, is a case of putting energy into an otherwise neutral social contextual system.
The social context is not neutral. It is overwhelmingly sexist.
Studies have been done as far back as the fifties which show, in America, almost cross-culturally, male infants receive an average of slightly over 100 percent more physical contact with their parents during the first year of life than female infants! Tomes have been written on the effect of physical contact in this period on later physical strength and psychological autonomy. This alone renders the word “naturally,” in a statement like “men are naturally stronger than women,” a farce! Yet, despite how many thousands of years (probably no more than six and possibly a good deal less — another point to bear in mind) of this sort of Lamarckian pressure, when a large number of skeletons from modern cadavers, whose sexes were known and coded, were then given to various doctors, anthropologists, and archeologists to sort into male and female, the results were random! There is no way to identify the sex of a skeleton, from distinctions in size, pelvic width, shoulder width, skull size, leg length — these are all empirically nonsupported myths. Yet anthropology books are being published today with pictures captioned: “Armbone of a woman, c. eight thousand B.C.” or “Jawbone of a male, c. five thousand B.C.” Studies in the comparative heights of men and women have disclosed that, if you say you are doing a study in the comparative heights of men and women, and ask for volunteers, men average some two inches taller than women — whereas, if you say you are doing an intelligence test to compare university students with nonuniversity students, and, just incidentally, take the height of your volunteers, men average a mere three-eighths of an inch taller than women! Other, even more random samplings which have tried to obliterate all sexually associated bias, seem to indicate that the range of height of men tends to be larger — as a man, you have a greater chance of being either very tall or very short — but that the average height is the same. (Of course women are shorter than men: just stand on any street corner and look at the couples walking by. Next time you stand on any street corner, take pairs of couples and contrast the height of the woman from couple A with the man from couple B. I did this on a London street corner for two hours a few weeks back: taken as couples, it would appear that in 94 percent, men are taller than women. Taken by cross-couples, the figure goes down to 72 percent. The final twenty-two percent is more likely governed by the sad fact that, in Western society, tall women and short men often try to avoid being seen in public, especially with the opposite sex.) A male in our society receives his exaggerated social valuation with the application of the pronoun “he” before he can even smile over it. A female receives her concomitant devaluation with the pronoun “she” well before she can protest.