Lines in language
Jun. 18th, 2007 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamara_russoI started composing this post yesterday and hadn't a chance to finish it - so here it is now:
I had a conversation with Racheli a few days ago, about how I feel when people call me "dear" or "honey" or "sweetheart" at work (or "kapara", "mami" and other bimbo-ish names). She didn't get why I fell degraded by these nicknames, why whomever speaks them belittles me. She said it's a part of our language, that it annoys me with little significance, but I believe that in our modern world, if I can't call whomever called my "honey" "honey" in return, something is seriously twisted.
There's the thing that Racheli is religious, and has been brought up in a much more conservative environment that I have, and this kind of speech is much more common in her society.
I told her that the line between work relationship and a personal one is very blurry in Israel - we call our boss in his first name, he hugs Lily when he or she are going away for a while on holiday and they return, we all tell off our bosses, in a polite way, of course, but still, we all use slang in our speech.
All of the above says that we have no real barrier between ourselves and others, whether or not it's a boss or a co-worker. My boss has never called me a nickname (as far as he goes he calls me Tamara at times instead of Tamar), but my co-workers have. Some of them has made a habit out of it until I stopped it. A man twice my age has no business calling me "Honey" when he doesn't even know my last name, as far as I'm concerned.
The problem is, I have a hard time explaining it to others - they all have the language excuse up their sleeves, as if some sort of a nickname is imprinted in our society's speech that it's all right to say it, and it doesn't even matter that our language is affected by our culture. Being a man-domminent society is imprinted in the speech as well as in every thing else.
I had a conversation with Racheli a few days ago, about how I feel when people call me "dear" or "honey" or "sweetheart" at work (or "kapara", "mami" and other bimbo-ish names). She didn't get why I fell degraded by these nicknames, why whomever speaks them belittles me. She said it's a part of our language, that it annoys me with little significance, but I believe that in our modern world, if I can't call whomever called my "honey" "honey" in return, something is seriously twisted.
There's the thing that Racheli is religious, and has been brought up in a much more conservative environment that I have, and this kind of speech is much more common in her society.
I told her that the line between work relationship and a personal one is very blurry in Israel - we call our boss in his first name, he hugs Lily when he or she are going away for a while on holiday and they return, we all tell off our bosses, in a polite way, of course, but still, we all use slang in our speech.
All of the above says that we have no real barrier between ourselves and others, whether or not it's a boss or a co-worker. My boss has never called me a nickname (as far as he goes he calls me Tamara at times instead of Tamar), but my co-workers have. Some of them has made a habit out of it until I stopped it. A man twice my age has no business calling me "Honey" when he doesn't even know my last name, as far as I'm concerned.
The problem is, I have a hard time explaining it to others - they all have the language excuse up their sleeves, as if some sort of a nickname is imprinted in our society's speech that it's all right to say it, and it doesn't even matter that our language is affected by our culture. Being a man-domminent society is imprinted in the speech as well as in every thing else.
