The Language War

by Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Book Overview

Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520232070
• ISBN13: 9780520232075
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Language of War - Available from Amazon and evident in the reviews published here

Anyone familiar with deconstructionist literary theories could easily tell you that the reviewer named "A reader" (the one who went on the anti-feminist rant and used the word "spokesbitches") is: (a) Definitely not female (as s/he claims) (b) Writing a review that is of and about this book in ways the reviewer, quite comically, will never understand. Read this book, "The Language of War"--along with some Derrida, Lacan, Fineman, Greenblatt, and Bretzius--and you'll be able to see through such mis-uses of language too.

Ignore the negative reviews as most are partisan rightwing republicans

Language matters a lot. If you want to know how the rightwing media and government seduce the American people by playing the victimization game even while robbing the hard working class and want to win the real war against fascism, this book is for you. There is no question that be it OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, Laci and Scott Peterson, Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, and other frivolous stories in the media, this book pretty much nails why this kind of unimportant bs beats the dangerous reality such as Iraq war failure and national debts. Time to reframe and smack out the distractors in the media and face reality.

A linguist's charming look at recent political controversies

Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist, examines several recent controversies from a linguistic point of view. She has chapters on speech codes, Anita Hill, Hillary Rodham Clinton, O. J. Simpson, Ebonics, and Monicagate, but she doesn't discuss the events themselves (although her viewpoint is usually quite clear); rather, she concentrates on the national discourse on the events. Her overarching thesis is that each of these controversies is part of a language war, in which previously downtrodden groups (especially blacks and women) are trying to seize the right to define themselves away from the traditional holders of power over language (i.e., white middle-class men).She speaks from a post-modern point of view, but much more rationally than I normally associate with the po-mo crowd. Through this book, I have developed much more sympathy for some of the underlying tenets of post-modern thought, if not for the more extreme examples that have turned post-modernism into self-parody (e.g., believing an article claiming that gravity is a social construct). Although Lakoff is somewhat out there at times, she's not too far out, and not all that often; and even when I don't agree with her, I still find myself understanding better the different sides of these very divisive issues, which in itself is a noble goal. And the book is a pure delight to read; Lakoff's style is breezy and pleasant, and she usually remembers to define linguistics jargon for her general audience. She is, however, a self-confessed unrepentant liberal, and more conservative readers may find her point-of-view somewhat hard to take.My only quibble is that her publisher has fallen prey to the evil of endnotes; they are especially criminal in this case, where the notes are few in number but highly useful. They should have been placed at the bottom of the page, where they belong.