“How to tame a wild tongue” summary and response:
Gloria Anzaldua writes about the taming of her “tongue” throughout her life and the constraints that are put upon an individual’s form of language in society. She introduces this idea with a story about being at the dentist and a Ray Gwyn Smith quote, “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” Anzaldua describes her experience at Pan American University and how even having an accent while speaking English was looked at as a bad thing. She even brings up the gender discourse between in language and how the Spanish language has many plural nouns described under masculine vowels. She breaks down the complexities of the different languages into seven “tongues”, from standard English to English slang, standard Spanish, etc. In the section about Chicano Spanish, Anzaldua talks about the different forms of speech in one language, how Chicano is considered the “poor Spanish”, and coins the idea behind this term as linguistic terrorism. I find it interesting how this writing was written in 1987 and is still very relatable in the present.
“The meaning of a word” summary and response:
Gloria Naylor focuses on the meaning of the n-word and what it meant to her when she first heard it. She begins this writing by claiming that writing is inferior to spoken words and that at the end of the day, a language is just a bunch of nonsensical sounds that we give meaning. With this in mind, Naylor tells her point of view of how she first came to understand the n-word, describing the gender associations that come along with the n-word and how it’s used. In her conclusion, Naylor states that perhaps she was present when the n-word was said before but she only truly heard it in third grade when it was used to humiliate her. Both Naylor and Anzaldua mention the plurals of certain words and their assignment to gender. They both bring up the idea of language being “a male discourse” (pg.143) in a sense.