Another brief posting opening up a parallel, from the world of grammar, style, and usage, to yesterday’s posting “Accepting variation, or not”, about the (attempted) enforcement of normative prescriptions for other sorts of behavior. The two crucial panels of a Peanuts comic strip from yesterday’s posting:
(#1) Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket; Linus defies her admirably with a sarcastic defense of variation in behaviorGramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:
different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming
while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also
undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening
Gramma refuses to accept the behavioral variation that Linus displays, thus mirroring the lack of social acceptance of other kinds of variation — in particular, the disapproval, by many, of same-sex desires, practices, and identities; and the more specific disapproval of what I’ve called f-gay men — the effeminate and the faggy. Disapprovals that are especially wounding because Prong 2 is wrapped up in them.
Now to something that might at first glance might seem to be completely different, but also involves a judgment of disapproval — nonacceptance — on a different sort of failure to conform to normative prescriptions, coupled with what amounts to a companion moral judgment on the whole business, including the people involved in it.
