Reinhold Aman, editor of Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression has written an interesting article on how Don Imus’s infamous epithet has been translated into different languages by news organizations. One common error made by users of British English (or dictionaries) was interpreting “nappy” as “diaper”. (Another interpreter inexplicably translated “nappy-haired” as “lawn”.) As Aman explains, even without such blatant errors, translating pejorative slang can be challenging, if not impossible, causing foreign readers to misunderstand the incident.

Apologies to Caddyshack here, but it seems an appropriate cultural touchstone. Gotta love this article from the Feb. 25 New York Times about how a bunch of women at DePauw University in Indiana feel they were kicked out of their chapter of the Delta Zeta sorority because they didn’t conform to the proper image for the sorority:

When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Apparently the women asked to leave had been interviewed by national officers who determined that they weren’t dedicated enough to recruitment, since membership had fallen. So what was the pre-diaspora Delta Zeta like?

…[T]he chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

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And I used to think of Bacon’s death-by-frozen-chicken incident in 1626 as a prime example of noble suffering in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. But now I think I have to root for the chicken.

This is also from Clifford C. Conner’s A People’s History of Science, as I wrote about in my previous entry. Sir Francis Bacon is lauded in history as an early advocate of the scientific revolution of the 17th century who cast a long shadow on how science would be practiced in English society, but his misogyny cast a long shadow on the culture as well:

The patriarchal imagery in Bacon’s writings reflected the social position of women at the beginning of the seventeenth century in England. Bacon invariably portrayed Nature as a female who was hiding her secrets. He wrote of the secrets “locked in nature’s bosom” or “laid up in the womb of nature,” and said she would have to be forcibly penetrated in order to make her give them up. (more…)