Regionalisms and Jargon

The narration in this chapter states that the long jump is grouped with athletics rather than gymnastics. This phrasing is accurate, but there’s some interesting context that makes this more meaningful than it may seem and that I want to unpack a bit. In most parts of Europe, “athletics” (accounting for language variation) is the term for sports which involve running, walking, jumping, or throwing. The running long jump is clearly included.

But this isn’t the case everywhere. In the United States, including Pittsburgh, “athletics” is instead a catchall term. It groups together essentially everything which could be considered a physical sport or training for one. It is also used to allude to physical prowess in general; picking up something very heavy might be called an impressive display of strength, but it might also be called an impressive feat of athletics. That particular group of sports, meanwhile, is called track-and-field.

Kyoko is thus using a regionalism not common to where she lives, and she knows it. Much like how she calls it petrol instead of gas, this is a relic of her having studied English in a rather eccentric way, and she declines to change either, despite living in the United States for well over a decade now.

This seems trivial. But there is a surprising amount to unpack here. I’ll start by comparing it with her use of petrol instead of gas. This hasn’t come up much, and in fact the only time the word has been used in-story so far was while describing Jack’s magic. This is just because Kyoko is so disengaged from the topic of cars that it doesn’t come up much. She does call it that in her normal language use. This essentially never happens in the United States, and calling it petrol immediately marks you as British, if the other person even knows what it means. Here it’s called gas. But Kyoko did enough chemistry that “gas” for her is referring to a state of matter, and she finds the overlap unnecessarily confusing. Thus, she calls gasoline petrol instead.

There are some significant things to observe in this. First off, it’s logical. You might or might not agree that the confusion is significant enough to stop calling it gas, but that it is the same sound as a completely unrelated word which is prominent in chemistry is an objective fact. She can easily describe this, and it’s something she’s clearly aware of and doing consciously.

But athletics has no such clear benefit. Calling this set of sports track-and-field instead doesn’t cause any problems. The term athletics becomes less clear, but what you lose in specificity by transitioning to using athletics more generally, you gain with how it can be generalized to an arbitrary physical sport. In fact, while petrol reduces confusion, insisting on calling it athletics actually makes it worse. Like petrol, if you say track-and-field outside the United States, it might not be the local word, but it’s not like it has some significant meaning other than the one you meant.

This one, I am aware, is an attribute which hasn’t yet been shown on-screen as it were, and this gap is a very subtle one. But when Kyoko uses the word petrol, she’s consciously aware of it. She already has logic worked out, and if you start asking why she’s doing it, she has an answer ready and waiting.

She doesn’t have an answer about athletics and doesn’t have good logic for it. And if you cornered her on the topic, all she’d really be able to come up with is that there’s already a perfectly good set of words available. You can call sports sports, you can restrict athletics, it’s fine. If you point out that there’s potential value in both having access to the generalizable term and reducing local confusion, she gets stubborn about it, and she can get pretty agitated.

The question, then, might arise: Why? Why does Kyoko care whether she’s using the proper interpretation of the word?

This might prompt some other questions. Most notably, why does she insist on using jargon? You can see this all the way from the very start of the series. Kyoko was irked at how she had to dumb down the chemistry jargon for Audrim and Anthony to understand. She then compared something to necrotizing fasciitis, despite knowing for a fact nobody would know what that meant. Flesh-eating bacteria would have been more informative. She doesn’t even notice she’s doing it, either. You might observe this in the narration. She’s not, for example, trying to illustrate that she knows more than the other people there. She’s not smug. She just uses those words and continues.

Why does she insist on calling people the names they tell her to? You may notice that this even extends to nicknames. Other people routinely shorten Raincloud’s name to ’Cloud. Kyoko never does this. The narration changes in what name is listed paragraph-to-paragraph if someone tells her to call them something. That’s conscious on my part, and it’s subconscious on hers. Even Thorn, an inanimate object, got this treatment, and that may be enough to suggest to you why I brought it up.

Why doesn’t she call athletics track-and-field? Because that’s not its name. If you managed to get her to stop deflecting, which would be tricky, she would ultimately be reduced to this. She is reluctant to change its name. Meanwhile, in other ways she’s not a linguistic prescriptivist at all. She scritches Rancloud instead of scratching. I use the spelling alright without exception, and that’s not because I don’t know that it’s improper grammar. I do know that.

But I also know that “always” was formed by the same type of contract from “all ways”, going back to c. 14th century CE. “Way” referred to a path of travel, and “all ways” was used essentially as “all the way through the duration”. This contraction has no special right to exist by virtue of age. And alright, like always, only makes sense as a compound. If someone asks you how you’re doing and you say alright, it makes sense; if you say about three-quarters right, it gets very odd looks. If you ask someone how right their health is, it makes far less sense than asking if they feel alright.

And Kyoko knows this. She’s not a prescriptivist. It is in large part the same reason in-universe for her that I use meta-textually. She doesn’t care about keeping language the same, not really. But athletics is not the only word where if you got an answer out of her as to why she’s using it, it would fundamentally be, “because that’s what it’s called.”

Now, I do realize that these specific examples have only shown up in the text once each. The narration does not explicitly call out either the jargon or the regionalisms, and only occasionally observes this pattern with names.

And so the reader hasn’t really been given much cause to emphasize this in their thinking. But I think it’s worth pointing out for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is that it might explain some things, when examined from the outside in the right lighting. The narration is from Kyoko’s point of view. But imagine this from the outside. When some Japanese girl gets into a screaming match with an athlete about what athletics means, it’s weird. When, especially with the temper she used to have, the argument ends with this scrawny girl who looks about nineteen punching someone’s lights out with a strength that makes no sense for her build?

It’s going to feel strange. She has no discernible accent a lot of the time, not even a Japanese one, but occasionally she sounds British or German for some reason. Think about that for a moment, because this also implies some things about Kyoko. She’s been here long enough to sound like a local, but occasionally there are tones or details of language use she’s not bothered to train herself out of.

Imagine that girl then proceeding to get in an argument with someone because she insists that the emotion someone’s feeling isn’t sad, it’s melancholic, and she can tell from how it tastes. Kyoko doesn’t normally do this, because she’s not an idiot. But she gets pretty impulsive when she’s manic, and this one was a much more significant problem in childhood. Kids don’t really have much impulse control to begin with. Imagine not just how strange it is when she says this, but how creepy it would be, especially if there are reasons you’re trying not to show that emotion.

This pattern is subtle. But I wanted to call it out, particularly because several of these examples are about language being used in the narration rather than in Kyoko’s dialogue. It’s important to keep in mind that the narration is in Kyoko’s voice and represents how she thinks. And I think that if you examine the ways I use language in the narrative text, you may find it suggests some things about Kyoko as a person, things she isn’t always aware of herself.