Friday, July 1, 2016

Standardized Childhood Cruelty and The Sourdough Mother




Let's start by saying the Wesley Throckmorton hated his name. He despised it, but he had kept it for nearly 40 years.

In grade school he had been among the very top level of children targeted for being harrassed. He understood the system, but he hated that his name made him a contender for the "Most Picked On" award.

In first and second grade, he had been Number One with a Bullet, hands-down, the kid with the worst name, but, of course, first and second graders have not yet even begun to develop the finer skills of picking on other kids.

When Wesley arrived in third grade, his class was somewhat larger and included Neville Niebeller, and Ordway Battstock, whose presence knocked him cleanly out of the crosshairs and down to the level of "barely worth hassling." This was fine with him, and while he felt some sympathy for Neville and Ordway, Wesley was careful to strike a fine balance between joining those who cast derision for the hilarious ways their names could be woven into jibes, and laying off  and encouraging the two unlucky children to persevere. For Wesley was smart and circumspect and understood that if anything happened to them, he would immediately be promoted back into that undesirable limelight.

It is worth taking a look now at the dynamics of childhood culture and name-bullying as a widespread phenomenon.


Exploration and Discussion

The process of development of the human mind is without a doubt, fascinating and worthy of deep and ongoing study, but here we will look at the phenomenon of how the child's mind uses the entire culture and history of childhood to develop superficially anti-social behaviors that actually lead to the brutish and earliest stages of social maturation.

Incipient Childhood Harassment 

While children of pre-school age are wonderfully imaginative and have abundant creativity, they lack the ability to formulate adequately (for their purposes) hurtful expressions, and so the capacity for really cruel harassment. It's also clear that new minds do not create their vocabularies de novo but instead need time and the company of other nascently evil minds to learn and amass a more complete arsenal of injurious words. Since children of preschool age lack the verbal skills to cause focused peer distress (FPD), we term this the "Pre-Zinger" stage. Frustrated with their lack of ability, they usually resort to throwing toys, biting and spitting on younger children.

Development of "Proto-Zinger" Stage

This is also called the "Thrpppbbb" phase, from the sound made by blowing past the tongue, when held by closed lips.

A single child with only basic non-offensive vocabulary may come into contact with an older sibling who has attained a much larger command of offensive words, who in turn, has been in contact with many others with their own circles of malign influences, creating a potentially vast reservoir of depraved and unkind words and phrases. Since this type of FPD terminology is naturally appealing to children, it is easily and quickly assimilated into their vocabulary. Gradually the offensive lexicon of each child increases, and is, in turn, passed along to the next child down the line.

This increases the inherent social worth of the child in their cohort, and therefore his or her desirability as a "playmate" and "foul concept mentor" to children who are eager to increase their own trove of injurious words and phrases. Thus, the cycle repeats itself in a ripple effect throughout a population of children.

In this way, each child benefits from a much larger pool of "bad" influence in the most efficient way possible. This process is ongoing and begins as soon as the child can distinguish the difference between itself and any other person. Usually about 6 months of age.

Propagation of Childhood Culture

It is interesting to note that a crude but accurate analogy of childhood FPD anti-sociality can be made with the "Sourdough Starter" or "Yeast Mother," more correctly called the "Pre-Ferment." in which a single strain of yeast is kept alive and active for a long period (potentially forever) by simply adding substrate, in this case, simple and complex carbohydrates. A single yeast culture can thus be cultivated for generations, with small portions regularly removed and added to flour/liquid/etc. combinations to provide the leavening for an infinite number of bread loaves over time.

In the culture of childhood, there is a direct parallel because information, FPD terms and phrases in this case, is propagated between children bother horizontally, to others of their contemporary cohort, but also vertically, through generations, because, like the sourdough mother, there are always children being added to the culture over time, or along the X-axis, if you prefer. New children in this model are the substrate and each wave coming along are both eager to join the process and self-regulating, because their inherent self-worth in the peer group increases as the child teaches others, passing on the offensive information.

In this way, today's children are being taught information from generations of children in the distant past, potentially into prehistory. Consider just one example.

There are not many English-speaking children that have not learned the "London Bridge is Falling Down" sing-song rhyme and yet have no idea of its meaning. You may say that it's because it appears in commonly read children's books but consider why it is in commonly read children's books. Isn't it because the editors of commonly read children's books learned the songs as children themselves and for some reason considered them an indispensable part of a child's knowledge. Clearly, there is no essential need for today's children to learn an obscure, encoded warning or veiled Public Service Announcement about the dangers existing in England of the 1600s.

There are many other examples of this deep knowledge passed in verbal tradition if you bother to look.

The Role of Offensive Innovation in Expansion of the Information Base

Once the child has an adequate vocabulary (FPD-Ready), he or she naturally begins to experiment in combining the words in different orders and contexts, to create new, clever phrases. When the other members of the child's peer group hear the improved phrase and approve as a group, they may begin using the new words and phrases. This has the effect of not only increasing the perceived value of the innovating member but in turn, adding to the social value of anyone that repeats the new terms, and repeated and approved widely, increasing the lexicon as it will be represented in the next rounds of propagation.

Conclusion

The world of children's culture as it relates particularly to harassment of peers is a rich and vibrant one, and while cruel and stupid, serves as a reminder that we belong not to a small local current culture, but, instead to a vast and long tradition of hurting others with our words and minds.

Surely, there is much here to think about, you idiotic turd.

P.S.- Wesley Throckmorton did just fine and has a wonderful life now. Neville legally changed his name to Bob Montreal, and Ordway Battstock moved to England where his name is quite normal.

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2 comments:

  1. best scientific article I've read today. In which journals have you published?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're right. It cries out for publication someplace like, "The Freeform Journal of Childhood and Immature Anthropology"

      Delete