Welcome to Braggsville (43 page)

Essentialize/essentialism
—Essentialize lives next door to stereotype. They have been dating for some time now, and they frequently appear together on Fox News and at conservative events.

Ewoks
—(1) Mammal-like bipeds native to the forest moon of Endor. Made famous by the Star Wars movies. (2) Tree huggers from the wilds of Berkeley.

Freud
—Nineteenth-century cocaine enthusiast. “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump— you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion . . .” [from an 1884 letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays].

Hermetic irony
—(1) Aesthetic productions delivered without the metadiscursive features traditionally relied upon to decode them. (2) The joke you don't recognize as such. (3) Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Amos and Andy. Laverne and Shirley. For years popular comedy and irony have depended on a clear separation of powers. A comedic duo has a straight man and a comic. The comic delivers the punch lines, and the straight man acts as the audience's surrogate, expressing rage, frustration, aplomb,
whatever the appropriate emotion may be, freeing the audience to laugh and assuring them that the joke is not on them, that it's safe to be amused and not outraged. Many new media such as online videos or mock websites are self-contained. In other words, the audience has no windsock, no surrogate, and no laugh track, nothing to indicate where the joke begins and ends—hence, hermetic irony. When Louis method tweets the bumper sticker slogans, he thinks it's funny because he knows he is joking. As Sheriff points out, and demonstrates, no one unfamiliar with Louis or the immediate scenario is guaranteed to come to the same conclusion.

Holler
—A small valley or hollow.

Incredible edibles
—See
alien technology
.

Institutionalization
—The spiritual and emotional ossification of higher education's long-term inmates.

Institutionalized racism
—Structural racism.

Internet
—The bisexual digital incubus.

Irony
—The use of metal where wood is expected.

Ishi
—Man.

Johnny Appleseed
—Semen.

The Juniors
—(1) Euphemism for buttocks. (2) Littler versions of yourself.

Kerana
—Because.

Ku Klux Klan
—Social club dating back to mid-nineteenth-century America. Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America! A Message of Love NOT Hate!

Likenin
g—(1) Industrious folk climb the ladder of success, others take the escalator (to paraphrase the great Biggie Smalls, RIP). Likening is your pass to the escalator. (2) See Michael Jackson. (3) See Beyoncé.

Lynching
—(1) Ceremonial purification and sacrifice featuring a piñata stuffed with sweetbreads instead of sweetmeats. (2) Ritual offering to the New World gods of honor and justice.

Mengapa tidak
—Why not?

Methuselah
—You'll have to ask him.

Micro-aggression
—The plastic gun of racism; you can sneak this one through security most of the time because it is comprised of nonracist ways of being racist, nonsexist ways of being sexist, and the like. E.g., You're not like other BLANK people, or, You speak English very well.

Mondays
—Be honest. Who likes them?
You
can be honest with
me
.

Oppression porn
—(1) The depiction of poverty, oppression, and/or despair with the intent of provoking moral arousal. Frequently appears as digital media, literature, and pseudo-immersive favela tours. The most common side effect is a dangerously inflated sense of national and/or cultural superiority. (Fortunately this form of priapism does not require lancing, an icepack, ligation, or aspiration.) As with Internet porn, desensitization is a risk. See also favela tours. See also Sally Struthers.

Pen mawashi
—That pen-spinning trick you wish you could do.

Performance
—That time you expressed great thanks for the toe socks, lavishly praised a lackluster meal, or thanked your boss for the “feedback.”

Performative intervention
—(1) Activism through acting. (2) Acting through activism.

Porque/¿Por qué?
—Don't know a Spanish speaker? Treat this as an invitation to meet one. Say hello to a busboy or a nanny or a Supreme Court Justice.

Reenactment
—(1) See reenactor. (2) See
Braggsville
.

Residual affect
—When colonial echoes haunt the station.

Sexicon
—(1) A sexy-ass lexicon. (2) The practice of using big words where small would do.

Siddhartha
—Like Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Biggie Smalls, Buddha had a birth name.

Slavery
—Employment by another name.

Solid CO2
—Dry ice. The magic engine of smoke machines. Metalheads, ravers,
Wicked
fans, salute!

So-Me
—Social media.

Split in the bib
—If you know what a bib is . . . and where a bib is worn . . . and what it covers . . . join us in this celebration of cleavage!

Suprasemiotic domain
—The constellation of meaning-making practices engaged in when people communicate face-to-face, including speech, writing, gesture, and dance. The suprasemiotic domain is the communicative field within which people naturally function. Speech is more than words. Body talk.

University
—(1) Colonialism's most exquisite distillation. (2) The birthplace of spring break.

Uppity-Plessy
—Portmanteau combining
uppity
and
Homer Plessy,
the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the states' rights to segregate under the doctrine “separate but equal.”

U.S. of A.
—See
Braggsville
.

Veil of Ignorance
—The golden rule gussied up as a fancy theory.

Wormhole
—(1) A shortcut through the space-time of virginity, the journey through which leaves the driver exalted and vehicle undefiled. (2) The dirty virgin superhighway.

Works Cited

Adorno, T. (1985). On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening. In A. Arato & E. Gebhardt (Eds.),
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
(pp. 270–99). New York, NY: Continuum.

Butler, J. (2000).
Everything
. New York, NY: Various Press.

Certeau, M. (1984).
The Practice of Everyday Life.
(S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

. (1986).
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

. (1988).
The Writing of History
. (T. Conley, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Cowan, E. R. (2015).
16 Voices
. Atlanta, GA: WXP.

Davenport, D. (2015). Residual affect: Race, micro-aggressions, micro-inequities, (autophagy) & BBQ in the contemporary Southern imagination at Six Flags. In T. G. Johnson (Ed.),
Welcome to Braggsville
. New York, NY: William Morrow.

De Haan, F. (1999). Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries.
Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 18,
83–101.

Fairclough, N. (2001).
Language and Power.
(2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Griffin, R. (2009).
Fundamentals of Management
. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

Johnson, T. G. (2010). Birth of a notion (From the great divide to the digital divide: Consilience in literacy studies during the age of the supra-semiotic domain). Unpublished MA thesis, UC Berkeley.

. (2011). Death of the straight man: New media literacies, aesthetic education and ambiguity in the ironic age. Unpublished proposal, UC Berkeley.

. (2012).
Hold It 'Til It Hurts
. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.

. (2015).
Welcome to Braggsville
. New York, NY: William Morrow.

Mahiri, J. (Forthcoming). Deconstructing race: Micro-cultures shifting the multicultural paradigm.

Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (Eds.),
Rethinking Linguistic Relativity
(pp. 407–37). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Old Hitch (1825–1999).
Cooking by Heartlight
. Braggsville, GA: Handheld.

W
elcome to Braggsville,
aka Braggsville, aka BRAGGZ, aka B-Ville, aka WTB is indebted to many a literary Sherpa: Eleanor “I'll Be the Judge of What's Hard to Sell” Jackson, aka agent extraordinaire, who found a home for “this peculiar little book that I can't quite describe”; Jessica “Make Them Say No” Williams, editor deluxe at William Morrow and sister by another mister; Katy “Clear-Eyed” Whitehead at HarperCollins UK/4th Estate; Jaimy “Libretto” Gordon; Sam “The Architect” Chang, quiet revolutionary; Connie “The Guru” Brothers; Karen “The Linguistinator” Russell; and Wiley “First Responder” Cash; and early readers Kate “Volte-Face” Sachs, Richard “Scorpio Rising” Katrovas, Jennifer “Mixmaster” Dubois, and Shane “Reed” Book.