The vocabulary of belonging and not belonging
Eight terms. Match each to what it describes.
Four formal texts
Four texts, all of them formal, all of them about belonging. Read for the argument first. Then read again and count the inversions — and notice which two texts have none.
A · From an essay
The question is never asked of everybody. That is the first thing to notice about it, and almost the only thing that needs establishing: some people are asked where they are from twice a week, and some are never asked at all, and the difference is not geographical.
Not only is the question unevenly distributed, it is unevenly answerable. A person with one passport, one language and one accent has an answer that fits into a breath. A person with three has a choice to make every time, and the choice is never neutral — each version of the answer buys a different conversation.
Rarely does anybody asking intend any of this. That is what makes it difficult to raise: there is no villain, and the absence of a villain is routinely mistaken for the absence of a problem.
B · From a speech
I want to say something about the word “integration”, because it is doing a great deal of work in this room tonight and it is not doing it honestly.
Never in forty years have I heard that word used about somebody with money. Never once. It is reserved, without anybody ever deciding it, for people who arrive with less than they need, and what it means is: become less noticeable.
Not only do we ask that of them, we ask them to be grateful for the asking. And so convincing is the story we tell ourselves about it that we have very nearly stopped hearing what we are saying.
C · From an academic introduction
Research on identity negotiation has tended to treat self-presentation as a strategic choice, and there is good evidence for that account in settings where the costs of misidentification are low. It is less clear that the model extends to contexts in which identification is imposed rather than offered.
This paper reports interview data from thirty-one participants in two European cities. The sample is small and self-selected, and the findings should be read as generating hypotheses rather than as testing them. What the interviews appear to show is that the strategic account holds reasonably well for the first two or three encounters and poorly thereafter, at which point participants describe something closer to exhaustion than to strategy.
D · A letter
Dear Ana,
Thank you for the invitation to speak. I am going to say no, and I would rather explain why properly than plead a diary clash.
The panel is called “Voices from Elsewhere”. I have lived here for twenty-two years. I do not want to sit under that title and be asked, in front of two hundred people, to be from somewhere — and I do not think you would want that either, if you saw it written down.
I would come and talk about the archive project any time at all. Please do ask me about that.
Eight statements. Decide which text each is true of. A text may be the answer more than once.
A The essay
B The speech
C The academic introduction
D The letter
1. Says that the absence of a villain is mistaken for the absence of a problem.
2. Limits its own findings before anybody else can.
3. Points out that a word is never used about one particular group of people.
4. Declines something and gives the real reason rather than a polite one.
5. Claims that a question is unevenly distributed and unevenly answerable.
6. Names a second demand made on top of the first one.
7. Reports that a model works early on and stops working later.
8. Offers an alternative in the last line, in ordinary words.
Count them. Text A has two — not only is the question… and rarely does anybody…. Text B has three, and it is a speech, which is where they belong. Texts C and D have none.
Text C is the most formal of the four and uses no inversion whatever: academic prose reaches for hedges where oratory reaches for inversion, and both are register choices rather than degrees of formality. Text D is a letter about something difficult, written in short declarative sentences, and an inversion anywhere in it would sound like a performance.
A fifth text, with four sentences missing
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
The form asked for my country of birth, my nationality and my ethnicity, in that order, and gave me eleven boxes for the last one. [1]
I have filled in that form nine times in four years and I have not given the same answer twice. [2] It is that the question changes shape depending on who is going to read it.
[3] A hospital wants to know something clinical; a landlord wants to know something else entirely; a research council wants a number for a chart. The same tick means three different things.
Not only is the box the wrong size, it is the wrong kind of container altogether. [4]
Which is why the honest answer to “what are you?” has never been a word, and why the form will never accept the honest answer.
Formal, and correctly built
Eight gaps. Choose the version that is correctly built and belongs in the register.
The panel had been running for an hour before anybody used the word “community”, and how much work it was about to do. anybody defined it. It was used eleven times and defined none.Not only the word vague, it was vague in a useful direction: whoever used it got to decide who was inside. the vagueness that troubled me; it was the confidence.Hardly had the session ended three people came up to say the same thing, which suggests the room had noticed and had not said so. had the discussion continued, somebody would have raised it eventually — but sessions end, and the unsaid thing goes home with everybody.So the omission that I wrote it down on the way out. claim that anybody intended it.
Eight sentences. Seven need work; one is correct as written.
1. Never I have heard that word used about somebody with money.
2. Not only the question is uneven, it is unanswerable.
3. Hardly had the session ended than three people came over.
4. No sooner had I said it when I regretted it.
5. Rarely anybody asking intends any of this.
6. So convincing was the story. — nothing follows it
7. Not until the second year did anybody ask me what it meant. — correct as written
8. Never have I been so annoyed by a group chat. — in a group chat
Where it belongs, and where it does not
Task card · Writing and speaking · Pairs · 12 minutes
One thing you would want to say about belonging — from your own life, from something you have read, or invented. One idea, written twice.
Two versions, two registers, and an argument about which one is better.
- 4 minutes: write it as text B would — a speech, sixty words, with at least one inversion that keeps its promise.
- 4 minutes: write the same idea as text D would — a letter to one person, sixty words, no inversion at all, short sentences.
- 2 minutes: read both aloud to your partner. They say which one they believed.
- 2 minutes: argue about it. The oratorical version is usually more admired and the letter is usually more believed, and that gap is the thing to notice.
Neither version is the right answer. Text B is doing something a letter cannot do — moving a room of two hundred people — and text D is doing something a speech cannot: telling one person the truth without performing it. The skill this unit is after is knowing which room you are in.
Which one they believed
Two questions.
1. Which version did your partner say they believed?
2. What did the inversion do in the speech version?
Two texts with none
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Why does the academic text contain no inversion?
2. What comes after hardly had the session ended?
Next. The five patterns taken apart — what fronts, what inverts, and the two that require a specific word later in the sentence.