Textile and Text Style Or, Why Linguists Are So Badly Dressed Martha Jo McGinnis During a talk several weeks ago in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Professor Marcel Danesi of the Italian Studies Department raised a question which, on the surface, appeared to be a trivial one -- namely, why is that linguists dress so badly? Judging from the general response to Prof. Danesi's comment, however, it would seem that his point was far from trivial. His indictment of the Department's collective haberdashery refused to settle into the dust of forgotten platitudes. It festered. It rankled. Prof. Danesi's remark seemed to call into question much more than our sartorial savoir faire. With mysterious accuracy, it struck at the core of our discipline -- dismissing our presuppositions, our approach, our very ethos, as just so many cheap bargains from Honest Ed's. As we sat there in our second-hand sweaters, our toeless sneakers, and our corduroys of indeterminate hue, it was difficult to argue with our tie-and-jacketed accuser. Yet we felt intuitively that somehow, perhaps at a more abstract level of representation, he had it all wrong. Linguists may not be, to use Prof. Danesi's word, 'notorious' for dressing badly; however, a certain disregard for externals is typical of our kind. A student at MIT recently reported to me that the Department of Linguistics there is still housed in a 'temporary' architectural monstrosity from the 1940's, not because they haven't been offered a better place, but because Noam Chomsky thinks it will keep them honest. Linguists distrust appearances. A discipline that devotes itself to proving that sentences and sounds arise from deep abstract structures is not about to attach much significance to the surface phenomena of dress. The existence of an NP-trace can be demonstrated logically, and thus is much more real to a linguist than the authority of someone who happens to be wearing a tie. Continental philosophy portrays the individual as a shifting nebula, defined and redefined according to the interpretations of observers. Perhaps this philosophy, which seems to underlie much of Prof. Danesi's semiotics research, accounts for a question he repeated several times during the course of his lecture: "Am I a linguist?" Linguists brush aside this sort of question with an impatient gesture, muttering carelessly about lexical idiosyncracies -- linguist, semiotician, whatever, label shmabel. But for Prof. Danesi, this was the important question. He faced his skeptical audience like some latter-day Scarlett O'Hara: "Where shall I go? What should I do?" The philosophy of the 'nebulous' individual underlies not only the field of semiotics, but also the vast image-making industry whose most pronounced manifestation is in advertising. Individuals, glossed as 'consumers', are invited to define themselves according to the products they consume. Shopping for a toilet-bowl cleaner becomes the mystic journey for self- discovery. By this account, the purpose of clothing is not to provide warmth or decency, but rather to 'present the Self.' For a linguist, the identity of the 'Self', whatever that is -- call in the human D-structure -- can only be glimpsed through a veil of surface phenomena. The sounds and structures that clothe the mind may vary from one individual to another, but their newness and neatness to fit hold little interest for us. A linguist's primary interest is in the universal qualities of the mind itself. So why do linguists dress so badly? Frankly, Prof. Danesi, we don't give a damn.