Language in Use 205-206
This unit is concerned with the fact that everyone has a personality, but that
other people, meeting someone for the first time, may make mistaken assumptions
about him because they identify him as a type. The unit explores further
the way in which peoples' response to the language of others enters into their
assessment of what type of person they are dealing with.
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[1] The aim of this session is to explore those features about a stranger that lead one to form an opinion of his character. The class should discuss which features tell most about him, and what use can be made of the way lie speaks in an attempt to place him. Ask the class to recollect their last encounter with a stranger and what influenced their opinion of him. Then ask them to consider what affects their judgement of people whom they see and hear on their way to school, in their neighbourhood, and so on. Likely features include hair style, fashion and expense of dress, accent, form and content of conversation overheard, purchases and how much is paid for them, accessories like brief-case or spectacles, newspapers being read, and so on.
[2] The aim of this session is to explore with the class whether they possess stock responses to figures like teachers, bishops, students, bank managers, doctors, or politicians. It needs a collection of pieces, one from each member of the class, in which a suitable figure is interviewed as on the TV kind of speech which has been used, and the writer's reasons for thinking that that way of speaking was suitable for the person concerned.
[3] This session considers what happens when people deliberately set out to conceal their real characters. It requires the devising and presentation of sketches which show an individual trying to be what he is not. The class should take their example from what is familiar to them like a new boy trying to show that he is a he-man, or very well-off, or good with the girls; a teacher who is trying to hide his indifference by being enthusiastic; or a relative who is trying to conceal his affection by being cold and remote. The discussion should centre on what has been put into the language and gestures of the characters in the sketches to suggest that they are not what they would like to be taken for. An individual's sense of his identity, the subject of Erving Goffman's book, Stigma, (Penguin), is widely used in literature, not only in the person of the stock or stereotyped character, but also in the person of the character who evokes a stock response in order to falsify it.
This unit may be used to introduce the handling of such characters in farce or melodrama; in children's fiction; in the notion of the hero, or anti-hero (see E8); and in such authors as Dickens, many of whose characters have easily recognisable labels.