An interesting observation. Other people have made similar observations, but, at least before this explosion, any such suggestion that her English was unusually proficient for a non-native speaker was generally dismissed as racist.
Well, they would. The overall flowchart of RH & Co.'s arguments is unusually simple, has some huge causal gimmes and force multipliers built into it, and arrives at a very small number of possible conclusions.
If anyone accuses me of racism for my remarks about RH/Benjanun's command of language, my response will be that I am not judging it against some imaginary privileged hierarchy of good vs. bad English. I don't do that anyway, and it's not the point. Instead, let us, for the purposes of this conversation, count all the possible varieties of English as equally valid. That question, then, is which of all those possible varieties of English does she speak?
Or: we are all fish swimming in the ocean of English. There is no privileged social hierarchy implied by discussing which kind of fish a writer is.
I am still not sure I'm completely convinced, but I long ago noticed that she had an extraordinary mastery of idiom and rhetorical style in a language that is notoriously difficult to learn. She also mocked people who only spoke English with the claim that learning another language is easy, and claimed English is easy to learn - something I know as a former ESL teacher is assuredly not true.
An expert! No one knows English like ESL teachers. Forgive me, but I'm going to talk for a moment about things you already know.
The only way it's easy to learn English is if you grow up speaking it.
English is a relatively easy language for back-and-forth face-to-face informal conversation. The conversation itself provides a huge amount of contextual information about the speakers' statements, and the speakers essentially collaborate on the task of establishing what the important words are. (Note: this is true of all mercantile languages.)
The difficulty of getting things right ramps up steeply when you move from spoken to written English, which is long on potential meanings, and short on formal grammatical and syntactical markers. I'm inclined to agree with those who say the basic unit of meaning in written English is the paragraph, because that's the point at which there's enough context to establish what the component words and sentences mean.
Business English and most technical writing uses a stripped-down version of the language that uses simplified mechanics and a curtailed vocabulary, and leans heavily on formulaic phrases and sentences. Verb constructions tend to add modifiers as needed to a short list of basic verbs, rather than using more specific verbs that might be unfamiliar to the recipient.
Literary English is miles more complicated. It has a high percentage of original sentences, and a huge and intricately connotative vocabulary. It draws on a vastly enlarged library of templates, tropes, idioms, and modes, and often assumes the reader is tracking a longer span of context (at least a couple of paragraphs in both directions) that may be modifying the meaning of a word or sentence. It hoards old bits of grammar and diction which are no longer compliant with the current OS, but which it is nevertheless unwilling to throw away; and it enthusiastically adds new forms, like the recent
because reasons, or the semi-recent
Emphasizing. every. damned. word.
Participating in a fast-moving online discourse is working without a net. Being able to not only participate, but write quickly and eloquently while getting all the finicky grammatical bits right, means the writer is comfortable speaking literary English conversationally, and gets the finicky bits right without thinking about it. To state the obvious, the majority of native English speakers can't do that.
I take a lot of cabs in NYC. I see firsthand how hard adults have to work to learn the language. Claiming that English is easy to learn is both obviously untrue, and an enormous and offensive assertion of privilege.
I saw at least one poster in one of the many threads that have exploded over this issue claim that he was able to find her birth certificate, which identified her as U.S. born. I don't really place much credence in that (this was one of her alleged stalkers who claimed it), since I doubt anyone actually knows her real name (nor do I think even she deserves to be doxxed like that).
I don't believe him. By all indications, RH is the topmost layer of a Matryoshka sockpuppet. Before I'd believe that someone's found basic ID documents for her, he'd first have to convincingly explain how he figured out her real identity, and then go on from there.
I don't recognize an absolute right to anonymity or pseudonymity in cases where changeable identities are being used for fraud and/or abuse -- and my standards for what constitutes abuse kick in pretty early. That said, there aren't many circumstances in which I can imagine revealing someone's real street address, annual income, medical profile, or children's elementary school; and whistleblowers are definitely a protected species.
RH's behavior has made her identity a matter of urgent interest to the community. If she wanted people to leave her identity alone, she shouldn't have used it as a weapon.
But I suspect the real truth behind RH/BS is still out there, and probably will never be fully known.
I think she'll be found out sooner or later. No matter how clever she's been, the analytical technology we use to examine texts is going to keep getting more powerful and sophisticated, and RH hasn't managed to delete everything she's known to have written. The current thrash just guarantees that there will always be people willing to save archives of her text.
Another reason I think she'll be caught is her appetite for new victims. I doubt she can stay quiet and lie low. Someone who studied workplace bullies found that when their habitual targets became unavailable, the bullies could only tolerate a gap of about seven to ten days before they picked a new victim.
At this point, people have drawn up battle lines and now the two camps are going after partisans on either side. There's a certain lack of nuance all around, which I find ironic but I'm not sure what it all really says.
It just means that awareness of the thrash has spread to less well informed circles. It's a normal part of the process.
Another sideshow: the right-leaning neanderthals have finally noticed the thrash, and are showing up to say dumb things about how it just goes to show [collect underpants] [something-or-other] about SJWs.
So far, the most popular response is that it's the SJWs who started organizing and working to take RH down, and when have the neanderthals ever made a comparable effort to clean up their own trash, hmmmmm?
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the real attention-getting venues started reporting this -- IO9, TPM, Boing Boing, GRRM, sites in that range -- and if they do, it has a chance of getting picked up by the mainstream media, which would focus ever so many eyes on RH & Co. The fun's not over yet.
