Graham M. Jones

Talking Text and Talking Back: ''My BFF Jill'' from Boob Tube to YouTube

Exploring the close relationship between poetic language and metalanguage, this article analyzes both a series of 2007-8 U.S. TV ads that humorously deploy the language of text messaging, and the subsequent debates about the linguistic status of texting that they occasioned. We explore the ambivalence of commercials that at once resonate with fears of messaging slang as a verbal contagion and luxuriate in the playful inversion of standard language hierarchies. The commercials were invoked by monologic mainstream media as evidence of language decay, but their circulation on YouTube invited dialogic metalinguistic discussions, in which young people and texting proponents could share the floor with adults and language prescriptivists. We examine some of the themes that emerge in the commentary YouTubers have posted about these ads, and discuss the style of that commentary as itself significant.

Magic, an appreciation

Response to comments on Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

New Magic as an Artification Movement: From Speech Event to Change Process

In recent years, a small but prolific network of French magicians and their allies have taken calculated, systematic, and very public steps to reposition magic as a form of high culture, produced and received according to a set of distinctively artistic criteria, and linked institutionally to the realm of fine arts. They call what they are doing ‘new magic’ (la magie nouvelle). This article takes a conversation analytic approach to a verbal disagreement between one of new magic’s principal proponents and a relatively senior music scholar who questions how art-like new magic really is. The speakers mutually accomplish the activity of arguing by realizing associated design features such as negative personal assessments, overlapping talk, format tying, sarcasm, bald directives, and interruption. In so doing, they also co-construct interactional identities as cultural insurgent and cultural gatekeeper, shaping this particular speech event as a skirmish in a conflictual and unresolved process of artification.