Mushfaking & Maintaining a Unique Discourse

James Paul Gee, a professor at UCLA wrote an introduction to language. And not just grammar, I mean real language. How the context of a situation underscores the necessary syntax we use. It’s why we have such a hard time interpreting foreign languages. Without context, those words are just bunches of letters, clumped together like a preschooler spooning up alphabet soup.  

When Gee discusses discourse, he describes it as our foundation for different ways of communicating with people. My primary discourse, based on my primary socialization of books that smelled of comforting must, engineering manuals, and hefty art books, relied(and mainly still does) on vocabulary I’ll always have trouble pronouncing, massive amounts of adjective phrase, and  

I was vaguely upset when Gee discussed the ways differences in discourse create tension – it hit a little too close to home. I always struggled in middle school fitting in with the kids who were discussing Twilight and young adult fiction; I, a blossoming “young intellectual” dreamed of holding my own at the adult table, amusing adults with theories of existentialism and precocious ideas of life from my point of view.

When Gee describes literacy as the mastery of a secondary discourse, I felt that. I felt that at the adult’s table when I was young.  I feel that now in a male-dominated career field. Adapt or die. There’s not quite a second choice if you want to survive in this fast-paced world. 

Mushfaking, or faking a fluency in a discourse not your primary, is a very interesting concept. I was humored by this concept; it’s not even an outlier in our modern study of language. Tumblr brought us a mush fake of uncapitalized, unpunctuated run-on sentences that at once carried a never ending feeling of nostalgia and crippling teen angst. You weren’t truly a teen in our age unless you mastered this discourse. While I tried my best to be tumblr-famous at 16, going back and reading my writing when I was that age seems really so fake. It sounds like someone else – because it was. I was mush faking. 

I think it’s honestly more rare to find people that aren’t mush faking now. Maybe in a diary, maybe in a private setting. I pushed myself hard to reflect in the most genuine discourse I could – because I couldn’t truly understand what I was going through unless I wrote about it. 

Writing truly helps one synthesize and clarify your current thoughts, but it’s hard to devote the time in a world that seems so last minute. People cram in homework, they cram in family time, they cram in you-time. By structuring our time in this wishy-washy flow, I feel like we sometimes mush fake a jambalaya of language together to best adapt to all situations – but wouldn’t we all be better off it we remained genuine to one discourse so we could be genuine to ourselves (and give a little baby middle finger to the world?). Developing a unique voice in a world where we are all so keen to adapt to everyone’s whims is a difficult task – but it’s one I believe can be accomplished by writing  more.