Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative, and I ...

Even despite the differences among the individual armed services—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Air Force—the similarities in training and customs are enough to provide clear intertextual references over time. In all services, for example, new recruits learn “basic responses” such as “yes, sir,” “no, sir,” “no excuse, sir,” and, “I do not understand the question, sir.” In fact, in a case of almost “metaintertextuality,” recruits are only allowed to use those basic responses and must, despite the frustration, make all answers conform to this small repertoire. Of course, some will be more familiar with these customary responses than others, due to their upbringing or the region in which they were raised. For example, American southerners are more accustomed to the use of “ma’am” and “sir” in interaction than are Americans from other regions. New recruits may also learn basic and specialized military terminology as well as decades old marching songs, also called “jodies,” which often take the form of narratives. Further, soldiers, sailors, marines, members of the Coast Guard, and airwomen/men are stationed in a fixed number of locations around the world. Veterans may therefore have served decades apart from one another; yet, military traditions, terminology, and duty locations provide intertextual links across the branches of service and the generations. As a colleague pointed out to me, the intertextual reference spreads outside the military to even the uninitiated, as he observed when some children passed near his home chanting, “hup, two, three, four.” Even service by conscription, which is still practiced in many countries, provides a mutual intercultural experience.

The notion of intertextuality, then, sheds light on the wide influence of military discourse, especially when taken together with the work of other language philosophers and researchers. The work of philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is important here on at least two counts: his concepts of “habitus” and “rites of institutions.” Bourdieu revived the Aristotelian concept of the habitus, interpreted as the set of “dispositions which incline agents to act or react in certain ways,” and which are inculcated, starting with childhood, in various types of training and instruction to the point where responses become second nature (Thompson 12).