When discussing politics or society as a whole, people saying "you need to be realistic" has two meanings when you strip away everything else.
First, the poor, powerless, marginalized, ect mean it as "Don't get yourself killed."
Second, the wealthy, privileged, powerful ect mean it as "Don't make us kill you."
@bigTanuki
(first off - thank you - never heard/saw heteroglossia before and just - thank you!)
Exactly this - the doublespeak of white supremacy was my introduction to it, but it's really everywhere.
@Kalshann Giving credit where due: I was introduced to this term in my English 101 class at SUNY.
The ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin have stuck with me. His ideas 100 years ago, that language is part of our material struggle, and the battle for meaning is power struggle to define what the problems “are” and thus control what responses are considered acceptable, explains to me a lot of gender, race and especially class struggles that remain largely invisible hidden under nuanced language.
From Wikipedia: “Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires speakers or authors to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect in which they will speak.”
I believe your post about “being real” is extremely timely and terrifyingly relevant. 🙇🏻♂️
Kalshann
Doubledado