The police do not shoot people. Not any more. Apparently, the word shoot has been deleted from the cop-speak dictionary.

A recently released video shows a Chicago cop doing what most people would describe as shooting a kid. Sixteen times. That’s not the way the Chicago Police Department puts it.

Chicago Tribune: A “preliminary statement” from the police News Affairs division, sent to the media early the next morning, said that after he had refused orders to drop the knife, McDonald “continued to approach the officers” and that as a result “the officer discharged his weapon, striking the offender.”

In Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter is protesting what they think is the shooting of Jamar Clark by a police officer. How wrong they are. The police did not shoot Clark. Instead, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

MPR News: At some point during an altercation that ensued between the officers and the individual, an officer discharged his weapon, striking the individual.

The police don’t shoot people. They discharge their weapons striking individuals, usually suspects or offenders. A Google search for “officer discharge weapon striking” returns 3.6 million hits.

Worse, the press often doesn’t even bother to translate but instead prints the insipid bureaucratic language of the police department verbatim.

Fearing for their safety and the safety of the public, they fired their guns, striking the suspect.

(Other sources on these stories do put the press-release prose in quotes. Also, in California, officers who discharge their weapons also usually “fear for their safety and the safety of the public.” I would guess that the phrase is part of some statute about police discharging their weapons)

Here’s another example from the Wilkes Barre area:The writer nailed the lede: a police officer shot a suspect. But whoever wrote the headline had majored in Technical Language and Obfuscation rather than Journalism.

Does the language make a difference? I don’t know. Suppose the headlines two weeks ago had said, “In Paris, some people discharged their weapons striking individuals.”

Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog; re-posted at Pacific Standard.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

SocImages News:

Sociological Images’ post on Kim Kardashian and the patriarchal bargain is mentioned in Peggy Orenstein’s forthcoming book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. What a wonderful surprise!

Also this month, we featured a guest post by sociology graduate student Nicole Bedera. Her criticism of the latest viral Barbie ad prompted NPR to do a story. Listen to hear Nicole and Barbie-scholar Ann DuCille comment on about how far the doll has, or hasn’t, come.

Finally, I had the opportunity to contribute to a smart analysis of energy drink marketing at the New Yorker and a really nice discussion of “love your body”-type marketing at The Establishment.

You like!  Here are our most appreciated posts this month:

• The “man-bun” as cultural appropriation (1,500+ likes)
• On the insidious sexism of the Covergirl Star Wars collection (600+ likes)
• Protecting white women in the bathroom: A history (600+ likes)
• What the 1% wants from our politicians (500+ likes)

Thanks everybody!

Editor’s pick:

• Disobedience or civil disobedience: Who decides when breaking rules is good?

Top post on Tumblr this month:

• “Man” vs. “girl”: Halloween edition (1,000+ notes)

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Hey folks, I’m all booked up for February and March, but might be able to squeeze something in later in the semester. Happy to talk about hookup culture (that’s the favorite) or to offer some of the other talks I’ve worked up on American thinking about genital cutting, the science of sex differences, feminism and friendship, public sociology, and more!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and Instagram and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

• Demystifying Commodities
• Ritualized Consumption Dances
• The Economy of Christmas (pictured)
• EBay Transactions on Black Friday 2009
• Discourse and “Doorbuster” Sales

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

• Have a Sexy Thanksgiving!
• The Happiest Day of the Year!
• Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner Up in 2011

Thanksgiving Mythology

• Red Bull’s Historically Stupid Thanksgiving Fantasy
• U.S. Schools Teach Children that Native Americans are History

Theorizing Thanksgiving:

• Emile Durkheim on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (pictured)

Some Fun History:

• Thanksgiving: The First TV Dinner
• For a “Wholesome” Thanksgiving, Choose Seagrams
• Suffragettes Delay Thanksgiving Dinner

Cigarette Advertising, on this Holiday:

• The Traditionalization of Tobacco
• Smoke Camels, for your Health, on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, Race, and Gender:

• Holding Women Responsible for Holidays
• Thanksgiving Poca-Hotness

Five minutes for fun facts on this almost-Thanksgiving day in the US. Some of my favorites:

• Stuffing goes back to at least the 4th century CE.
• Potatoes are truly an American tuber; it’s grown in every 50 states.
• Corn is a flower.
• Meat pies preceded desert pies and they were called “coffins.”
• In case you need a 15th century aphrodisiac recipe: boiled peas and onions sprinkled with cinnamon, ginger, and cardamon.
• The average American eats between 3,000 and 5,000 calories at Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanks Mental Floss!

Enjoy!

I don’t know for sure what holidays are like at your house, but if they resemble holidays at my house, and most houses in the US, women do almost all of the holiday preparation: decorating, gift buying and wrapping, invitations, neighborhood and church activities, cooking, cooking, more cooking, and cleaning.

Holidays are moments in the year when women, specifically, have extra responsibilities. I distinctly remember my own beloved stepmother telling me — stress making her voice taut — that she just wanted everyone to have a nice Thanksgiving. She would work herself silly to do and have all the right things so that everyone else would have a good time. Multiple this by 10 at Christmas.

This Bed, Bath, & Beyond ad, sent in by Jessica E. and Jessica S., reminded me of the crazy workload that accompanies holidays for women:

Alone with the responsibility of making a holiday for everyone else, the woman manages to mobilize technology and goods from BB&B to make it happen. Ironically, the text reads: “When you need a hand with holiday entertaining,” but actual human help in the form of hands is absent. Apparently it’s easier for women to grow five extra arms than it is to get kids and adult men to pitch in.

Anyhoo, be a peach and give your mom a hand this holiday season.

Originally published in 2009.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Pre-prepared frozen meals pre-dated the Swanson “TV dinner,” but it was Swanson who brought the aluminum tray — previously only seen in taverns and airplanes — into the home.

They were motivated by opportunity and necessity. The necessity went something like this, or so the story goes: After the 1953 Thanksgiving holiday, Swanson found themselves up to their ears in turkey. They had overestimated demand, and there they were, with 260 tons of frozen turkey and the next bird holiday 364 days away. So, they slapped together a frozen turkey dinner, with peas and mashed potatoes, and held their breath.

The opportunity was the meteoric rise of living room television sets. In 1950, only 9% of American households had TVs. By 1953, 45% of households had one. The next year, that number would rise to 56%. Swanson’s overstock of turkeys occurred at exactly the same moment that owning a television became the new hot thing. So, Swanson tied their advertising directly to TV watching, inventing the phrase “TV dinner.”

Rumor is that Swanson wasn’t optimistic, but the dinners outsold their expectations. They planned to sell 5,000 turkey TV dinners that first year, in 1954, but they ended up selling 10 million.

So, if you celebrate Thanksgiving and are eating a TV dinner tonight instead of a whole bird, know that you, too, are part of a true American tradition.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Flashback Friday.

A study published in 2001, to which I was alerted by Family Inequality, asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex.  Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right:

The article is a great example of the difference between research findings and the interpretation of those findings.  For example, this is how I would interpret it:

Today in the US, but not elsewhere and not always, blue is gendered male and pink gendered female.  We might expect, then, that men would internalize a preference for blue and women a preference for pink.  We live, however, in an androcentric society that values masculinity over femininity.  This rewards the embracing of masculinity by both men and women (making it essentially compulsory for men) and stigmatizes the embracing of femininity (especially for men).

We might expect, then, that men would comfortably embrace a love of blue (blue = masculinity = good), while many women will have a troubled relationship to pink (pink = femininity = devalued, but encouraged for women) and gravitate to blue and all of the good, masculine meaning it offers.

That’s how I’d interpret it.

Here’s how the authors of the study interpreted it:

…we are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans.

Go figure.

Important lesson here: data never stands alone. It must always be interpreted.

Originally posted in 2010.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.