Name Calling

When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. The insult, however, assumes its specific proportion in time. To be called a name is one of the first forms of linguistic injury that one learns. But not all name-calling is injurious. Being called a name is also one the conditions by which a subject is constituted in language. Does the power of language to injure follow from it's interpellative power? And how, if at all, does linguistic agency emerge from this scene of enabling vulnerability?
The problem of injurious speech raises the question of which words wound, which representations offend, suggesting that we focus on those parts of language that are uttered, utterable, and explicit. And yet, the linguistic injury appears to be the effect not only of the word by which one is addressed but the mode of the address itself, a mode-adisposition or convention bearing-that interpellates and constitutes a subject.

The first two paragraphs of a book my friend Dave needed to read for his English Class. It's mind boggling how unnecessarily long winded it is, and how this author feels the need to show her linguistic prowness through dry, overtly technical sentence structures which sound horrible when read out loud.

Thank god I'm not an English Major, I can't stand these kinds of readings. -.-