Medieval Muteness

by KARL STEEL

First, congrats Jeffrey on your excellent review, cited below. And second, GOOD LUCK to all prepping for Kalamazoo: may your papers cohere easily, and may you be grabbed and whirled by fun.

Schöneberger Südgelände Nature Park, Berlin.

The first biography of Thomas Aquinas had the job of turning this Christian Aristotelian and theological systematizer into a saint. As ideas themselves, sadly, cannot be sanctified directly, the scholar must be furnished not with a scholastic, but with a personal halo. Thus Willliam of Tocco has a nurse fail to convince the infant Aquinas to give up a wadded-up cartulary that, as it turns out, "contained nothing else but the Ave Maria, the greeting to the glorious Virgin" [nichil aliud continentem nisi Ave Maria, salutationem Virginis gloriose]. Thus the face of the young Aquinas shines like the sun, illuminating all around him. And most famously, Aquinas so humbly shuts up his genius in silence that his fellow students call him a "bouem mutum," a mute ox, as they are "ignorantes de eo futurum in doctrina mugitum" [ignorant about his future mooing in teaching/doctrine]. Only after witnessing a series of precocious intellectual feats does his teacher, Albert the Great himself, proclaim "we called this one a mute ox, but he will give such a mooing of teaching that it will resound throughout the world!" [Nos uocamus istum bouem mutum, sed ipse adhuc talem dabit in doctrina mugitum quod in toto mundo sonabit]. The story would be repeated in the second life of Aquinas, penned by the famous inquisitor Bernard Gui, and so on into G. K. Chesterton (who, in 1933, declared that his hero's big, square head  - like those of Napoleon or Mussolini or a "head waiter" - elevated him above the common run of otherwise thin and noisy Italians). And medievalists should be grateful for the superbly named Dumb Ox Books, dedicated to publishing English translations of Aquinas's Aristotle commentaries.

Unsuspected excellence is a hagiographical commonplace. Medievalists should know not to take the story of Aquinas's schooldays any more seriously than that of his mother's desperate efforts to keep her son from joining the Dominicans, a story whose chase, capture, and escape recall nothing so much as a romance (which is to say that the story can be taken seriously, as a romance). The quality of heroes is commonly misrecognized by their young playmates: as boys, Cyrus of Persia and Cú Chulainn alike startle and dismay their fellows with their innate sovereignty, while Moses, before he lays down the law, first complains of being tongue-tied. Narrative needs surprises, and it also wants us to feel that we're in on the secret (I knew who Aquinas was before it was cool). Sanctity also demands this quality of concealed genius, not just because the saint has to be persecuted, but also because true genius, like true sanctity, requires the cloak of sprezzatura. 

Thus Aquinas must be a bouem mutum. I am avoiding translating the adjective as "dumb," both because the Latin "mutus" has a wider range of common associations than the English "dumb," and because the English "dumb," combines silence and stupidity in a way that the Latin does not. To be mutus in Latin is not necessarily to share the qualities of a stupid person, but rather to have the qualities of speechlessness or, crucially, incomprehensibility. This is how Aquinas could moo and still be mute: it is not that the muteness would give way to mooing, but that the mooing would finally be understood for what it really was, the voice of a genius. Misunderstood noise gives way to astonished understanding. 

Not only animals are "mute," and not only humans (as the word "mutus" unsurprisingly tends to travel with "surdus," deaf). To be mutus is to share the qualities of an animal, or even of a stone (while I'll simply mark, without further development, the word's use as professional terminology in the grammatical manuals of Donatus, Priscian, and others). The condition of muteness slides from irrationality into inanimacy, from a life whose noise cannot be understood to one that has no life and no voice at all. It traverses the conditions of human impairment, animal inability, and material inertness. To be mute is not necessarily to be silent; in many instances, it is rather a condition of being silenced: not listened to, not taken seriously, ignored.

The muteness of things goes almost without saying. Habakkuk 2:18 mocks those who believe that the "simulacra muta" they themselves made possess divine power. (Though Habakkuk splits the silence of idols from the voice of the humans who made them, we postmodern sophisticates know that all distinctions between autonomous subjects and secondary objects are themselves fetish constructions and mere ontotheological baggage). 1 Corinthians 12:2 contrasts devotion to, again, "simulacra muta," to an appropriate devotion to spiritual things. All an idol can do is sit there, inert, and wait for someone to give it a little tap. And then it keeps waiting.

But that muteness is just one of its varieties. Consider Augustine's troubled response to Psalms 144:10. Faced with "Let all thy works, O lord, praise thee: and let thy saints bless thee," he insisted that no one should "think that the mute stone or mute animal has reason wherewith to comprehend God." Certainly not. Everything has its own place in the scale of being, and most things were created on the wrong side of the tracks. Yet, barring God, it turns out that everything is at least a little bit mute:

God has ordered everything, and made everything: to some He has given sense and understanding and immortality, as to the angels; to some He has given sense and understanding with mortality, as to man; to some He has given bodily sense, yet gave them not understanding, or immortality, as to cattle: to some He has given neither sense, nor understanding, nor immortality, as to herbs, trees, stones: yet even these cannot be wanting in their kind, and by certain degrees He has ordered His creation, from earth up to heaven, from visible to invisible, from mortal to immortal. This framework of creation, this most perfectly ordered beauty, ascending from lowest to highest, descending from highest to lowest, never broken, but tempered together of things unlike, all praises God.

Augustine's goal is clear enough: to sort kinds of being hierarchically according to their capacities. But his scheme suffers from an inconsistency caused by the problem of conceptualizing the voice. One of Augustine's scales establishes a set of discrete, hierarchically arranged types: at the top, God, then angels, humans, beasts, and finally, in one group, plants and stones. As I observed long ago, this arrangement is not dissimilar, even not dissimilar enough, from Heidegger's division between da-sein, weltarm (world poor, like the lizard on the rock), and weltlos (worldless, like the rock itself). This Augustiggerian scheme splits beings between those that have understanding, and therefore a voice of their own, and those that do not. One the one side, God, angels, and humans, and on the other, "mutus lapis aut mutum animal” (PL 37:1877), the mute stone or mute living thing (a word perhaps even translatable as "animal" in the modern, colloquial sense of the word).

With this scale is another one, still hierarchical, but in this case not discrete. Augustine likely did not intend this other "never broken" [nusquam interrupta] hierarchy to function differently than the first; but a scale that neatly splits sense from mere being, understanding from mere sense, and immortality from mere mortality cannot work like the second, uninterrupted scale, which, below the level of the Divine Itself, sorts without splitting. Continuity means contiguity, which means a basic point from poststructuralism: contiguity means that qualities are shared, however faintly, across the whole scale before stopping, as all things do, at the Great Infinite of God. At the bottom is  "a kind of voice of the dumb earth" [vox quaedam est mutae terrae]; but that quality must run across the whole scale, because everything but God can only have a vocem quaedam. When Augustine demands that we admire the fecundity of creation, and its beauty, and that we ask of it how it got these qualities, not just the earth, but everything in "one voice" [una voces] would respond  "I myself did not make myself, but God" [non me ego feci, sed Deus], for nothing has anything in itself, unless it comes from that Creator [non potuit a se esse, nisi ab illo Creatore].

Again, barring God, everything has just enough voice to speak of its own fundamental secondariness. Even those things that seem to have a voice - us, that is - have a voice that is only the effect of God's divine voice. We are therefore more like rocks that like God. Here is one quality of the voice, then: to have a voice is to have been granted a voice, that is, to be secondary. To have an inbuilt inability. To always carry a silence within the gift of the voice, because the voice you believe to be your own is not, finally, all yours. It is granted, at least in part, by the conditions that make it possible to be heard as a voice: as when, for example, Augustine calls on us to listen to all of Creation.

My second consideration on this point concentrates on the listener rather than the speaker. Augustine does not distinguish between mute stones, mute plants, and mute animals, but between things with understanding and those without. The same adjective applies either to a "mutus lapis aut mutum animal," so that "muteness" distinguishes not between sound and silence, but between sense and senselessness. Things we think of as noisy could be, in medieval writing, "mute," because - to belabor the point - muteness has less to do with silence than with incomprehensibility. Old French uses “mue beste” as a virtual pleonasm. The word "mutum" (to choose the accusative singular as my representative), which appears 469 times in the Patrilogia Latine, appears with the word "animal" 43 times. This is not more often than it appears with "surdus" (deaf) -- 160 times! -- but more than it does with any other word.

Of course, animals bark and hiss and low. They make noise. Sometimes, medieval writing distinguishes between silent and noisy animals, calling only the former mute: this is what Beroul's Tristan does, when Iseult saves Husdent's life by convincing Tristan to train him not to bark: for a dog that cannot keep quiet (1552; ne se tient mu) is of little value in the hunt. But in general, animals were still mute (or "dumb" in Middle English, def. 5), because the noise they made was assumed to be meaningless, or because it was indivisible into letters or even words.

This later characterization of animal muteness comes from the professional cant of grammarians. Isidore puts it like this: "every voice is either articulated or confused. Articulated is the voice of humans, confused is the voice of living things [or, again, simply "animals," in the modern sense]. Articulated is what can be written, and confused what cannot be written" [Omnis vox, aut est articulata, aut confusa. Articulata est hominum, confusa animalium. Articulata est quae scribi potest, confusa quae scribi non potest, PL 82:89B].Notably, Isidore sets out the division in two ways, with two distinct responsibilities for the fault of unwritable sound. Either the vox confusa is inherent to the voice itself, which is itself a sonic materialization of the irrational limits of the spirit: this classification divides human from animal. Or the vox confusa, by dividing writable from unwritable, becomes a problem of technology, and, in a larger sense, inadequate anticipation, training, effort, and care on the part of the listener (for more, on accessibility and accommodation, compare this and this). The former formulation assumes that the speaker is at fault; the second suggests that the listener, or scribe, might be.

Animals are either mute because they are irrational, or because humans make the mistake of assuming they have nothing to say. Anyone who's lingered in a birding guide ("'prreet,' 'prrlhr', 'prrūt-ūt,' and 'preeh-e,'" is what mine says the skylark says), or anyone who's listened to Messiaen's piano works, knows that bird sounds can be written down. Certainly, modern ethnography has demonstrated that some nonhuman animal species really do have, if not languages - with all that implies about trading second-order ideas about, for example, philosophy or sports - then at least dialect, so that specific groups of animals have their own vocalizations distinct from those of their conspecifics. A training in dialect requires distinguishing between sounds; it requires the divisions and differences necessary to any concept of writing, which operates within the supposedly primary function of the voice, too (again, elementary poststructuralism). Writing is possible, necessary even, even among these supposedly mute things.

The same might be said of other mute, presumably inanimate things, like the earth. Within a certain crowd, with my own training and inclinations, this final proposal would probably pass without much comment. I'm going to at least feign reluctance (without forgetting my debt to Cohen, for example, via Oppermann).While it might be tempting for scholars of a certain theoretical instinct to use impaired people as a figure for the "silenced" "voice of the earth," and so on, I cannot easily accept the advantage of reaffirming the mistaken medieval habit of using the same adjective, "mute," to characterize both impaired humans and mortal and submortal nonhumans, like animals, plants, and stones. Now that my work is belatedly straying into matters of disability, I am eager to emphasize the obvious: that humans face particular dangers of being rendered mute, of not having their reason recognized, of being treated like objects. The problem of muted humans is obviously a problem of justice of a different order than what nonhumans routinely face (and yet see Sunaura Taylor and Sue Walsh).

Yet there still may be an advantage in the word "mute." It has typically been applied from outside: someone hearing an animal's  voice as only noise, someone thwapping a stone and hearing only that. But William of Tocco's gives us the perspective of the bouem mutum. Here is a "mute" figure whose thoughts we know. No one would read this life of Aquinas without already knowing Aquinas as a thinker. As a mute ox, Aquinas is moving more slowly than his fellows; as William of Tocco tells us, he is ruminating. Given enough patience, given enough time of his own amid the expected metrics of his training and institution, his thoughts will burst forth, and astonish the world. In that gap between Aquinas's supposed muteness and his thoughts, we have at least a figuration of the split between subjective impairment and objective disability. In the gap between what they think they know and what we know, we have a hint at what might be muted.

In that gap, the word "mute" becomes a call to imagine, to wait, to meet others on their own terms (see a related move here, from Dominic Pettman). Jonathan Hsy has approached this problem brilliantly from the side of the voice. He has observed that medieval wordlists of animal sounds sometimes included nonanimal noises too: crows croak, donkeys whinny, and fire crackles: muteness and the possibilities of translation, or at least classification, encompass noise in a variety of ways; ultimately, Hsy argues that these and other, related texts show how "Earthly creatures, human and nonhuman alike, can creatively adapt to and accommodate all kinds of sonic utterances and diverse vocalizations that register as alien to their ordinary lived experience." Also essential is Robert Stanton's engagement with Anglo-Saxon riddles alongside classical Skeptic philosophy, which discovers in them an exploration of animal vocal performance that recognizes in these animals the deliberation that performance requires. Projection, patience, meeting (more than) halfway, and a transformation of understanding: even medieval texts could do this. 

I have approached a similar problem from the side of muteness, a word that at once means silence, noise, and, as I have pushed it, misunderstanding. We need not think of "mute" anymore as it's normally presented in medieval Latin. It does not have to paired with "surdus"; it does not necessarily need to be cured. In its not being the opposite of sound, in being on the side of what is experienced as noise, muteness can invite us to wait in the possibility it offers, and to rethink the difference between what we think we know and what we might come to know if we let ourselves suspect our own ignorance and its habits of muting. 

Who Gets a Voice on Twitter?

by Boyda Johnstone (@BoydaJosa), a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University.

A few months ago, medieval twitter blew up. In a guest post on this blog, Dorothy Kim called medievalists to tweet the MLA and argued persuasively that “twitter, as a multimedia communication platform, functions like the space of marginalia in medieval manuscripts.” And Jonathan Hsy after #kzoo2014 posted a Buzzfeed-style article outlining the ways in which twitter is “not just a diversion or pastime for conference attendees but can actually be a useful tool.” Both bloggers built on the official conference-tweeting guidelines established by Roopika Risam before the 2014 MLA Convention. I’ve been on twitter for quite a few years, and after having read these posts and followed remotely on twitter some of the conversations at Kalamazoo, I was excited at the prospect of engaging in the twitter conversation during the New Chaucer Society biennial conference in Reykjavík, Iceland, held between July 16-20, 2014.

And my experience tweeting this conference was so much better and more enriching than I’d even anticipated. As a graduate student at a conference with many well-respected scholars, twitter allowed me to find my voice, helped me feel like I was part of the intellectual conversation. Discovering an alternative digital discussion happening across tablet, smartphone, and laptop; gaining new perspectives through the reactions and analyses of others; finding cross-currents and cross-connections with other panels in other rooms; gaining followers; meeting people in person who, amazingly, recognized my name from Twitter; feeling more confident speaking to more senior scholars in person due to our digital interactions.

On a more personal and/or practical level, twitter kept me awake and alert through multiple presentations, encouraged me to become a more active and engaged listener, helped me hone my critical and analytical skills, and helped me imprint ideas and arguments more firmly in my memory. I loved that I could follow fragments of the conversation in other panels as well, or catch up on panels I missed, which is important in such an intensely scheduled conference. Together, we NCS tweeters created a beautiful polyphony of fragmented, fascinated, confused, and curious thoughts and ideas, a multiplicity of voice and response that is crucial, I think, for ethical scholarship. Many of us are dedicated in our teaching and in our work to encouraging and uncovering active readerly engagement with texts, so this kind of polyphony has pedagogical and academic ramifications as well.

However, twitter also has its limitations, and I noticed a few problems as I observed the physical and virtual spaces around me. And so to the question: who gets a voice on twitter? As Hsy noted, not everyone has a twitter account, or possibly even the wireless technology to follow along in a session. In actual fact, the “multiplicity” of twitter voices was really only 15 or 20 people in a conference of 500, and of those 15, only a handful were tweeting regularly throughout the panels (though many more chimed in after the conference). Not everyone who has a twitter account interacts with it in the same way: some people need time to let arguments simmer and distil before they can actively respond to them, and so they can’t necessarily engage with sessions in real time; some people concentrate and learn better when just sitting and listening rather than dividing their attention among many different outlets; some people have political and/or personal objections to publicizing themselves online in such a way (for the NSA or future job committees to read). As much as we need to be listening for twitter’s variegated vocalizations online, those marginal responses to real-time scholarly activity, we also need to be listening and looking for the various degrees of silences surrounding the more vocal tweeters, and we should never fool ourselves into thinking that the sounding voices are more important than the quiet.

More to the point, we urgently need to maintain ‘Best Practices’ for twitter that exercise awareness of issues of representation, privilege, access, and attribution. My panel at NCS was wonderful: my paper felt good to deliver, the three papers spoke to each other in interesting ways, and we had a riveting discussion in the Q&A that left me wishing we had more time to talk. In short, I really couldn’t have asked for a better session. However, if you search the hashtags #ncs14 and #6d, you will find...nothing.

According to twitter, this productive session on Chaucer’s House of Fame—and its shimmering, vanishing surfaces of ice and glass—didn’t even happen, an ephemeral event that, if the future archive depended solely on the Library of Congress’s official twitter catalog, will be completely forgotten. While I fear this complaint may sound whiny or like a kind of humble-brag, it is simply a fact that I am a graduate student being trained in a struggling profession, and the future is uncertain. I would ideally like to secure a permanent, nonprecarious job, and if we are increasingly depending on twitter as an outlet for recognition and remembrance, the twitter archive of conferences such as this one is important to me.

On the other hand, if someone had been tweeting my paper and panel, there are a few guidelines I would have wanted that person to follow; for the other harsh reality is, we young scholars at a prestigious conference need to be careful not to allow our ideas to slip out of our hands, to lose their attribution and find homes somewhere else. One great thing about conference twitter etiquette is that if one’s ideas are properly cited, they are henceforth archived and remembered as yours, not someone else’s. And at this conference, I noticed that not everyone was observing such best practices: ideas and individual tweets were still floating around on twitter without attribution to their progenitor, mostly due I think to oversights and overexcitement (I even found myself doing this once or twice as well, admittedly). I think I speak for all graduate students and young scholars present at this conference when I say that this loss of attribution is a hugely pressing concern.

So, I’d like to outline and reiterate, firstly, one thing that I think needs to happen on Twitter during conferences such as NCS, and secondly, six things that should happen to ensure ethical scholarly practices, for students and faculty all. While Hsy, Kim, and Risam have already outlined most of these guidelines, they bear repeating from the perspective of an emerging young scholar. I welcome any further additions, objections, or insights.

What needs to happen: with a few understandable exceptions, every single tweet must contain named attribution to at least the last name of the presenter of the idea (formats such as “[tweet proper] [#conference #session] [last name pinned to the end]” are fine, though it is best if the first tweet contains a fuller statement of who is presenting, followed by briefer attributions later). This means that if you choose to tweet a number of the presenters’ (or questioners’) ideas in a row, every single tweet should contain the name of the idea’s progenitor. Imagine what would happen if one unattributed tweet amongst many suddenly went viral: suddenly it is the tweeter, not the presenter, who receives the credit. Scholarly chaos ensues (....no, but really.). If you are adding your own ideas to a presentation or tweeting a thought completely your own, make that clear (eg. “Brown says X, and I would add Y” or “I wonder what Brown would make of Z”). This is no different than citing and grappling with the ideas of others in our scholarly work, and should not be difficult.


What should happen:
1.     Try not to overtweet. Others have said that tweeting is like note-taking, but I would complicate this notion a little bit; note-taking tends to be much more profuse than the summative actions of tweeting should be. Be aware, when tweeting, that the scholars whose ideas you are reproducing may not be thrilled to have every single point they make in their laboriously constructed paper haphazardly flung across the internet, attribution or no (and they might not think or wish to announce this preference at the beginning of their talk, as it might seem overly defensive and set a bad tone). While I wish my paper had received an enthusiastic tweet or two, I do not wish that the entire thing had been published online in 140-character portions. Again, the currency of the idea is volatile and unstable, and issues of consent and ownership are at play here, especially for young scholars.

2.     Be aware of other tweeters. When choosing to tweet in real-time, follow the session and conference hashtags and observe what other people are saying. Twitter is supposed to be a dialogue, not a monologue, and as such you should listen to the multiplicity of voices around you; remember Kenneth Burke’s famous claim that when entering into conversation, you should “listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.” One of the most exciting twitter experiences I had at this conference occurred when I and co-tweeters in a different session, in a different room, realized that we were having parallel discussions about manuscript paleography/codicology that could speak to one another in productive ways. This new awareness could trigger further conversations and cross-pollination of ideas outside the panel sessions, and would not have occurred if we weren’t looking and listening for the tweets of others as well as our own.

3.     Be respectful of the physical space you inhabit as you are tweeting online. Try to maintain a courteous posture (ie. do not bend far over the table on your phone lest you resemble a bored, texting undergraduate), try to make eye contact with the speaker, take manual notes perhaps, try to convey a sense that you are at least as much present in the room as you are present online. Remember, again, that not everyone tweets, not everyone has read the previously cited manifestos on conference tweeting, not everyone is technologically savvy. I have heard stories of people in sessions becoming offended at the tweeting postures of others, perceiving them as rudeness; and although I don’t want to victim-blame, being aware of your physical body as you tweet communicates respect to the diversity of persons around you—including the speaker—and minimizes misinterpretation of your twitter-stance as rudeness or boredom.

4.     Be aware of which panels are and aren’t being represented. The degree of panel representation depends in large part upon who happens to be sitting in the room and how prolific of a tweeter he/she is. If one panel or paper is tweeted more than another, that panel or paper receives disproportionate representation online. I don’t fully know how to remedy this problem, but I wonder if, in the future, there should be an official “Tweeter” stationed in every room (or perhaps a job for the moderator) so that every panel and/or paper receives at least one or two summative and/or representative tweets. Until that day, just look around you and observe whose ideas are being tweeted and whose aren’t, and consider actively seeking out an underrepresented panel to broadcast it online.

5.     Be aware that tweets cannot encompass complex arguments. In one of the most well-attended sessions at NCS, 8A on the question of the “Agential Object” in critical theory, an audience member (unfortunately and somewhat hypocritically I don’t know who it was!) pointed out that one of the problems with new methodologies is that we as scholars tend to want to translate them into functional machines that allow us to pump out scholarship and articles as fast as possible. Similarly, when tweeting, we must be aware of the dangers of domesticating complex ideas into facile 140-character boxes. Judith Butler, in her essay “Ordinary, Incredulous” in The Humanities and Public Life (Fordham UP, 2014), argues that we need to be wary of breaking down complex arguments into the language of instrumentality, because that kind of simplification can cheapen and indeed betray our very calling as critical humanities scholars. To avoid this problem, treat tweets as imperfect containers of ideas that—as panel 10D on “Monument, Edifice, Container,” organized by Elaine Treharne and Noelle Phillips, taught us in regard to medieval manuscripts—possess fragments, ruptures, limitations, even as they present exciting possibilities for distilling ideas into graspable and memorable bits.

6.     Finally, with this last problem in mind, be aware of the form of your tweet. As this is the first time I have ever tweeted a conference or panel, I don’t entirely feel like I have the authority to say this, but in my opinion a good conference tweet contains both local and global (or specific and general) components. Local so that there’s something educative or some substance for your claim, but global so that outsiders looking in—and those whose twitter-feed is currently being bombarded by tweets from excitable Chaucerians—might derive some kind of general application from our conferencing. Don’t fill your tweets—at least not all of them—with esoteric facts and alienating coded details. Tweets with general instead of or as well as specific content help avoid the problem, mentioned above, of overexposing the intimate details of someone else’s argument. And also, tweets with general instead of or as well as specific content are arguably more fun and engaging to read.


This last suggestion brings me to my final point, as the question of how we present ourselves on twitter to the wider world is, again, about privilege and voicing: we scholars at this exotic academic conference (if I may include myself amongst this group), some of whom have letters after our names and stable institutional positions, are always already privileged by the very nature of being here, and by nature of belonging to institutions that in many cases still support such expensive events. As much as we’d like to believe that it is the virtue of our scholarship that has brought us to such a place, in actual fact there are powers and institutions that have contributed to bringing us here, that have given us a voice. Using twitter as a digital resource means that we are not only speaking to other people at the conference, but also to those who could not make it, who were not accepted, who have been cast outside the academic institution, who deride the academic institution, who have no interest in the academic institution, or who have never been able to get into the academic institution for various personal, material, political, geographic, or economic reasons. And as we are increasingly called (rightly) to make our work legible to audiences outside the ivory tower, and (less rightly, perhaps) to justify our work to such institutes as funding organizations, we need to become more conversant in how to package our ideas for the looking and listening nonacademics around us who, well, may not fully understand this weird and wild field of medieval literature. This stuff is going online, friends, and others are listening: please be aware of who is getting a voice.

*I am grateful to Zachary Hines, University of Texas, for his valuable feedback on this entry.