A 2019 story in USA Today begins by describing “The People’s Justice” Sonia Sotomayor’s prowess at interrupting. “The Supreme Court had heard about 15 seconds of debate over adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census when Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor interrupted the government lawyer at the lectern.” It even gets into the numbers: “Sotomayor broke in 58 times during the 80-minute debate, more than any justice in any case throughout the term.”
Perhaps Sotomayor, who is from the Bronx, is part of a culture that embraces what linguists apparently call “cooperative overlap” or “response culture.” As blogger Anil Dash recently wrote, he often hears people say things such as “I’m a New Yorker, I talk over people to agree with them” to explain that they use a style of conversation “that involves talking along with the person one is having conversation with.” Everyone doesn’t necessarily have to wait their turn in certain geographic areas and in certain ethnic groups, he explains (he cites Jews and South Asians). I’m a New Yorker, and I like interrupting and being interrupted. It’s stifling to follow some sort of Robert’s Rules of conversational order. And yet, “some people who use the cooperative overlapping style of conversation said they felt embarrassed or ashamed about it, like they had been told they were doing something wrong.”
Why would that be? There’s no way to be sure, but here are some guesses: The Atlantic’s Experiment Podcast has just done an episode called “Justice, Interrupted,” explaining how “the highest court in the land isn’t safe from mansplaining.” In CNN, we find an article on how “Justice Sotomayor deals with ‘manterruptions,’ too.” The Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, CBS, Business Insider, Axios, and a dozen or so more outlets also wrote up the issue in October. Turns out, this spate of articles is the result of comments Sotomayor made at a recent “diversity and inclusion conference,” where she revealed that the court changed the rules for how oral argument is conducted in part due to 2017 research findings that female justices were the most often interrupted. The practical result of the rules change has been to make Justice Clarence Thomas speak regularly after being completely silent for years, but alright, sure, whatever.
Rebecca Solnit coined “mansplaining” to great acclaim with her essay about how “Men Explain Things to Me.” It is a concept that has more purchase than actual use. Mansplaining once meant the phenomenon of a man telling an expert woman remedial things he should have estimated she would already know. It was never clear what was so harmful about repeating basics just in case. The culture war over pronouns hinges largely on the cultural Left’s insistence that I should kindly introduce myself with my preference for “he” and “him,” which I can confidently guess strangers already know from the way that I look and the fact that I am usually describing the plot of Die Hard.
But anyway, though some instances of it are morally mandatory while others are sexist abuse, “mansplaining” has come to just mean speaking while male now. The definition of “manterruption” suffers from the same problem: a double standard baked in. Any given interruption of a woman by a man could well be a sign of disrespect, as though her thought was presumptively not worth finishing. Or it could be a sign he thinks she’s worth boosting, for those of us on the “cooperative overlap” side of conversational culture. Then, there’s “manspreading,” a synonym for splaying one’s knees, which New York put up subway public service announcements to end. Men rudely feeling “entitled to take up space” in a patriarchal culture? A function of differing anatomy? Either way, many people are being trained to see ordinary human interactions through the lens of identity-based discrimination. These port-man-teau words are inflammatory and useless. One woman’s cooperative overlap is another’s manterruption.
