Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’m going to make a rather unusual post, combining several topics: How much I miss my mother, how tiresome I find the “Your Mom” joke, and what I think the predominance of that joke in some social settings means.

First of all, my Mom passed away over five years ago now, but there’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. She’s the little girl on the right in the picture above (the original photo was taken on a boat in Turkey in the early 1940s; the adults are my grandparents, the other little girl is my aunt). Most people would, of course, feel a sense of loss at losing a parent, but for me, I think I lost one of the only people in the world that I could really, openly talk to. On days like today, I think a bit more about her and what she meant to me. I miss my Mom.

Also, it’s been a rather frustrating year socially, in Madison. In the groups I have run around with, I have felt pretty alienated at times — one annoyance is that many relatively normal adults use the “Your Mom!” insult, and quite freely. You know what I’m talking about; I’ll ask something relatively innocuous like “Who’s going to go play basketball this weekend?” and will get “Your Mom!” as a response from adult colleagues, over and over again. I quickly got out of the habit of using this particular joke after I was 13 and unthinkingly used it in front of a kid who had recently lost his mother — the pained look in the kid’s eyes will always stick with me and I’ve felt awful about that ever since.

Anyway, the “your Mom” joke just doesn’t make much sense to me as an adult, as it’s not terribly funny. It continues to persist around me even though everyone who uses it knows that my mother passed away a few years ago and I interpret this differently. I think it’s notable that the social sphere is predominantly white, as well, and I’m distinguishing this from the very stylized ways that “your momma” jokes play out in African-American culture.

Obviously, this kind of ridiculous trash talk isn’t intended to insult but it’s still going to strike a nerve with me that it won’t strike with other people. But, that’s exactly what I find curious about it — it’s juvenile and just not funny, so it must serve some kind of alternate purpose, right? The rise of these kinds of quasi-ironic verbal memes has always interested me, as they clearly signify something social to the speaker that people from outside the group might not be clued into. And which I’m having a hard time understanding.

My guess is that the genesis of use of “your mom” jokes in our little corner of the planet fits the concept of Border Discourses to some extent. That is, at the intersection of two kinds of disparate Discourses which are unable to communicate, participants form a third Discourse to bridge the discussion. In this case, I suspect that falling back on juvenile wordplay is one of the easiest ways to bridge between the specialized Discourses of academia and games. Since our program operates on the cusp of both the worlds of curricular design and game design, relatively academic discussions among adults occasionally get punctuated with the kind of talk you’d expect from 14 year olds as a means of deflating the foreign nature of the specialized lingo. Though there are all sorts of quasi-academic Discourses forming at that intersection (since both areas deal with kids and the kinds of competitive talk that occur around games), I assume that the “junior high speak” gets fallen back upon out of some deeper commonality — we were all 14 at some point, and nearly all found this kind of humor amusing once.

This feels like the opposite of the ways that other Internet-savvy technophiles use tiresome terms such as “mashups,” “blogosphere,” “Web 2.0″ and the like. Instead of trying to create buzzwords that alienate the uninitiated, the use of the “Your Mom” kind of humor — and “gamerspeak” such as “QQ,” “GTFO,” “ftw,” “lawl,” etc. — indicates a desire to revert to the kinds of languages used by what it is we study. There’s a desire to emulate the gamer going on here, perhaps, and the underlying assumption that to view games from the gamer’s perspective is something that we should be striving to do. Nurturing our “inner 14 year old,” perhaps?

Regardless of if I think that’s a good idea, I won’t be putting up with the “Your Mom” jokes anymore. I’m still very new to this academic field and the field of games, but I don’t find appealing using a kind of wordplay that might offend others — the gamerspeak uses of the words “retarded” and “gay” are equally problematic, and I won’t partake in that, either. I’m simply not here to be a gamer, I’m here to be an academic who studies games. It remains to be seen if that’s possible without being active in this particular kind of Discourse, however.

On Mother’s Day, it’s odd that my thoughts turn to stuff like this. I’m sure my Mom wouldn’t have really cared — no one is seriously insulting her, after all — but I care, simply because Discourses matter, and the ones I choose to actively be a part of say something about who I am and how I view the world.