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SHAKESPEARE WOULD HAVE HAD A BLOG

VOCAB 2.0 | September 30th 2008

antigone78/flickr

Critics complain that technobabble is a sign of our moral or aesthetic decline. Sure, the blogosphere has introduced some lazy writing, but brave new words continue to rise, writes Molly Flatt. Shakespeare would've loved it all ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Literary criticism is notoriously prone to the pat and the pretentious. A few years ago Tom Payne brilliantly lampooned "the words that reviewers and
publishers love too much" in the Telegraph. His glossary of horrors included such tired
terms as "cracking pace", "darkly comic" and "that
rare thing", which is surprisingly common. The theme was reprised this year with Bob
Harris's "Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing" for the New York Times: "poignant", "compelling", "intriguing", "eschew", "craft", "muse" and "lyrical" were his pet peeves. The piece was gleefully
received, with no fewer than 265 online readers posting their own personal bugbears.

Literary lingo does seem to be getting lazy. If you've read one review this year of a "raw" and "intriguing" debut
from a "fresh, accessible voice" whose "sweeping urban epic" raises "poignant"
issues for an "alienated post-9/11 world", you've read them all. As it turns out, the New York Times is itself a
particularly reliable source for painfully mannered criticism. Walter
Kirn's recent critique of James Wood's "How Fiction Works" is an inadvertently comic example: anyone who can criticise "the eminently
resistible prose style of [Wood's] donnish, finicky persona", and then
write phrases like "Wood's study must be vast, with well-stocked
shelves, judging by the inarguable erudition displayed in his compact vade
mecum", must be pretty immune
to irony.

But if book reviewing is a
dangerous habitat for a writer, it can be a positive minefield on the
web. Having recently moved from the sanctimonious but reliably rigorous circles of university academia to the brave
new world of social media, I know all too well the dangers of the blogosphere in
encouraging sloppy and platitudinous prose. I have become expert at recognising
the symptoms of blogspeak in my own writing. These include the widespread Americanisation ("autumn" becomes "fall", for example); the use of "super" as a cure-all
modifier ("The show was super-fun"); and a pervasive allergy
to hyphenation (preschool, coworker, pigeonhole). Of course there's a
proliferation of over-neat soundbites (otherwise known as the Daily Mail disease), and articles peppered with just a little too much of an
effusive! personal! touch!

At the opposite extreme, I
catch myself lapsing into the aggressive, smart-arse, self-satisfied tone of a "citizen journalist" with a terabyte-sized chip on my shoulder. Ordinary subjects suddenly become an opportunity to rail against the closed-rank dictatorship
of "old media". Even while discussing benignly bland novels, my writing veers Huffington Post-ward, my prose littered with finger-jabbing questions (eg, "Does this author think his readers are fools?"). My
sentences become. Very short. In these moods, my opinion on a book either hardens beyond recognition, to prove my "provocative" and "free-speaking"
credentials, or it expands to encompass so many different perspectives, in
anticipation of a comments backlash, that it becomes flabby and wan.

It can even be difficult to
hold onto basic linguistic rules. Proper grammar looks disconcertingly formal
in a colloquial post; contractions, for example, which I was always taught to
avoid when writing, seem appropriately intimate
and genuine online. And in the badlands of social media, spelling is a
political statement. When the route
to online start-up success demands that you omit vowels, swap S's for Z's,
and generally get phonetic, the web tends to read like the work of a dyslexic
Scandinavian poet. Surrounded by Pownce, Flickr, Tumblr, Cluztr and Jaiku, you
can easily loose your orthographic bearings and Follo Soot.

When I first started
blogging, my language seemed stuffy and artificial. Now I worry that I'm
morphing into a social media scribe of the worst "hey guys!" kind. But it's
also true that writing online can be an excellent discipline for those who, like me, are inclined towards verbosity or pomp. The attention-deficit
enabling aspects of the internet raise the stakes for writing in
concise, lucid and engaging prose.

In any case, Shakespeare
would have loved the internet. (This is something Mark Rylance cleverly suggested
in last year's play "The Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime
Chat-Room Show", an ambitious comedy that resurrects the bard using the
electric human power of the web.) Our beloved neologising
court jester of coinage, Shakespeare invented
some 2,000 new and compound words and a
host of now-familiar phrases. He was particularly partial to turning nouns
into verbs--to cudgel, to champion, to gossip--just as we like to twitter, to
spam or to blog (he would surely have gorged himself on Google
like a kid in a sweetshop). He created numerous compounds from existing words
(farmhouse, bloodsucking); we do the same (homepage, podcasting). The man who
first used the falconry term ‘hoodwinked' to describe human trickery might even
have enjoyed being rick-rolled.

Every year the
furore over new words allowed to enter our official lexicon suggests we
prefer custom to infinite variety. (Funnily enough, Shakespeare himself coined "the
Queen's English", the favoured phrase of linguistic snobs struggling to defend
a non-existent, linguistic empire.) But brave new words continue to rise, and
our lissom, living language is continually regenerating the dusty skin of the
old.

Dystopian grumbles about
our moral or aesthetic decline are misplaced. Critics claim that technobabble is a
technoBabel, an increasingly unintelligible din of teens spawning new ways to insult each other and bloggers venting their vitriol. But Shakespeare invented insults with similar
speed and verve. His "minnow" is our "noob"; his "slugabed"
our "cappuccino
cowboy". Street slander is surprisingly timeless. Call some hedge-fund-hawking
gadget geek "a dog-fox not proved worth a Blackberry" (plagiarising
from "Troilus and Cressida") and he'll definitely know what you mean.

Plenty of sites are now
devoted to exploring the rich and strange world of Vocabulary 2.0. Collins has
launched an
online dictionary for "netheads" to debate net-influenced inclusions. NetLingo compiles the latest web words; Word Spy purports to practice "lexpionage", or
"the sleuthing of new words and phrases"; and the Double-Tongued Dictionary is dedicated
to fringe, slang and street English. Traditional
media outlets now publish guides for navigating blogspeak. Of course many net coinages are plain ugly,
and I hate text and chat room acronyms (IYKWIMAITYD).
But as a lover of Latin and Middle English, I understand most of these new terms
as inevitable products in a pleasingly democratic etymological evolution.

Basically, it's a bit
love-hate. For now, I'm simply trying to tread the fine line between
clean elegance and jingoistic chat. It's a modern manifestation of an old
struggle: remaining adaptable and accessible while maintaining an individual
and timeless style. TFDS.

Picture credit: antigone78/flickr (top), Foxtongue/flickr (below)

(Molly Flatt is a writer in
London. She
blogs about the arts at the Guardian and at HitchcockBlonde.
Her last piece for More Intelligent Life was "Love
Me, Love My Books".)