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".)