LHTC

Scarlett.  

She's "the most accomplished woman in e-sports" and "is known for her macro mutalisk style and kick-ass creep spread." according to New Yorker. I don't need to ask Dorothy if we're still in Kansas any more or if they still speak English there. If this were a 'tweet' or a 'text,' or if I were 14, I'd say WTF?  It's not your fathers English any more, it's your granddaughter's and Madison Avenue's.  And yes, sometimes Madison is still an avenue and back in 1957, for a short while, a dance that made you hip.

Being willing to bet that a mutalisk isn't the gastropod it might appear to any speaker of Old English (last Thursday's) to be, I looked it up.  Apparently there's a Heart of the Swarm and a Wings of Liberty version of this beast, for beast it is or would be if virtual reality were more real than virtual.

I suppose that knowing I'm dealing with Video game dialect and that indeed it is a dialect separated by several degrees from the language formerly known as English, relieves me of the need to look up e-sports.  This being the age that it is, the universal and sole metaphor for defeat is the kicking of ass. Movies today can be based on video games which are based on Comic books which are based on life as people fantasize it with the aid of movies.  As I said, the hip world is removed by several degrees as is the language they speak there.

A cartoon in the same issue carries the punch line: "@FBarnes12 favorited a prophecy you were mentioned in"  WTF?  

Language has to change, rufft uns die Stimme. And of course, like it or not, it does change. LHTC is not just a dispassionate observation I fear, as much as a phrase usually used to stop all conversation about the nature, extent, causation or direction of that change or the question of whether the change is inevitable as much as it is profitable, a thing of politics, a thing of choice --  of proclamation, hortatory or compulsory or sought after.  I often think that the inevitability of that reaction, the peremptory attitude and conclusive pose of that retort smells strongly of  one of those social, cultural or academic cults that proliferate and evolve, expand and contract like planes in a Multiverse, and like universes, resist the transit between or access to each other. Things all that are for me like reading Kierkegaard -- things of nausea and sickness unto death.  It doesn't matter whether I walk, or march or ride or crawl as much as it matters -- where.

While cultures world wide seem to be agglutinating and homogenizing and Americanizing, there is a level at which it is fragmenting and racing apart at an accelerating rate.  Gamer-speak or Business school babble of  last week is harder for me than Chaucer and the number and compartmentalizing of dialects  follows suit.  The question for me however is whether this change is a "must-be" or an attempt to make the fool seem intelligent, the nerd hip and the outsider belong. Do we accept clumsy, indecipherable English because the English Department bullies insist we do, or because we are so afraid that if we can't understand it, it's because we are inadequate?  Did the Sokal hoax succeed because people who needed to seem smart thought it was over their heads, because we thought that academics talked like this?  I hate the Imperial nudity fallacy, a form of the argument from ignorance, but sometimes -- hey!

It's been suggested that the main attraction of being able to quote Derrida or Foucault is that it sounds impenetrable and thus immune from contradiction because it puts the opposition on the indefensible defensive and at the point of aporia.  I have to ask whether this is the kind of change that has to happen or is this, like so many changes we see: simply marketing.  Do changes in nomenclature reflect diversity of objects as much as the desire to create false choices, make things more attractive or less undesirable -- to cover the emperor's ass?  We used to laugh 50 years ago at the insistence that we call the garbage collector a 'solid waste transfer technician' while we don't seem to be amused any more at ordering some tongue twister at Starbucks instead of  a cup of coffee. Marketing of marketing, all is marketing.

Is the LHTC, Language Has To Change catechism here mostly to support this sort of thing?  Is the teaching of English now no more than rigid spelling exercises?  Do we indulge and feel good about ourselves because video game lovers want to be seen as athletes, participants in "e-sports" instead of nerds, because 'homes' are more attractive than houses or apartments, pre-owned sounds less sordid than used.  Are we suddenly "gifting" presents at Christmas instead of giving them because it sounds more technically knowledgeable to the easily confused?  Do things "negatively impact on" rather than hurt, damage, harm, degrade, retard or a dozen other nuanced words because we think it elevates our speech or because it reduces the need for vocabulary?  Are we seeing change for change's sake, for business sake, for political reasons, for the furtherance of  a cause -- for social climbing, for social equality, for identifying with criminals or saints or intellectuals or food faddists?  When we talk about gluts or abs are we trying to seem athletic and fit in with those who are?  Again, it doesn't matter that change is inevitable, but where it inevitably takes us.

Orwell had a grand old time showing us the benefits of change in 1984, where language had to change because you had to change.  Whether you call it Obamacare, the ACA or Swiss style or Socialized medicine has everything to do with who you're trying to keep on track for your station as well as which track you've been put on. Control the language, control the thought, control the purchasing and call it lifestyle.

Yes, jargon has a use. Acronyms and abbreviations have a use although we so often use them to ridiculous extremes  SOS or QRM make life easier for the telegrapher, ALS is easier to say than Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but so much is simply marketing or euphemy or other ways to hide fraud, fallacy and fakery:  FFF if you will. There does seem to be an expansion in that universe, but contrary to the message of the LHTC, all change isn't the same, doesn't serve the same purpose and may or may not be deleterious (may negatively impact on) to your health, well being, freedom of thought or solvency.

We have to have new words -- sometimes.  We don't necessarily have to learn to talk like people who  are 12 years old or are illiterate, confused or dialect infused, although we might buy more or more foolishly if we do.  We don't have to think we're sophisticated multilingual sophisticates by ordering an Americano in Fargo like a phony.  We don't have to assume Liberal means Fascist or Conservative means Anarchist or that calling Asia the Orient means you're a racist any more than you are just being current, hip or up to date by thinking your uncomfortable chair might discomfit you.

How much of LHTC is really "follow orders" posing as "do as thou wilt?"

The question is not whether language has to change, but whether lack of  education is to be the driving force or whether the need to deceive, persuade or to sell should never be interfered with, that any idea must be allowed to masquerade as something else and most of all the self esteem of the unread should never be risked.  Telling us it has to change is more than a way of  giving up, it's a way of facilitating deception, interfering with cognitive function and increasing the difficulty of  communicating.  

Epawesome

In today's American parlance, or kidspeak as I call it, everything worth mentioning is either awesome or it sucks.  As with some aspects of American politics there's not much in between the extremes of cliche description, although of late some things have become less awesome and more epic. Perhaps the kids are growing tired of awesome as they grow older, some of our kids being in late middle age these days.

Anyway, I have the bad habit of noticing trends and processes in things and I noticed a sign just the other day, advertising a church down here in the Bible belt -- a church where they provide "Epic Worship." 

It's not that epic is a bad or lesser word for what goes on in churches.  The Bible after all is truly an epic: an historical and poetical narrative or tradition.  For those who worship the Bible or the characters in it,  the experience might indeed be awesome in the true sense of the word if I might be permitted to suggest that words have true meaning or history.

Perhaps awesome has lost a bit of its panache, having effectively replaced a large portion of the vocabulary although, like the other cute, cliche manifestations of eternal youth and hipness we cling to, perhaps not. Such things have an extraordinary life span, after all. Backwards hats are entering the second half century of  cutting edge semiotic splendor seen at the country club as well as the convenience store dumpster late at night.  Who knows how much longer things will be awesome or how much longer we'll be content with saying it as though we were Oscar Wilde uttering some fresh, novel and awesomely trenchant witticism.  I suspect one of those syncritisms we see when we study ancient pantheons or senescent dialects: Amun and Ra become Amun-Ra and gigantic and enormous fuse together to make the user feel ginormously less illiterate.

In short, how much longer before we hear epawsome?

Ruminations on a cold morning

App - app app app - app app! No, it's not the AFLAC duck, or a farmyard full of turkeys a week before Thanksgiving. It's not your neighbor's nasty little Lhasa Apso, it's the sound of consumers quacking away in consumer-speak in the American night. The malls are full of it, the AT&T and Verizon stores should hand out earplugs because of it --APP APP APP! Getcher apps here -- apps! Apps, apps.

"To most people, an "app" is something you download on your smartphone to help you do a specific task."

says CNN.com this morning. I guess most people now means airheaded and hysterically eager to buy consumers between the ages of 13 and 24. Those are the people most retailers are interested in and the most likely to speak the language of consumerism, invented to make it difficult to speak without advertising a product or concept thereby.

So what happens when you want to apply for something? Do you app on some sunscreen at the beach? So what ever happened to "application" in the sense of software designed to perform some function? I guess it got teenagerized into a form more easily entered on a telephone keypad derived from the dial phones that began to go out of fashion around 1960. Most people indeed. So I guess for the newspeak speaker it's now silly to talk of developing computer applications and ridiculous all the more if we shorten it to "app." To me it's all something that springs most rhymingly to mind.

Yeah, yeah, it's more "evolution" only it's not - it's intelligent design because language now is a consumer product which changes to suit corporate sales, not our communications needs. That's why we have "realtor" for real estate broker, why they sell "homes" and not houses or apartments, why we have "mobile estates" rather than trailers and why health is now "wellness." It's why we have pre-owned cars on the used car lots, patriot acts and worse.

Of course it's not all bad. We now have "tweet" which is easier to type than "mind-numbing and narcissistic banality" although "blog" works almost as well there; which brings me to the point at which I'd better rest my case.

Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.

I hate the word "blog" the way I hate most cutesy, childish terms like "cookie" that have somehow infiltrated the world of computers. At least the attempt to make us all say 'puter died the miserable death it deserved, but we're stuck with blog. It's even lost the vestigial apostrophe it sometimes used to have when 'blog was a cute adolescent bit of geeky hipness. Peter Merholz, in fact is given credit for coining 'blog' on his Petermemes personal website in the Oxford Dictionary. But that was ten years ago - back in ancient times only very uncool people remember, and when cell phones were larger and were for making phone calls, 'text' was a noun and not everyone had a weblog.

Of course without Brad Graham complaining in jest about that annoying word on his blog Bradlands back in 1999, we wouldn't have the word 'blogosphere.'

Where are we headed? Will personal publishing soon be described as being "as simple as falling off a blog"? Shall we see ultra-conservative gays start weblogs and dub themselves Blog Cabin Republicans? Track the tides with an Ebb Blog? Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century? Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah? Despite its whimsical provenance, it's an awkward, homely little word.

Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos? (Carl Sagan: "Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.")

Graham was found dead yesterday in his St. Louis home of "natural causes." Goodbye Brad -- we'll always have blogosphere.

Wise to the words

This being the last day of 2008, it's customary to bring out my consultant Dr. Syntax and air his views about how none of you speak English properly. Indeed there are a number of stupid neologisms, platitudes, Clichés, malapropisms and other linguistic transgressions I'm sick of hearing and you should be too.

It seems however, that academia has scooped old Syntax and released a more official list of awful verbal offal yesterday. Michigan's Lake Superior State University has taken it upon itself, or at least the English Department has, to ban a number of recent common usages, and although my cranky friend is a bit offended at the lack of respect and recognition he feels he deserves, he's used to it and he quite agrees with most of their condemnations.

Carbon footprint has been spewed forth from journalistic smokestacks all year and it deserves to be at the top of the list for many reasons, not the least of which is the inherent misunderstanding of basic chemistry. It's the compounds of carbon fouling the air and carbon dioxide is no more carbon than water is hydrogen, nor does either substance lend itself to having footprints. Find a better term, says my friend Syntax, or you may find his footprint on your you know where.

What else has brought forth the wrath of Syntax this year? Green: yes it's easier to type than ecologically advantageous and easier to attach to every trivial thing, action or policy the creativity of Madison Avenue and other enthusiastic simpletons can dream up. A thermos bottle isn't particularly green, for instance, unless it's made by Stanley, and virtually all things advertised as such wouldn't make a bit of difference even if most of the world bought them -- unless being green in the face from disgust counts. Algae is green and we could do with less of it in our rivers and ponds. Organic? Crude oil and snake venom are organic. Don't look for them at Whole Foods.

Syntax, you'll note I'm not calling him "the good doctor" because that's vapid Cliché number 147 on his list, remains thoroughly opposed to a number of hackneyed metaphors, so overused that they have often obliterated more accurate and legitimate words. The now permanent fatwa on the carrion metaphor impact has been joined by ass kicking and references to suction to indicate incompetence or disapproval. These stopped being creative or even mildly humorous before you were born. Stop it.

Perhaps it will be another 4 years before we have to arrest anyone for using stumping and campaign trail, but please use the time to think of more direct replacements for these bits of verbal road-kill.

Syntax has nearly beaten efforting and texting to death, as he does with "verbed" nouns in general, but nearly isn't enough, is it?

Euphemisms such as right-sizing don't disguise the fact that your company is firing your department and it just makes your boss more of a jerk then you knew he was.

Changing the sign on your Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian or Japanese restaurant to say "Asian cuisine" makes you sound like a moron and it's an insult to the ethnicities you're attempting to cover with some gluey "Asian sauce." There's no such category as Asian, Asiatic or Oriental food - or sauce, and yes all three words mean exactly the same thing. And while we're on the subject of food, what the hell is comfort food and what would discomfort food be?

Graphic doesn't mean scary, and issue isn't synonymous with problem or concern. A bowel movement is an issue -- constipation s a problem.

There's been nothing new in rocket science since Newton and as a metaphor for technical difficulty, you'd be better off talking about rocket technology. All you'd lose thereby is the association with the lemmings of language.

Warfighter. Did we really need that one and doesn't it serve to dehumanize a soldier? As the military ( right after the business school) is often at the forefront of promulgating misleading and opaque usage, I'm suspicious, although I will admit with some degree of guilty feelings that I've always liked Overkill.

So anyway, the old man is getting a bit tired of you and the thoughtless way you talk and of having to remind you of it every year. We both know you'll be eating double bacon cheeseburgers in front of the TV by next week regardless of all your resolutions and you'll still be using "fell swoop" and "control freak" as though you knew what you were saying, you reprobate you.

Silly Sunday or where have all the mothers gone?

This being my first Mother's day without having a mother, I tend to notice all the hoopla from the people selling things, from flowers to Caribbean cruises, with a bit of sadness. Of course being a language snob and a grammatical elitist, at least in America where using the language at above the Kindergarten level is like carrying Chairman Mao's little red book, I'm disgusted with the metamorphosis of Mother's Day into "Mom's Day."

"I always wanted to be a Mom" reads today's local newspaper headline. The respect implied by being someone's mother would be too much for down-to-earth, anti-adult Americans. Maybe we should stop saying Mother of God or Mother Theresa or God forbid, Mother Miles and change them all to "Moms."

Isn't it bad enough that we wear backwards caps like the Little Rascals; do we have to talk like toddlers? Grow up.

And while we're on the subject, why the hell not a Grandparent's day? Particularly when the grown children are still being subsidized by said ancestors? Just don't call it Gramps' day or Granny's day. Why? Because I'm a pistol packin' Grandpa and I don't like it, that's why.

*All the above is null and void if you actually are my grandson, of course. In that case you can do no wrong.

Proactively efforting impactful resolutions

"Will the impact negatively impact Mars? We're efforting more information"
- TV news anchor -

Well, it's another new year and time for those resolutions, but this time it's going to be different. I've had enough with the "lose ten pounds, clean up the garage nonsense."

So, enter the caped crusader, the masked avenger, the diabolical Doctor Syntax; scourge of the illiterate and the savior of the tongue. No, I'm not the only one that would prefer to have people speak plain English rather than hide their flimsy educations behind meaningless, redundant, inappropriate, misused cliche, jargon and worn out metaphor, but I'm the only one willing to do more than compose lists that only the literate will read. This time it's going to be different. This time I resolve to kill.

• The next person I hear using "efforting" as a verb as in "I'm efforting information" is a dead man. If you are unaware of participles like attempting, trying or even endeavoring, I'm going to make an effort to see how many slugs I can put through you before you hit the ground.
  
• If you insist on using words like "impactful" or "impactify" or think it's cute and witty to continually and relentlessly substitute the stale and mawkishly metaphorical "impact" for effect, I'm going to think it's cute and witty to put a hollow point between your eyes. How's that for proactive impactification, bozo?
• Same goes for those who think "having a negative impact on" sounds more educated than hurt or harmed or damaged. If an impact is a collision, a negative impact must be an explosion - like the one that propels a 9mm slug through your empty skull - impactfuly, of course.
• I don't care what your excuse is, waiting for someone is very different than waiting on someone. Think otherwise? Here, hold these two wires.
• The verb to invite doesn't turn into an invitation by stressing the first syllable, even if you're on Jeff Foxworthy's list. I invite you to have some of this Kool Aid - it's delicious.
• You angry folks who write about "mute" points and use "haft to" and "tow the line" and expect me to take your arguments seriously: I'm not going to, I'm going to kill you instead.
• You upper middle class suburbanites who think it's cute to appropriate stale inner city slang - it's jewelry, not "bling" and the next sound you hear is not going to be bling either - it'll be BANG! Badunkadunk? Sounds like this UZI blowing your head off, now get back in your Lexus and go back to Palm Beach.
• "Could of?" "Try and?" "the reason why I did it?" " The reason was because?" Up against the wall.

You'll have to guess at the rest, I'm not going to help you too much and it will do you good to think twice about your obsession with redundant 1980's academic neologisms and political buzz words, like empowerment and proactive -- or those just plain annoying Deconstructionist affectations like Verisimilitude. Think Kindergarten portmanteau words like "Ginormous" make you sound erudite? Think twice, because I just may be lurking around the corner somewhere. Doctor Syntax is listening to you.

Fade to black

Tell people the same thing over and over until they're blue in the face. It doesn't matter. Tell them ten thousand times that A is not B but when you ask again later; from 30 minutes to three days, depending upon their age, all they will remember is A and B and how they must be the same because they appear together all the time.

The Washington Post talks today about several studies confirming this sad fact, although it's nothing new. Creating false associations always has been the game of the powerful and those who would be but even without ill intent, it happens. Say SUV and safety often enough and you forget the statistics. Say Illegal and Alien often enough and you associate foreigners with crime. It doesn't matter what separates or comes between A and B; after a while they become identical in memory.

False associations affect public opinion whether they are accidental or deliberately manufactured. During Bush War I, for instance, the writer Andre Codrescu wrote about the way he was set upon in New Orleans by people screaming "America - number one" because he had dark hair and a moustache and an accent. He is of course, not an Arab, much less an Iraqi, but Romanian. That was simply the result of ignorance and nationalism. Worse of course is when we learn to associate Iraq with 9/11.

The article speculates that all the information that has repeatedly shown that there is no significant association simply serves to create an association as memory blurs. Worse of course is how Bush's junta has striven to connect those two things. An interesting new blog, unfortunately named but very erudite and highly recommended Unfrozen Caveman Rhetorician points out the sly way that Bush used what Kenneth Burke called "merger terms" to conflate al Qaeda and Iraq in a speech in Charleston, SC last month. Merger terms, like his continually repeated "al Qaeda in Iraq" are

"rhetorical expressions used to obscure the material differences by falsely subsuming via an ideological frame of reference"

Somehow he and Cheney and their various mouthpieces, through this phenomenon of forgetfulness and rhetorical sleight of hand, have come to be able to rely on an argument that has not only been refuted years ago, but even previously denied by them.

McDictionary

Corporate Lawyers can be ferocious and McLawyers, like dogs with seven heads, surround you before you know what's bit you. So when the Oxford English Dictionary included McJob, defined as a boring, dead-end gig, the barking began. People tend to portray anything that's mass produced, nearly identical and mass marketed on the scale of "billions and billions" by putting Mc in front, like McMansions or McChurches, but sometimes the prefix refers to the sort of job that could almost be done by a machine if a machine would put up with something that boring and pointless.

But as I said, the McLawyers are as relentless as mosquitoes in a Minnesota summer. I once know a collector of McDonald's memorabilia who used the nickname The McNutt who got a cease and desist letter from them; not because he was making money from it - in fact he was promoting their products - but because he dared to Mc anything without their permission.

But anyway, since they can't sue the dictionary and there are too many people using McJob to take them all to court or to threaten them McDonald's is trying, in an Orwellian way, to stack the deck of language so that McJob will no longer be pejorative but filled with praise.

We can laugh and the Oxford linguists probably will too, unless enough money starts flowing, but the language really doesn't belong fully to us any more. So much of what we say and how we say it has been prescribed by special interest groups, lobbyists, University sociology departments and lawyers, that Orwell himself would giggle. We hardly see health clinics anymore, but "wellness centers" are everywhere. Real Estate Brokers wanted a higher sounding name, so they forced us to say "realtor" and we obey with hardly a snicker. Last week's paper announced the impending arrival of several new "lifestyle centers" which as best I can tell seem to be strip malls.

Most of us still realize that "pre-owned" means used and that a "mobile estate" is still a trailer, but all in all and just like everything else, our language is their language, bought and paid for and the function of their language is to sell and to manipulate.

Ancestral voices

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far,
Ancestral voices prophesying war

Metaphor may be the thing of poets, but few of us are poets and in common speech and the level below that, called journalism, metaphors become malignant but somehow unnoticed cancers, eating away at language. I can't stop people from their fetishistic obsession with the stale and metastatic metaphor "impact" any more than I can stop malignant politicians from forcing every policy from drug use to terrorism into the procrustean bed of the war metaphor.

No one will sacrifice for a policy or an effort, nor will they look the other way as their liberty is infringed for an attempt, but war is such an ancient part of culture, shaped by countless tales of glory that it sets the young heart beating and the old heart scheming. It makes milquetoast reporters into war correspondents and failed presidents into "war-presidents" and gives second tier entertainers a big stage to perform on; it gives corporate interests what they want and gives military, security and enforcement interests the kind of power and budget they live for. War, even in itself isn't often the best way to deal with anything, but all in all, you can get people to go along with being exploited so that they can support the troops and display flags and feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Obvious? Of course it is, but then obvious things are what we're least likely to notice; the commonplace is what we're least likely to examine. I enjoy reading people who like to disassemble language and logic and what started me off on this second-hand rant this morning was a post at The Rhetoric Garage where you can see the things people say and do in various states of disassembly.