The Language of the Blogosphere

People often assume that those of us who pursue advanced degrees in English are sticklers on language - fanatics who are just waiting for their friends to make a grammar error so they can write a big check mark on their faces in red marker. In fact, I do dream of such powers, but the closest I may ever come would be if I pitched a superhero film to Hollywood, something along the lines of "The GrammarPersons" or "Team English" or "The Grammaricans," who would display on their "English standard" a proud and dashing semicolon. They'd consist of such marvelous persons as:

the dashing and debonair Dr Dirk Diction

his wife and partner grammarian Ella Quince, who is always in style

Syntaxator, a gentle giant famous for his impersonations

The Splicer, an ambiguous fellow capable of destroying the very things he aims to mend

the ever witty and a propos "Bartlett" (always in quotes)

their sexy, dominant leader The Grammatrix, who is harsh only to be kind, for her discipline makes us better people

and the loose cannon of the group, the Grammatrix's twin sister, Lingua (the Tongue), who keeps going wrong though she tries to be good, and who has a tendency for slipping

Alright, that's enough fun on the tangent. I was actually trying to say that the more you get into language the more you appreciate that its power includes its flexibility and adaptability, but that, as with any superhero, its power can also be the site of its weakness - lazy and haphazard language can void it of its meaning and threaten the breakdown of community itself.

Which gets me to the moment of this post: Brian McLaren's recent post at the God's Politics blog. McLaren uses that pastorly ploy of sharing an anecdote in which he himself features as the learner so that he can, in his assumed position of knower, meet us, as the learner's at his feet (or fingers, as it were), where we're at (Where you at?). Style aside, there's wisdom in the notion that an attitude or spirit underlies the way we use language, and that spirit infects the context into which we speak. Just like selfishness on the road creates a traffic jam of everyone fighting for position, anger or vitriol in our speech, whether in our homes or online, creates an atmosphere of competition, anger, shame, anxiety, etc.

Christians like to cite the Scripture, "speak the truth in love," both to justify the wishy-washy, smarmy, coddling of others and to temper such a spineless attitude. I often find the latter camp as annoying as the former, since they will say what they believe, then try to qualify and soften it for an audience they imagine might be offended by a viewpoint different than their own. This often has the form of, "I don't mean to say..." or "I'm not trying to discount/diminish/deny..."

That kind of rhetoric certainly isn't violent or hateful (as McLaren speaks of), but it also isn't that different than a coddling, enabling version of love. In fact, it works in part to protect the speaker/writer from accusations of harshness or from any real critique at all - "Oh, but I didn't actually say anything definite, I just indicated a direction, then said what people already do or say is okay, thereby removing any real challenge to make more than superficial changes in their lives or attitudes. Don't blame me."

Ella Quince has no patience for such quibbling. A challenging word must stand as a true challenge, or else why speak it? Qualifications and coddlings indicate a distrust of one's audience, and audiences, I like to think, tend on the whole to pick up on such things and to not like them. To let love lie under our language is a worthy goal, but it requires us to really examine what we mean by "love."

Occasionally we can make what looks like progress

This recent post on the God's Politics blog has the virtue of demonstrating what can come of people actually talking to one another. The abortion "debate" is among the stickiest facing our country today, but it has long struck me that the incorrigible stickiness (which, I think, is real) appears more extensive than it really is because the two sides are arguing at cross purposes, or not arguing about the same subject, anyhow. So the so-called debate turns into a shouting match, with arguments even about what words to use.

There's that joke: "Democrats don't care what happens to a baby before it's born; Republicans don't care what happens to it afterward." As a joke, or quip, or whatever, it is intentionally hyperbolic and unfair, but it does work by taking note of the disparity I'm talking about. Pro-choicers don't hate babies or parenthood (not most of them, anyhow) - they just hate the injustice and indignity suffered by victims of rape, by mothers abandoned by their child's father, by children born into homes that can't keep ends together to properly care for them. Pro-lifers don't hate women or poor people (not most of them, anyhow) - they just hate the thought that a burgeoning human life might be extinguished.

These are simplifications, of course, but I think they more or less fairly represent the kinds of places we might find common ground on the topic of abortion. That's what I appreciate about Sojourner's/Call to Renewal: in making it their goal to decrease the number of abortions, they are bridging the yes/no gap - so tainted as it is with propaganda - and necessarily having to turn their sights to the way society deals with all its marginalized and suffering peoples. I'm not sure what a "seamless garment of life" really means, as the post author uses it, but it obviously represents an attempt to think the whole of injustice rather than to barely think at all.

Taking Irony Seriously

Whilst putzing about on YouTube a while ago I found a series of videos relating in various ways to one particular video, under the screenname Paperlilies, which calls for a ban of sarcasm on the site (see it here). I'd actually not recommend you bother with watching it; it consists of a girl "complaining" of sarcastic videos on YouTube and suggesting that no one should make them anymore because she's tired of feeling stupid when she watches them. Her other suggestion is to tag sarcastic videos as such.

The point of the video is to be itself "sarcastic." There was a surprising outlash against this video, particularly by people who didn't understand the joke. Paperlilies posted another video, both amusing and disturbing, in which she reads from the "hater" comments she received (caution, adult content revealing the ignorance and latent aggression of the American YouTube user). Among the interesting responses to this comes from a sympathetic little girl who seems concerned that Paperlilies might take some of the comments to heart. Then there is this "instructional video" on what sarcasm means, which has a kind of low-budget production value to it that almost makes it amusing.

I can't really watch all these videos without flinching each time someone says "sarcasm" or "sarcastic," when what they really mean is ironic. Irony is a difficult concept to pin down, but almost always involves a statement that, taken at "face value," appears to mean what it says, but taken in context or by intonation, actually means something contradictory. Sarcasm is a form of irony, and so the confusion is quite understandable. But in sarcasm there is usually a clear tone and some form of hyperbole in the statement. As a form of irony, it is not always true that all irony is sarcastic, though all sarcasm is probably ironic.

John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are masters of both irony and sarcasm. When Stewart responds to a news story with that exaggerated innocent look on his face, he's usually being sarcastic. When Colbert pretends to be an earnest reporter and asks absurd questions of congresspeople, he's usually being ironic. Another good example of irony is Andy Kaufman, as played by Jim Carey in Man on the Moon. No one could tell when the guy was playing a character and if he was ever being genuine.

To complicate, or maybe simplify things, there's the irony Reinhold Niebuhr discerns in American history, as discussed in this post at God's Politics. Here, irony exists where our misled goals and hopes produce contradictory results that do not in themselves delegitimate the goals. This is a more esoteric form, perhaps, but I think it helps get at the broad nature of the term.

Language changes, of course, but it should change because new situations or ideas require words to be used in new ways, not because we don't know what we're talking about. In the first case language grows; in the second, it becomes meaningless.