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."