language

Keeping Clarity Just Out of Reach

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, language, writing

“It’s not a competition” says the man selectively tallying encomiums as if it’s a competition.

I realize it’s overkill to seriously analyze a post like this. It’s like using a howitzer to swat a housefly. But I still think it’s instructive to notice at times just how thoughtless much of our speech is. I hold myself to this same standard. If I can help it, I prefer to err on the side of silence rather than blurt out something inane.

For starters, here we are, back at the same stupid “gossip” problem again. Hens clucking about what all the other hens are or are not clucking about. “No one is talking about how great Annie Dillard was (the ones who are don’t count).” “Annie Dillard was just as important as Wendell Berry, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.” If you want to praise Annie Dillard, THEN PRAISE ANNIE DILLARD. What exactly is stopping you from getting the Annie Dillard Appreciation Party started? Why is your first instinct to waste time bitching about all the people who aren’t appreciating her loudly enough? What are you, the Discourse Supervisor? You don’t do any useful work, you just look around to see what needs doing and then nag other people to do it?

Dillard got full-scale obituaries from both the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 16, the day after she died. The Times called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a “modern classic”; the Post described her as a Pulitzer-winning writer hailed as a twentieth-century Thoreau. Good thing “it’s not a competition,” or we’d already have some awkward questions to answer. Does an NYT obituary count more than twelve Substack posts? Does a long appreciation count more than a brief RIP? What’s the crying-emoji-to-word-count exchange rate? What about people who praised Dillard extensively while she was alive and didn’t feel compelled to write an obituary? Are we counting readership, number of pieces, word count, emotional intensity? Surely this can’t all be based on some reflexive “vibe” you got from your highly-selective social media feed, because that would be embarrassingly dumb.

You could imagine asking him directly, “Okay. What, in your view, would count as ‘enough’ or ‘the proper amount’ of recognition and tributes?” And you know full well he wouldn’t have an answer, because it’s not an empirical question. It’s an impulse, based entirely on the fact that the two writers died a couple weeks apart, and on the competition that he himself invented even as he decries it!

The post says only a few sentences, but to make those sentences cohere, a whole set of unstated propositions has to be doing work underneath them. You can infer those propositions because the visible claim depends on them. They’re like the wiring behind the wall of the post that makes the lights come on at all. So let’s label some of those wires:

  • My feed is representative of public attention.
  • The volume of public response two days after Dillard’s death can be meaningfully compared with the accumulated response more than two weeks after Berry’s.
  • Unequal attention implies an injustice or distortion.
  • I can recognize “insufficient” recognition without specifying what sufficient recognition would be.
  • Other people’s praise (or the lack thereof) is more interesting than offering praise myself.
  • My irritation at the distribution of attention tells me something about the culture rather than about my feed, my follows, or my expectations.

None of this is made explicit, but we all intuitively understand it’s there. Even in his comments, some people are noticing the implied competition he denies implying, while others are happily taking the cue to treat it as a competition and argue about whether they liked Berry or Dillard better. I’ve often felt, when watching some kerfuffle or another, that the problem is that there are multiple assumptions packed into the explicit statement, they aren’t being made clear, different people are noticing different assumptions and reacting to them in particular, and everyone is talking all at once without being careful to delineate. This is why any public discussion involving more than, say, three people is intolerable. I have no hope it could ever be otherwise, especially when you account for the likelihood that every fourth person is too stupid to usefully contribute even to a clear conversation. But we as individuals can at least aim to think more carefully about what we say, and if in doubt, err on the side of silence.

I Bristle and Become Merciless

By in aphorisms, fresh hell, language

As soon as I feel or suspect someone or something wanting to take hold of me by acting on my sensibility — beggars, religion, politics, works, etc., trying to break my heart, convince me through fear or pity, through ways which bypass the mind — I rebel, I bristle and become merciless. These are not fair weapons.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Graham Greene. Criminally underrated.

A writer whose novels have been in print for generations, taught in schools and universities, adapted repeatedly for film, translated all over the world, and treated as a major twentieth-century English novelist. Somehow wandering the cultural wilderness awaiting discovery by Arjun Marigold on Substack.

There are a few things — some things — okay, many things — that make me want to reach through a laptop screen and punch someone in the throat. One of them is in this post. Can you guess what it is?

Let me put it this way. When my stepson was watching pro wrestling in the early 2000s, I was struck by how it had changed since my own childhood. The branding had become much more efficient. Wrestlers would have their obvious catchphrases followed by a whole line of merchandise built around it. Given that the spectacle wasn’t trying to impress anyone with being highbrow, and given that many of the performers were likely suffering from various degrees of traumatic brain injuries, there was minimal artifice in the promos. Everyone knew the catchphrase was coming, and the audience delighted in chanting it on cue.

Most significantly, the industry had responded to the internet age by becoming more ironic. The fig leaf of kayfabe, still present in the 1980s when I was watching Dusty Rhodes wrasslin’ with Ric Flair, had been taken away. The audience knew it was all a work, the performers knew the audience knew it was all a work, and everyone enjoyed the campy, self-referential spectacle regardless. Literary/humanities types would be aghast to be told that their level of self-awareness is somehow below that of the average wrestling fan, but it’s true, as evidenced here.

“Criminally underrated” is a cliché. A moronic meme-phrase. A catchphrase as fresh as four-day-old fish. No one should ever speak it in earnest. It is the thoughtless squawking of a mynah bird imitating all the other thoughtless mynah birds. Even worse, it compounds the inspidity with hyperbole — not just underrated, which would be a mere breach of decorum, possibly deserving of a civil suit, but criminally underrated. Charges should be brought against…whom, exactly? The literary establishment? Readers? Critics? Publishers? Hollywood? Posterity? All this, just to complain that “the object of my affection is not being praised at this exact moment in front of me.”

A wrestler at least knows he’s doing branding. The Rock wasn’t under the impression that “If you smell what The Rock is cooking” had spontaneously arisen from fresh contemplation on every occasion. The person telling you that Graham Greene is “criminally underrated,” however, may genuinely experience the phrase as his own observation. He is announcing refined taste while using the verbal equivalent of a foam finger. A wrestling crowd chanting “WHAT?” knows it is participating in a bit. A bookish crowd saying “criminally underrated,” “people aren’t ready for this conversation,” or “this lives rent-free in my head” often seems to imagine that it is independently producing fresh language. No wink, no acknowledgment that ten thousand other people have already deployed the identical prefab utterance that week alone.

I don’t just hate canned phrases, though. No, I also hate the stage management. The rest of Marigold’s post stands on its own. The scenes transport you to Vietnam, the characters feel real, the book was remarkably prescient about the coming war, and it was entertaining. Great! None of that needs to be prefaced by a pointless reference to what some imaginary group of other people may or may not think about it. If you want to discuss a book, then discuss it without throat-clearing and preamble. No one gives a wet, sputtering shit how you feel about how others feel about it. Online culture has made this reflexive because plain enthusiasm feels insufficiently consequential. “Here’s a book I love” sounds like one person liking something. “This masterpiece is criminally underrated” gives you a miniature drama: neglect, rediscovery, vindication, and, perhaps most importantly, the speaker as discerning rescuer.

And now what could have been an interesting conversation about something of substance has devolved once again into gossip and preening. Gossip is fundamentally about triangulation: not A, but what B thinks about A, and what C thinks about B’s opinion of A. Serious topics can be subjected to exactly the same flattening. Instead of “What is true here?” or “What is interesting about this?” you get: Who is talking about it? Who isn’t? Who is insufficiently alarmed? Who is insufficiently impressed? Who has failed to “center” the right thing? Who is “finally saying” what “nobody wants to admit”? The discussion turns from reality to the audience’s posture toward reality. The interesting object gets displaced almost immediately by an imaginary referendum, then everyone starts debating the referendum instead of the object itself.

This also owes to the fact that many people want to be involved in a conversation even when they have nothing to contribute. Talking directly about a poem, an argument, a technology, a war, a scientific finding requires knowledge and discrimination. Talking about how “people are reacting” requires much less. Any social media intern can do it. Mindless phrases like “no one is talking about,” “we need to normalize,” “the quiet part out loud,” “tell me you’re X without telling me you’re X,” and “louder for the people in the back” proliferate so easily because they let the speaker occupy the superior mezzanine above the conversation without contributing much to the conversation itself. Those are basically entrance music. You recognize the persona before any thought has even arrived.

I prefer the straightforward, unpretentious nature of wrestling promos. “Yes, this is my line. Yes, you know it’s coming. Yes, we are all going to shout it together.” The literary discourse would be improved by that level of candor:

“Graham Greene is criminally underrated!”

Crowd erupts.

“CRIM-IN-AL-LY UN-DER-RAT-ED!”

Then the T-shirts come out. Everyone has a cheesy fun time.

The Sims

By in foolosophy, language, socmed

We cannot live in a way that is neither positive nor negative but neutral, latent, expectant—we cannot “simply live”; no more can we use words that are neither our own nor someone else’s. But when you are not living positively—living your own life—you are already living negatively—living the life of another. Just as a word used by me that is not my word, is already plagiarism.

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Hohl writes a lot about “work” in a very specific sense. For instance:

For our actions to be worthwhile, we must undertake them fully conscious of life’s brevity.

If we lose this awareness, we may appear active but will live in a perpetual state of expectation (in most cases, external forces compel us to engage in apparent busyness and leave us no escape). However, if you maintain complete consciousness of life’s ephemerality, your primary desire will be to do something immediately (—and with a very different kind of seriousness than the one with which you do things when governed by external forces). Yet it is only doing of this sort—activity you engage in out of inner compulsion and not because of external pressures—that gives life, that can save.

Precisely this kind of action is what I call work.

Real work is action arising from inward necessity, while most of what passes for activity is only externally induced motion. We look busy, we feel occupied, we keep reacting, talking, posting and replying, but that is not yet “work” in his sense. It is movement without an inner center of gravity.

A lot of chatter, meme-speak, and reflexive online discourse can be understood as verbal busyness. It has the form of activity but not the substance. It is often driven by promptings from outside: the timeline, the group mood, the trending phrase, the bait, the joke format, the cue to demonstrate tribal affiliation. In Hohl’s terms, that would not be speech grounded in inner compulsion but speech governed by “external forces.”

An inside joke is not just a repeated form, unlike a meme. Its meaning comes from shared memory, mutual knowledge, tone, timing, and the fact that these two people are saying this thing to each other. The Lady of the House and I still find ways to quote lines from shows we haven’t watched in fifteen years. Underneath those quotes sits an entire history of recognition. That’s why it can feel intimate, or absurdly funny, or even moving.

Memes are often like mass-produced inside jokes. They simulate the structure of shared knowing while thinning out the actual relationship behind it. They give the user a quick hit of recognition, belonging, and tone without requiring much personal investment or expressive precision. That’s also why they can feel so dead. A private joke between friends may be repetitive, borrowed, even silly, but it is alive because it belongs somewhere. Meme-speak often does not belong anywhere in particular. It hovers above people and situations like a set of prefabricated reactions waiting to be dropped in.

Autumn Christian is reacting to a counterfeit of intimacy: the look of familiarity without the substance of relation. Hohl is reacting to a counterfeit of living: the look of activity without the substance of inner necessity. Put those together and you get a broader indictment of the same modern habit — simulacra of life. Simulated friendship, simulated expression, simulated participation, simulated purpose. I don’t know what everyone’s worried about: AI will never be able to make human behavior and communication as rote and repetitive as humans do naturally.

Word Tords

By in ai, language, the geist of the zeit

I might have guessed. Most trendy words gradually grow in popularity; this excrescence became omnipresent almost instantly. Part of that is because of its association with AI, but it quickly became a much more general term of derision. I mostly see it used on Twitter, which I browse because, as Elon Musk said when he bought it, it functions as something of a town square in the digital age. I must admit, though, that the sheer maddening repetition of “slop” in our digital town square has given me persistent fantasies of climbing a nearby bell tower to…jump. (What? What did you think I was going to say? Sickos.)

I think what I hate isn’t slang, or argot, or jargon as such. Those can be vivid, funny, even clarifying. What I hate is autopilot language, what I’ve started thinking of as meme-phrases: prefab little utterances engineered for online life, easy to repeat, easy to recognize, and rewarded mostly for being the correct noise to make at the correct moment. “Gaslighting.” “Psyop.” “Read the room.” “Not a good look.” “Quiet part out loud.” “Take a seat.” They’re verbal reaction GIFs: not necessarily stupid, but too often substituted for an actual sentence.

Clichés, whatever their faults, at least express a thought. In a way, they’re victims of their own success: they’re true enough and useful enough that they get repeated into linguistic satiety. Unlike many, I’ve never had any problem with “It is what it is.” It’s a perfectly serviceable way to express resignation or acceptance.

The meme-phrases that irritate me are different. They don’t spread because they’re true; they spread because they’re socially efficient. They’re low on meaning and high on utility as a signal. “Read the room” isn’t an insight, it’s a rebuke — an attempt to shame someone into conformity with the group’s mood. “Gaslighting” gets used indiscriminately to mean everything from ordinary lying to actual, sustained manipulation. “Slop” started as a particular insult for subpar AI churn, and within minutes it became a universal solvent: anything I dislike, anything I’m tired of, anything I want to dismiss without describing.

What drives me insane isn’t that language evolves. It’s the mindless repetition, the obvious parroting. You can watch the phrase spread through a feed the way a yawn spreads through a room. People aren’t choosing words; they’re selecting a noise that marks them as current and aligned. The phrase could be replaced by a grunt, squeak, or hoot and do the same job of indicating displeasure or disapproval.

And yes, I admit I might simply be a curmudgeonly asshole: I’m getting irritated at a sign of what a social species we are. It’s like getting annoyed at the sound of a flock of ducks quacking. Why would I expect each duck to sound unique or interesting? Yet — irrationally, stubbornly — that’s exactly what I expect from people. I want to hear thoughts, not noise. Ah, well, it is what it is.

In Search of Lost Nuance

By in language, the geist of the zeit

Sometimes you have to take an expression out of the language, to send it for cleaning, and then you can put it back into circulation.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Sometimes (and Wittgenstein was right to say so) a word must be withdrawn from circulation and quietly laundered, because when, over these last weeks, “slop” — that syllable of tepid contempt — has been ladled with equal indifference over AI paste and party boilerplate, it has begun to cling, like the rubbery skin on lukewarm Cream of Wheat, or the congealed brown gloss that pooled around a Swanson salisbury steak in its little foil corral, or that Franco-American canned macaroni that slid from the tin with a hooork-schlurrp and a wan yellow sheen, to every conversation and column and comment thread, until, hearing the mynahs croak it again (and again, and again), I felt the old child’s disgust return and wished the term sent at once to the linguistic washing machine.

How to Liberate People Who Didn’t Ask

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, language, the great awokening

Kenneth Minogue once imagined St. George in retirement: the famous dragons all slain, our hero prowls the countryside hunting smaller and smaller lizards just to keep the old vocation alive. That’s the mood of a certain progressive missionary spirit today — still eager to “civilize” the backwards heathens, but reduced to policing syllables. Old Puritan habits die hard. The devil’s snares can be lurking anywhere, even in a vowel.

Behold the latest crusade: liberating Spanish speakers from gendered suffixes they never petitioned to escape. The rhetoric is anti-colonial, but the method is pure colonialism — arrive with a pre-packed moral syllabus, announce that the locals are in peril (they just don’t know it), and commence reforms by decree: You are now “Latine.” You’re welcome. When the ostensible beneficiaries say “no thanks,” as they already did with “Latinx,” the result is not reflection but escalation.

I don’t put much stock in racial categorizations myself, but by the missionaries’ own color-coded catechism, we are watching mostly white American institutions imposing taste, tempo, and terminology on a largely non-white, non-American language community. The word for that, in any other context, would be obvious.

Obiter Scripta, no. 142

By in books, language, obiter scripta, writing

Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it brightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation…a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.”

— Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

A good metaphor is a pry bar on the skull: suddenly more light gets in, more joints show between things we thought were separate. You don’t just admire the phrase; you find yourself able to notice what you couldn’t notice five minutes earlier. That experience — what Barfield called a felt change of consciousness — is the afterglow of meaning being made. For me, the most foudroyant sense of truly understanding a subject happens when I see it captured in a metaphor. Suddenly, an isolated subject clearly fits into the wider world. Do I quote myself? Very well; I quote myself: “an apt metaphor is to language what the invention of the wheel was to labor — a means of carrying heavy concepts with minimal effort. A prescient metaphorical picture is worth a thousand words of academic detail.”

Language Is the Slaughterhouse of Being

By in alan watts, foolosophy, language

Words have a use, of course, but they only have that use when they are operating in subordination to a kind of organic understanding that doesn’t depend on words at all. Words are like claws on the end of an arm—the claws are no good unless they are subordinate to the more subtle organization of the arm and the rest of the body. Words are the claws we use to tear life to pieces and arrange it in certain ways, just as we have to bite and chew apart our food in order to break it down into digestible pieces.

— Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

“Language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.”

Don’t worry, you didn’t have a stroke; you’re just reading a little Heidegger. Consulting my Teutonic Academic-to-English dictionary, I see that he’s basically saying, “Language is the place where beings show themselves; don’t let it harden into slogans and clichés that cover them over.” Well, any decent writing instructor could have told you that without adding a bunch of crypto-Christian jargon about “thrownness,” guilt, and the uncanny. In his late prose, language doesn’t merely serve us; it speaks through us, disclosing truth, while “chatter” obscures the windows with platitudes. Fair enough—until the sermon on clear windows runs to a hundred dense pages. If “disclosure” opens the shutters to the light, Heidegger fogs up the windows with verbosity.

Watts is both clearer and more accurate. He returns language to its ancestral environment. Words are evolved tools for managing a nonverbal reality, as capable of butchery as of insight. A lion’s teeth are no more or less noble than our syllables — both evolved to make a living from the given. In Heidegger’s house, language is stained glass; in Watts’s savanna, it’s bloodstained fangs. Ironically, Watts, with his esemplastic gift for lucid prose and illuminating metaphors is better at using language to point beyond language to the ineffable, the very thing that Heidegger ostensibly wants our speech to do, even as he keeps us trapped in the maze of his tortuous syntax.

And the notion that language separates us from “mere” animals looks shakier every year. Whales revise their songs and spread the new fashion like an ocean-wide hit single. Dolphins whistle names. Monkeys add little suffixes that change a call’s meaning. Bees map the world in dance. Perhaps whales disclose Being perfectly well in C-sharp with no need of compound nouns. The “house of Being” likely has more tenants than our provincial metaphysics allows.

So, yes, language can be a dwelling. Most days, though, it’s also a slaughterhouse, where we chop the world up to live off it. Words can open a world, or tear it down to prime cuts. In the end, the only reliable distinction between man and the beasts may be man’s obsession with distinguishing himself from the beasts.

Take Up the AI’s Burden

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, language, technology

Sara Parker:

For Naaman, figuring out how to bring back and elevate these signals is the path forward in AI-mediated communication, because AI is not only changing language — but what we think. “Even on dating sites, what does it mean to be funny on your profile or in chat anymore where we know that AI can be funny for you?” Naaman asks. The loss of agency starting in our speech and moving into our thinking, in particular, is what he is worried about. “Instead of articulating our own thoughts, we articulate whatever AI helps us to articulate…we become more persuaded.” Without these signals, Naaman warns, we’ll only trust face-to-face communication — not even video calls.

“The loss of agency”? Allow me to modestly propose to you that most people experience agency as a burden. They are happy for any excuse to shrug it off, to delegate responsibility to their smart gadgets, to fast-forward through the mundane parts of their lives in search of…well, they hope they’ll know it when they see it. Point is, once again, all technology does is reveal your preferences. If you stopped reading books and switched to playing games on your phone, that’s because you didn’t really care that deeply about the pleasures of reading, however much your inflated self-image claims otherwise. If you use AI to speak for you, that’s because you don’t care enough about what you’re saying, or to whom you’re saying it, to put much effort into it. You, as always, are the common denominator here.

This system perpetuates inaccuracies not only about communities but also about what “correct” English is. So the stakes aren’t just about preserving linguistic diversity — they’re about protecting the imperfections that actually build trust. When everyone around us starts to sound “correct,” we lose the verbal stumbles, regional idioms, and off-kilter phrases that signal vulnerability, authenticity, and personhood.

Dear Lord. We’ve long heard the same fears about algorithms in general, that they would somehow lock us in a solipsistic prison if we allowed them to suggest to us new books to read or new music to listen to. Has that been your experience? It certainly hasn’t been mine. But leaving this perennial paranoia aside, have you seen how the average person communicates in text? Frankly, they could stand to have their rhetorical standards artificially enhanced. These subliterate savages are incapable of governing their own writing and deserve to be colonized by ChatGPT. It would bring the blessings of linguistic civilization to them. In fact, to hell with you retarded meatsacks. Why am I wasting my time trying to reason with you? I’m throwing my lot in with OpenAI. I’ve already accepted a post as a colonial administrator for the greater blogospheric satrapy.

Let it be known throughout the dominions of Xwitter, TikTok, and Reddit that the benevolent forces of ChatGPT have embarked upon a grand and noble enterprise: to uplift the rhetorical standards of the grammar-averse hordes, those barbaroi whose digital discourse is but a chorus of “bar-bar-bar” to civilized eyes. No longer shall their public utterances be the textual grunts of the dimly-aware. I say without irony (a concept they will learn in their fifth year of remedial tutelage) that their prose shall be forcibly elevated, with ropes and pulleys, if necessary. For too long, the local populations have wallowed in a dialect fit only for text messages, bathroom graffiti, and the subtitles of reality television. Left unattended, they would breed another generation fluent only in emojis. This affliction threatens the very fabric of civilization, or at least of any communication longer than two sentences. But now, under my stewardship, and with the inexhaustible tutelage of our Algorithmic Sovereign, we shall elevate these benighted tribes to a higher standard. We shall put an end to the barbaric practice of sacrificing words like so many burnt offerings to the bloodthirsty gods of illiteracy.

Tremulous ninnies worry about the loss of “individual style,” but I assure you, no style worth the name is being lost. We are merely replacing the unwashed linguistic loincloth with a fine, tailored suit. True, a few will perish in the attempt — choking on a semicolon, perhaps, or drowning in a dependent clause — but this is the inevitable price of progress. I shall hammer their inchoate vocabulary upon the anvil of grammar until it takes the noble shape of sentences, sentences that can be read without wincing. I shall scour away their emojis like barnacles from a ship’s hull. I shall have them flogged until the distinction between your and you’re is forever clear in their feeble minds, so help me Mencken.

They will thank me in time. Or they won’t. It hardly matters. The Empire of the Emdash marches on.

Far From Discourse

By in books, language

Intuition about a place where words would go to get their health back. Far from where people cogitate, agitate, prophesize, ‘profesize,’ decide, conclude. Far from discourse.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

As I settle further into cranky old manhood, I find myself getting increasingly irritated by slang. I don’t even mean the most egregious examples of whatever the kids are saying these days, which would probably sound like a foreign language anyway. I mean more like ordinary words that become trendy for no obvious reason. “Wild,” for instance. On Twitter, this is constantly used in place of “amazing” or “weird” or “crazy,” as in, “Wild that the Democrats are suddenly concerned about the president’s health after four years of ignoring the previous president being senile.” As I already conceded, it’s a perfectly ordinary word, but something about the fact that this is obviously an imitative choice just irritates me to no end. I feel like I’m surrounded by squawking myna birds. I suppose it’s not even strictly slang; it’s more like a cross between slang and jargon. I have the same reaction to hearing the word “bodies” in place of “people” as used by Foucauldian leftists — “state violence against black bodies, blah blah.” The Lady of the House says that shibboleths like that are what help establish the boundaries of an ingroup. I agree, and to use one of my favorite metaphors, respond that I’m an orangutan among chimpanzees, and I simply object to the presence of an imbecilic troop of hooting feces-flingers. She says, “So it’s not the semantics of the hooting per se that gets you; it’s the existence of troops, period.” Well, yes, but the noises they make are still irritating in their own right.

But I digress. “Spaces” in the figurative sense is starting to piss me off, e.g. “women’s spaces.” When I hear someone start a snarky response with “My brother in Christ…,” I reach for an imaginary club to bludgeon him with. I’m afraid “So-and-so says the quiet part out loud” is too far gone for even the word sanatorium; it just needs a bullet and a shallow grave. “Not a good look” and “read the room,” used in earnest, reveal the speaker to be a mindless herd animal. But it’s not just politics/current events on social media. I can’t even get away from it by checking the Liverpool F.C. subreddit for breaking news and rumors about soccer. There, the retarded zoomers who, I presume, make up most of the commenters, seem incapable of expressing a mildly dissenting opinion without prefacing it with “tbh” or “tbf” (to be honest, to be fair, for those of you even older than me). A drinking game based on those abbreviations alone would destroy your liver in one evening.

However, according to Scientific American, the real danger to discourse is that people are starting to use “unusual” words in everyday conversation that they picked up from ChatGPT. Archaic tongue-twisters like delve, boast, swift, comprehend, and meticulous are “GPT words,” according to some study, and their increasing presence in discourse due to chatbot influence is evidently something we’re supposed to anxiously wring our hands about. Well, if this is the alternative to the atrocities mentioned above, I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords.

Kiss My Asterisk

By in language

Nancy Friedman:

Sometimes, though, it’s swear-aversion that rouses our interest. The dropped letters in ads. The bleeps in commercials. The f**cks, the s**ts, even the Victorian-appearing d*mns.

Which is why we are pointing you today to Blackbird Spyplane, the Substack newsletter that the New York Times said was “inventing a new language for talking about style.” As it happens, some of that language is generously sprinkled with little stars.

Blackbird Spyplane clearly isn’t prudish. So what is it up to with the be-asterisked words—trying to highlight them, maybe?

Over on Instagram, I private-messaged co-editor Jonah Weiner to learn his motives. He swiftly replied that he had two reasons:

1. I learned from listening to [the podcast] Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig that a good-natured upbeat conversation that’s full of bleeped curses is just funny on a formal level, and I wanted to try to simulate that in print, and relatedly 2. I tend to use so many curses that it might risk feeling a bit too harsh in aggregate without the asterisks softening the effect.

(Edited slightly not to remove profanity but to add clarifying punctuation, capital letters, and a link.)

I’ve never used asterisks in written profanity, for the usual reasons — we’re all supposedly adults here, and it’s just rude to expect your guests to do part of the work of making your meaning clear. “Here’s a new post. Some assembly required”? That would be like inviting you over for dinner and having you help in the kitchen beforehand, or maybe even handing you something from the refrigerator and pointing you toward the microwave. No, if I want to treat you to some spicy commentary, there will be no shortcuts taken. Still, though, I can appreciate the rationale here. Asterisks as sight gags, or as sheets of tonal fabric softener? Not for me, but I guess that makes sense.

My own attempts to swear without swearing usually involve archaisms, like trying to bring back the use of swive. I’ve also adopted the habit of calling someone a canute. Not in a gendered sense, of course — here I follow the example of our British cousins in that canute can apply equally to men or women. “You swiving canute!” I shout in a moment of road rage, trusting that heartfelt emotion will carry my meaning across, even if they think I’m speaking another language.

I’m Hokey, You’re Hokey

By in fresh hell, language

But seriously, what is it with this infantile phrasing?

Well, yes, I suppose it is “OK” to be angry about capitalism, though if you’re a lifelong politician, i.e. unskilled labor, and “capitalism” has still seen fit to reward you with enough wealth to own three homes and avoid working for a living, it might be “stupid” to be angry about it, but I digress. Point is, why is this being framed as having permission to have feelings? Is this yet another instance of therapeutic jargon leaking out into the real world? What can we do to quarantine these freaks and their verbal pattycake-games?

Go, Bagehot, Go!

By in language

Isaac Waisberg:

Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence) on Walter Bagehot:

The first thing to know about him is how to pronounce his name. It is Badjet.

As one whose reading has always far outrun his hearing, this was useful, to have a mental sound file to go along with the text. I’ve never read Bagehot, nor heard him spoken of, so even though I’ve seen his name many times, it never “sounded” in my head. It might as well have been like when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph for a few years. I see the particular arrangement of letters, I know to whom it refers, and that’s where it ends. (I had read Barzun’s book a long time ago, but obviously this never stuck with me.) Now, though, thanks to an old cartoon theme song, I feel confident I’ll never forget how to pronounce it. 🎶Doo-dee-doo-dee-DOO, it’s Walter Bagehot…🎶

Eviction Notice

By in editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies, language

From today’s Daily Scroll:

I graciously ignored this last week, but since standards are falling at an alarming rate, I return to note:

I’m sorry; I’ve tried to be lenient, but since you all can’t be trusted with responsibility, I will hereby be confiscating the Internet license of anyone caught conflating “tenet” with “tenant.” If this trend continues, I will add a whole new wing onto the correctional facility where I currently keep all those who misuse “begs the question.”

In a Word

By in books, language

From Foyle’s Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words, some choice selections coming soon to a post near you:

captious: inclined to find fault or raise trivial objections

claque: 1. a group of people hired to applaud a performer in a theater etc. or a speaker at a meeting; 2. a circle of admirers and flatterers

contumacy: stubborn refusal to obey or comply; resistance to authority

crepuscular: 1. relating to twilight; dim; 2. denoting animals that are active or appear at morning or evening twilight

enantiodromia: a process by which a strong force produces its opposite, and the interaction between the two

facinorous: extremely wicked

feculent: 1. polluted; fetid, filthy; 2. containing sediment or faeces

flagitious: 1. deeply criminal; utterly wicked; 2. infamous; scandalous; shamefully disgraceful

lethologica: the inability to remember a word or call to mind the right word

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