- just think of the range of meanings that a simple "Yeah right" can have, depending on intonation. This is so central to our speaking that it's inevitable absence on the page is something we need to make up for. It's one of the reasons in writing why we need to choose our words carefully and unambiguously, and also why we use punctuation, italics and, these days, emoticons and emojis. (Other reasons why we need all this in writing include the absence of body language and the impossibility of checking whether the person addressed is understanding us.) Gaston Durren, BABEL
I have said - repeatedly these last few years - that I am not good at tone on the internet, always in response to someone I have have misunderstood or who has misunderstood me. There was a final straw moment that got me off Facebook.
I don't mean it, though. I think I am pretty good at capturing tone in internet writing, choosing words carefully and gradually becoming more adventurous in my punctuation. It's just difficult to have conversations online, and texting is worse. We don't get to be Montaigne anymore. It's the rest of you who are bad at this, I swear.
A little goodwill goes a long way though, which may be why we are becoming more divided as we increasingly rely on social media. Blogging and having your own website is social media, after all, just more like the older methods of letter-writing, kitchen-table or pub conversation, letters-to-the-editor, and magazine reading.
5 comments:
If a blog is social media, what do we call Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the like? Corporate social media? Algorithmic social media?
A tech-savvy friend never got an account on corporate social media, because he was certain that he'd screw it up by pissing off friends or getting banned. During the Covid lockdown, I found that corporate social media made my life worse, so got off.
Whatever we decide constitutes social media, there are distinctions. I do like Reddit because it is anonymous, is organized by area of interest and algorithms don't decide what the user sees.
Generating content for someone else's website does feel like a sucker bet. More people should have blogs to talk about what interests them.
"We don't get to be Montaigne anymore"
Don't we? If "essay" meant "trial", aren't a lot of blog posts trials?
I have an idea. I sit down to try write it out, organize my thoughts, and do a little research to make sure I'm not making a stupid mistake. As I write, the idea crystallizes, and changes. Sometimes I hit "publish" on something that's 90 degrees from the direction I started with, and every now and then 180 degrees.
Even a (very) few of the squib posts underwent changes in thought.
Reminds me of this Key and Peele sketch about texting gone wrong:
https://youtu.be/naleynXS7yo
There is the convention that a double negative in English is a positive but that a double positive can't be a negative. The 'yeah,right' disproves that.
We have Bishop Lowth to thank for that rule about double negatives as well as many other pettifoggeries in the late 1700s. Not only are double negatives used in nearly all other languages, including French, which has a supervising academy for proper language, they are mandatory in many, including some other West Germanic languages like ours.
I like the "Yeah, right."
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