A Post Every High School Graduate Should Be Able To Understand*

Over at Crooked Timber, Seth Edenbaum churlishly proclaimed me another fatuous academic who abjures clarity:

Academic snobbery is snobbery first and foremost ... Kaufman used the very specific language of a snobbery that I for long standing and very personal reasons find repulsive ... It's a class thing.

The sentence he identified as incontrovertible evidence of my snobbery?

I mean to sound light and quippy, but I seem destined to the stentorian.

I pay attention to my prose.  Some words, like "stentorian," have a knack for enacting their meaning.  My defense of tweedy naïvete sounded overwrought, so I apologized in language equally overwrought.  Little is less "light and quippy" than a phrase like "destined to the stentorian."  Edenbaum, I presume, would have me write more abstemious prose—my tactical naïvete made him "wanna go all Joan Didion on his sorry ass," a phrase seemingly designed to compel Joan Didion to wanna go all Joan Didion on his sorry ass, but I digress.  When Edenbaum is crowned King of the Words, all this ironic chicanery will stop.  His Omnipotence will put an end to the Hegemony of the Facetious and the deleterious playfulness of its oligarchs.  Sentences like this one, from Little Dorrit, would be banned:

How there had been a final interview with the head of the Circumlocution Office that very morning, and how the Brazen Head had spoken, and had been, upon the whole, and under all the circumstances, and looking at it from the various points of view, of opinion that one of two courses was to be pursued in respect of the business: that was to say, either to leave it alone for evermore, or to begin it all over again.

See how Dickens interpolated the feckless phrasing of those who work in the Circumlocution into his description of its workings?  Such loquaciousness might be literarily effective, but to the supercilious Edenbaum, such rhetorical flourishes betray mannered emptiness.  They are mere rhetoric, the feckless noodlings of orthographic nihilists like Joyce. 

When Edenbaum is King, he will declare war on the jejune.  In the beginning, his campaign will be subtle—a little gerrymandering here, a little disenfranchising there, you know, the quotidian manipulations of contemporary politics—but his bellicose nature will out soon enough.  Questionable language will be expurgated.  (The Chief of Soliquies is reputed to have asked the Second Assessor of British Literature, Elizabethean Divsion: "Do 'outrageous fortunes' really need 'slings' and 'arrows'?  Are these 'fortunes' even 'outrageous'?  Winnow 'em out!")  Any novel not written by Hemingway will be bowdlerized. 

When his administration publishes its official lexicon—complete with a taxonomy of adjectives and guide to their proper usage—the public, before only mildly unsettled, will become tempestuous.  They will demand their representatives mount a filibuster, futile though they know it will be.  The more vehement will call for them to impeach Edenbaum, but you cannot impeach a king.

He will appear on television with a diffident smirk that grows into an obsequious smile as he explains why he had to remove the epiphanies from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: "There was just something excessive about those swans."  As the language, once so rich, became more vacuous, more homogeneous, people will begin to pine for the lush, descriptive antebellum days.  In the words of one pamphleteer:

We should not have to describe our love with the same precision with which we find the hypotenuse of a triangle.  It is simply gauche.  We should not have to kowtow to those who express their emotions as a physicist would describe the kinetic energy of a cannonball at the apex of its parabolic flight.  When I say someone has blood on their hands, I care less about its hemoglobin's oxidation state than the desanguinated people.  If I want to call Our King, Hubris be His Name, a 'tectonic vortex of stupid,' it is the strength of the insult, not its sense, that concerns me.  When we abrogated our inventiveness to this totalitarian—when we decided it best that all our emotions be stamped and notarized by the Rector of Expressive Parameters—when we accepted this paradigm of featureless prose, we gained an infrastructure, but we lost our humanity.  All must inculcate in their children a laissez faire linguistic attitude.  Let the marketplace of language dictate the manner of expression, not that Usurper of the Tongue!

Needless to say, this man will publish incognito, the pecuniary reparations he will demand fifteen pages later invested in the construction of yet another bureaucratic ziggurat.  So people will continue to speak in irreverent terms of deciduous trees in autumn; the pulses of lovers will quicken at the mere mention gametes; expecting mothers will place hands on their womb, flush with the thought of the mitotic maintenance of chromosomal sets; treasured Christmas tchotckes will trigger thoughts of their polymer structure as they remind widows of equinoxes long passed and their evanescence; the sun will inspire enervated poets to thoughts of plasma and thermodynamic decay, shooting stars of quasars, &c.

I would not want to live in the literal world Edenbaum would have us live in.

*Because, you know.

Comments

[Nullifidian]

"Which, to be fair, I only noticed because when I clicked through to see the list, my immediate reaction was 'some of these are kind of weird, but nobody, much less high school seniors, needs to know moiety, which really is just a pointlessly erudite synonym for a common word.'"

I felt the same way reading the word ziggurat. Perhaps I run with the wrong crowd, but there aren't many times I'm going to be discoursing on Sumerian architecture.

[Wax Banks]

seth's blog is so great i went and started one of my own! it's called SCOTTGETBACKTOYOURDISSERTATION-MYSPACE-THISDUDEISNOTWORTHYOURTIME.BLOGSPOT.WWW.ORGANIZATION.COM.rightNOW!!

please someone nominate me for a goddamn WEBBY

[JPool]

No, no, ziggurat is very important. I used the word twice last week and once again this Tuesday. Two of those were rather elaborate jokes punning off the word cigarette, and the other was in describing the facade of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory. Without that word under my belt I would have been reduced to, "you know, those squared of pyramid type things," which is clear, but not very eduacated sounding.
As for moiety, maybe it's because I study Africa, where, generally speaking, the idea of having just two lineage groups seems like your not really trying, but, unless we've got highschool students reading Durkheim or doing extended segments on Australian social organization, I don't see how they're going to be able to work moiety into a sentence.

[JPool]

No, no, ziggurat is very important. I used the word twice last week and once again this Tuesday. Two of those were rather elaborate jokes punning off the word cigarette, and the other was in describing the facade of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory. Without that word under my belt I would have been reduced to, "you know, those squared of pyramid type things," which is clear, but not very eduacated sounding.
As for moiety, maybe it's because I study Africa, where, generally speaking, the idea of having just two lineage groups seems like your not really trying, but, unless we've got highschool students reading Durkheim or doing extended segments on Australian social organization, I don't see how they're going to be able to work moiety into a sentence.

[JPool]

stupid accidental double posting...

[Nullifidian]

Well, barring ever going through Atlanta, its usage in an elaborate pun on cigarette is a bit too specific to justify demanding that every graduating high school student know it.

As for "moiety", I thought it more useful than many of the other words, from my perspective as someone who got his bachelor's in biochemistry, since it's a term of art in chemistry (e.g. the deoxyribose moiety of DNA).

[Adam Roberts]

Well colour me, er, English, but ... whilst disagreement is the soil from which the best flowers grow, adressing somebody as "you pathetic little fuck" when narked by such a disagreement crosses the line. I can't think of anything it achieves, save characterising the speaker as an individual insufficiently in control of his/her own temper.

I'm stating the blindingly obvious. I'll stop.

[Doctor Slack]

I'm sure Seth meant "pathetic" in the sense of "having pathos," alluding to the fact that Scott was making a poignant emotional connection with the reader. And I think "little fuck" is one of those rapper nicknames, along the lines of "Li'l Flip," meant to denote that SEK is a ladies' man. Looked at in the proper context, a lot of what Seth is saying is more complimentary than you might think.

[Karl Steel]

Looked at in the proper context, a lot of what Seth is saying is more complimentary than you might think.

Very funny. Where I come from "You're a moralizing, stuck up prig" = "You're a freewheelin' downhome bro, hoss."

[Rich Puchalsky]

So what Seth was really saying was "It's hard out there for a pimp". Thanks for the translation, Doctor Slack.

If I were a blogger, I'd just delete any comments that seemed annoying. Maybe it's good that I'm not one.

[Adam Roberts]

Doc Slack: brilliant. You are clearly the most pathetic and littlest fuck of all. The littleness of my pathetic fuckosity pales by comparison. I salute you.

Hey, let's all move to Deadwood!

[R.L.Page]

" ... adressing somebody as "you pathetic little fuck" ... crosses the line."

Sometimes I think you academics will never be 'down.' In Mr. Edenbaum's 'hood, such colorful phrases as "you pathetic little fuck" serve as non-violent expressions of the anger felt by the oppressed sub-culture of which SethDog (if you will)(even if you won't) is a member.

We can see then that SethDog employs his 'mad language skillz' to assert his bona fides with his 'homies' (i.e. to secure his standing as 'the common man')
and to, of course, stick it to the (headless) 'Man.'

[Doctor Slack]

You are clearly the most pathetic and littlest fuck of all.

Me and my big mouth...

[Jeff G]

In Mr. Edenbaum's 'hood, such colorful phrases as "you pathetic little fuck" serve as non-violent expressions of the anger felt by the oppressed sub-culture of which SethDog (if you will)(even if you won't) is a member.

That actually made me laugh out loud. And here I thought R.L. Page and I couldn't share a common (read: shared; I'll save the class stuff for that other America) giggle...