This is an essay deserving a very long slow clap. I'm a fiction editor (dev and line, copy and reluctantly proofreading.) and author. I'm also a descriptive linguist. (Prescriptivism can fuck itself into non-existence.)
To borrow from cryptography, what we're transmitting is a signal with speech, yeh? K. Did Alice receive Bob's signal and understand it? Yeh? WELL DONE, ok, now fuck the rest.
There's one reason to learn proper grammar outside of the context of white supremacy, and it's so you can operate under the hegemony of the system and also know which rules are "conventionally" acceptable to break in an artistic framework. The shock to most people is the correct answer to that is "all of them you pedantic pickle holster" Past that, grammar, syntax, linguistics, (under white supremacy) only functions to show that wow, so you know how to use a fucking semicolon; good for you. (I sleep with a copy of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage 5th ed. under my pillow, and the first thing I tell an editorial client who wants to publish fiction, exhibits core competencies in milk cricket English, and understands narrative is, "OK, so now toss like, fully half of what you know out the window.")
Jesus I'm tired of this, thank you for writing it out properly and elegantly. If I wrote this I'm just another pedantic linguistic descriptivist pale white half Slav community college dropout. The colonisation I see but yes, I've not anywhere to comment aside from what I've said in your comments sections before. I only know its actual origins because my mother, like myself, is lower class, often poor, and rode public transportation in a city both integrated heavily and split right down the middle (Google: St. Louis Missouri, Delmar Divide if you don't know how literal I'm being, please, it's sad) on race lines AND class lines. (White person driving car in St. Louis = white person. White person riding the bus in St. Louis = filthy poor, criminal, or as close to not being white as you can get while still being as pale as an incandescent lightbulb. What's wild is my mom, who is decidedly small and white, was called a racial epithet traditionally only used by white people as supremacists, for riding the bus?!) (OK, that was a wildly divergent path of commentary but needless to say race and class relations in STL are more complex than most cities in the US and I've been through all of them at one point or another.) (Note: she first heard the term woke on the bus in the late '90s, so near thirty years ago.)
I'd also hoped I could find it but there was at one point on a listserv (my age is showing) there was an entire 100+ entry long LIST of jokes about which languages and how English was in a trenchcoat doing various things to other languages, etc. The original list seems lost to time (Or I suck at the wayback machine) but a quick list of examples would be something like: (Thanks ChatGPT, I won't even pretend I wrote these, but they're fairly in tone with what was on the list, albeit quite less exacting since the original list was written by linguists.)
"English is just German, French, and Latin in a trench coat beating up Anxient Greek for its lunch money."
"English is just three drunk languages in a trench coat shouting at each other and hoping someone understands."
"English is just Old Norse, Latin, and French in a trench coat doing a bad impression of a Germanic language."
"English is just Saxon, Viking, and Norman French in a trench coat fighting over word order."
"English is just Latin and German in a trench coat sneaking into a Greek etymology party."
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat trying to sneak into the Romance languages club."
"English is just French and German in a trench coat pretending they can handle Greek's vocabulary."
"English is just Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dr. Seuss in a trench coat writing whatever they want."
"English is just three languages in a trench coat stealing spelling rules from a dumpster."
"English is just Latin in a trench coat trying to remember what it was supposed to sound like."
"English is just French, Latin, and Norse in a trench coat mugging Greek for science terms."
"English is just Dutch, Old Norse, and French in a trench coat arguing about how to spell 'through.'"
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat pretending it remembers its own grammar rules."
"English is just a collection of bad linguistic decisions in a trench coat insisting it's normal."
"English is just Old English in a trench coat trying to hide its midlife crisis with French vocabulary."
"English is just three etymologies in a trench coat and none of them are cooperating."
"English is just Germanic roots in a trench coat pretending it's fluent in Latin."
"English is just three random languages in a trench coat explaining why 'ough' has five pronunciations."
Or, more to the point:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll (b. 1961), "The King's English", rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990
Having said whatever I just said I would like to say I hate linguistic prescriptivism as anything but a tool to exploit for whatever reason you need. All the rules are made up anyway, most of them are bullshit, and someone explain to me why more than thirty fucking languages call pineapples "ananas" and some white fuck came along to Mexico (the only place pineapples in spite of their current globally grown acreage are native to) saw one growing from a bush, pointed it out, and said "TIS A PINE-APPLE!"
The rules are made up. Nary one of them makes fuckin' sense. Limiting your reading based on arbitrary rules created by the white gentry to keep you out of their club is fucking stupid, something about the power elite. OH, and don't get me started on cognitive load. My fellow beings in imaginary Christ, have ye not heard of any of five thousand authors, not even all white and male, thank GOD, whose work AIMS to overload you cognitively. (To that end, one of my modes of fictional expression is MEANT TO CREATE PANIC ATTACKS, and according to many readers is very effective at doing so.)
I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require. And I get paid a tidy sum to EDIT FICTION (and I do it for fun on Substack free once a week.) I'm. I cannot explain the BILE this subject brings up in me. ABSOLUTE BILE. (I've not had tea since before the 7th, honestly I'm maybe losing my fucking shit over it. My kitchen looks like a scene from Dead Space, or some sort of crusty abandoned space station filled with IKEA furni lit by fluorescent motion sensor lights slapped to every surface)
This essay, in other words, is perfect. Thank you.
Apologies for my comment's length, if I were more sane at the moment, it would be shorter, or not, I don't know.
this reminds me of something I read ages ago based on an experiment. It theorised something along the lines of: if you jumble around the letters inside a word but keep the first and last letters the same, as long as the word is no longer than 5/6 letters, your brain can still to process it relatively quickly.
So I could write, "wlel taht's qitue carzy!" and not only is it legible to most people, most people would read it just as quickly as if everything was spelt correctly.
"I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require."
this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the "it gives me a headache" declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language. There is so much pretending. If the grammatical rules aren't adhered to then you're taught to be dismissive or punitive or derisive, or pretend you didn't understand, or pretend its more difficult than it is, or pretend that you are in physical pain. It is all a performance, or if it isn't, then its an indoctrination that is obscuring the highest truth, that ultimately, if you've understood what I've said, what's there left to talk about?
That is qiute czray (This is really base cog neurosci, you're on the mark. The order of letters doesn't matter if you know English, just the placement of the first and last. There's a ton of memes and jokes that use this effect too.)
"this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the 'it gives me a headache' declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language." EXACTLY! OK, so, we have László Krasznahorkai, sure he's Hungarian, but his last novel (award winning, for the record) Herscht 07769, is 500 pages, and one sentence. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for a novel that had no conventional punctuation or dialog tags, and only like, 5 commas total. This argument is spurious from every fucking angle.
My theory is that it's simple indoctrination along with the fact of it being, and the quotation marks here are large, cartoonish, and comical "PrOpEr EnGLiSh", is not only an acquired skill that takes time to learn and master (I'm 39 and I edit fiction, I've been writing since I had the tactile dexterity to hold an instrument to do so, and I still reference Fowler's modern usage, I've been a paid editor 10 years... Let's consider that.) AND it's a gatekeeper to the OFFICIAL LEAGUE OF ELITIST MILK CRICKETRY. Indoctrination or if you're a writer of fiction (or I'd argue non-fiction, the mode of which is now usually the personal essay, which fits neatly under the category of creative non-fiction for various reasons. Which is why Weinberger is a genius, which is why you're so fucking good among others) a complete lack of understanding of the finer points of language and how it is used to make art. (This is leaving out formalist experimentalism. Someone most famously wrote a near 500 page book without using the letter "e" now OK, that's just showing off. And it's legible!)
If it's mostly performative then fuck, get a better hobby. It's like these right coded "authors" (again, very unserious sarcastic quote marks) complaining about fucking the Big Five in New York and how they can't get published when they're writing IN THE STYLE THAT CERVANTES WAS SKEWERING WHEN HE WROTE DON QUIXOTE (Shit you not, I've seen them on the platform.) Or, they're appealing to the idea of some halcyon ere of literacy and fiction that they consider to be the platonic ideal. (DeepLeftAnalysis... God I hope none of his fans hate read you, they're insufferable, tried to make a QUANTITATIVE, though to his credit even he admitted possibly flawed, argument that the height of the English language for style, fiction et al. was Shakespeare. Which, no offense to the Bard, he did just make up words when he needed them (He's attributed with coining or popularising around 1,700 words... English isn't a liar's language, it is THE liars language, and our grammar is fucked up by global standards but I'll not even touch on that.) Including one I'm fond of in swagger.
For me, what's left to talk about, with you in specific, is just the reinforcement of agreement. For everyone else, I have no idea, remove the phone pole from their asses I guess.
And the guy who was talking about lowering the cognitive load of the reader?! MY GOD. HOLY FUCK. HAVE YOU EVER READ A CELLULAR MICROBIOLOGY TEXTBOOK? Have you read a single scientific research paper? Because you're as white as my fucking nicotine gum but as dim as a dying LED bulb flickering helpless set to low, in the middle of the night. If my cognitive load is not at least somewhat challenged or stressed by a text, wether it be by ideas or otherwise, I'm likely less interested in it.
If you're being a scold to people writing lowercase essays, the most brilliant woman I ever knew never used capitals and rarely used punctuation outside of scientific academia (which broke her) she would be 39 this year if she hadn't drank the dumbest bitch juice and hanged herself in May, 2023, and she was writing all lowercase essays LONG BEFORE THEY ENTERED ANY LARGER DISCOURSE. (Why is this a thing people care about? Facebook has been a haven for the lowercase screed, essay, rant, what have you for a decade. Oh, is it the platform? Oh, is everyone suddenly discovering they have domain mastery over English grammar, linguistics, syntax, etc. Or do you still use spellcheck to see which words do and don't follow the i after e rule? Because I beleive that his is a common way to decieve yourself.)
One final mid-coffee example. My editing service and my Substack are both named, Burnt Tongue. No, this is not because as many (specifically since I'm on his comment responding to him, in an Oscar Kilo I agree fashion) people know, I DO NOT SHUT UP. Burnt tongue, or burnt voice, is a concept named from Chuck Palahniuk as taught by Tom Spanbauer in his Dangerous Writing Workshop (which rest his soul, his work is done, produced MANY popular and cult American novelists) after he decamped from New York back to Portland from surviving Gordon Lish's FAMOUSLY BRUTAL WORKSHOP (which by metrics probably produced the most notable crop of published authors of any workshop EVER in spite of Lish's notorious savagery, narcissism, and blatant and unabashed tendency to fuck his students, of whom who survived the workshop I will now give a small list, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Tom Spanbauer, Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Bourdain, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Mary Robinson, Barry Hannah... This list is by no means exhaustive.) Burnt Tongue, is a minimalist stylistic tool, whereby you use syaing something wrong, such as a typo, or having a character in first person POV blatantly misstating something, a malapropism, etc. as a tool to point to something larger, create a pause, or even bring up another larger or more interesting point from earlier in the text, or otherwise. It is quite an interesting tool. Notably the entire PLOT of Palahniuk's thesis novel Adjustment Day, 2018, Doubleday (which is also amazing satire imo) HINGES ON ONE INSTANCE OF BURNT TONGUE. I'm quite proud I can say that and not give anything about the novel away, but the novel is amazing satire and Inigo, I can tell you now, you would either absolutely hate it, or not, but you would have something to say about it worth reading I'm sure, and I'm very interested either way in what your take on it would be. The plot being that the aggrieved low class Whites kill the government and intelligentsia, the nation splits in thruple, a Straight White Christian Monarchy, a literal and unmaligned if I remember correctly, which I'm only remembering so well because I recently read your piece on it, Black Utopia that subverts the "magical negro" trope in an interesting way (Palahniuk is many things, gay, white, but ignorant of sociology and race issues he is not), and a west coast state for all those who full under the rainbow umbrella. Anyway, that's the short of a very dense novel.
As a trained high school English teacher, I find it disgusting how many people there are on this platform who consider themselves language police. I had to enforce normative modern English standards in the classroom, but it was always with the understanding that “this is what we do in the classroom, do whatever you like outside.”
I’d love for all the prétendant English teachers on Substack to read some printed English language from over a hundred years ago.
One of my favourite ways that someone has said fuck you to the language police:
great essay. for me, one of the absolute joys of writing is playing with language and format and breaking all the rules i was taught at school. i hate gatekeeping in all its forms and telling folks they have to conform to certain rules to be ‘worthy’ of being read is another way of saying “you don’t belong here.” we all belong here.
Bruh, that question "why should we treat something sacred just because it doesn't belong to us" made me cringe SO HARD. Haven't even finished this yet, but I just had to say, you're doing great work engaging these nikkas. I don't have the bandwidth nor the skill to interface with ignorance as gracefully as you do, but its inspiring, really. You're a revolutionary calling me out of my skin to really talk directly to people's conventions of thought. thanks :)
Well, you changed my mind on the lowercase essay thing. I still read essays written in lowercase, it just used to give me a bit of a poor impression. But yeah, why should we reject or think less of writing just because it doesn't adhere to the style of formal English? Sometimes that's just a stylistic choice. This isn't English class, it's a forum to share ideas. Art doesn't always have to follow strict guidelines.
(1) Here in California, the people that appropriated "woke" are the new age hippies (to describe themselves); haven't heard it in use in the lgbqti+ community.
(2) I don't use TikTok, but there's some data that shows that the company is lax in showing children/teens child porn, and they are knowingly targeting teens with poor emotional regulation to keep them on the app longer. Of course, that's not a Tiktok problem alone, I'm sure Meta's three apps function similarly. I'm glad it's a comfort to the kids that need it, but I fear it's a bit more like the first time doing heroin is a comfort than it is a warm fuzzy blanket.
(3) As someone for whom English is a second language, I have a certain amount of self-consciousness around proper grammar. As I was not allowed (so to speak) to use slang or to ever slip up. I commend writers of color in the Western world and/or writing in English for breaking that rule.
I know we've interacted in notes, but I loved this essay (and my brain is too tired is to say more about it) just as I enjoyed our notes interactions, so finally subscribed.
you nailed it every time, and this one is Xtra special, thankyou for sharing once again. Sent many excerpts to friends, every paragraph is a powerful entity in itself, and together it is even better.
god, this was a stunning read! your writing always has me spellbound, and as a lowercase frequenter, this was everything and more <3 literally read (basked in) this piece over the course of three days, three different times!!
Love this piece, tysm much for writing it! I esp love how you talk about the dual threat of white contempt and white admiration. Like Woke was a term that was adopted by white folks, first through white admiration (wypipo have a hard time admiring something and just letting it be. They always got to center themselves in the thing and f it up in the process) and then through white contempt.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Black things that white ppl and white institutions don’t admire/have contempt for/are untranslatable to them. There’s this viral clip of this white hip hop producer talking about how much he hates R&B/Soul music. After seeing it, part of me was like, Okay, Good. Because you would probably harm R&B in your admiration just as much as in your contempt. Idk I’m rambling now lol, but fr tho great piece!
this has to be one of my favorite of your pieces yet, following the argumentation was like watching a movie you know can only end one way, and yet being taken for a ride all the same. will be running off to read it to anyone in the house that will listen to me.
Soooo necessary and articulate. One of my fav one’s by you so far. May we instigate many more uncomfortable conversations highlighting our lived experiences 🌺 ✨ This is exactly what this platform needs right now.
Man, there's so much here. This is not only a challenge to the concept of existing literary rules and "ownership" of language, but to my own perception of works based on the learned emphasis placed on those rules.
English seems particularly beholden to these judgements of who can appropriate what, and can set or change its rules. This despite the fact that it's filled with exceptions that are acceptable because its established rulers say so.
Take ain't for example. As a child, I heard you shouldn't use it, and it wasn't a word because you couldn't find it in a dictionary. It was primarily seen as a word for "uneducated" minorities. As more and more in the dominant demo began using it, it eventually appeared in the dictionary, complete with a caveat that it's not deemed an acceptable contraction. From there it eventually was acceptable in informal settings. The only change was who began to use it more over time, not its use or meaning.
The gatekeepers of English apparently believe a practice isn't acceptable when it originates from the disempowered, unless enough descendants of the empowered decide it's worthy of their own use. Then, all bets are off and it can be coopted or corrupted at will. Same for rules around written structure.
As for the upper/lower case argument and "proper" writing, I fault the way English is taught. The very instruction you're given about its rules implies any departure isn't stylistic, exploratory or experimental, just wrong. I've got to admit having to overcome a judgemental aversion to lower case works at first glance, but that's a factor of how I've been trained to think about right and wrong in writing. Once the words are given a chance to speak, I've often found more than I initially would've believed. I wonder if we looked at words the same way we do other art, like paint or sculpture, where no one presentation is "right" but all are valid forays in expression, if more of us would give space for exploration.
Also, apologies. I wrote all that and I can't say for sure I've added anything you haven't already expressed. I just couldn't find another way to say how much I appreciated the considerations in this piece.
no apologies necessary. "ain't" is definitely an interesting example of how words/terms from marginalised communities find their way into legitimacy *despite* the rigid laws of "proper usage" over time. thanks for reading!
Also, people are apparently incredibly ignorant in your comments and on behalf of humanity as a whole (who I have no right to speak for but don't care either way. My hubris is always my eventual undoing) I would like to apologize because fuck, I read some of those links through. I'm sorry people are how they are.
This is an essay deserving a very long slow clap. I'm a fiction editor (dev and line, copy and reluctantly proofreading.) and author. I'm also a descriptive linguist. (Prescriptivism can fuck itself into non-existence.)
To borrow from cryptography, what we're transmitting is a signal with speech, yeh? K. Did Alice receive Bob's signal and understand it? Yeh? WELL DONE, ok, now fuck the rest.
There's one reason to learn proper grammar outside of the context of white supremacy, and it's so you can operate under the hegemony of the system and also know which rules are "conventionally" acceptable to break in an artistic framework. The shock to most people is the correct answer to that is "all of them you pedantic pickle holster" Past that, grammar, syntax, linguistics, (under white supremacy) only functions to show that wow, so you know how to use a fucking semicolon; good for you. (I sleep with a copy of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage 5th ed. under my pillow, and the first thing I tell an editorial client who wants to publish fiction, exhibits core competencies in milk cricket English, and understands narrative is, "OK, so now toss like, fully half of what you know out the window.")
Jesus I'm tired of this, thank you for writing it out properly and elegantly. If I wrote this I'm just another pedantic linguistic descriptivist pale white half Slav community college dropout. The colonisation I see but yes, I've not anywhere to comment aside from what I've said in your comments sections before. I only know its actual origins because my mother, like myself, is lower class, often poor, and rode public transportation in a city both integrated heavily and split right down the middle (Google: St. Louis Missouri, Delmar Divide if you don't know how literal I'm being, please, it's sad) on race lines AND class lines. (White person driving car in St. Louis = white person. White person riding the bus in St. Louis = filthy poor, criminal, or as close to not being white as you can get while still being as pale as an incandescent lightbulb. What's wild is my mom, who is decidedly small and white, was called a racial epithet traditionally only used by white people as supremacists, for riding the bus?!) (OK, that was a wildly divergent path of commentary but needless to say race and class relations in STL are more complex than most cities in the US and I've been through all of them at one point or another.) (Note: she first heard the term woke on the bus in the late '90s, so near thirty years ago.)
I'd also hoped I could find it but there was at one point on a listserv (my age is showing) there was an entire 100+ entry long LIST of jokes about which languages and how English was in a trenchcoat doing various things to other languages, etc. The original list seems lost to time (Or I suck at the wayback machine) but a quick list of examples would be something like: (Thanks ChatGPT, I won't even pretend I wrote these, but they're fairly in tone with what was on the list, albeit quite less exacting since the original list was written by linguists.)
"English is just German, French, and Latin in a trench coat beating up Anxient Greek for its lunch money."
"English is just three drunk languages in a trench coat shouting at each other and hoping someone understands."
"English is just Old Norse, Latin, and French in a trench coat doing a bad impression of a Germanic language."
"English is just Saxon, Viking, and Norman French in a trench coat fighting over word order."
"English is just Latin and German in a trench coat sneaking into a Greek etymology party."
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat trying to sneak into the Romance languages club."
"English is just French and German in a trench coat pretending they can handle Greek's vocabulary."
"English is just Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dr. Seuss in a trench coat writing whatever they want."
"English is just three languages in a trench coat stealing spelling rules from a dumpster."
"English is just Latin in a trench coat trying to remember what it was supposed to sound like."
"English is just French, Latin, and Norse in a trench coat mugging Greek for science terms."
"English is just Dutch, Old Norse, and French in a trench coat arguing about how to spell 'through.'"
"English is just a Germanic language in a trench coat pretending it remembers its own grammar rules."
"English is just a collection of bad linguistic decisions in a trench coat insisting it's normal."
"English is just Old English in a trench coat trying to hide its midlife crisis with French vocabulary."
"English is just three etymologies in a trench coat and none of them are cooperating."
"English is just Germanic roots in a trench coat pretending it's fluent in Latin."
"English is just three random languages in a trench coat explaining why 'ough' has five pronunciations."
Or, more to the point:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll (b. 1961), "The King's English", rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990
Having said whatever I just said I would like to say I hate linguistic prescriptivism as anything but a tool to exploit for whatever reason you need. All the rules are made up anyway, most of them are bullshit, and someone explain to me why more than thirty fucking languages call pineapples "ananas" and some white fuck came along to Mexico (the only place pineapples in spite of their current globally grown acreage are native to) saw one growing from a bush, pointed it out, and said "TIS A PINE-APPLE!"
The rules are made up. Nary one of them makes fuckin' sense. Limiting your reading based on arbitrary rules created by the white gentry to keep you out of their club is fucking stupid, something about the power elite. OH, and don't get me started on cognitive load. My fellow beings in imaginary Christ, have ye not heard of any of five thousand authors, not even all white and male, thank GOD, whose work AIMS to overload you cognitively. (To that end, one of my modes of fictional expression is MEANT TO CREATE PANIC ATTACKS, and according to many readers is very effective at doing so.)
I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require. And I get paid a tidy sum to EDIT FICTION (and I do it for fun on Substack free once a week.) I'm. I cannot explain the BILE this subject brings up in me. ABSOLUTE BILE. (I've not had tea since before the 7th, honestly I'm maybe losing my fucking shit over it. My kitchen looks like a scene from Dead Space, or some sort of crusty abandoned space station filled with IKEA furni lit by fluorescent motion sensor lights slapped to every surface)
This essay, in other words, is perfect. Thank you.
Apologies for my comment's length, if I were more sane at the moment, it would be shorter, or not, I don't know.
this reminds me of something I read ages ago based on an experiment. It theorised something along the lines of: if you jumble around the letters inside a word but keep the first and last letters the same, as long as the word is no longer than 5/6 letters, your brain can still to process it relatively quickly.
So I could write, "wlel taht's qitue carzy!" and not only is it legible to most people, most people would read it just as quickly as if everything was spelt correctly.
"I don't care if you're BARELY literate, if you can express a thought as linguistic signal and I can understand the signal and meaning, that is ALL I require."
this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the "it gives me a headache" declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language. There is so much pretending. If the grammatical rules aren't adhered to then you're taught to be dismissive or punitive or derisive, or pretend you didn't understand, or pretend its more difficult than it is, or pretend that you are in physical pain. It is all a performance, or if it isn't, then its an indoctrination that is obscuring the highest truth, that ultimately, if you've understood what I've said, what's there left to talk about?
That is qiute czray (This is really base cog neurosci, you're on the mark. The order of letters doesn't matter if you know English, just the placement of the first and last. There's a ton of memes and jokes that use this effect too.)
"this is literally the only requirement for communication and one of the reasons why the 'it gives me a headache' declarations are what reminded me that English is a liar's language." EXACTLY! OK, so, we have László Krasznahorkai, sure he's Hungarian, but his last novel (award winning, for the record) Herscht 07769, is 500 pages, and one sentence. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for a novel that had no conventional punctuation or dialog tags, and only like, 5 commas total. This argument is spurious from every fucking angle.
My theory is that it's simple indoctrination along with the fact of it being, and the quotation marks here are large, cartoonish, and comical "PrOpEr EnGLiSh", is not only an acquired skill that takes time to learn and master (I'm 39 and I edit fiction, I've been writing since I had the tactile dexterity to hold an instrument to do so, and I still reference Fowler's modern usage, I've been a paid editor 10 years... Let's consider that.) AND it's a gatekeeper to the OFFICIAL LEAGUE OF ELITIST MILK CRICKETRY. Indoctrination or if you're a writer of fiction (or I'd argue non-fiction, the mode of which is now usually the personal essay, which fits neatly under the category of creative non-fiction for various reasons. Which is why Weinberger is a genius, which is why you're so fucking good among others) a complete lack of understanding of the finer points of language and how it is used to make art. (This is leaving out formalist experimentalism. Someone most famously wrote a near 500 page book without using the letter "e" now OK, that's just showing off. And it's legible!)
If it's mostly performative then fuck, get a better hobby. It's like these right coded "authors" (again, very unserious sarcastic quote marks) complaining about fucking the Big Five in New York and how they can't get published when they're writing IN THE STYLE THAT CERVANTES WAS SKEWERING WHEN HE WROTE DON QUIXOTE (Shit you not, I've seen them on the platform.) Or, they're appealing to the idea of some halcyon ere of literacy and fiction that they consider to be the platonic ideal. (DeepLeftAnalysis... God I hope none of his fans hate read you, they're insufferable, tried to make a QUANTITATIVE, though to his credit even he admitted possibly flawed, argument that the height of the English language for style, fiction et al. was Shakespeare. Which, no offense to the Bard, he did just make up words when he needed them (He's attributed with coining or popularising around 1,700 words... English isn't a liar's language, it is THE liars language, and our grammar is fucked up by global standards but I'll not even touch on that.) Including one I'm fond of in swagger.
For me, what's left to talk about, with you in specific, is just the reinforcement of agreement. For everyone else, I have no idea, remove the phone pole from their asses I guess.
And the guy who was talking about lowering the cognitive load of the reader?! MY GOD. HOLY FUCK. HAVE YOU EVER READ A CELLULAR MICROBIOLOGY TEXTBOOK? Have you read a single scientific research paper? Because you're as white as my fucking nicotine gum but as dim as a dying LED bulb flickering helpless set to low, in the middle of the night. If my cognitive load is not at least somewhat challenged or stressed by a text, wether it be by ideas or otherwise, I'm likely less interested in it.
If you're being a scold to people writing lowercase essays, the most brilliant woman I ever knew never used capitals and rarely used punctuation outside of scientific academia (which broke her) she would be 39 this year if she hadn't drank the dumbest bitch juice and hanged herself in May, 2023, and she was writing all lowercase essays LONG BEFORE THEY ENTERED ANY LARGER DISCOURSE. (Why is this a thing people care about? Facebook has been a haven for the lowercase screed, essay, rant, what have you for a decade. Oh, is it the platform? Oh, is everyone suddenly discovering they have domain mastery over English grammar, linguistics, syntax, etc. Or do you still use spellcheck to see which words do and don't follow the i after e rule? Because I beleive that his is a common way to decieve yourself.)
One final mid-coffee example. My editing service and my Substack are both named, Burnt Tongue. No, this is not because as many (specifically since I'm on his comment responding to him, in an Oscar Kilo I agree fashion) people know, I DO NOT SHUT UP. Burnt tongue, or burnt voice, is a concept named from Chuck Palahniuk as taught by Tom Spanbauer in his Dangerous Writing Workshop (which rest his soul, his work is done, produced MANY popular and cult American novelists) after he decamped from New York back to Portland from surviving Gordon Lish's FAMOUSLY BRUTAL WORKSHOP (which by metrics probably produced the most notable crop of published authors of any workshop EVER in spite of Lish's notorious savagery, narcissism, and blatant and unabashed tendency to fuck his students, of whom who survived the workshop I will now give a small list, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Tom Spanbauer, Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Bourdain, Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Mary Robinson, Barry Hannah... This list is by no means exhaustive.) Burnt Tongue, is a minimalist stylistic tool, whereby you use syaing something wrong, such as a typo, or having a character in first person POV blatantly misstating something, a malapropism, etc. as a tool to point to something larger, create a pause, or even bring up another larger or more interesting point from earlier in the text, or otherwise. It is quite an interesting tool. Notably the entire PLOT of Palahniuk's thesis novel Adjustment Day, 2018, Doubleday (which is also amazing satire imo) HINGES ON ONE INSTANCE OF BURNT TONGUE. I'm quite proud I can say that and not give anything about the novel away, but the novel is amazing satire and Inigo, I can tell you now, you would either absolutely hate it, or not, but you would have something to say about it worth reading I'm sure, and I'm very interested either way in what your take on it would be. The plot being that the aggrieved low class Whites kill the government and intelligentsia, the nation splits in thruple, a Straight White Christian Monarchy, a literal and unmaligned if I remember correctly, which I'm only remembering so well because I recently read your piece on it, Black Utopia that subverts the "magical negro" trope in an interesting way (Palahniuk is many things, gay, white, but ignorant of sociology and race issues he is not), and a west coast state for all those who full under the rainbow umbrella. Anyway, that's the short of a very dense novel.
Anyway, yes, exactly.
This is brilliant. Thank you.
As a trained high school English teacher, I find it disgusting how many people there are on this platform who consider themselves language police. I had to enforce normative modern English standards in the classroom, but it was always with the understanding that “this is what we do in the classroom, do whatever you like outside.”
I’d love for all the prétendant English teachers on Substack to read some printed English language from over a hundred years ago.
One of my favourite ways that someone has said fuck you to the language police:
https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/six-oclock-news
Six O’Clock News
BY TOM LEONARD
this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.
awesome insight and poem, thanks for sharing brother.
absolutely love this, Inigo - and completely agree re: lower case essays and the discourse surrounding them, never seen it worded this well before !!
ahh thank you darling, means the world! 🫶🏾
great essay. for me, one of the absolute joys of writing is playing with language and format and breaking all the rules i was taught at school. i hate gatekeeping in all its forms and telling folks they have to conform to certain rules to be ‘worthy’ of being read is another way of saying “you don’t belong here.” we all belong here.
i too hate gatekeeping in all its forms! there’s much to play with in the linguistic realm.
Bruh, that question "why should we treat something sacred just because it doesn't belong to us" made me cringe SO HARD. Haven't even finished this yet, but I just had to say, you're doing great work engaging these nikkas. I don't have the bandwidth nor the skill to interface with ignorance as gracefully as you do, but its inspiring, really. You're a revolutionary calling me out of my skin to really talk directly to people's conventions of thought. thanks :)
it was a mad thing to say. we share a planet with some truly, selfish souls. glad i could provide you with some thought, appreciate you, bro
Well, you changed my mind on the lowercase essay thing. I still read essays written in lowercase, it just used to give me a bit of a poor impression. But yeah, why should we reject or think less of writing just because it doesn't adhere to the style of formal English? Sometimes that's just a stylistic choice. This isn't English class, it's a forum to share ideas. Art doesn't always have to follow strict guidelines.
A bunch of thoughts as I read this:
(1) Here in California, the people that appropriated "woke" are the new age hippies (to describe themselves); haven't heard it in use in the lgbqti+ community.
(2) I don't use TikTok, but there's some data that shows that the company is lax in showing children/teens child porn, and they are knowingly targeting teens with poor emotional regulation to keep them on the app longer. Of course, that's not a Tiktok problem alone, I'm sure Meta's three apps function similarly. I'm glad it's a comfort to the kids that need it, but I fear it's a bit more like the first time doing heroin is a comfort than it is a warm fuzzy blanket.
(3) As someone for whom English is a second language, I have a certain amount of self-consciousness around proper grammar. As I was not allowed (so to speak) to use slang or to ever slip up. I commend writers of color in the Western world and/or writing in English for breaking that rule.
I know we've interacted in notes, but I loved this essay (and my brain is too tired is to say more about it) just as I enjoyed our notes interactions, so finally subscribed.
R u jesus on the X???
you nailed it every time, and this one is Xtra special, thankyou for sharing once again. Sent many excerpts to friends, every paragraph is a powerful entity in itself, and together it is even better.
Long slow claps shared with Emil. <3
hahah thank you very much! 🫶🏾
god, this was a stunning read! your writing always has me spellbound, and as a lowercase frequenter, this was everything and more <3 literally read (basked in) this piece over the course of three days, three different times!!
i’m so happy it resonated with you darling thank you so much 🫶🏾
Love this piece, tysm much for writing it! I esp love how you talk about the dual threat of white contempt and white admiration. Like Woke was a term that was adopted by white folks, first through white admiration (wypipo have a hard time admiring something and just letting it be. They always got to center themselves in the thing and f it up in the process) and then through white contempt.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Black things that white ppl and white institutions don’t admire/have contempt for/are untranslatable to them. There’s this viral clip of this white hip hop producer talking about how much he hates R&B/Soul music. After seeing it, part of me was like, Okay, Good. Because you would probably harm R&B in your admiration just as much as in your contempt. Idk I’m rambling now lol, but fr tho great piece!
Interesting
this has to be one of my favorite of your pieces yet, following the argumentation was like watching a movie you know can only end one way, and yet being taken for a ride all the same. will be running off to read it to anyone in the house that will listen to me.
I will probably have to read this essay 3 times. It is packed full of gems. Thank you for setting this all out, and shining so many lights here.
i'm happy, thanks for reading!
Soooo necessary and articulate. One of my fav one’s by you so far. May we instigate many more uncomfortable conversations highlighting our lived experiences 🌺 ✨ This is exactly what this platform needs right now.
thank you so much, darling! for your help and your words 🫶🏾
happy 2 support u ♥️
Man, there's so much here. This is not only a challenge to the concept of existing literary rules and "ownership" of language, but to my own perception of works based on the learned emphasis placed on those rules.
English seems particularly beholden to these judgements of who can appropriate what, and can set or change its rules. This despite the fact that it's filled with exceptions that are acceptable because its established rulers say so.
Take ain't for example. As a child, I heard you shouldn't use it, and it wasn't a word because you couldn't find it in a dictionary. It was primarily seen as a word for "uneducated" minorities. As more and more in the dominant demo began using it, it eventually appeared in the dictionary, complete with a caveat that it's not deemed an acceptable contraction. From there it eventually was acceptable in informal settings. The only change was who began to use it more over time, not its use or meaning.
The gatekeepers of English apparently believe a practice isn't acceptable when it originates from the disempowered, unless enough descendants of the empowered decide it's worthy of their own use. Then, all bets are off and it can be coopted or corrupted at will. Same for rules around written structure.
As for the upper/lower case argument and "proper" writing, I fault the way English is taught. The very instruction you're given about its rules implies any departure isn't stylistic, exploratory or experimental, just wrong. I've got to admit having to overcome a judgemental aversion to lower case works at first glance, but that's a factor of how I've been trained to think about right and wrong in writing. Once the words are given a chance to speak, I've often found more than I initially would've believed. I wonder if we looked at words the same way we do other art, like paint or sculpture, where no one presentation is "right" but all are valid forays in expression, if more of us would give space for exploration.
Also, apologies. I wrote all that and I can't say for sure I've added anything you haven't already expressed. I just couldn't find another way to say how much I appreciated the considerations in this piece.
no apologies necessary. "ain't" is definitely an interesting example of how words/terms from marginalised communities find their way into legitimacy *despite* the rigid laws of "proper usage" over time. thanks for reading!
Also, people are apparently incredibly ignorant in your comments and on behalf of humanity as a whole (who I have no right to speak for but don't care either way. My hubris is always my eventual undoing) I would like to apologize because fuck, I read some of those links through. I'm sorry people are how they are.