Humanizing The Vacuum

A response to Katherine, Frank, Dave, Chuck, et al.:

ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammeled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is no appeal.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” has served as a touchstone since my early twenties; I’m taken with the notion that criticism is “the only civilized version of autobiography.” In an age of Rotten Tomatoes aggregates and atomized audiences but one in which I still stumble across amazing pieces in the most unexpected places, it’s as edifying to discover the pleasure of paradox as drinking a gin and lime juice on a May afternoon.

A public service:

Sarcasm is a form of communication that relies for its effectiveness on contextual cues, a sort of “knowing wink” between the sender and receiver(s). Nowhere in Delgado’s article is there any indication that he is intending these remarks sarcastically, nor that he or Barton have any sense of the article’s possible audience, which is ostensibly well beyond those unfortunate few who find remarks conflating Jennifer Hudson’s weight and the tragic death of her family members entertaining or enlightening in a “sarcastic” way.

Luc Sante on editing:

Some people like to hand their work over to another pair of eyes for an objective view. This is not always possible, however, and even the most loving partner will have limits, so I prefer to slip another set of eyes over my own.

It’s a bit like method acting. You choose someone from your life who is reliably opinionated but very different from you (preferably a number of people: a mean teacher, a bar-stool wit, a highly intelligent but uneducated acquaintance) and then read your work imagining what they would see. One of them will call you out on the overwriting here, another on your groundless assertions there, a third on the fact that you never make good on your claim at the top. With only a small bit of imaginative exertion you can hire phantoms! They won’t expect anything in return.

In my experience this “Method acting” approach works well. Not best though. Since I began blogging regularly in 2005 unexpected transpositions and outright errors will appear in my non-official prose: I’ll write Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Heads Will Roll instead of It’s Blitz or call Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss’ new band Wild Flags. I blame nothing but the compulsion to publish immediately. Thank my readers, who have no qualms about spotting these mistakes — and reading me anyway.

Another item of practical advice. Treat adverbs like bacon: a delicacy consumed with utmost care; they lose their taste with overconsumption. Use an adverb when the verb, adjective, or other adverb requires a modifier that isn’t an intensifier.

(h/t Michaelangelo Matos)

In a review of a revised edition of Kingsley’s The King’s English, Martin Amis writes:

Usage is irreversible. Once the integrity of a word is lost, no amount of grumbling and harrumphing can possibly restore it. The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Recently I’ve noted my campaigns to instill awareness of usage in my students. Thumbing through Amis’ book brought to my attention a few other examples of usage. He’s no pedant:

DIALOGUE. In the past, talks or discussions o no important subjects were considered to be satisfactorily described as talks or discussions. Nowaways the two sides in a dispute, for instance, are apt to be engaged in (wait for it) a meaningful dialogue. The first element of this phrase is an absurdity, since no dialogue is meaningless, and the second illiterate, since any reasonable number can take part in dialogue or a dialogue…And anyway the whole meaningful-dialogue expression look sand sounds unbearably pompous. Nevertheless one would not wish to be deprived of a phrase that so unerringly points out its user as a humorless ninny.

I learned that decimate, as its Latin antepenultimate syllable would suggest, is a word derived from the Roman practice of executing every tenth man in a mutinous or demoralized party of soldiers, “so to decimate in English was used to mean ‘destroy a small but noticeable part of.’ Most of us use decimate to mean “damage beyond repair.” Amis The Right Wing Crank leaks into his dismissal of the way in which feminism has reclaimed chauvinism, once a byword for “bellicose patriotism” derived from Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier fanatically devoted to Napoleon. The King’s English is great fun.

As prescient as George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” continues to be, he could not have foreseen how the language of commerce, sports, and talk radio would sully discourse. I hear or read the following phrases and words more times a week than I can note. In most cases, the Latinates transform unwieldy nouns into verbs when an appropriate word already exists (e.g. “incentivize” for “encourage”), which, I suppose, is the point. Most of these lexical atrocities are such because they obfuscate; they subtly but intentionally wrap a sentence in a fog of neutrality. Others merely inflate sentences into ponderosities. One construction I see often: “Not only did I buy a taco, but a burrito as well” instead of “I bought a taco and a burrito.”

If you can think of others, please post in the comments. I’m showing these to students next week.

fast track (verb)
green light (verb)
incentivize
impact (verb)
fundraise
network
transition (verb)
ramp up
double down
walk back
Not only…but
prioritize
proactive
cutting edge
internalize
doable
all things being equal