This just in! (Or, stuff by semi-experts on language I found this morning)

Today, thanks to the web, I became a fan of Anne Trubeck's columns, particularly her latest one on the rhetorical/literary functions of the facebook status update, and also learned about the "100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language". But, before I go on, I need to say this about the latter column--as a "word person," I'm on board with several of these, and use quite a few of them in speech and writing (for example, "obsequious" and "panoply," I cannot live without). Several others, though, I have serious doubts about. For example, years ago, a list of "do nots" came rolling down the WPA email pike: it concerned the linguistic faux pas presenters at a certain national conference should avoid: one of the recommendations was to steer clear of using the word "conflate" in any form because of its overuse and flatness--it had been, in fact, banished to the realm of "just don't go there" in academic discourse, and, by extension, to the list of words one could use to play a game affectionately known as "bullshit bingo"".

Clearly, anyone who calls himself "Dr. Language" must have a sense of humor and irony. But I take offense at the idea that simply because this guy posts a list of words, purporting to offer us the best of the best, we will start using said words and subconsciously thinking to ourselves, "My God, he's right! These are the most lovely words!" Such an assumption is pure madness, as "Dr. Language" is, first of all, no one's cynosure, and this epicurean ailurophile will happily eschew his list. And hey, if his pecadillo is to decree which words out of an entire language are beautiful, that is certainly his right: but, I find his motives umbrageous.

But back to Trubeck's thoughts on the status update--I find her ruminations an excellent springboard for further discussion the whole "medium is the message" debate--and I will not take sides with Burke vs. McLuhan on this one, though I think that what McLuhan observed in the 60s is far more true now (and Burke's criticism is, hence, less relevant), given the myriad intrusions eletronic genres make into our constructions of prose--case in point, the fact that the "prompt" for the status update requires that your name be the first word--such a constraint drives the message in that I need to mold my content to make the subject the doer of the action (unless I wish to subvert that structure rather awkwardly through a passive construction), and it also encourages egocentric writing--not a bad thing per se, but in that genre, *you* (or whoever's name appears to start the update) are always the focus/agent: the star of the show.

One issue Trubeck circumvents in what is really a great informal discussion of social-network mediated discourses, is how all this plays with the canon of memory. When writing was first invented, as Socrates explains to Phaedrus, this technology was suspect--what, oh what, would happen to the sacredness of memory in storing our narratives, speeches, plans, etc? (For a more contemporary contextualization, think of how riled up some get about spell check--i.e. what, oh what, is that horrid little mechanism doing to corrode our spelling skills?) But currently, although I agree with what Bolter contends about the breakout of the visual, we are in a hypertextualized society, in which memory's essence seems to be diminishing as we filter our lives through five, six, seven different media a day that beg for fragmentary, immediate updates deperately trying to gesture to (signify) our reality. We are textualizing our every move, perhaps in order to preserve "memory" through our own terminisic screens so that we have the goods on what really happened/is happening (or are we?). All of this reminds me of E.M. Forster's saying, "How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"