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Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agotl;dr An article espousing the merits of postmodernism and the obsolescence of so-called "Standard White English" (formal English), while also being written largely in SWE itself. Apparently, the "masses" read Reddit. Writing in formal academic English is for privileged white people and should be phased in favor of broken, anarchic, meme-inspired vernaculars, except on Wikipedia. How charming.
- skylan_q 13y agoDFW was mentioned and then I skipped the rest of the article to the comments. A commenter said "You had me at DFW". I felt the opposite.
- Kluny 13y agoI don't have downvote privileges. But I found this comment to be condescending without adding anything to the discussion but sarcasm.
- na85 13y agoHow interesting. I do have downvote privileges and found your comment to add literally nothing at all to the conversation.
- aaronem 13y agoLikewise and likewise. I never downvote for content; I do, on the other hand, quite freely downvote in cases, such as this, where there is no content of which to form an opinion.
- sp332 13y agoIt's a piece in favor of writing however you want to because CSWE is hard to express yourself in. It's not really in favor of meme-inspired vernacular ("a horrific mess") but maybe it's still better than constraining ourselves to formal English. I'm not sure I agree with the part about people being mistrusted just because they speak that way though.
- aaronem 13y agoWould you make the same argument for programming languages? Should anyone feel free to code in whatever "vernacular" style he please, because living up to a defined standard makes it "hard to express [one]self"? No doubt someone will attempt the argument that there is a qualitative difference between a language in which one speaks to a computer, and that in which one speaks to other people, but in this case I contend it's a distinction without a difference. The very reason why coding standards exist, after all, is because what we write in programming languages must be understandable to other people, no less than to the computer, and supine permissiveness as regards writing style impairs the legibility of one's code for the other people who must also read it. Granted, it takes more effort to live up to the coding style required by whatever project one happens to be working on, just as it takes more effort to express a thought in Wallace's "SWE" than in whatever corrupt vernacular happens to be one's native pidgin. In exchange for this additional effort, one produces a result which is both more generally legible and more likely to be taken seriously. (On that latter point in particular -- would you have read this far if I were writing, not in that acrolect Wallace and his latter-day imitator so deride, but rather in my native Southern American English? Don't seem any too likely to me.)
- sp332 13y agoIf you're writing authoritative, reference-style code, then formal standards may be appropriate. If you're part of a huge project, writing code that is readable by everyone else on the project is simply a pragmatic thing to do. But standards can go too far even in those cases. I once worked on a project where we weren't allowed to depend on order of operations for math operators - we had to put parentheses everywhere. While it may have avoided some bugs, the coding style didn't allow for much self-expression. When you're writing code for a smaller audience, or just one-off code for your own use, standards are much looser. If you're writing a one-liner in Perl, maybe there aren't any standards! And that's the point of the article. It doesn't make sense to apply strict rules about what you can say and how you say it when you're just updating your facebook status or making a blog post. I mean you could if you wanted to, just like "you can write FORTRAN in any language." Yes, I would have read your post all the way through, and that judgmental attitude you reference is just what the author is arguing we should get rid of.
- rezendi 13y agoI note with great amusement your use of "tl;dr".
- philosophus 13y agoIt's also a little unfair to criticize standard English for being largely what is spoken by white people. English is the language of English people. They are white. I would assume that standard Swahili, for example, closely correlates to language as spoken by primarily black people.
- fosap 13y ago"Doge" is even more childish and cancerous than ragecomics. In 2 years most of us will try to forget how popular it once was.
- zaroth 13y agoStill don't understand if it's supposed to be pronounced as dog, doggie, dougue. But perhaps that's the point? Either way I've had quite enough of it.
- elag 13y agoFirst time I heard of it was in the context of dogecoin which I assumed was something inspired by the Venetian Republic.
- brokenparser 13y agosuch ignorant, so confuse, nice doge wow
- fosap 13y agoAnd this is why I'm not taking anybody serious using that meme. Using it is saying "look at me, I am retarded".
- stefan_kendall 13y agoThe intentional breaking of form takes more mental effort than just writing normally. Good slam on the mentally handicapped, though. Good for you.
- wyager 13y agoApparently language standards are racist/classist/whatever against everyone except the people who made the standard. Damn those British, oppressing me with spellings like "theatre" and "dialogue".
- aaronem 13y agoNot quite; there seems an implicit claim that oppressiveness exists along a gradient which, I can hardly resist observing, correlates closely with the average skin tone of those who employ a given dialect. On one end of this gradient, Wallace's "Standard White English" oppresses basically everyone on the planet save its few most fluent speakers; on the other, I've never seen anyone even try to make a claim of oppressiveness on behalf of, for example, AAVE.
- steveklabnik 13y agoJohn Zerzan claims that all language is inherently oppressive. Not that I agree, but there you are.
- aaronem 13y agoFrom what I can tell, he seems to claim that everything since the invention of agriculture is inherently oppressive. I suppose it's a point of view.
- kabdib 13y agoUh, okay. SWE exists. It is cold, impersonal and so forth. What now, am I supposed to rebel? Burn a library? Ohmigod, I think that I'm The Man now. [commits suicide] This is just a lot of jumping up and down informing us that there is gravity, that it exists and works, and that it is cold and impersonal. Somehow I feel I am not improved by the information. You want to rail on language? Try reading an Army manual. Or just about any computer documentation (equal opportunity here, btw, but if you crave a villain: Oracle, and we've just gone Godwin...)
- devindotcom 13y agoI have my own long, long column I'm working on (for TechCrunch, no less) on this topic. Nice to see Jon chiming in, but I think he dismisses the usefulness of the type of essentially formal prose being replaced by more conversational stuff. If you ask me, it's important to consider the strengths of the old way as well as the new one, which is what I'm attempting to do (4000 words and counting...). Also, I disagree with the idea that SWE, or however you like to define it, works as a "mask." I express myself best in that language, personally, and I suspect many others do too. Conventional, "prescriptivist" English is to me very powerful, because the words all have agreed-upon meanings and relationships -- when you break those down, you allow new modes of expression but you reduce cointelligibility.
- elag 13y agoAnd we call that poetry.
- baldurrdash 13y agoYep: http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/ http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/.
- elag 13y agoOh, code poetry. 'Ni code, ni poetry' &c.
- ndeine 13y agoShould we not be bending these cold, standardized, "agreed-upon meanings and relationships" anyway? Is that not what the great English authors have done? Also, the title for this article is god-awful. All of the meme plugs make his point hard to understand, not easier. There is tremendous distinction between stupid quips that can be dropped anywhere and creative use of the English language. The author seems quite fond of the former.
- philosophus 13y agoAgreed, if you are trying to understand the topic and not the author, then injecting non-standard usage and "personality" is simply a distraction. There is something narcissistic about believing your writing should reflect you, rather than your topic.
- Dewie 13y agoThis article seems to be anti-establishment for the sake of being anti-establishment. Intentionally "broken" English can be fun and cute and equally valid and expressive as standard English - if not for the adoption of it - but I don't see much that actually improves on more standard English, in a more-or-less objective way. An improvement might be to promote a gender-neutral pronoun ('they' for example) and disambiguating "you" when it is unclear if you are talking about singular you, personal you or 'general' you. Or maybe this is totally unrelated to what the author is talking about.
- aaronem 13y agoSay what else you like about Southern American English, but we solve the second-person plural problem quite handily with nominative and oblique y'all, and genitive y'all's.
- angersock 13y agoI'm willing to wager that future historians (combing, perhaps, through ancient metal disks found in strange sort of mausoleum in Utah) are going to be greatly annoyed at deciphering communications from current times. One of the annoying side-effects of memes (doge, le, whatever the next thing from 4chan is) is that they put very heavy context into whatever uses them--they shade the meaning in a very particular way, and once you are lacking that context it becomes very hard to pull out meaningful information.
- mcphilip 13y agoIn the spirit of the article: TL;DR write all the words! much slang makes doge happy. disregard old farts' style. acquire upvotes, much happiness achieved! ---------------- I, for one, love good longform journalism (e.g longform.org) and appreciate the consistent usage of SWE. I'm not convinced the OP article's claim that SWE can make a commenter seem less trustworthy to other users on sites like reddit. The links to popular comments in r/bestof and r/DepthHub are almost always written in SWE.
- swordswinger12 13y agoI posit that the author of this article has only ever read that one George Orwell essay[1]. If he had read any others he would have probably known better than to connect an author renowned for his clean, precise, journalistic prose to an argument about how such prose is outmoded. [1](http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_Language-1.pdf http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_...)
- asveikau 13y agoFor a guy who is trying to celebrate and identify with (possibly attach himself to) "the masses" for their nonstandard grammar, this guy sure comes off as pretentious. I don't think this is really about those topics. The author would just like everyone to know how smart he is for considering it.
- aaronem 13y agoWhile I don't love the author and carry no brief on his behalf, I would like to point out that "you're pretentious" and "you just want to look smart[er than everybody else]" are, in my experience, the two charges most commonly leveled against one who uses acrolect (the proper name for what Wallace calls "SWE"), by one who is incapable of doing the same.
- asveikau 13y agoPerhaps some do have such a reaction. I don't think this is the case for me specifically. He genuinely comes off as pretentious to me, and as someone who is very deeply interested in language I find the content intellectually vacuous. He hasn't really said anything, just made a few references.