The Dandy and the Epigrammitist (BayCon, Part II)
This had taken longer to finish than I'd thought. I've been working on it in fits and starts after work, but sometimes writing then is difficult, especially with a topic like this. It's much easier to kick back and chill out with the Bice Squad. :-)
As I'd said, I met many cool, compelling people at BayCon. People that embrace alternative lifestyles come to conventions like these to feel safe acting out, and act out they do. Yet for all the Klingon histrionics, corseted cross-dressers, and charity slave auctions, the most memorable moments were, as always, smaller and more personal.
I'd never knowingly met anybody born on my birthday: November 22. I've met November 21's and 23's, but never one that shared my day. It's kind of a weird day, to begin with. It's the anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination, so I will likely never see a birthday where I don't hear the voice of Walter Cronkite: "The news...apparently official..." Every five or six years, it coincides with Thanksgiving Day. It's the only instance on the calendar of a date with two pairs of identical integers. Disciples of astrology like to tell me that I was born on a cusp, which is something like a day-long DMZ between Sagittarius and Scorpio. Reasonable astrologers will
disagree on whether I'm one or the other, or what any of that means, or whether it matters. That's what reasonable astrologers do.
Alex offered to pick me up on the way to the hotel and he arrived at my apartment with Robyn, who was set to DJ Tycho's party. I'd met Robyn couple years before at Jerry and Micah's, but I'd not seen nor heard from him since. It was still around 9 PM, and in the quiet time before the revelers arrived from the second floor, Robyn and I sat on the suite's big poofy chairs and had an interesting, thought-provoking conversation of uncommon quality.
Describing Robyn is difficult without dusting off some words from a more genteel time. In the century before the last one, persons of good breeding would have recognized Robyn as a dandy gentleman. He arrived to the convention dressed in a crisp, finely tailored navy blue suit of an American style, circa the 1790s, with a tall hat, a bowed tress ribbon for his hair, and all the accoutrements befitting the period. He wore the lightest brush of eyeliner, a nod to the Gothic tradition he embraces. When he speaks, he uses precise, nuanced vernacular that is slightly elevated but entirely conversational. And he pulled this off without ever once seeming tedious or out of touch.
I often have a difficult time with affected people. I've come to the point of asking more than one person: "Are you always on?" But as Robyn and I talked, I had a sense that Robyn's style, while deliberate, wasn't a melodramatic presentation. As the evening went on, I found that I admired him as a person of genuine, applied standards. He wore layered finery not as an indicator of class, but rather of discipline, a commitment to a difficult lifestyle. His very identity evoked a time when refinement, chivalry, and temperance were virtuous pursuits, before the once-heroic persuit of self-elevation was quashed by brutish, exalted nescience.
I strongly related to the defiance that he'd carefully reasoned and considered over time, because I'd made asimilar choice after moving to California. I've always been fascinated by words, images, and history, and as a kid I would practice the form of web-surfing I had at the time: sitting down with a dictionary and etymology guide and bouncing from word to word, learning their roots, relationships, and variations.
Once I left high school, upon moving someplace new, I would always research its history. I still do. Otherwise, I do not feel connected to my home. A place without its history, without context, is an empty vessel with buildings and people. Later on, I realized the same was true for words. I've never been comfortable using a word until I know the definition and etymology. A word without its past is, for me, imbued with none of the nuance with which it is inherently capable.
My vocabulary was always larger than anyone I knew - adult or child - by the time I hit 5th grade. That year my text book was the one used by the seniors at the high school. My teachers appreciated my aptitude, but they were usually the only ones - on campus or off. My peers had no idea what I was saying, and most adults around me, unable to admit they didn't know every third word, would berate my usage instead of simply asking for a definition. This tendency to keep the syllables as low as possible goes back to the days when America broke from England to settle puritanical, armed religious colonies.
After the Revolution, many Americans rejected words that evoked the old countries or suggested the speaker was "putting on airs". Vibrant words were exiled into obscurity, their nuances stripped out of the culture and then supplanted by a simpler, lower vernacular inclubated in agrarian isolation and cultivated into a virulent weed that has reached the highest office in the land.
When talking to my dad around age 10 or 11, I remember using the phrase "in other circles" meaning "in other groups of people." My dad said, quite angrily, "Now what the hell does that mean?" I explained, and he said, "Now, Jay, why didn't you just go ahead and say that in the first place?" It had never occurred to me until then to adapt my vocabulary to my situation. My brain chooses the word that best fits myriad conditions of the situation, and does it instantly. I never deliberately chose a florid or complex word over a "plain speaking" counterpart, because when I say "lugubrious" I mean lugubrious, not whiny. Dumbing down wasn't convenient, it was necessary.
One of Lou Reed's greatest lyrics is from The Velvet Underground's "Some Kinda Love," where he sings, "between thought and expression / there lies a lifetime." The only thing we have to communicate the rich tapestry of our thoughts, emotions, and instincts, besides our bodies, are the words we use to express them. The English of sound bites and bold strokes carries none of the flexibility required to verbalise the more esoteric elements of the human experience. We are not telepathic, and yet our culture is draining the only river through which our thoughts can truly find honest representation inside someone else's conciousness.
I decided when I began to write again that I would refuse to play a part in the emotional destruction of future generations by dumbing down my most developed and valuable facility. I would learn as many words as I could, and draw from the well with alacrity, precision, confidence, and acuity.
The loss of language is epidemic, and the symptoms are in every American's experience. There's a general sense of disconnection and paranoia. The sickening perversion of doublespeak is no longer the dour satire of depressed dystopians but the de facto practice of business and government. It's become normal to feel out of touch with ones feelings. What caused your last breakup? I'll bet it's (all together now) "lack of communication." The most interconnected time in human history coincides with the time we are most disconnected from ourselves.
I wonder if Laura Bush, touched by her work with gang members, has ever discussed with her husband the legacy of his proud stupidity. Every parent, every "plain speaking" president that suggest that big words are the bearers of dishonesty and confusion, are speaking out of the ignorance and insecurity their parents inarticulacy helped to bring about. Southerers have had an especially ominous and unconscionable phrase spoken to generations immemorial: "Don't get above your raising." There has never been a more emblematic phrase of the bizarre vicarious relationship between Americans and their children, where the discomfort and self-shame of ignorance leads a culture to istiutionalize intellectual castration.
I don't argue for linguistic arrogance, or needless formality. Usage purists are the poor Bill Gateses of linguistics, committed to a tightly controlled, locked-down language, with standard and rules that apply across the board. To these folks, upgrades are released rarely, if at all.
Personally, I think language is a wiki, and perhaps wikis are the best models for a big picture understanding of how languages, cultures, all cumulative collective knowledge - coalesce. We need the messy, colors of street language along with the considered reasoning of the professor. Without common vernacular, the mother tongue dies, or worse yet, is kept alive only by the vacuous machinery of marketing, whose professionals, for all their wily genius, are the one remaining arena with the audacity to regularly coin and use new words.
The results are occasionally positive: the English speaking world is better off now that we "google" things instead of "search for them on the Internet" (which doesn't hurt Google either). Most often, the results of marketing language aren't so much negative as without purpose: a sad waste of talent and energy on words with a shelf life that rarely sees two birthdays.
I advocate inclusiveness and invention and, above all, conversation. The flummoxed academics that decry the influence of hip-hop and Latin culture are missing the bigger picture: the problem isn't misuse, it's disuse. English is full of words that are remarkably adept at shrink-wrapping to the contours of your most frustratingly intangible thoughts. The elation of understanding and genuine expression, with all it's gradients and colors, is not a wispydream of an ineffable, potentially better humanity. It's in stock and ready to ship right away.
The language is your birthright, and you have the right to use every single gross, gracious, grevious, grand, grandiloquent, or grandiose word in whatever context you feel. Words are yours to adapt, mix, match, mashed up, abbreviate, and even invent. The answer to "there is no such word," is "there is now." William Shakespeare simply invented words for concepts without them, and over 1700 words still are in contemporary use, including arouse, addiction, advertise, assassinate, equivocal, lackluster, metamorphose, outbreak, tranquil, rant, bet, ode, and puking.
Practice applying new word discoveries different ways. Write, converse, chat, ramble, blog - whatever it takes. You quickly get past the soreness of the first workouts and into to the zone where the only time it feels bad is when you don't hit the gym. The more you use the language to grouw your vocabulary, the more adept you are at knowing which word to choose when an image coalesces in your mind. Once abstract concepts gain depth, richness, and clarity. Connections before unseen are illuminated, hidden doors open, emotions become tangible, and you can more easily ascertain the subtlties of context when they belie the literal.
The Internet is a great place to start. I don't fear instant message abbreviations spilling out of the chat window. Since written language was invented, humans have abbreviated the unwieldy. It's in our nature. If you think IM is bad, you should read a Colonial American leaflet. The internet has, in reality, fostered an explosion of creative and expository writing unseen in modern times; a new age of letters and personal journalism. The outcome is neither certain nor assured.
Reader's digest used to say that it pays to increase your word power. What they didn't say that the payout is as close to real freedom as we mere humans are likely to get, certainly more than our President, this "simple man" who champions education while subverting it by example, will ever give the world. Regardless of whether you seek refinement or erudition or plain' ol' syntactical aptitude, be confident in going forward with the knoweldge that that, despite the specious, self-serving maxims of a violent past, getting above your raising is one of the most noble, most humanly generous things that you will ever do. Our collective human memory is embedded our language. To avail and apply the broader expressive legacy of our anscestors is to see the world with ancient eyes and to live life itself as urgent, sustaining poetry.
As I'd said, I met many cool, compelling people at BayCon. People that embrace alternative lifestyles come to conventions like these to feel safe acting out, and act out they do. Yet for all the Klingon histrionics, corseted cross-dressers, and charity slave auctions, the most memorable moments were, as always, smaller and more personal.
I'd never knowingly met anybody born on my birthday: November 22. I've met November 21's and 23's, but never one that shared my day. It's kind of a weird day, to begin with. It's the anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination, so I will likely never see a birthday where I don't hear the voice of Walter Cronkite: "The news...apparently official..." Every five or six years, it coincides with Thanksgiving Day. It's the only instance on the calendar of a date with two pairs of identical integers. Disciples of astrology like to tell me that I was born on a cusp, which is something like a day-long DMZ between Sagittarius and Scorpio. Reasonable astrologers will
disagree on whether I'm one or the other, or what any of that means, or whether it matters. That's what reasonable astrologers do.
Alex offered to pick me up on the way to the hotel and he arrived at my apartment with Robyn, who was set to DJ Tycho's party. I'd met Robyn couple years before at Jerry and Micah's, but I'd not seen nor heard from him since. It was still around 9 PM, and in the quiet time before the revelers arrived from the second floor, Robyn and I sat on the suite's big poofy chairs and had an interesting, thought-provoking conversation of uncommon quality.
Describing Robyn is difficult without dusting off some words from a more genteel time. In the century before the last one, persons of good breeding would have recognized Robyn as a dandy gentleman. He arrived to the convention dressed in a crisp, finely tailored navy blue suit of an American style, circa the 1790s, with a tall hat, a bowed tress ribbon for his hair, and all the accoutrements befitting the period. He wore the lightest brush of eyeliner, a nod to the Gothic tradition he embraces. When he speaks, he uses precise, nuanced vernacular that is slightly elevated but entirely conversational. And he pulled this off without ever once seeming tedious or out of touch.
I often have a difficult time with affected people. I've come to the point of asking more than one person: "Are you always on?" But as Robyn and I talked, I had a sense that Robyn's style, while deliberate, wasn't a melodramatic presentation. As the evening went on, I found that I admired him as a person of genuine, applied standards. He wore layered finery not as an indicator of class, but rather of discipline, a commitment to a difficult lifestyle. His very identity evoked a time when refinement, chivalry, and temperance were virtuous pursuits, before the once-heroic persuit of self-elevation was quashed by brutish, exalted nescience.
I strongly related to the defiance that he'd carefully reasoned and considered over time, because I'd made asimilar choice after moving to California. I've always been fascinated by words, images, and history, and as a kid I would practice the form of web-surfing I had at the time: sitting down with a dictionary and etymology guide and bouncing from word to word, learning their roots, relationships, and variations.
Once I left high school, upon moving someplace new, I would always research its history. I still do. Otherwise, I do not feel connected to my home. A place without its history, without context, is an empty vessel with buildings and people. Later on, I realized the same was true for words. I've never been comfortable using a word until I know the definition and etymology. A word without its past is, for me, imbued with none of the nuance with which it is inherently capable.
My vocabulary was always larger than anyone I knew - adult or child - by the time I hit 5th grade. That year my text book was the one used by the seniors at the high school. My teachers appreciated my aptitude, but they were usually the only ones - on campus or off. My peers had no idea what I was saying, and most adults around me, unable to admit they didn't know every third word, would berate my usage instead of simply asking for a definition. This tendency to keep the syllables as low as possible goes back to the days when America broke from England to settle puritanical, armed religious colonies.
After the Revolution, many Americans rejected words that evoked the old countries or suggested the speaker was "putting on airs". Vibrant words were exiled into obscurity, their nuances stripped out of the culture and then supplanted by a simpler, lower vernacular inclubated in agrarian isolation and cultivated into a virulent weed that has reached the highest office in the land.
When talking to my dad around age 10 or 11, I remember using the phrase "in other circles" meaning "in other groups of people." My dad said, quite angrily, "Now what the hell does that mean?" I explained, and he said, "Now, Jay, why didn't you just go ahead and say that in the first place?" It had never occurred to me until then to adapt my vocabulary to my situation. My brain chooses the word that best fits myriad conditions of the situation, and does it instantly. I never deliberately chose a florid or complex word over a "plain speaking" counterpart, because when I say "lugubrious" I mean lugubrious, not whiny. Dumbing down wasn't convenient, it was necessary.
One of Lou Reed's greatest lyrics is from The Velvet Underground's "Some Kinda Love," where he sings, "between thought and expression / there lies a lifetime." The only thing we have to communicate the rich tapestry of our thoughts, emotions, and instincts, besides our bodies, are the words we use to express them. The English of sound bites and bold strokes carries none of the flexibility required to verbalise the more esoteric elements of the human experience. We are not telepathic, and yet our culture is draining the only river through which our thoughts can truly find honest representation inside someone else's conciousness.
I decided when I began to write again that I would refuse to play a part in the emotional destruction of future generations by dumbing down my most developed and valuable facility. I would learn as many words as I could, and draw from the well with alacrity, precision, confidence, and acuity.
The loss of language is epidemic, and the symptoms are in every American's experience. There's a general sense of disconnection and paranoia. The sickening perversion of doublespeak is no longer the dour satire of depressed dystopians but the de facto practice of business and government. It's become normal to feel out of touch with ones feelings. What caused your last breakup? I'll bet it's (all together now) "lack of communication." The most interconnected time in human history coincides with the time we are most disconnected from ourselves.
I wonder if Laura Bush, touched by her work with gang members, has ever discussed with her husband the legacy of his proud stupidity. Every parent, every "plain speaking" president that suggest that big words are the bearers of dishonesty and confusion, are speaking out of the ignorance and insecurity their parents inarticulacy helped to bring about. Southerers have had an especially ominous and unconscionable phrase spoken to generations immemorial: "Don't get above your raising." There has never been a more emblematic phrase of the bizarre vicarious relationship between Americans and their children, where the discomfort and self-shame of ignorance leads a culture to istiutionalize intellectual castration.
I don't argue for linguistic arrogance, or needless formality. Usage purists are the poor Bill Gateses of linguistics, committed to a tightly controlled, locked-down language, with standard and rules that apply across the board. To these folks, upgrades are released rarely, if at all.
Personally, I think language is a wiki, and perhaps wikis are the best models for a big picture understanding of how languages, cultures, all cumulative collective knowledge - coalesce. We need the messy, colors of street language along with the considered reasoning of the professor. Without common vernacular, the mother tongue dies, or worse yet, is kept alive only by the vacuous machinery of marketing, whose professionals, for all their wily genius, are the one remaining arena with the audacity to regularly coin and use new words.
The results are occasionally positive: the English speaking world is better off now that we "google" things instead of "search for them on the Internet" (which doesn't hurt Google either). Most often, the results of marketing language aren't so much negative as without purpose: a sad waste of talent and energy on words with a shelf life that rarely sees two birthdays.
I advocate inclusiveness and invention and, above all, conversation. The flummoxed academics that decry the influence of hip-hop and Latin culture are missing the bigger picture: the problem isn't misuse, it's disuse. English is full of words that are remarkably adept at shrink-wrapping to the contours of your most frustratingly intangible thoughts. The elation of understanding and genuine expression, with all it's gradients and colors, is not a wispydream of an ineffable, potentially better humanity. It's in stock and ready to ship right away.
The language is your birthright, and you have the right to use every single gross, gracious, grevious, grand, grandiloquent, or grandiose word in whatever context you feel. Words are yours to adapt, mix, match, mashed up, abbreviate, and even invent. The answer to "there is no such word," is "there is now." William Shakespeare simply invented words for concepts without them, and over 1700 words still are in contemporary use, including arouse, addiction, advertise, assassinate, equivocal, lackluster, metamorphose, outbreak, tranquil, rant, bet, ode, and puking.
Practice applying new word discoveries different ways. Write, converse, chat, ramble, blog - whatever it takes. You quickly get past the soreness of the first workouts and into to the zone where the only time it feels bad is when you don't hit the gym. The more you use the language to grouw your vocabulary, the more adept you are at knowing which word to choose when an image coalesces in your mind. Once abstract concepts gain depth, richness, and clarity. Connections before unseen are illuminated, hidden doors open, emotions become tangible, and you can more easily ascertain the subtlties of context when they belie the literal.
The Internet is a great place to start. I don't fear instant message abbreviations spilling out of the chat window. Since written language was invented, humans have abbreviated the unwieldy. It's in our nature. If you think IM is bad, you should read a Colonial American leaflet. The internet has, in reality, fostered an explosion of creative and expository writing unseen in modern times; a new age of letters and personal journalism. The outcome is neither certain nor assured.
Reader's digest used to say that it pays to increase your word power. What they didn't say that the payout is as close to real freedom as we mere humans are likely to get, certainly more than our President, this "simple man" who champions education while subverting it by example, will ever give the world. Regardless of whether you seek refinement or erudition or plain' ol' syntactical aptitude, be confident in going forward with the knoweldge that that, despite the specious, self-serving maxims of a violent past, getting above your raising is one of the most noble, most humanly generous things that you will ever do. Our collective human memory is embedded our language. To avail and apply the broader expressive legacy of our anscestors is to see the world with ancient eyes and to live life itself as urgent, sustaining poetry.
You speak like me. I'm often chastised for my use of overly big words, because using too many different ones apparently means one is arrogant. I like this essay.
Thank you! And welcome. :-)
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