I was reading a blog entry (or blessay, if you will) by the excellent Stephen Fry this morning on language, pedantry and pleasure, and a few thoughts have been percolating. Some of this is brain-dump material, but, as always, I’m not trying to make you think the same as me. I’m just trying to make you think.

I think about language often. I collect words and phrases hither and thither. I make up funny (in the dual senses of humourous and strange) little rhymes or phrases or songs to amuse myself. I make up words for their sound or their feel (there aren’t nearly enough ideophones for my tastes), or because they fill a much-needed gap. I’ve spent idle hours wondering at the fact that our writing and speaking voices are comfortable in different registers and with different idioms. You might say that makes me a geek, and to that I say “well spotted” in a sort of dry sarcastic font remarkably similar to my everyday speaking font. I am indeed a language geek, among my other geekeries. I’m sure most of my (two?) readers are geeks in a few ways themselves. Language as a love for me, however, is an artistic rather than intellectual pursuit.

Anyone who knows me well will attest to the fact that I have an abiding love for words and language. I delight in wordage. In building and sculpting and tweaking phrases that trip or flow over the tongue of the mind with just the right taste. In distilling from these scratchings on silicon or paper or stone an essence composed of not just an intellectual concept, but also primal elements of emotion: a touch of familiarity, a dash of awe, a sprinkling of forbidden thrill. The connections with stories, another of my great loves, should be obvious. One connection worth pointing out, however, is that neither of them are really worth bothering with unless you’re at least trying to do something new. At some point that means breaking rules. And, indeed, as long as the communication aspect is not interfered with it’s tough to make a case for ‘knowing the rules before you break them’. Which quite neatly (as if it were happenstance) brings me around to the pedantry aspect.

As a sometime amateur futurist (purely for the purposes of self-amusement, you must understand) I feel I must ascribe any pedantry I hold over the usage of language to a vested interest in our ability as human beings to communicate, and to continue to be able to communicate. I applaud creativity in language, even if I sometimes cringe at new words or ‘creative misspellings’. Two parties need a common set of rules in order to communicate, however, and I see those rules potentially breaking down in two ways: dilution and divergence. Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want to do is stifle the growth and evolution of language. And don’t think I’m unaware of the fact that people have been prematurely despairing the demise of languages for as long as they’ve had words to allow them to do so. I posit that the internet changes the playing field, however. Anyway, I’m not asking anyone to stop doing anything. Let’s just say I’m watching with interest.

The first concern is the dilution of language. Let’s take that perennial example of internet forums and comments, there/they’re/their. Using your eyes you’re sure to see there that they’re distinct words, but their usage in general would seem to contend that all three are valid spellings of one word with three very distinct meanings. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some forum vigilante who flits from board to board righting the writing of the many, but I do see that loss of distinction as something to be lamented. Ideally they wouldn’t be homophones to begin with. It’s not like we’ve run out of potential words. I submit that gryzik/they’re/flibbin would be less confusing, assuming we all learned it from an early age. As long as communication isn’t affected, the effect of all this is negligible, but I still don’t feel that losing words is a good thing under any circumstances.

The second concern is the divergence of language. Here’s the thing: the internet is the Tower of Babel all over again. Not just in that we’ve built something bigger than any of us could even conceive individually, nor indeed in that large parts of it are built solely to demonstrate to others just how clever the builders are. Perhaps more than any invention of humanity, this is the one thing that echos “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” To some, it seems to pave the way to the long-sought-after Tribe of Humanity. The danger is that people get caught up in the smaller tribes. The Tribe of Mac and the Tribe of PC are good examples of this, or the Tribe of Facebook and the Tribe of Myspace. The fact is that the connecting properties of the internet bring together tribes that couldn’t possibly have existed before, to the point where everything is a tribe these days. Microcultures spring up around the smallest of shared experiences, spawning memes and traditions and yes, even language. If I identify with even as few as a dozen tribes, and you another wholly distinct dozen we each have large tracts of our language space inaccessible to the other. As an unqualified amateur observer, I only see these trends accelerating. Let’s just hope we don’t all end up speaking different languages. Still, for the most part, I think it’s brilliant. You can’t make the omelet of the Tribe of Humanity without breaking a few memetic eggs. More than that, the internet is one of the single greatest advancements or advancers of human science and culture, and it only works because everything is (at least in potentia) on the internet. (Which is yet another reason why liberty-eroding internet censorship schemes such as the horrific ‘Clean Feed’ debacle will either fail, or result in massive community efforts to transmute the internet into something that simply cannot be corralled.) So, lest ye be called a n00b, embrace the blogosphere, and the podcast and the vodcast, and the lolspeak that is even now in ur tubes.

But if you ‘LOL’ out loud, as it were, we’re going to have to have words.

“What would you have of me, then?”
“Only love. I know that it is an opinion much out of favour in the common custom, but it has always been my belief that true love is sufficient of and for anything. Indeed, that any love that is not sufficient also be not true.”
“It is not, nor has it ever been that simple!”
“You do me ill, madam, to imply so. For, in the implying, you deny the truth of all that I feel for you. More again, of all that I am. At love’s call I would bear all of fortune’s slings and arrows save one, that one being only your wish that I bear none in your name. Even in this I am undone, for guided as it is by Apollo it is the one whose aim I cannot escape.”

“Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.”

That’s where it ends, you see. I’ve seen the original edition, hand-lettered and signed. I wish I could tell you other; I wish I could tell you anything else, but everything from there is a lie. Peter was touched. There is no denying that. He’s not the type to change overnight, but he made the effort. Imagine, if you will, Peter making the effort. Hands on his hips, all a-crow, but something holds him and he asks first after her. It’s a dilemma, of course. It’s a problem. But Wendy moves on. Wendy grows up. The adventures are there, but as much as he throws himself into them there is something wrong without her. Day by day, year by year, fresh-faced all the while, Peter grows old.

I’m not sure if anyone besides my brother visits this site on a regular basis, but if so then I’m sorry about being AWOL lately. I’ve been meaning to post about my absence for a while, but things have been stressful and hectic for all kinds of reasons. I honestly don’t think anything I wrote at the moment would be worth reading anyway, but this site was never really about that, so I suppose that’s beside the point.

To break it down, I am writing a PhD thesis. It was supposed to be submitted by now, and that isn’t the case. Until it is submitted I really need, no matter how much it is killing my soul, to be in technical-writing-mode. When it is all finished and done then I’ll be trying to get back in the groove here. Unfortunately the PhD is far from being the most stressful situation I’m in, so if I’m being honest I can’t see the post-a-day thing starting up again straight away, but we’ll see.

All that said, I’m trying not to let the writing stuff slide completely. I have found a couple of self-publishing avenues for the novel recently, one in particular that seems quite promising. I don’t know what’s happening with the editing situation there still, but I’ve been working on sorting out other neccessary things like a cover and a version of the world map that is suitable for printing. The overhead is so small on this priniting method that when it all comes together I’ll be getting a few copies no matter what. When this plan gets closer to fruition I’ll hopefully be able to take pre-orders and make sure that anyone who wants a copy gets one.

As yet I’m still unsure how the free CC-licensed online part of this will all play out, but it will still definitely be happening. Perhaps a serialised version after the people who pre-order get their nice shiny hefty meatspace copies.

More news as events unfold.

The rain is fierce on the canopy outside, but only a few drops make it through the leaves to trip a staccato beat on the metal of the roof. The rest trickles and pools, gathering in hollows and slipping down trunks to soak the earth. The path to the door is overgrown and disused, covered with fallen branches and vines on the outside, and tottering piles of books and sheets of loose paper on the inside. The books shift restlessly, still unused to their captivity and nervous about the ability of these walls to keep out the damp. A few eye the fire nervously, gnawing quietly in the corner on a log that might just be someone’s distant relative.

Reality is made worthwhile only in the sharing. This is largely because of, and largely hindered by, the fact that no two people agree on what reality is.

It is widely accepted that there are great truths, although fewer than one might suppose. It is widely ignored that the chances of even one of these truths having been hit upon by even one person in the history of the world is astronomically small. This is further confounded by the fact that the opposite of any great truth is also likely to be true. There is probably no way of proving that something is a great truth, but many mere ‘facts’ can easily be shown not to be great truths by virtue of the fact that they contain the words “but”, “except”, or “assuming”.

And, so, we construct bubbles of approximations, assumptions, half-truths and flat out lies and proceed to call this conglomerate ‘reality’. This process is called ‘growing up’. Everything we see from inside these bubbles is distorted by their shape, and tinted further by the worst assumption of all: that the inside of every other bubble either is or should be the same as our own. Every injustice perpetrated by humanity can be explained by this, and it is only natural therefore that we are wretched.

If we are worthy of elevation above this status it is only because of our ability and our willingness to build bridges between these bubbles, to attempt to understand their contents and see the world through them.

In the House there is a Room. In the Room there is a Wall. This is the Wall of Doors. At the center of the Wall is a fireplace, as tall as a man. The ceiling is lost in the dark, away from the glow of firelight and candlelight, but as high up as the eye can see the Wall is covered in doors and windows and picture frames. Each one is different: large, small, ornate, plain. Through some, snatches of music can be heard. Through others comes the smell of earth or sea air. What are you waiting for? Open one.

The moon rose full in the sky over the sleepy seaside town. It lit up the mist that rolled in over the ocean, and picked out the figures standing on the headlands. The night was so cold that even the sheriff was safe and warm inside, otherwise someone might have been out walking and seen the suspicious figures, or heard the monotonous chant they sent out to sea. As it was, they remained undisturbed. After a time the waves grew larger, disturbing the surface of the mist and whipping the chanting figures into a frenzy. Some collapsed, foaming at the mouth, but a few kept up the chant. From out past the horizon, rising from the depths, it came.

“I’m tired,” he said.
The sun streamed around him and in through the balcony doors, and the air was fresh with a gentle breeze blowing in off the ocean and up the cobbled streets.
“So sleep,” she said. “We’ll be up until dawn tonight.”
“I wanted to walk around the quayside with you today. Stop for coffee or a glass of wine somewhere right by the ocean. Wind our way through the back alleys looking for treasures in antique stores and bookshops and delis.”
“That sounds nice. There’s plenty of time, though. Come over here. Sleep. I’ll still be here when you wake up.”