(taken by ilovememphis)
Within the last few months there have been at least five people who have accused me of intentionally inflating my speech, vocabulary, diction, writing, whatever in an effort, they say, to sound impressive or smart or important &tc. I do a lot of stupid and immature things, but deceiving people with pompous language isn’t one of them. Suggesting someone simplify their sentences for clarity or for aesthetic reasons is one thing; assuming and saying that their complex speech patterns are consciously crafted hypocrisies is quite another.
The way I communicate is in fact pretty much the way I think. Most people are okay with it. An annoying few are not. Well, I’m hardly constructing what I’m typing here right now; I do think in semicolons. This for me is genuine and authentic communication. Because I recognize that many people construe the way I communicate as pretentious, I have tried in little social settings to screen everything I say before I say it in order to render my sentences more informal — to earn a better score on the allegedly important scale of how well you’ve conformed to the conventions of normalcy and tradition and small talk. During those experiments I sounded completely devoid of affect because, guess what, I wasn’t being sincere.
I am not well-informed about the rules of charade which govern much social interaction, rules that apparently tell you how not to rock any boats. So I go about sincerely communicating in the way that’s most natural to me, and people time and again criticize it for not being colloquial enough. I had a professor once tell me that lyrical or odd prose is immoral, whereas plain prose is moral because it supposedly doesn’t talk down to readers. This is the “Style is Morality” crowd. What the hell? You’re an ethicist and you don’t have other problems to worry about?
If you’re like those five people I mentioned earlier, probably you’re thinking: Gee, why did he use the strange word ‘affect’ above? Because I don’t know what it means. That’s why he’s so pretentious! Instead of thinking that, you should try using a dictionary. It’s not that hard. C’mon. You can do it. Really.
This has all been so frustrating to me for a very long time. Look, you get a verbose person when he comes from a background of:
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Studying Latin & Greek instead of European languages; my vocabulary became less Anglo-Saxon gutsy and more Latinate baroque. Whoop-tee-do, deal with it, get a dictionary.
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Spending enormous quantities of time alone reading instead of socializing. I’m not saying this makes me superior. In fact much of it was probably a gigantic waste of time; I should have sought out more friends.
I could go on, much further, but aside from smacking of LiveJournal whining (stereotype alert), such a bullet-point list would be bad for biz, it might get me in trouble with people, and we all understand just how important biz is, right, because it’s more important to produce goods/services than it is to be honest, sincere?
For me this rant is closely related, emotionally, to my disgust with many science fiction & fantasy readers’ refusal to empathize with protagonists who are anything other than Freytag-problem-solving reliable narrators. I’m not sure what the connection is. But that’s for another post.
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2 comments ↓
Remember when Hilary was stumping for the Dem nomination and she caught all that shit for affecting a southern drawl when she was visiting wherever it was? I didn’t feel bad for her, but I should have: she was trying to know her audience, and made a giant miscalculation. People saw the accent as a put-on, as a political inauthenticity.
But I know I’ve done the same and worse, and it wasn’t because I was trying to posture, it was because I was trying to tune my presentation to my audience. Which is something everyone does, all the time, without thinking of it — how you move your body when a third person joins what had been a two-person conversation, the volume of your voice when the lits dim, all of that.
I think of all this because I’ve dealt with what you’re talking about; people thinking I’m putting on airs when I say “We were” instead of “We was.” Where I came up that’s how half the people talked, and it was how I talked, until my social circumstances changed.
Anyway, my strategy is that I try to blend in when it won’t cost me too much. When the subjunctive will strike my auditor as phony, I don’t use it. When I’m giving a talk to some academics, I will. Once upon a time I used to think there was some authentic me, some authentic version of me and of everybody, and to deviate from that was a kind of cowardice. Now I’ve lost most of my principles and simply do what is most convenient at the time, subject to some base constraint that I couldn’t elaborate on without a good deal of time and a stiff drink.
That was utterly useless, wasn’t it? Well, I liked your post, anyway.
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