Page 4 - Ruminations

2. Three flights of linguistic fancy

1. Vulgar Latin spread through Rome’s colonies, becoming the
mutually-unintelligible Romance languages; Classical Latin was
preserved by church and cloistered academia. English, having
overtaken French as the global lingua franca, also evolved into official
and local versions at the popular or vulgar level. If those subsets of
the latter do not diverge as Vulgar Latin did, it will owe to the
electronic interconnection of their users. That concurrence will be
mediated by artificial intelligence: although formal or literary English
and Vulgar English will remain distinct (despite mutual influence),
both will be understood by computers. Translations of Slanglish
(emoticons, acronyms and other neologisms) will be immediately
available to people around the world—for better or worse.

2. Phatic communion, the social glue fashioned from words and other
verbalization, may find its most ironic form in the expression, “you
know.” It is a positive negation of itself, indicating this: “I cannot or
will not articulate my meaning, but it is acceptable not to because you
might not understand or appreciate some of my idiosyncratic
implications, or my real ignorance may be exposed in the attempt;
thus it is better for our relationship to suppose some level of mutual
agreement has been attained without looking at it too closely.”

3. “Inspired nonsense” is redundant. That is, if what is presented as
meaningless is not spontaneous, it will exhibit structural characteristics
preventing it from being sufficiently nonsensical. A residuum of
authorial intent, no matter how cleverly disguised, can always be
inferred. And to the extent an editing mind discovers hidden sense in
its own purportedly nonsensical work, it will attempt to erase or
obfuscate it, unavoidably leaving a trail for the observant. Indeed, to
achieve the appearance of pure drivel we try to conceal our purpose
with random number generators, doctored photographs of the dark
side of the moon, and glossolalia played backward. Further, we count
on the tolerant acceptance of contrived nonsense as the real thing by
the unsophisticated, as in stories or verse written for children, or the
conventional portrayal of babble for adults—both cozy arrangements
with an author’s audience. The only intellectually sensical sort of such
stuff is ironic doggerel: that has a chance of being artful rather than
clichéd or strained.