
Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow. - hackhackhack
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/11/such-dfw-very-orwell-so-doge-wow/
======
vezzy-fnord
tl;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.

~~~
sp332
It'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.

~~~
anigbrowl
_CSWE is hard to express yourself in_

This claim baffles and infuriates me.

~~~
sp332
It's natural to express my opinions and experiences in a first-person account
including emotions. That kind of thing isn't allowed in Wikipedia or
textbooks, and is generally discouraged in the NYT and school essays.

~~~
anigbrowl
Write a novel, or poetry, or whatever form you find appropriate. I do disagree
with the notion that one can't express oneself without resorting to
colloqialisms, but on the other hand I have no problem with using such devices
for self-expression if they're what works best. On the other hand, when I read
a newspaper like the NYT, I'm not interested in the authenticity of the
writers' self-expression; I want a clear and dispassionate report or analysis
of current events, just as in an essay I want an exploration of a particular
topic.

I'm afraid I find the entire Techcrunch article redolent of neo-Marxist
critical theory, which I think is intellectually bankrupt and antithetical to
progress, and which brings on an overwhelming desire to projectile vomit upon
its nearest exponent, so I'm a touch biased about this.

~~~
sp332
It's not just colloquialisms, but entire dialects, that are not allowed. A
small subset of the population just declared that they way they write and
speak is "correct" and everyone else is inferior simply because it is
different.

------
devindotcom
I 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
And we call that poetry.

~~~
baldurrdash
Yep:
[http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/](http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/).

~~~
elag
Oh, _code poetry_. 'Ni code, ni poetry' &c.

------
angersock
I'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.

------
kabdib
Uh, 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...)

------
wyager
Apparently 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
Not 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
John Zerzan claims that all language is inherently oppressive.

Not that I agree, but there you are.

~~~
aaronem
From 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.

------
mcphilip
In 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
I 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_...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_Language-1.pdf))

------
asveikau
For 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
While 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
Perhaps 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.

------
fosap
"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
Still 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.

~~~
aaronem
If it helps, the English IPA for "doge" would be /doʊʒ/; if you need a key,
Wikipedia has a good one:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English)

~~~
anigbrowl
That's correct for dealing with the Doge of Venice, but there are many words
in English that have multiple pronunciations depending on their individual
meaning. In this canine context you really have to start from 'dog.'

~~~
aaronem
I'll happily argue that, regardless of the path by which a given meme's
promulgators happened to stumble upon an actual English word of whose
existence they were (and perhaps still are) entirely ignorant, the established
pronunciation is correct nonetheless.

Besides, if you start from /dɔːg/, you more or less invariably end up at
/dɔːgə/ or /doʊgə/, both of which are so ugly to speak and to hear that
arguing against them seems worthwhile.

~~~
anigbrowl
The existing word _Doge_ is Italian and describes the rulers of a particular
few Italian city states, so I don't think generalizing from that makes much
sense: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge)

I personally pronounce mem-Doge as Doggie, which I find an amusing parallel to
the grammatical mismatches upon which the humor depends.

~~~
aaronem
_Doge_ is indeed originally an Italian word, but it's also a loanword in
English [1], this being of course the entire basis on which rests my argument
above. And I try not to pronounce the meme version at all.

[1]
[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doge#English](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doge#English)

------
Dewie
This 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
Say 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_.

