Baby Talk

How many times have you found yourself sitting in front of the television set on a late afternoon or late night waiting for a ball game, the news or your favorite needlepoint or gardening show only to find yourself watching some nonsensical program like Access Hollywood or TMZ because you're just too damn lazy and comfortable to take the effort to punch a button on the remote control. And then, before you know it some "reporter" specializing in celebrities, such as Mary Hart, appears on screen to breathlessly announce that a female actress, singer or celebutard is showing a "baby bump" which means that said woman is with child, pregnant or, to use the current patois, "preggers."
If you are anything like your faithful correspondent the use of the term "baby bump" is like dragging a nail across a blackboard when the term is not used while speaking to children ("No, honey. Maria is not gotten fat. She has a baby bump.") or by children ("Mommy? Is that lady going to have a baby? She has a baby bump." "No, Junior. That old cow just has a beer belly.")or by people who seem somewhat retarded or just trying to be cute. The same goes for the word "preggers." The word "preggers" is a term best used, and should be only used, by adolescents in describing their schoolmates who are about to drop out of school and go on welfare and become regular customers of the local WIC center.
To hear a person in the media, who apparently is an adult with a college education, use the term "baby bump" and the word "preggers" is not unlike when this writer was a callow youth hearing the local gray-haired news reader use the word "groovy." It was just silly and made the user sound and look silly. It was tantamount with one's father, a veteran of the Marines in the Pacific during World War Two, wearing paisley shirts and bell-bottomed Levis to church because he wanted to be "with it." Just embarrassing. Thank God that Baron Nib never did any such silly thing. He was always a proper gentleman in his behavior and dress.
This writer has noticed an infantilization of the spoken and written word that he finds disturbing. It goes beyond "baby bump" and "preggers." All too many times he has heard a person on television or radio, or read articles in the newspaper in which the reporter describes a frightening incident as "scary." In the old days such incidents were described as "frightening", "terrifying", "horrifying" or "disturbing." The word "scary" was a children's word that could be used of anything from falling off a skateboard to fighting off an ax murderer or watching a horror movie. It seems that a certain segment of society has not progressed from grade school descriptions of emotions because they have neither matured or they feel that the viewers are rather stupid.
If one listens or reads the outpourings from the news media and popular culture one can find many instances of baby-talk put forth by people, who by their educations alone, should know and (one would hope)desire to speak and write in an adult manner. And these people seem to show no embarrassment about using terms and words that were heretofore used exclusively by children. It's a wonder.
Other words or terms that have come into common usage in the media are "poo" instead of feces or offal (one wonders when Katie Couric will break new ground by saying "poo-poo","poopy" or "do-do"; "doing the nasty" instead of making love, mating or fornicating; "bad guy" instead of criminal, enemy, jerk or idiot. The list goes on and on.
Language changes over the years and centuries, but usually it becomes more sophisticated instead of degraded and infantile. This writer would suggest that news writer and reporters, before using words that they feel might be somewhat suspect (and they DO know unless they are complete idiots) that they look in a Roget's Thesaurus, the King James Bible or Shakespeare to find an adult word to replace the baby talk that they have been babbling to us for the past twenty years.
One shudders to think of what the next twenty years hold for the language. Perhaps a spoken form of text messaging. CN U DG IT?

We're All Socialists Now

We here at the Manor have always made it a point to play by the rules.
We never built up mountains of debt, tried to pay for our cars with cash and have managed to pay off the mortgage and pay help without taking out a second mortgage. We have tried to save as much money as we can.
When we were young the very idea of taking out a loan of any size was considered shameful. One was expected, except in the case of the most dire emergency, to be self reliant as much as possible. One would borrow money from family members before going to the bank.
Now, due to the current financial "crisis" we find that the federal government is bound an determined to bail out everydamnbody who behaved in a less than wise financial manner. In other words, the government is bound and determined not to allow people fail who really should fail. It is like the indulgent mother of a gang member who has been arrested for shooting a slug from another gang crying, "My boy is a good boy" while the cops take the gun from the woman's son's hand and toss him into the squad car.
In other words, in the name of national interest the government has decided to institute what are, in fact, socialist measures to prevent the possibility of a "meltdown." Those who have behaved badly will be saved and those who have behaved responsibly will have to pay for it.
This writer fell asleep one night in a capitalist nation and woke up in a socialist one. And he never heard a shot fired or saw a ballot cast.

Blame it on the Computer

Recently one of the judges for the Nobel Prize for Literature stated that he saw no chance for any American writers to be considered for the prize. The reason, he said, is that American writers are too "insular."
To be absolutely honest, this writer does not know exactly what he means considering the fact that the last American writer to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature was Toni Morrison; a woman who has made a career about writing exclusively about the lives of black people in America. There is nothing universal, despite what literature professors in Ivy League and Ivy League "wannabe" schools say in Morrison's writing.
But your faithful correspondent is in complete agreement that there is no American writer on the horizon, perhaps barring Joyce Carol Oates*, who deserves to even be nominated for the Prize. And the reason is simply this: contemporary American writers, even the literary ones, just can't write worth a damn. This is not to say that they cannot make themselves understood. But their writing is lacking in style and substance. It all seems to be cleaned up first drafts; the first expression of an idea is used without thought of using other words to make the thought deeper, funnier, sadder, more poignant, etc. But that may be their intention. We live in a world where first thoughts trump pondering and the exhibiting of raw emotion is considered being "real" while taking time to have a second thought is considered artifice.
Be that as it may, this writer blames much of the problem on the computer; specifically, the word processor. The use of a computer is the most artificial form of story telling. It verges on the writer almost becoming an android with the machine. Because of the ease of spell checking and the use of cut and paste features the machine becomes an assistant instead of a tool.
The best literary writing has been done by hand or by type writers. Compared to writing on a computer the use of pen or type writer are slow and messy. And it is the slowness and messiness that improve the writing. The hand writer and type writer have to constantly look over their work to fix spelling and grammatical errors, and in doing so they see how they can make their writing better by changing, adding or removing words, sentences or paragraphs. On a computer, on the other hand, the words are on a screen and with a press of a key all words can be properly spelled, and in some cases the grammar fixed, per style book rules. With a computer the writer depends on the machine to fix the flaws instead of going through pages, reading and re-reading, looking for and marking errors with pencil in preparation for typing up or writing the second draft. It is the reading and re-reading and re-reading again that makes the author ponder his or her story and writing. The computer makes the very act of writing too easy, and easy writing is not often good writing. There is no need to re-read and re-read the writing. The words magically appear on a screen and, in this age of television, what appears on a video screen must be good.
Your faithful correspondent has seen copies of first drafts by famous writers written by hand or on type writers and he has also seen what are called first drafts written by writers on computers. The difference is striking. The first drafts of the manual writers (hand and type writer) are marked up with spelling corrections, phrase, sentences and paragraphs marked out and hand written notes crammed into the margins. The computer based writers, on the other hand, change a word here or there and perhaps add a phrase. The manual writers bled over their work. The computer writers just tweak. The difference, to use a vulgar illustration is like that of a person building an engine for a top fuel rail based on a Chevy big block engine and tuning up the family SUV.
At this point you may be asking the following questions:
"But Lord Nib, how can you say such things? Do not writers in other nations not use computers to write their literature? And you yourself use a computer to write the Bloody Nib. Does that mean that the Bloody Nib is bad writing?"
This writer has the misfortune of being able to read only one language, and that language is English. The problem may hold true for other languages and probably does. Americans, Canadians and the English take to technological advances much faster than do other peoples and in taking to the technologies they sooner become dependent to them. It will soon become a flaw in the writings of non-English writing writers that writing becomes a co-operative effort between man and machine.
And yes, the writing on the Bloody Nib is bad writing. If this writer pounded out the entries on this blog on a typewriter as he once pounded out a monthly magazine on a typewriter the writing would be much better.
At the top of this post are photos of two writers, now deceased and much writers of much different style and substance who, each in his own way, were masters of unique styles that have yet to be matched.
On the left is William Faulkner, a writer of stately and ponderous prose who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. He is, in the photo, working on a Royal desk type writer while wearing a collar and tie.
On the right Mickey Spillaine, the creator of the Mike Hammer novels, among other. Hard boiled, slangy and fast. His attire reflects his writing; casual and muscular. He is working on a Smith-Corona desk machine.
Neither man would have benefited from the use of a computer. In fact, a word processor would have probably ruined their writing because the word processor does not call for the sweat and blood that a type writer does.
There is another thing that has reduced the quality of American writing and that is the falling out of common knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare and Homer not by the reader, but by the writer. These three sources have been, for centuries, the ground of literature, the sources of themes, phrases and ideas. Since they have fallen out of favor the ground has shifted and keeps shifting. There is no place to stand. And if there is no place to stand the is no place to locate a lever with which to move ideas.
For those who question this writer's presentation of the term "type writer" instead of "typewriter," please know that the original patent for the machine called the machine a "type writer."
And please know that this writer prefers the indented beginning to a paragraph to the current practice of starting the paragraph at the left hand margin.
*Joyce Carol Oates writes her novels longhand and then writes the final draft on an electric type writer.