Quite the dustup the last couple-three days over the simplest word ... first Sheila makes herself look sort of -- to put it gently -- unwordly by complaining about people using themthere high-falutin obscuro academic words to intimidate people, then when folks suggest that, hey, it’s not that uncommon a word she goes off and does a poll of her local 7-11 clerks to see how many of them have heard it, and when normally civil and gracious folks like Language Hat suggest that it’s a bit odd for a writer of all people to not be pleased to learn a new word, she goes all ballistic and starts pissing on peoples’ screen names (“Language Hate” indeed) and banning people from her comments ...
Note to Sheila: if you’re going to attack people who know something about writing, you might want to be a bit more selective about how you excerpt your own work on the internet ... at least, if you’re going to recycle hoary cliches like “Hippocrates never had days like this” you might not want to do it in multiple novels, or (again, at least) you might want to choose excerpts so that you don’t do it multiple times on a single page.
(Do be sure to read the comments on Language Hat’s blog for more fun with published prose.)
And the word whose grandiosity was so egregious? Luddite. Luddite. Honestly.
As a number of people have pointed out, it’s a word generally learned in high school. It’s a word that one should have encountered with even passing knowledge of the history of Labor, or the history of Technology, or simply by reading the newspaper, since it’s a word that’s used often in discussions of the impact of technology on society (that is, on all of us). How often? A google search returns about 117,000 hits on “Luddite”; it only returns 1,800 hits on “Ludd,” which would suggest to me that knowing the derivation of the term isn’t particularly important to knowing what it means. By way of comparison, “Hippocratic” returns 74,600 hits, or 63% of “Luddite”; kind of a poor showing, given the good doctor had a head start of a couple millenia on General Ludd.
What’s really disheartening to me about this exchange, though, is not the idea that someone might not have encountered the word “Luddite,” but something from one of her comments as she became more and more defensive:
I’ve never really been in love with words. They’re tools, like screwdrivers and hammers. They get the job done.
This is a sad idea from anyone, but it’s particularly sad from a published author. I’m in a bad mood, so instead of just shaking my head as I usually do when confronted by this sort of unpleasantness (like election results, or polls about Iraq), I feel the need to do a little stamping on it.
Sombody named “msg” in Language Hat’s comments thread responded more eloquently that I’m probably capable of (sorry, no internal permalinks ... it’s toward the bottom):
Ms. Sheila equates words with hammers and screwdrivers, and fades from view.
It’s wood we’ve grown to love, the grain and heft, its music in the beam and fit, its tones, under the saw and under the floor.
Carpenters know about trees, good ones do, and the shape of rooms.
Yes. Words aren’t the tools; words are the material. A piece of fiction, an essay, a biographical sketch -- they’re all writing, just as a landscape or a portrait is painting. Let me say this as forthrightly as I know how (excuse me a sec, I need to take a second to add a selector to my stylesheet to make this stand out enough):
Writing is Art made out of Words.
If I still had a <blink> tag I’d use that.
To say that the story is what’s important and the only use of the words that make it is to “get the job done” ... well, it must be really easy for someone who thinks like that to make it through a museum before lunchtime. Take the Art Institute at a trot: “chunky women on beach ... people in a diner ... brass dildo ... skinny guy walking ... train comin’ outta’ fireplace (what is that, a joke? are you making fun of me?) ... mean old farmers ... old lady at a vanity ... a door ... big-ass flower ... ok, that’s over with, let’s go have a beef ’n’ a coke.”
Sure, there are plenty of people who respond to paintings like that ... people who like “sea pitchers” or “cowboy pitchers” and wouldn’t care less if they had an original Remington as long as it was the length of their settee. They’re sad, but they’re not the point. Painters don’t think like that. Even assembly-line Starving Artists can be expected to have a rudimentary understanding that paintings are made out of paint. Why should we expect less from a writer?
