Last night Richard Lanham spoke to my Rhetoric and Copyright class. He's a writing expert and has written several books like Analyzing Prose. He emphasizes the point that prose can be looked at (seeing how the words are arranged stylistically) or looked through (getting to the gist of the idea), and being able to do both is a good idea.
After the presentation I asked him a question which morphed into a discussion on emoticons. I said how I tried to avoid using them, thinking that they were a crutch and that the language should be able to convey the same expression if used correctly.
He was not so critical. When I said suggested that the language must have been able to have conveyed the same thing before emoticons were developed he wasn't so sure. He likened it to the evolution of any punctuation. Originally language was written without any, so it required a rarified expertise to be able to read and know where to put in the breaks. When punctuation came along there was a lot of resistance - shouldn't the language be able to express itself fully without these devices? - but it eventually became accepted because punctuation turned out to be a good idea in helping to convey an even wider panolpoly of ideas. So might emoticons be, he suggested. They are a new form of punctuation that may turn out to be just as valuable as its older kin, so being presumptively hostile to them may deprive language from expanding to include other tools that can help us be more expressive.
Comments (1)
Well, language can't express everything you want to - but you've got different kinds of language here. Spoken language is probably the most flexible and expressive. Writing has never been able to express everything, because you lose so much information, for example, when you need a particular sound (I hate writing 'yay' - I'd rather write 'yeah' for the same sound, but 'yeah' also has another sound associated with it). A given language may not even be able to express exactly what you want when another one can.
One day I had dinner with my friend (Japanese-English speaker) and her boyfriend (not a Japanese speaker). The waiter brought a menu, and we ordered, and he took the menu away. We wanted to hold onto the menu to look at later, but we forgot to hold on to it. And my friend goes:
"Mottekarechatta...!"
...which very accurately expressed our disappointment that the menu was taken away, because we seemingly had no control over it. If you want to break it down morphemically, the biggest problem is with the morpheme 'cha', which basically expresses the powerlessness of the speaker relative to the action taken (maybe not its primary function, but this the best way I can think of to express it).
However, we had a grand time trying to explain to her boyfriend what she just said.
I still don't have any idea how to express this in English succinctly enough so that I can say something similar in conversation. But maybe this is something that can be well expressed in English with either intonation (maybe you say it whiny) or with an emoticon.
Posted by Koichi | October 30, 2004 12:32 AM
Posted on October 30, 2004 00:32