Life

I don’t know how many of you still read your local newspaper. I hope there at least a few of you out there. For my part, I would take the print edition of a local paper over the doom loop of a national news site any day, and the same applies to your good, old-fashioned TV news. If you find yourself watching a national news broadcast anytime soon, consider how many times you hear one or more of the following words: shocking, stunning, harrowing, frightening, terrifying.

Is it really a shock someone committed a violent crime in the United States of America? Were you stunned when one of your esteemed politicians said something stupid or unbecoming? In my experience, local news tends to be less prone to embellishment for the sake of shock and awe. You’ll still hear a few stunnings and terrifyings here and there, but because the anchors are not using such terms to describe every piece of news, the words hold truer to their intended function.

Maybe you are wondering what I’m getting at here (I am wondering the same thing myself as I write this). I guess the point I am trying to make is that in our strange, modern world, there seems to little regard for the actual meaning of words. You see it in news and broadcast media. You see it in politics, of course. You also see it in academia, where any slight to one’s sensibilities might be labeled an act of violence. You can even find it in the opinion section of your local newspaper. I’ve long been irritated with correspondents’ habitual abuse of adjectives, but that was not what got me started on this post.

The paper I like to read prints a handful of short letters to the editor, most of which—surprise, surprise—focus on politics. Some opinions are informed, others are not. Nothing to write home about there. But every so often someone will fashion (and for some reason, the paper will publish) a long-winded diatribe stuffed with inaccessible terms and rhetoric, the kind of language that would die if dictionaries failed to preserve it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your average reader’s response to such a piece would be: what? So why write something like this at all? What purpose does it serve?

Intentionally inaccessible pieces of writing are not meant to inform. They function only to sell the intellectual superiority of the author and their oh-so-dignified take on the matter. I find this type of manufactured credibility particularly annoying because (A) at the end of the day, it is just bad writing, (B) professional editors do not seem to recognize it is bad writing, and (C) it reinforces the idea that knowing a few big words adds value to your opinion.

You can find these types of bloated, insufferable op-eds just about anywhere. Sites hosting amateur movie reviews are rife with them, for example, one-star ratings followed by five-hundred words on plot development and dialogue and character motivation, the writer claiming they rarely write reviews but just had to for this one. I think the South Park episode lambasting Yelp reviewers said just about all that needs to be said on this phenomenon, so check it out. It is one of my favorites.

Anyway, the long-winded diatribe I found so irritating was five or six paragraphs long, and if you cut out the unnecessary words and metaphors and convoluted turns of phrase, the guy’s actual point would amount to two or three sentences. A reader would read those sentences and think to themselves, yeah, well that’s nothing new, because it wasn’t. Free of the manipulative wordplay, it was no more than the same tired point hundreds of political commentators make every day.

Whether it’s news anchors abusing adjectives, wannabe intellectuals stroking their ego or idealogues hijacking words, it all boils down to the same sad truth: It’s been a bad decade for the English language. There’s no harm in having a little fun with it—I try to—but when that fun veers into shenanigans, that’s where I draw the line. I can’t be the only one who sees it, right?

Until next time,

Cal

It’s about that time again: posting time, or in truth, well past it. I tell myself I should post something here every three to four weeks, though I rarely seem to meet the deadline. I could blame this on all types of distractions and what-nots, though it really boils down to two things: (1) I forget, and (2) when I actually remember it’s time to post something, I put it off. Tomorrow is always another day, and then the tomorrow that follows it.

I’ve made some progress on the next book . . . and I hesitate to say any more than that. There is still plenty to do, and I don’t want to go throwing potential release dates around yet. The path is always rife with roadblocks, and I imagine I’ll hit one or two before the end. I can see a bit further ahead with this one than I have in the past—always a good thing—though one still must travel the distance.

While considering what to write about for the rest of this post, I recalled an article I discovered a few weeks ago. The piece was about a prize-winning author who has been accused of either (A) using AI to manufacture prose or (B) not being an actual person at all. I have harped and crowed about generative AI in previous posts, so I am not going to focus on that bit. Rather, I wanted to highlight some of the criteria referenced for determining whether this author is in fact flesh and blood.

The article stated that this particular writer had next-to-no social media presence (I am paraphrasing from memory), which supposedly constituted a red flag. My thought was, so what? Do authors need to subject themselves to the myriad offenses of Big Tech companies to be considered authors? Are humans required to do so to be considered human?

You may have noticed I do not keep profiles on any of the big name social media platforms (apart from Goodreads—I find Goodreads’s cause more noble), nor have I since circa 2012. I looked into it when I was first getting ready to publish, and I did not like what I found. The amount of personal data such platforms expect you to provide is Orwellian—A three-dimensional mapping of your face? Seriously?—and for an author looking to maintain a degree of personal privacy, it was nothing short of a deal breaker. I would rather air my thoughts on this humble site than allow the data-mongers to sell my stats off to the highest bidder. You’ve heard the saying, right? If a product is free, then you are the product?

Offenders will claim they are collecting such information in the name of security, and whether you choose to believe that is your prerogative. Cybersecurity is no joke in the modern world, and I don’t doubt that is at least part of the equation. But how much is it worth? Do you have to be of a certain age to value privacy nowadays? Should we have to forfeit it altogether to access so-called public forums?

For the record, I am inclined to believe the award-winning author in question was likely a cheat (there were other notable tells), along with a boatload of others who have managed to slip through the cracks. Writing a book is no walk in the park. It takes time, patience, and determination, not to mention a fair degree of knowhow. Society is full of wannabes, and thanks to AI, they now have an easy workaround.  

But choosing privacy over the Big Tech data-traps should not automatically lead to questions of one’s validity. Pen names exist for a reason, and they existed long before corporations sought to commodify personal information. Some of us would prefer to keep our private lives out of the public sphere, and while the data-brokers might frown on such behavior, the literary world should not.

I have to wonder what Mark Twain would have made of all this. Or J.D. Salinger.

Until next time,

Cal