Yes, I am being a tad lazy today by reprinting a quotation from a man whose views I admire enormously, or at least, I have yet to read anything of his with which I disagreed. I refer to the ever-excellent 'Theodore Dalrymple' (aka: Dr. Anthony Daniels) who has this to say on the subject, not so much of bad language as indicated in my title, but excruciatingly sadistic language of a type likely to reduce grown men to tears:
"The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else?
I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seem, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error...
Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. Ii'd rather listen to my local pub bore than to a paper entitled 'Open Ended Poetic Closure and the Digital Interface':'The aim of this paper is to read Plath's work through the lens of contemporary hermeneutic discourse concerning the autonomy of text and language, while situating it within recent developments in digital poetry and electronic means of experiencing literary texts.'
I have sometimes tried to write parodies of such language, but try as I might, clarity keeps breaking out. The habit of using language to convey meaning is too deeply ingrained in me now ever to be overcome. I am a dinosaur."
- Theodore Dalrymple, Second Opinion
I can only ask whether "digital poetry" is the sort of poetry which demands that you raise two digits in response? Or one digit if you're American. See, this is an equal opportunities blog!
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