Blogorrhea Junior

Presecriptive vs. Descriptive

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I've taken to starting almost every writing or literature class I teach, whether it's remedial or advanced, with a brief lecture about the basic building blocks of both: words. It goes something like this: Our spoken vocabulary is usually limited to about 200 words, which means that many of them do double, triple or even quadruple duty. The words "stuff," "things," and the unholy trinity of "dat, dese, and dose" (not to mention "dem") stand in for much more precise nouns and verbs. The possible vocabulary residing in the OED is something like half a million words, one of the largest wordhoards (thank you, Old English!) in the world. Without a decent vocabulary, our efforts to express ourselves are not very different from lying in the crib, screaming and flailing our limbs.

Because many of my students are first or second generation Americans (and the ones that aren't should be reminded we're nearly all immigrants) I work in the Eddy Peters quote on the icon above, which actually goes like this:  "Not only does the English language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head and goes through their pockets."  I end by sharing my favorite words with them and why I love them, and every class I teach from then on has at least two or three new vocabulary words associated with it, some the jargon of criticism, some not.

My most recent remedial class ate this up and immediately started to demand vocabulary lists. They ran out and bought dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) and they shout out, "what's that mean?" when I use a word they don't know. I luff them. They got exactly what I mean.

One of the other subversive "rules" I offer them is that grammar doesn't really matter. They're not dumb; they've seen professional writers use fragments and one-sentence paragraphs, split infinitives, and decline to use "whom" when they should. How come they can get away with it and we can't? they whine. Not fair! And they're right. The difference, I tell them, is that you have to learn the rules to be allowed to break them. There's a fine line between breaking grammatical rules for a purpose and just looking like an maroon.

Or is there?

In my earlier days of teaching and editing, I would have said "oh hell yes!" Now, I'm not so sure. If the primary purpose of language is to communicate, those 200 words actually do a pretty good job, with or without "correct" grammar, thanks to our ability to decipher meaning from context and body language. "Yo, gimme one a them," will generally get us what we want with a little pointing. Immigrants and tourists prove that every day. Those big vocabularies and perfect grammar only really come into play when we want to express complex, precise ideas. Even then, language often fails miserably because (and nobody ever admits this) we all have our own personal definitions of words, nuanced definitions that aren't necessarily communally agreed-upon or sanctioned by the dictionary. That's what Holmes is saying in the quote I started this post with. (And wow, look at the grammatical errors in that sentence: "quote" instead of "quotation"; sentence ending in a preposition. And yet, I'm sure you understood what I said, right?)

I have, in fact, become a Descriptivist, rather than a Prescriptivist, according to Jack Lynch, in The Lexicographer's Dilemma. I'm more interested in how language functions and changes in the real world than in enforcing the arbitrary rules we made up to govern it. This may seem like a bad stance for a teacher of basic writing skills to take, but I'm just as interested in fostering the creative use of language and its continuing development as I am in honing my students' skills, because without that sense of playfulness about language, they're never going to either enjoy or become truly proficient in English, spoken or written.

In that spirit, I give you Stephen Fry's diatribe about the Prescriptivists, in kinetic typography:

 

Glyphs and Ampersands and Rubrics! Oh My!

One of the things that often gets sacrificed to the beautiful regularity of type is the quirky individuality of handwriting, with its swashes, ligatures, and shorthand. Early medieval books copied in Latin were full of abbreviations, rubrics, and illuminated capitals that printers like Caxton tried to emulate, while making their books and broadsides more legible. But it wasn't quite the same. Hand-copied work has the luxury of working in many colors quite easily, as opposed to the multiple passes required with a press. I can't think of anything that would bring this home more clearly than the exhibit I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week:"The Art of Illumination," which featured pages from the Hours of the Duc de Berry, one of the most famous illuminated books still in existence

It's an absolutely exquisite piece of work, done by a caliber of artist that comes along once in a lifetime. In this case, it was three brothers: Herman, Paul, and Jean de Limbourg, who started on the book when they were in their mid-teens (they would have been apprenticed at a much earlier age). Each page is carefully composed to integrate both the words and the decorative elements as a whole, and to show off the illuminator's art. The page here (click to enlarge) is a calendar page listing the saints days and holidays for the month (yep, there were a lot more then than now) and the page measures about 6 x 4.5 inches, to give you some idea of the size of the work on it.

What I love about medieval calligraphy is how fancy it is, with its illuminated capitals, red letters (also known as rubrics), and pothooks on all the letters. Most of that was eliminated as typography  developed to make print more legible, but we still see it in swashes and glyphs, including ampersands, on some typefaces. Usually they appear in display headlines precisely because they do make block text, to our eyes, hard to read. But that's not the only use for glyphs, at least in Cameron Moll's mind. Just recently, he released the third poster of a series of typographical edifices he constructs with typeface glyphs and characters, "Colosseo." Here's a little vid about its development:

Colosseo: Reimagining the Roman Coliseum with type (Canon 7D) from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

Along with the print (which is currently being offered at a 30% discount), Moll offers a print of the glyphs he used in its creation, most of which are elaborate flourishes reminiscent of calligraphy.

And if you can't afford an illuminated manuscript to take home, or even Cameron Moll's print, you can own some really cool ampersands for use in your own digital work. Just yesterday, the newsletter of font distributor My Fonts spotlighted a font collection called "Coming Together," which is a compilation of ampersands designed by a huge number of typographers. I know a lot of people who are fascinated by ampersands and the varying designs they come in, so this is your chance to not only own some really cool ones but to benefit the work of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.The collection was put together by SOTA, the Society of Typographic Aficionados and it's only $20.

Letterpress Obama

Our new president seems to have inspired a lot of people all over the world, not just here at home. You've all seen Shepard Fairey's Obama "Hope" poster, and probably Cameron Moll's beautiful temple and church posters. Now here's a great combination of the two, in subject and technique, from a designer in India over at KishoreLive. There are 45 of them left, and if you missed out on Shepard Fairey's poster, this would make a lovely substitute. What makes this a little different from Moll's posters is that Kishore has included words and phrases too, rather than just random letters. They're 14x20 and $40 ea. with free international shipping. Since the poster is copyrighted, I'm only posting a picture of the zinc plate used to make it. You can see more pictures of the poster itself over at Kishore's photostream on Flickr.

I'm not much for political memorabilia, but think I'm gettin' me one of these.

Buy a Set of Vowels

Or a consonant or two, for that matter.I thought while we were on the subject of paper cutting, that I'd draw your attention to The Cutty Spot, where New York-based graphic designer Peter Karras is painstakingly producing 1-off cut mosaics of each letter of the alphabet. They look like a huge amount of work, but if you have a love of paper art and typography, they're going to collide happily here, like peanut butter and chocolate. Take a look at the closeup, then go see the full poster: This post brought to you by the letter U and the Grid Kid.