Comment: Emojis

This is one of those posts where I am going to try and work out a train of thoughts as I write, which is a bit of a high-wire act (two metaphors for you there, one dead, one ailing). Written language started with pictures – man (person), antelope, water, food, etc. My guess is that these symbols once introduced (together with the appropriate materials for recording them, cave walls having their limitations) were quickly and very widely adopted. Hierogylphs are essentially these ideographs – symbolic pictures representing at first things, and then later more abstract concepts such as actions. From here the development of written language with letters representing sounds may have been quite a leap, but an inevitable one. There are whole libraries worth of study on this topic, so I am not going to embarass myself by trying to summarise this evolution, but wanted to introduce some thoughts about the direction of language today, as influenced by the introduction of emoticons and emojis.

Because there is an argument, which I wanted to test, that emojis represent a reversion of language back to its earlier origins, a degradation of the complexity of writing to drawing. Pictures with their limit range of meaning are in this context replacing words. Emojis can have a range of meaning depending on the context within which they appear, but they hardly have the subtly of the tens of thousands of words in the English language, nor are they likely to be as dynamic and fluid in their meaning. We have already seen some wit translating the Bible into cockney – will an emoji version be long in following? Probably not, which probably means that the range of meaning we can convey in these symbols is so profoundly limited that they will not replace words. Probably. Will people communicate solely in emojis in future, the written equivalent of grunting at one another? Written language started as drawings – is it reverting back to its origins?

On the whole I think not. There’s no evidence that emojis are anything other than a fun way of supplementing short written messages, often in a clever way, breaking out of the tyranny of 26 characters. A winky face can make the ironic tone of a message clear in a much simpler way than laboriously spelling it out. One to watch – will these symbols begin to proliferate and intrude into more formal contexts, outside the setting of texts and emails, and increase in volume and complexity, or have they found their niche?

Supplementary: The Shadow of the Wind (2) – a note about some translation issues.

 

Occasionally when reading this novel I came across a few phrases that jarred, and sounded unnatural. I appreciate that translating is a very difficult process, capturing not just the sense of the original but the poetry, the complexity, and the idiomatic phrasing. I also recognise that any awkwardness of phrasing could be deliberate, to emphasis an aspect of a character’s nature for example. Having said all that, there were a few usages that felt just wrong.

Some examples:

“he had augured that in her lifetime she would behold the death of everything she loved.” (268)

To use “augur” as an active verb meaning to forecast, rather than to simply signify a future event, may not technically be incorrect, but it feels archaic.

“Look here, Merceditas, because I know you’re a good person (though a bit narrow minded and as ignorant as a brick)” (Fermin) page 159,

Translating idiom is fantastically difficult, I appreciate, but “ignorant as a brick” is not an expression I recognise, and the internet hasn’t been able to provide me with any examples. OK, this is Fermin speaking, and his language is colourful, but not deliberately awkward surely?

“The downpour slithered like melted wax” (314).

Slithered is another very active verb – snakes and worms slither. It implies sideways movement, at pace – but melted wax may move sideways, but always slowly.

“What blessed innocence, Daniel, You’d even believe in the tooth fairy. All right, just to give you an example: the tall tale about Miguel Moliner that Nuria Monfort landed on you. I think the wench told you more whoppers than the editorial page of L’Osseratore Romano.”(231)

Just how wooden is this? “Landed on you”? You don’t land a tall tale on someone. And “more whoppers than the editorial page of L’Osseratore Romana” is never going to catch on!

“if he could lie better, he wouldn’t be teaching algebra and Latin; he’d be in the bishopric by now, growing fat in an office like a cardinal’s and plunging soft sponge cakes in his coffee.” (Fermin) (231).

I’ve two issues with this sentence. Firstly, wouldn’t “growing fat in a cardinal’s office” be better? I appreciate “in a cardinal’s office” is different to “an office like a cardinal’s”, but the distinction is slight, and the sentence as written is ugly and confusing – on a first read I thought there was a missing word after “cardinal’s” (hat?). The other issue is with the verb choice. Plunging is not something one does with soft sponge cakes. It is a violent, vigourous movement; surely the right choice would be “dunking”. Now obviously I haven’t read the original Spanish, and there could possibly be a reason why the author wanted us to imagine this priest aggressively shoving his soft sponge cakes into his coffee, but I doubt it.

What does all this add up to? Is this just a massive exercise in pedantry? If these were the only examples, perhaps, but there was a woodenness through the novel that was hard to escape. I sometimes rather fancifully pictured the characters talking as if in a badly dubbed movie. It made the disappointing experience of reading the novel just that little bit worse.

Comment: Proverbs

I’ve written quite a bit over the years about sayings, proverbs, idiom, and dead metaphor, so this article caught my eye yesterday

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/16/are-these-11-proverbs-for-the-digital-age 
 
If you don’t want to follow the link or read the article, the eleven phrases are:

1. Haters gonna hate
2. The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off
3. If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product
4. You’ve got to fake it to make it
5. The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed
6. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature
7. You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out
8. Don’t read the comments
9. 90% of everything is crap
10. Problem between keyboard and chair
11. The fish that is being microwaved doesn’t fear the lightning

I can say with quite a high degree of confidence that while some of these phrases show some wit in their construction (7, 10, and 11 for example) and others are useful (e.g. 1, 6 and 9), none are sufficiently robust to survive and become modern proverbs. Having said that, if the curate’s egg example proves anything, it is that the source of modern proverbs is almost impossible to predict. If a need exists for a phrase, it will be found. Incidentally, my contribution to this list, without any expectation that it will last more than a few years, is “Don’t feed the troll(s)”, which I have found useful in numerous situations online and otherwise.

Dead Metaphor

I stumbled across the concept of “dead” metaphors a while ago, and it has fascinated me ever since. My hunch is that our language is heavily littered with these terms (littered being an example) to the extent that we simply don’t notice them.
The most commonly accepted definition of a dead metaphor is that the source from which the term derives its meaning has become disassociated from the current meaning of the term.

The phrase has been challenged in recent years by linguists, and I accept it is not precise – metaphors can retain their effectiveness even when remote from their original meaning, and therefore retain their claim to the status of metaphor. In fact, metaphors are often not truly dead, just dying. Arguably they start dying from the moment they are coined, and it is only the speed with which their inbuilt meaning decays that will vary. A metaphor tied to a specific cultural event or icon will die more quickly than something more universal. To illustrate this, the word “jumbo” originally drew its meaning form the elephant of the same name – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo. To most people the term no longer conjures up the mental image of a large elephant, as it must have once done. So jumbo the metaphor died in probably less than a hundred years.

Compare this with the range of ageing but definitely still active metaphors that derive from tools – sawing, chiselling, ploughing, hammering etc. The verb “to hammer” must have been used almost immediately the noun was adopted. The term would almost certainly have been used metaphorically to describe “behaving like a hammer” as in “rain hammering down” very quickly thereafter. My guess, although I have nothing to support this, is that the noun for hammer in most languages is also used as a verb, and in a wider sense than just “using the tool”. So is “rain hammering down” an example of a dead metaphor? Certainly we don’t use it to make the audience picture hammers beating on a roof or pavement, but it retains its force as a way of describing heavy rain – it means more than just raining, in a way that jumbo doesn’t mean more than big.

Not all tools turn into verbs, let alone metaphors – we don’t “mallet” things on the head, nor ladle anything other than liquid, but we do whisk things away, spoon together, and sieve evidence for clues. Is this a matter of scale – we drive cars, instead of “car” as a verb; we fly in or by planes, but don’t say “I am going to plane to Stockholm”, and so on? Interestingly scale is a rich source of dead metaphors. Gargantuan derives from a 16th century story by Rabelais, and there can be few listeners/readers who think of french giants when using the term. Colossal derives (surely) from Colossus, mammoth from the woolly elephants, and so on. Terms to describe the quality of being small do not appear to attract the same type of language behaviour – we don’t say “Tom Thumbian” and even Lilliputian is showing off rather than metaphorical. Brobdignagian never stuck, surprisingly.