Grammarly vs. the Literary Canon — Language and the Internet
In which Great Authors Take on Grammarly…and Lose, Heroically
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Winner of the Best Unique Take Award at Wonk Bridge’s 2020 Award Ceremony.
I nurse what I must admit is a persistent paranoid suspicion that my internet service provider holds a particularly low estimation of my ability to write in a way that is, by any given modern standard, efficient, legible and correct. I confess that, judged solely by contemporary standards, some among my article content for this very outlet proves that my service provider has a point, if they are not necessarily correct outright.
The trigger behind this suspicion is that, of all of the pre-playback Youtube advertisments which I encounter while using that site of a given week, 77% on average are for the text editing companion Grammarly. The remainder of the adverts targeted to me suggest that Youtube (and whomever else) believe, rather adorably, that I am most likely female, speak German, and am living somewhere in east Asia. But that is by-the-by.
I write a considerable amount of material broadcast, to the extent that it is, on public online channels. I privilege Firefox, a relatively secure browser as far as avoiding unwanted forwarding of user data is concerned. I do use Facebook messenger, and I typically write messages on there in one of two registers.
- Perhaps, unsurprisingly, a register virtually indistinguishable from the one I use to write articles like this one (for it is my most natural mode).
- The kind of grammatically pitiless text-speak — featuring occasional random lack of definite articles, unjustifiable elongation of vowel sounds for emphasis, a pronounced unwillingness to begin new messages with pronouns — that makes a kind of cubism of syntax, and mocks the idea that writing need make semantic sense at all in order to convey meaning.
I also encounter the odd-metered advertisement for Grammarly on Facebook, although the remainder of the advertising fronted to me on that platform is fairly pro forma, stuff related to my recent browsing history, and Facebook’s impression that, for instance, having just booked a stay at a hotel, the first thing now on my mind is to look at more hotel options. I can only presume, given the aggression with which Grammarly is marketed to me — which well-oversteps the limits of what is generally considered over-marketing, [1] — that Youtube has identified the ‘need’ for grammatical support in this most incorrigible of customers, and may well have availed themselves of private messenging data in order to make themselves familiar with the dimensions of that need as they see it.
Language and the Internet
The question which most interests me out of that is, not “How did Youtube come to possess this data?”, which is fairly easy to deduce, but rather, “What kind of a relationship does the internet as a whole have with language?”
For any of those among you who looked at the article’s subtitle, and wondered if it should be interpreted literally — the answer is yes, we will indeed be feeding the works of widely acclaimed masters of literature through Grammarly, and sieving through the chewed remains. Of course, it would be pique and rhetorically dishonest to take writing conceived as literature, and from bygone ages; feed them through a professional correspondence solution; and then pronounce the ensuing bloodbath commentary on the net’s contemporary relationship to language. Pitting Joyce & friends against Grammarly is obviously a joke. One of them doesn’t have a chance of beating the other, though at this point it’s hard to say which is which.
But there is truth somewhere in the jest — it is a joke which leads to a point, instead of merely decorating it. Unlike a number of other human properties, language (in form, if not in fact) is entirely the product of social conditioning. While drive to acquire language is understood to be innate, language relies entirely on social convention, learning and consensus for its shape. As a result, the form of a language, and the way in which it is used, is tied intrinsically to the character of the society using it — which makes it a subject of study as searingly clear and maddeningly opaque as one could wish for, when trying to understand what exactly is the nature of the society in which they live.
Meme Talkin’
We’ve already alluded to the fact that the internet, being its own place, makes a kind of dialect of its own out of a host language. Meme theory is especially helpful in providing a summary of one dominant informal register of language on the internet. According to “A Study of English Language Used on Social Media Memes” the linguistic register which mediates such meme time tends to be based around:
- Abbreviation & Contraction
- Usage of subordinate conjunctions like “When…” to begin a sentence
- The use of grammatical fragments which, isolated or moved into a different context would be considered non-sequiturs, but which in the arena of a meme take on meaning by consensus.
- With respect to non-verbal components of communication through the ‘language’ of memes, a vernacular of common understandings, often based on understanding of typical demographic and group behaviours, is required to parse the non-verbal components of the meme, which are both plentiful and key in successful communication via meme.
It is interesting in and of itself that, within the culture of internet memes, a set of linguistic traits which are both relatively dynamic and fairly constant have developed and lasted well beyond the lifespan of an average meme (which runs to a fraction over 4 months). For instance, the overmemes ‘No u’ or ‘When…’ have far outlasted any given meme which they have characterised, and have ostensibly become part of a common informal vernacular.
What is more interesting still is what studies of memes-as-generalised-anthropological-construct suggest about the reasons why they develop in the first place. According to Linxia & Ziran (2006), mimetic language development is driven by:
- Education and knowledge impairment
- Idiomatic use of words and phrases
- Casual exchanges in communication
Meme talk accounts for but a single ‘net dialect’, remember. There are different prescriptions for digital business (in which the joke is formed by an infinite variety of ‘style guides’ which bear no substantial difference to one another) and online dating (in which the joke is of an entirely obscured variety, concerning which questionable PUA-esque ads Youtube will serve me with my having searched for a ‘Tinder messaging style guide’).
We can see, through the difference in our means of expressing ourselves, the way in which our social natures and our language reciprocally affect one another. In the words of the psychologist and linguist Lera Boroditsky:
“Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, […] research shows, make people think and act differently.”
There is, in other words, nothing social — nothing intellectual, philosophical or ethical — which is not first linguistic.
The Clipped Wing of a Word
In general, the language of the internet makes roughly the same pursuit of ‘linguistic’ value (that’s to say, the use of figurative techniques[2]) as a technical manual. Much as the internet’s social constitution was essentially laid out post-war in Theodor Adorno’s flat constellational hierarchy, the nature and effects of which Wonk Bridge has discussed at length, its linguistic lineage — in English, at least — can be traced back to two writers in particular. Those two writers are George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, the latter of whom is the namesake of a Grammarly competitor.
Orwell’s pessimistic humanism and Hemingway’s patrician cosmopolitanism have done a great deal to inform some of the net’s other most profound sensibilities as well[3], but it is for their language that they are most interesting. They are perhaps the most popular 20th century writers in the English language who are both ostensibly canonical and widely read (in the sense that their respective figures and appeals are recognisable to those who are not aficionados of good literature). Compared with their forebears of the 19th century and well before, who wrote from the privilege of a writerly retreat from wide affairs, they were men of action — eager to inspect upon the meat of war, if not the machinery of politics; full of cause; itinerant, prone to womanise. They were both journalists and had at all times, including through their fiction, the perceived need of addressing a wide and indiscriminate audience. They both, in short, saw the all-consuming purpose of their work as being communication, and both devised a set of discrete rules for the use of language in accordance with this.
No writers in English had ever codified their approach to language as thoroughly as Orwell and Hemingway did, Orwell in his Six Rules of Writing and Hemingway in his philosophy of the iceberg. Orwell’s schema can be seen below. Hemingway’s was explicitly derived from his time as a newspaperman; focus on event to the exclusion of context or interpretation (or else risk editorialising), so that only the ‘tip’ of the proverbial iceberg of overall theme shows in the final written work. It is a ‘theory’ of language which has become synonymous with literary minimalism, with literary minimalism itself being at least somewhat oxymoronical, for it is the kind of writing which admits as few writerly features — anything which would look out of place in commonplace 21st century conversation — as possible.
Refrain from the use of common metaphor; avoid lengthy words; be scrupulous in avoiding passive voice; be free of jargon. There is barely an element of these theories of writing which has not come to serve as a central pillar of the formal dialect of internet communication, the kind which prevails in both public content and private-professional correspondence. The intent behind following these rules of language is ostensibly to make use of language more communicative. That, in itself, may be something of a problem.
Communication, Consideration & Clarification
The idea ‘language is a tool of communication’ is so axiomatic that we can easily come to view it, and so language itself, in two dimensions. By thinking of language as purely a communicative tool, however, we risk overlooking the two other vital services that it provides. Language is also a tool for hewing coherent thoughts out of complex impressions, and for clarifying and delineating the bounds of problems. The former idea, which we might call ‘consideration’, is a solely first-person employment of language, the first language of the internal voice of the mind. The latter is a more impersonal form of language altogether, and might be called ‘clarification’.
The kind of language that is best adapted to perform functions of consideration or clarification is very different from that which is purely communicative. A language that is roughly as well optimised to do any of the three things involved is different from any of the ‘specialised’ kinds of language.
The Register of Clarification
The distinctions between these kinds of language can hardly be gotten away from as one looks back to key examples from canons of world literature. If philosophy tends most towards the register of clarification, then we can see that this is a kind of language that can only be simplified so much. Of Western philosophers, Descartes and Russell are perhaps the most easy and unpedantic in style, and even at their most relatively straightforward Grammarly sees fit to dub the latter “bland” and “a bit unclear”. If one were to subject a putative French-supporting Grammarly to Descartes’ originals, one expects the verdict would be rather similar. It would nevertheless require chutzpah in the extreme to suggest that Russell, among the most linguistically meticulous of perhaps history’s most linguistically meticulous school of philosophy, could have successfully delineated the issues concerned in ‘On Denoting’ any differently or more successfully than he did.
The Register of Consideration
Where flouting the norms of concision, brevity and modesty are concerned, the linguistic register of ‘consideration’ is even worse. Anyone who has ever felt relieved and happier having written the contents of a distressing or confusing day into a diary is aware of the effect language can have on not only communicating thoughts, but in giving them order, bringing about unexpected syntheses of ideas, or ushering forth new ones altogether. The register of language required to do so is markedly different — freer in character — than that of communication, which prizes the conveyance of ends, or that of clarification.
The register of ‘consideration’ is the register of developing thought, and is most common to poetry, or else any work in any other genre which is conceived with a poetic mindset. In this register, in the Indo-European languages, Shakespeare and Kalidasa reign supreme. You can see it in Lear or Hamlet; we view Edmund interrogate the boundaries of nature and law, of bastardy and legitimacy, in real time. Iambic pentameter rules in English poetry owing to its ability to most closely mimic the rhythm of natural thought. The same in Hamlet, or in any of the Bard’s soliloquies. As his characters make their interrogations, we are ostensibly watching Shakespeare do the same, and observing this path of working-out is no less thrilling than an equivalent path leading to a final mathematical proof; coming to grips with how others build thought helps us build our own. It is done entirely in the register of consideration.
English is particularly suited to the register of consideration, with its swollen lexicon and vast array of means to the approach of a given thought. That’s as opposed to the no-less-beautiful strictures of, for instance, the Romance languages, which are accordingly more conducive to the register of clarity, and so to philosophy.
Poets, and poetry, have in various passages of history been exalted as among the worthiest, most prestigious, and most beloved of professions. In some cultures — such as Georgia’s — it still is; and yet it is only remarkable now in the West for how negligibly it is esteemed at all. Why might this distrust of the merchants of language be so pervasive? And what might this mean?
The Problem of Communication
One of the reasons early modern English remains so popular among readers is that it is a language in the throes of exploring its own form and extent — it’s a new tongue spreading its wings for the first time. When Shakespeare, Chapman, Marlowe, Milton neologise so rampantly and experiment with registers as they do, they’re testing the limits of what their language can express. In such a way, early modern English is perhaps the first literary corpus written outside of the Italian city states to fully embody the Renaissance will towards individuation and personal freedom.
However, where language is concerned, there is much evidence to suggest that individuation and personal freedom are not always qualities that travel together. Indeed, one conclusion which preoccupies the average Wonk Bridger with its insistence across many lines of inquiry relative to the internet is that this, humanity’s most profound tool of freedom, has rather shown the degree to which the majority are made nervous by the prospect of the more total freedom which the internet promises. We are nevertheless made thoroughly free(r) via having the net available to us — but we see language has responded mimetically, via contraction into greater homogeneity, not differentially, with a move towards great variety and heterogeneity. If language has responded as such, we can presume it is largely because the mass of the people have responded as such — confronted with means to achieve a more-or-less absolute difference, a really tremendous degree of individuation through the internet, they prefer to shrink instead into what is simple and familiar.
What is explorative and ambitious in language is thus disdained. Words are disappearing from English, Spanish and Hebrew at a greater rate than new words are appearing. The average sentence in English has reduced in length by 75% over the past 500 years. Given the rampancy of the informal linguistic register of the internet, a cultural dispreference for literature that is ‘literary’, and the profusion of text-speak in all but the most formal of business communications, the Acropolitan’s assertion that “by the year 2100, all in-sentence punctuation, such as commas, colons, and semicolon, might be reduced altogether from our language,” does not seem all too farfetch’d.
We quite rightly are beginning to apportion greater concern to incipient environmental woes, and chide ourselves at our prior ignorance of possibilities to arrest the rot. Are we taking the possible fact of an equivalent intellectual decline — not merely the means to which we purpose intellectual activity, but the health of the in-earnest building blocks of intellectual activity themselves — altogether too lightly?
What My Words Reveal About Me
A certain grandiloquence in language and expression has marked many of the great epoques of human advancement — the Symposium is a functionally useless tract, as far as modern definitions of function are concerned, for it consists of nothing more than a set of prolonged digressions from a given subject matter with copious uses of figurative language. And yet, this golden volume in the the register of consideration was authored by a group of thinkers whom collectively all but invented a great many of the practical systems on which the Western episteme — and, by extension, tangible society — now relies. The same properties, and occasionally an approximate profundity of social effect, can be seen in the Analects, the correspondence of Sancho and Sterne, Il Cortegiano, the pamphleteer-journalism of the American Enlightenment, the Meghadutam and Gitagovindam.
It is perhaps egregious of me to relate my impression — which is anecdotal — that a narrower use of language often commutes to a narrowness in thinking, and I concede that this idea is hypothetical and apt to be qualified either way. However, one cannot help, returning again to the shrine of Hemingway the Unintended Saint of Businesspeak, but infer the hint of a parallel between our times which are increasingly stratified, unimaginative, and at all times businesslike, with our torpid, oppressed conception and use of language; of our dictionaries that are preferred to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive.
There is a passage in one analysis of Hemingway’s writerly technique — “Hemingway’s Camera Eye”, by Zoe Trodd — which is particularly telling, and so particularly fascinating, with regard to the unwitting social effects which may have been enabled by the adoption of the iceberg theory as a majority linguistic value. Trodd writes that Hemingway’s style, in addition to making like the proverbial iceberg, “is also a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic.” While this is a humourously ironic — and perhaps entirely necessary — defiance of the theory itself, Trodd then suggests that Hemingway’s style obliges that the reader “fill the gaps left by [Hemingway’s] omissions with their feelings.”
There is certainly much space left in Hemingway by the absence of defined thematic shapes, space which the reader then fills in with their feelings. ‘Fill it in with your feelings’ might as well also be the linguistic — and so the intellectual, ethical and philosophical — war-cry of our truth-resistant times, ones which just so happen to purpose as their main tool of communication and mediation a forum which treats Hemingway’s approach to language as gospel, and abounds in non-descriptive language. Following centuries of purple prose, Hemingway’s will to the elimination of context seemed notionally progressive, ‘manly’, even democratic in spirit. Now it is one of those oblivious rebellions, whose reason for being has been functionally obscured by its unintended consequences, which we today are now suffering.
The Three Grammars
Let us, at the death, be frank about Grammarly — it is not a tool that was conceived in sin, and it certainly was not meant to be able to parse forms of high literature. Its primary virtue, for which it is reasonably well-equipped, is excusing the deficiencies in standards of public education in English that result in a large number of people reaching professional age still without mastery of some of the basics of the language.
It is merely a monster — that is, a monster as per the original conception of that term, from the Latin monstrum, which is itself descended from the verb moneo (“to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell”); a warning.
In his Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino suggested that “Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.” Knowledge and language are all but inextricable as concepts — this is ostensibly proven by the phenomenon of natural language, itself a development to enable the acquisition of knowledge. In a world whose solidity intensifies just as it seems to disintegrate [4] before us, sublimation can only be achieved by a truly athletic language — a various and a versatile language. A free language.
We cannot hope to get by purely on communication. By attempt of doing so, we are dooming ourselves to what we already know; and what we already know is, self-evidently, not enough.
[1] I have frequently been so infuriated by this form of legitimised spam as to have been tempted to go ad-blocker, even though I consider this commercially unethical, as ad-revenue remains the only source of income for a number of our most valuable online service providers, awaiting a viable alternative to be developed.
[2] That’s to-say-to-say, literary devices including metaphor, simile etc. as well as digressive passages, a non-linear method of structuring etc.
[3] Orwell’s sublimation of artistry to a dominant political purpose, and his tendency towards a polemical understanding of his political opponent, has informed the register of Twitter more than any other element which I can discern as being individual. Hemingway, meanwhile, coined the practice of jaunting around the world while remaining in a state of impregnable solipsistic reverie that cannot be said to be anything but a harbinger of the Instagram mindset.
[4] While I find it amusing that Mr. Brison’s article is something of a contradiction-in-construction, being so short, I heartily endorse his central message.
