You're Bloody Well Write
Two weeks ago, I went on a minor rant about the manner in which the English language was being slowly drained, or bleached, of meaning. Not all of you agreed. I wasn't surprised. Back in 1989, my university linguistics teacher and I had a screaming match right in the middle of a sixty-person class about whether ghetto dialects of English --- you know, the ones where the word "shit" substitutes for five hundred other words and a heavy dose of body language and verbal inflection is required to get the point across --- are of equal merit to the English of Samuel Johnson. His position was that since you could communicate things just as well in a ghetto dialect, as long as the communication occurred in-person, there was no superiority on either side.
My response was, "That's all well and good, but don't we have a written language so we don't have to communicate in person? And isn't a written language considered to be of merit directly commensurate to its ability to transmit meaning free of external aid like pictures, sounds, or even contemporaneity?" In other words --- if a language is truly excellent, you should able to read your great-grandfather's diary and understand everything he tried to convey.
Lacking an Académie française to govern its evolution, English has typically not been so good at passing the great-grandfather's-diary test. That does not mean that we should slack off on using the tools that we continue to have available in order to communicate meaning as effectively as possible.
With that in mind: What's wrong with Raphael's caption for this very pretty Jaguar?
He writes,
Does anybody love the Jaguar E-Type V12 more than the early straight six models? Probably not, but the big 12s were still cool.
The way that I read that first sentence is like so: The early straight six E-Types love their successors. Assuming cars can love, of course, like the cars in Cars, The Movie can love. Does anybody have more love for the V12 E-Type than the straight-six E-types do?
That's ridiculous. Clearly what Mr. Orlove means is: Does anybody love the Jaguar E-Type V12 more than they love the early straight-six models? Written like that, the sentence is unambiguous. So why not write it like that?
Well, there's the crushing pressure of the Gawker machine to be considered, demanding an endless input of clickbait and "listicles" for distribution to the moronic faithful. By and large, the Web is an unedited place and Gawker is doubly so. It's not like someone else looked at what Orlove wrote and signed off on it. And I'd be lying if I didn't admit to having made a hundred mistakes just like that for hurry-up Web writing.
I think the true answer is a little more interesting, however. I believe that we have come to rely on texting and Instagram commenting and Facebook chatting as primary means of communication. Those channels require a certain amount of compression, which is why we all laugh at our grandparents when they write FB comments that read like paper-and-ink letters from 1963. The nature of compression is to shrink the communication as much as possible without losing too much information. A JPEG is not a perfect digital representation and a MOV file is not "lossless" but we bear the losses of detail and clarity so we can get the smallest file size possible.
Another characteristic of compression is that there is processing required on both ends. It takes computing power to change a recorded song into an MP3 and it takes computing power to decode it as well. Raphael's headline is compressed. If you look at it quickly, without your computing power, it doesn't make perfect sense. You need to think about it for a moment in order to understand it.
So there you have it. Raphael's not wrong, he's just modern. Yet it's not a sort of modernity that I particularly crave for myself. So please, readers, continue to call me out when I write something that is vague or unclear or difficult to comprehend. It's my goal to continue to provide a high-quality product to the best of my ability.
Playing devil's advocate for a final moment, the number of people who posted pictures of straight-six E-Types in Raphael's comment thread with captions like "REFUTED" or "I DISAGREE" is more depressing than I can adequately convey. Listen, you idiots, he was SAYING that the straight-six car is better looking. Why are you TELLING him the same thing he was SAYING to you? And the answer is, inevitably: the Jalops are too stupid to read even the blandest, most inoffensive caption. They view everything they see on the site as a launching pad for THEIR opinions and THEIR half-baked wit and THEIR idiocy. What the writers contribute is almost irrelevant. The readers just want to be heard, no matter how stupid or ill-informed their comments may be. AER SHOULD HAVE SPECIAL RAIN TIRES FOR RACES LOL.
Mark my words, the day will come when Gawker's sites look pretty much like the screens that the citizens in Idiocracy watch. There will just be a picture of a car on the screen with the word CAR underneath it and when the viewer sees it he'll start yelling about the picture and that will be the complete interaction right there. So much for the glory of Rome.
Since there's still time for me to rage against the dying of the light, however, I'm going to do it. And if rebellion in this age consists of nothing but writing conventional English in a manner easily understandable by old people, then call me a rebel with a cause. Who is with me? Be ye ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle thy condition. Which means: if you survive this battle, you'll be a member of proper society, maybe even an aristocrat.
You might even get a Jaguar.