----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Smith" <mjs at smithbowen.net>
"Sounds more like those constipated jerks Strunk & White.
Back in the very best period of English prose they had a concept they called 'copia', which might be translated as 'copiousness' or 'abundance' or even 'luxuriance'. Pithy prose is a bourgeois shibboleth. "
--------------------- Agreed about Strunk and White.
I'm willing to blame the bourgies for everything, but the pithy/plain vs the ornate goes back to at least the Romans. Who are the poster children? Cato vs Cicero? I forget. The "copia" strictly speaking has more to do with wealth of examples and allusions, which was a requirement of learned discourse and which people like Erasmus made available to the common folk by composing books filled with copia that you could crib from.
Anyway.
What's fascinating about the pithy/minimalist style in the twentieth century, is the influence of "proletarian" writing on the hard-boiled detective genre...and eventually on Camus, Hemingway, Carver, and so on. And, I'm fascinated, because there was nothing proletarian about the "proletarian" style. It was more of an invention of the CP and idiots like my countryman Mike Gold than it reflects anything about the copiousness of the language of workers who, in my experience, take a certain amount of pleasure in word play, hyperbole, metaphor, and bombast.
As a technical writer, I can attest to the righteous discipline of pithy and to the ways it has refined my ear for bullshit and nonsense. But what might hold for describing a subroutine, does not apply to the wealth of life, shared reality, and passionate dreams.
Anyway.
Although I find shag's style deeply grating and find her invective mode offensive, I also think she has valuable insights and I think she does a lot of work to educate us in current sociological thought. The contempt, insults, and fuckyouness I can certainly do without, but it seems to come with the package. Sometimes it even seems that she presents the invective as proof of her working class credentials, and *that* I find really offensive.
But right now we are all posting overtime so it seems unfair to single her out for it. Also, I think it's counter-productive at this time to enforce the three-post rule, especially programmatically.
Joanna