What Words Do I Own?

The wonderfully intelligent Caveblogem, who has been compiling a series of linguistic analyses of bloggers’ sites, paid me the great honor of deconstructing the Reading Room yesterday, and I’ve been poring over his post ever since. I spend so much of my time picking apart other people’s writing that it’s a rare treat to get someone else to do it to my own. Caveblogem constructs word clouds that effectively bring you face to face with your own privileged lexicon, your vocabulary’s greatest hits, as it were, and of course this is deeply fascinating because inevitably it tells you a lot about your obsessive preoccupations in writing and posting.

It’s always struck me that blogs are immensely intriguing because they distill the essence of the person writing onto the screen. It’s inevitable in a format where the blogger gets to choose on a regular basis what it is they’re going to talk about. We can’t help but get drawn back into our own personal universes of concerns and pleasures. Yet looking at the word cloud for the Reading Room, it was nevertheless surprising which were the words du jour: shadowy, intolerable, vibrant, anticipatory, open-mindedness. Some of the other words I could recognize immediately as personal favourites: acute, barricades, credulity, fiercely, idyll, intrigues, magnetic, rationality, transcends, vitality. I can almost see a pattern emerging, not in terms of what the words mean, particularly, rather the musicality of them, their poetry. I know I pick words because I think they are beautiful. I choose them because I like the way they feel on my tongue, and the zest they add to a sentence. As I was driving in the car today I was thinking over a chapter in a book I’d been reading about some of the great personalities among the dons in Oxbridge over the course of the twentieth century. The particular chapter was about women dons, and it was pretty thin on the ground as the author could only find two to talk about. One, a Classicist named Jane Harrison, he considered from the angle of her endless failed love affairs and from her work. The author hadn’t paid so very much attention to the work of a lot of the other male dons he’d written about, but Harrison’s work he studied carefully in order to come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t quite good enough.

Now this annoyed me because there were many male dons under discussion who had clearly not excelled in scholarship (trust me – a don’s life is often about many things besides research; teaching and administration to name the big ones, but also consultancy and politics out in the other world, too). It’s always seemed to me in the professional arena that men are very tolerant of other men’s faults but women need to be more than perfect to gain their grudging approval; maybe that’s changing now. Good, if so. But the point of this long anecdote is the way that I felt myself paring down all the many things I thought and felt about this unwelcome disparity in judgment into a concentrated sentence that pleased me. I wanted to say something like: it seemed to me that all the publications mentioned were as insightful and as flawed as each other, regardless of whether men or women had authored them, and there was yet to be a work of academics that has not been, nor will in time be, surpassed by newer thinking. And I wanted to chip away at it until it became a compact and balanced sentence: there can be no work of academic criticism that is without flaws nor limitations, that will not in time be superceded by the new. It’s not quite there yet, but that’s what it’s like inside my head all the time, this endless chipping away at sentences because one whose delectable words suit your purpose is a form of intense pleasure.

The first word cloud Caveblogem did for me showed me the words I take delight in using; the second, whose calculations I won’t go into here, brought me up sharp against the self I construct in language. Lines of words in this cloud sound to me like Surrealist poetry containing the enigma of the way I think. If someone had filled me full of bourbon and asked me to pen some automatic writing, I couldn’t have done better than this: ‘life literature live love makes marriage’ or ‘ideas individual inner intellectual into invisible’. It’s not exactly my unconscious speaking: the unconscious is a word-free zone. It’s very vivid and restlessly churning down there, but always silent. These words seem to me to collect in the lake that provides the rite of passage between those silent depths and the noisy surface. What comes up has to pass through their condensed soup. It’s not so much a case here of the words I own, but rather a salute of recognition to the words that own me.

And finally, Caveblogem (or at least his computer) generated a haiku from the most common words I used. The poor long-suffering computer crashed six times doing this because of a lack of monosyllabic words in my private lexicon, which certainly tells you something. There are a few monosyllabic replies to that I could type here, but lets settle for: oops. Anyhow, I thought the haiku was a work of computer-generated genius and here it is:

In boy’s forthright sneer
she adheres perilously
to the politeness.

Now that really tells you everything you need to know about me and my secret writing life. So all I want to say now is a huge thank you to Caveblogem for having thought up and conducted these brilliant experiments on bloggers’ sites and particularly for having conducted his research on mine. It’s been truly fascinating.