Sunday, 31 August 2008
My biggest regret about the death of the rolodex is that it’s just such a great word. A portmanteau of rolling index, as I understand it. Funny how quickly language can change—now we have a thousand different spin-off words from “blog”, which requires technology that wasn’t even on the horizon at the time the rolodex was invented (1958).
I love every time we get a new “blog” offshoot, because they all seem so damn improbable: blogosphere, liveblogging, vlog, tumblog, etc. And yet they catch on. They’re almost as silly as the names Margaret Atwood gave the corporations in Oryx and Crake: NooSkins, AnooYoo, RejoovenEsense, etc. Though the corporate trend of stuffing as many Xs Ys and Zs into product names (especially prescription drugs) has gotten pretty tiresome, I’m just glad they haven’t gone the ludicrous phonetic spelling route.
Anyway! Have you been reading Joey Comeau’s I Am Other People? ‘Cos you should. (Joey’s the guy that writes the excellent photo webcomic A Softer World.) I Am Other People is a series of interviews with people who are important to him: not necessarily anyone you’ve ever heard of, just people he knows and cares about. There generally aren’t many questions per interview, but they are quite in-depth, and elicit very thoughtful responses. The interviews also have a very back-and-forth, conversational quality, so we learn a lot not just about the interviewee, but also about Joey and about the relationship they share.
The first interview was with Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, and Ryan’s thoughts on comics and cartooning were wonderful. I’ve often felt kind of embarrassed about being interested in comics and cartooning and animation, but man did this make me feel better:
People ask me “What do you do for a living?”, I say “cartoonist”. If they press, I say I do comics online. “Cartoonist” is a good career label. I’ve never said “I’m an writer” because “writer” is just so tainted by all these 16-year-old kids still hacking their way through language but reaching for the authenticity they think the label provides. You want to be a writer, the easiest way to do that is to call yourself one. But cartoonist doesn’t attract that! There’s no prestige. People hear “cartoonist” and they think the guy who writes Garfield, the guy who draws Archie comics so that Archie looks exactly like how every other artist has drawn him since the 1940s. The result is that most cartoonists really love the art and what they’re doing. They love it enough to be lumped in with all the pablum that people think of when they hear the word.
—Ryan North
August 31st, 2008 at 12:24
I’ve recently wondered whether any truly new words—words without an etymology—enter our language, or whether nouns and verbs and adjective have become closed class and from this point forward it’s all portmanteaus and product names. The only recently novel word I can think of is “googol,” which was invented by a mathematician’s nephew who thought it sounded right. I would do some research into this but part of me doesn’t really want to know the answer.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:25
Also, I think I was the one who mentioned how often our circle talks about second-order simulacra. I at least did at one point.
August 31st, 2008 at 01:01
You did, but so did Frank.
English has such an astoundingly large lexicon that we can probably name anything the way the Germans do: just stick existing words together. Or repurpose old ones. Of course we also cut chunks out—a lot of newer words seem like compromises between portmanteaus and acronyms (à la the UN: ECOSOC, etc.). And depending on how much credence you lend, uh, the Internet, we seem to be getting a lot of new words from wordplay and misspellings (plox, woot, and the like). Now that so many more people are writing all the time because of the Internet, we’re seeing something of a divergence between written and spoken conversational languages. I’m not going to say “PASS TEH HOTSAUCE PLOX” at the diner, for example.
(And what about gorphmig and oppgorph?)
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:02
[...] I like the idea of seeing the body as a means of doing things and not as a thing in itself. Another simple concept which somehow evaded me until just recently. [...]
September 24th, 2008 at 07:00
Did your blog just post on itself?
IAN HAVE YOU CREATED SKYNET?
September 25th, 2008 at 12:17
I am convinced Skynet will arise once spambot zombie networks reach a sufficient level of complexity. Actually, I made a draft of a comic about this, but I never actually finished it. Skynet was all, U LIEK NUCLE@R W@R C|@L|$? WE HAVE GRAET OFER