Exercises In Style is a book by a French Linguist, Rayond Queneau, in which the same simplistic story is told 99 times in differing ways.  Sometimes the story is first person, sometimes third; other times everything is reported verbatim, and yet others everything is reported vaguely.  The result is that Exercises In Style is a great book for demonstrating how context and background to something can change it entirely.  The story is one of a vague encounter and mild confrontation on the public transport system in Paris, the two protagonists meet twice, once when they argue and once in passing later.  The different ways in which the story is told leave the reader sometimes summising that one is in the right, and sometimes summising that the other is, while others of the Exercises will give the impression that the whole thing is a folly and to be ignored.  Another great book is Exercises in Style by Matt Madden which is the same thing but with a simple comic strip re-‘told’ in many ways graphically.

Anyway, in the original work, Queneau demonstrated that context, supporting evidence and plot, and the presentation of a work linguistically would be as important to the conveyance of a story as the basic occurences themselves.  He demonstrated in perhaps the most fun way he could’ve that these things are vital, and Exercises in style is a book that few academics working in the mechanics of writing will have not heard about.

At it’s lowest level this is demonstrated by a phrase my drama teacher used whilst I was assisting with a class of year nines, when I was at Sixth Form.  Facing me and stepping towards me he yelled “I hate you!”, then he paused called us back to positions and looked to me again.  This time he said “I [PAUSE] Hate you?” with an upward inflection as if questioning reality itself.  On paper, in a script without stage directions, each sentence he said is EXACTLY the same.  In reality one means the opposite of the other.  I’ve made the point well that context, inflection, verbalisation and so on are vital to communication.

I’ve recently been the victim of chinese whispers, and I hope it doesn’t happen to you.  A friend of mine believes I disapprove of her relationship with another friend of mine because of something I said, when in fact I was just expressing some of my exasperations and anxieties to a friend.  My point here isn’t to write one of those blogs that you can read knowing it’s a private message to someone (like a facebook “I miss a certain someone” status), in fact, I’ve not told anyone who she might know about this blog, it’s just an outlet for my frustration on the matter.

Queneau would have a field day with how she has interpretted events, and so this is just a little way for me to let off some steam and also warn a few randoms away from these situations.

Parents. Tell your kids about colloquial linguistics, before someone else does!

No related posts.

A word on online personas.  I’ve had a few obviously, having started using the internet before there was a web in around 1991.  Back in the days (not the ‘good old’ days please note!) of IRC, and alt. boards, NNTP and then the famous only-good-thing-that-Microsoft-ever-did MSN chat and of course Yahoo Chat, a handle was necessary.  These systems didn’t even allow enough space for your real, full name in most cases and besides, the outlook and purpose of the net was severely different anyway.

The Internet that was given to us by hackers of the ARPANet was a world of cliques, achievement-based acceptance and sharing of information only if you were willing to look hard, the net still embraced info for all, but it was kind of a thing you had to earn.  Just as with a web-help forum, you will need to show a little willingness to learn before you get any useful help, with the net in the old days, users relied heavily on link swapping and such, and there was no way you were just gonna give away links to people who you had no reason to respect.

Google, Web and Web 2.0 changed this.  I single out Google because it is the single largest and most successful processor and sharer of information ever.  Bar none.  Google started collecting links and allow people to search them.  They now collect photos, links, books, scholarly papers, useful technologies, navigation info, sattelite photos and for some even GPS tracking of individual people.  The information shared by Google is potentially worth trillions of dollars (international currency innit) and yet they have negated this cost for all but the stupid.

With this open spirit of the web came the open spirit of sharing aspects of identity.  Finding friends from school is easy, as is tracking down potential partners, current friends or whatever.  To at this time be still using an internet handle is stupid and outdated.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not calling for totally open ID information, simply pointing out that in today’s web with the prolific spreading of information what it is, no matter what you call yourself, a potential criminal (or even smart-arse demonstrator like me) can probably tell you all about yourself regardless of what you call yourself. Whether your facebook name is Brain Green or BG ‘Greenster’, I can almost certainly track down a load of info about you.  Internet security is not about hiding your name, it’s about hiding your bank details, phone number etc, and that is no harder/easier than it ever was.

Online, I am Owen C. Jones.  I have been for a good few years, if I do anything I want a nickname for, I call myself Seajones.  The nickname isn’t to hide my identity (Google it, you’ll see how effective that is! The first link is not me, but the second is my audio boo and the third is my twitter).  If I had a different name, you’d be able to search that, and find some forum that bore to the world my email address, and searching that would find you my website or something else that would tell you who I was.

Online personas just don’t work.  Pick one and try to find out who it is.  People like talking about themselves and so even those with a carefully thought out online handle will have chatted away about themselves Narcissus-stylee at some point.  If you can find nothing, they probably just don’t use the net much.  Now stop and think, if everyone on the net could find your name, what difference would that make to you?

Online, it’s possible to find my Name, a couple of my addresses, phone numbers, emails etc. and proudly so.  You can’t find out my bank account number, or anything that it’s important you don’t find out but the rest is there proudly attributing itself to me.  And rightly so, I don’t want someone saying to me one day “that wasn’t you, that was gobbledegeek12!”.

Consider people who tradtionally have handles, the most obvious one is hackers.  Prolific hackers include who?  Kevin Mitnick?  Not much of a handle is it?  The only hackers who routinely use handles are those who routinely break the law and then take credit for it.  Taking credit for illegal activity with your own name would be stupid, and so is not taking credit for your existence online by calling yourself by some pseudonym.

Related posts:

1. A word on your privacy Following a couple of coversations I’ve had over the couple...
2. T-shirt online shop T-shirt online shopIt’ll be at our real website soon, but...
3. Another word on FSCKVPS After my post on FSCKVPS, the company that suspended my...