I can only hope that Doug was kidding when he said this:

“Words are for saying things, not doing things.”

I’m going to omit all the obvious arguments that this is clever-sounding hogwash, an empty slogan that ironically contradicts itself, because Doug is smarter than I am and already knows them. Because of what he does and teaches, I don’t think Doug believes it either. Irony? Sarcasm? I don’t know. I’ll admit I couldn’t make it through the endless Yippie Manifesto it was attached to, so perhaps it’s some kind of joke too subtle for rubes like me.

But I will say I believe this to be not just a philosophically untenable position on its face, but one of the most dangerous statements I’ve seen come out of an educator’s mouth (or do Tweets come from beaks?) in a long time, representing a facile diminishing of one of our most potent and (sadly) too often untapped and untrained powers as human beings, cultural participants, and members of communities.

If you need an example, look to Washington. We have a President right now who would agree wholeheartedly with– and who lives out– this sentiment about sayin’ and doin’. Words are action… misunderestimate them at your peril.

Erin McKean’s TED Talk on Redefining the Dictionary is pithy, insightful and interesting. Usually with web video you get to choose just two of those qualities. It’s also the first time since an early lit crit class that I can remember anyone using the word "synecdochical" in any sentence, much less one spoken out loud.

McKean’s talk is about how traditional the form of one of our most common references– the dictionary– is, having hardly changed in hundreds of years (it is essentially steam punk technology) and some pointers to how it might be transformed in the light of distributed, networked knowledge and read/write social webs. Some of this distribution is already happening with online dictionaries and dictionary like things of various kinds, integration of dictionary functions into search engines, Wiktionary, etc… but the importance of this talk is not about dictionaries per se as much as it is the concept of the dictionary as a metaphor for ways the social web can be produce levers for knowledge. And not just in the sense of members of that web contributing to a centralized resource, but participants’ own sites as sources themselves.

The exciting possibility is finding more ways to bring together individual small pieces of word wisdom, from magic words to the insight of  irascible linguist bloggers, from one-letter words to the dictionary of grandiloquence, one that includes inveterate word-coiners and language observers alike.

This talk also has me thinking about the knowledge that we believe is passed down to us from our elders. In the talk, McKean refers to the story of the Ham Butt. My mother not only cuts the ends off the ham before she cooks them (which meant we got to fry that tasty piece up for an early treat) but told me this exact story by explanation, attributing it to my great-grandmother, who confirmed it not long before she died. I still do the same, despite knowing better. I have no doubt my great grandmother believed that she originated the story and my mother certainly believes it is a family anecdote. How much of what we think we know as educators, what we have learned can or can’t or should or shouldn’t be done is Ham Butt wisdom?

While on the subject, Visuwords is a visualization engine for mapping relationships between words using data from the Princeton University WordNet.

The resurrection of John Ciardi’s “On Words” radio show as an NPR Podcast is an example of a still largely untapped podcast market: shining light on the dark archive of older materials currently walled off and kept from us. Podcasters seem to be highly focused on being “new and now” while there is a ton of great stuff that I never had a chance to hear that I would love to have available in a format convenient to my own listening habits. Plus, we are early in the game and most current podcasts are crap– even the worst clunker in many of these shows’ archives would be ten times more interesting than the best of many of the current offerings…

The web has bestowed upon me the Bruce Sterling speech Cory Doctorow mentioned while introducing Sterling at last night’s Etech keynote. If you’re a writer, artist, geek, gamer, or language lover, you should go read it. Some bits:

Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying
to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible
obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years,
“woo the muse of the odd.”

[...]

I don’t know many works of art that last that are
condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are
deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they’ll
never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that
straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell
with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what
society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird.
Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly,
thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of
horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to
recognize your own significance in culture!

[...]

Don’t become a
well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull.
Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle.
Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the
muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge
plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s
off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.
If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read
about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites
and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of
extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants.

[ruminate etech etech06 sterling writing geek]

I guess if "MySpace Whore" is out, then being a "link whore" is out too? What happened to Danah is sad and a bit funny, reflecting a strangely reductivist view of language that is completely at odds with technological affordances of communication. Maybe she should have run her whole proposal through a translator and put it in Victorian era speech. Ah, the possibilities. MySpace Harlot? Link Strumpet? MySpace Courtesan? Link Tart? Lady of Easy MySpace Virtue?

Oh, and the title is a bit of Blake, who wrote:

"What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate?"

[ruminate, myspace whore, link whore, language]