Literacy: May 2008 Archive Page
Sentence punctuation to indicate slowed speech rate
On page 28 of Robert Harris's novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride, "Not a word, boy. You listening? They did not get. One. Single. Word." That's the usage I'm talking about. So it's at least ten years old. Now, if you can find an occurrence that is earlier than that, and earlier than all the ones above yours in the list of comments below (if there are any yet), kindly supply the details.
The Storybook Forest Copyeditor
If your father is an English professor, how do you respond to poorly written signs in a kiddie park?Everywhere I go, I like taking pictures of signs with mistakes that make good classroom proofreading examples.
Shortly after I moved to Western Pennsylvania, I learned that Idlewild Park is the regional version of Disneyland. Every year we get season passes, and a regular stop for us is Storybook Forest -- which my wife remembers visiting when she was a little girl.
Who knows how many generations of children have seen this sign and wondered about the anonymous dwarven sign-maker who claims ownership over the familiar seven?
My son, a voracious reader, takes a scientific interest in words. After getting his six-year-old sister interested in comic books, he helped me teach her about onomatopoeia (notably "thwipp," which every Spider-Man fan recognizes as the sound of web-shooters.)I was quite amused when Peter launched into a critique of the supposedly educational sign pictured below. (The audio file is about 2 minutes long.)
The Power of Suggestion
With every step "forward" in any area of human endeavor, something is gained, and with rare exception there is a concomitant loss. I feel this keenly in video game design, as the cutting edge of graphics slices into the future, opening up new and ever hotter arteries of experience for the player, but leaving imagination dead in its wake. Consider an informal visual chronology of computer game graphics:
Left to right, top to bottom: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Rogue (1980), Lords of Midnight (1984), Master of Magic (1993), Age of Wonders 2 (2002), Battle for Middle-Earth (2004).
The earliest text adventures used words alone to suggest the game world, allowing the player's imagination to fill in all of the details. Later, the ideogrammatic use of ASCII characters made possible things like the dungeon floorplans of Rogue to be clearly delineated, but that "*" that represented a pile of gold was still something to conjure with. With each step in the progression from limited-palette, low-resolution graphics to high-res 3D models and particle effects -- with each step toward a more photorealistic rendering of the game environment -- the player has to do that much less creative work, that much less imaginative interaction.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad progression. The trade-off is that we get games that are more immediately, actively immersive, as opposed to ones in which we have to work to immerse ourselves. Something is lost, but something else is certainly gained. Even as better and better graphics technology is erasing the need for an active imagination in playing video games, increasingly sophisticated game design has made possible a range of consequential (as opposed to imaginative) interactivity that is unparalleled in any other medium. Plus, I'd hazard that most people who play video games don't want to use their imaginations -- they just want a fun rideยน. The more bells and whistles the better.
Each of us probably have our own sweet spot between abstraction and representation, a point where our imagination is fired up by the power of suggestion, but would be extinguished by too much more information.
