Alan Jacobs

There is no evidence that Shakespeare was illiterate. But Cutler is also misguided in calling him a “brilliant scholar.” His contemporaries certainly didn’t think of him that way. Ben Jonson felt he “wanted art,” i.e. lacked erudition; Francis Beaumont considered his best lines “clear” of “all learning.” And that view prevailed: later, John Milton praised Shakespeare’s “native wood-notes wild” – the opposite of scholarship.

The notion that Shakespeare was extraordinarily erudite is a 20th-century fiction, an effect of historical distance. Even now, though, it is easy to identify a truly learned writer: just read Jonson. His Sejanus bursts with classical footnotes; the Venice of his Volpone, unlike Shakespeare’s, is pieced together from a meticulous study of authoritative sources; his scenes debating literary theory are incomprehensible to modern readers. (Jonson was a bricklayer’s son who hadn’t gone to university.)

Jonson’s learnedness, however, makes his works a hard sell nowadays. Unlike Cutler, I would identify Shakespeare’s very lack of erudition, his limitations, as the qualities that make his works enduringly powerful; his thoughts, and especially their expression, can be startlingly simple. Shakespeare’s language shows more familiarity with rural England than with any field of learning, although he clearly could reference the worlds of law, of alchemy, or of sports like hawking and tennis – he lived in London for most of his life, after all, cheek by jowl with courtiers, and performed for aristocratic audiences every year.

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. The mainstream right will not challenge those who’ll exploit the system for their own ends, and exploit others for their own profit, because so many have off-loaded their moral thinking to the market. Nor, not in a million years, will the Republican Party. That may be one of the worst results of the sixties, that the politics of gesture and emotion have been privileged, as the academics put it, which means a politics with no actual political content will drive a publicly successful movement like Occupy Wall Street—even though it is not going anywhere in particular.

Twitter is all about slang and abbreviations, but it’s just not eroding the English language. In fact, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman found the exact opposite: It’s making it better.

Averia, the average typeface

In Wittgensteinian fashion, I shouldn’t advance any thesis—but there is food for thought here. With some clever technology built by some clever people, Google has decreed on language and translation, confirming the nonsense of prescriptive rules—a small victory for the descriptive grammarians, if an obvious one—and that Wittgenstein’s remarks on language really bear an effective model of artificial means of learning it. Google Translate might not become better than humans at translation any time soon—perhaps it can’t be done. But at some point it will be good enough: cheaper and more convenient than hiring human translators (for many whose standards are lower, this is already true) or bothering to learn languages ourselves—at which point “good enough” becomes our standard. How do we want our machine translators to work for us?

Son of Dracula

These fears, however, seem to have been largely isolated; mass panics over genital retraction were not recorded until 1874. This was the year that, on the island of Sulawesi, a certain Benjamin Matthes was compiling a dictionary of Buginese when he came across a strange term, lasa koro, which meant “shrinking of the penis,” a disease that Matthes said was not uncommon among the locals and “must be very dangerous.” Sporadic reports of koro, as it came to be known, recurred over the years, and during the late twentieth century the panics proliferated. In 1967, an epidemic of koro raced through Singapore, affecting some five hundred men. In 1976, in northern Thailand, at least two thousand people were afflicted with rokjoo, in which men and women complained that their genitals were being sucked into their bodies. In 1982, there were major koro epidemics in India and again in Thailand, while in 1984 and 1985, some five thousand Chinese villagers in Guangdong province tried desperately to keep their penises outside their bodies using whatever they had handy: string, chopsticks, relatives’ assistance, jewelers’ clamps, and safety pins.

Since I’m the old-fashioned sort of person who clings to the belief that words, whatever their length, ought to mean something, I thought I’d check whether it’s really true that “words are getting shortened” by the constraints of the Twitterverse.

So I grabbed the text of Hamlet, the text of a number of P.G. Wodehouse stories (Leave it to Jeeves, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg, Absent Treatment, Helping Freddie, Rallying Round Old George, Doing Clarence a Bit of Good, and The Aunt and the Sluggard), and the 100 most recent tweets from the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper. I figured that the DP ought to count as a good representative of the Kids Today who are responsible for the alleged word-shortening trend.

I wrote a little program to adjust these texts in appropriate ways (removing the character attributions and stage directions from Hamlet, removing the Gutenberg boilerplate from P.G. Wodehouse, removing the @’s and #’s and URLs from the DP tweets, etc.), and then to count the letters in each word.

The result? The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP’s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters.

tastefullyoffensive:

Shakesbear

That bright ideas, far from guaranteeing against blunders, are often their cause is illustrated by the fate of the “D. D.” (i.e., dual drive) tanks launched offshore on D-Day. Equipped to float with impermeable canvas skirts, these were to propel themselves to the beach with an ad hoc propeller and then resume normal operation. Thirty-two were launched, their skirts deployed, but in high seas and (doubtless because of fear) too far from land. Twenty-seven sank with their complete crews, a tribute to stubborn hope, for tank after tank was launched seriatim, each sinking like a stone, observed by everyone on the launching ship. The Time-Life World War II volume dealing with the invasion devotes a full-color page to the D. D. tank without in any way suggesting that something went fatally wrong. “A TANK THAT COULD SWIM” is the caption.