How many academics are frustrated novelists, poets and literati? How many attempt to vent this frustration with literary flourishes in articles and books? It may be a sentence like this: ‘His work is sui generis, a tumbling stream of consciousness that swishes and swirls in egregious eddies around its slippery subject’. Or it may be, ‘She is inevitably outdone by doughty defenders of the sublime sanctuary of the book, who intone the inscrutable inheritance of tract scribblers and podium pounders who fulminated and fumed against the trespasses of modern thought’. Or one can write like a fish: ‘I love to swim straight out into the middle of the ocean, but this is often curtailed by grinning great white pointers and assorted cousins. I can go from 0 to 70 kilometres per hour faster than a Porsche and with better brakes’.
In this respect the wordsmith is like the journalist who loves to produce bad puns and excruciating alliteration. Go to any newspaper and you are bound to find examples such as ‘Rudd Wreaks Revenge’, or ‘Finding Mojo: How Mothers Can Get Their Groove Back’, or ‘Arbib Pitches for a Sporting Life’, or ‘Bronto Burger off the Stone Age Menu’ (reporting that a new fast-food chain, Paleo, ‘takes inspiration from the Stone Age to create primal gastronomy’), or ‘Mariners Slip Off the Hook’, or ‘Champagne Flows as Local Drop Loses Its Sparkle’. All these come from one issue of one newspaper.
What is it with the wordsmith? Is there a string of rejected novels or poems? Is there an unhealthily high sense of self-importance that makes the wordsmith feel he or she is better than the novels studied over the years? Has someone, a kindergarten teacher perhaps, said, ‘you write really well’? (The teacher meant handwriting …) Is the wordsmith really a sadist out to inflict untold suffering on his or her many few readers? Or is the wordsmith just a hack whose scribbled lines should best be bundled into a plastic bag, brick attached, and dumped in the bay?
4 March, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Ha ha. Today’s Typology was like bat’s piss: a shining ray of gold in a cavernous void of academic blackness.
But if any biblical scholar is tempted to add a rhetorical flourish or some mellifluous sesquipedalianism to their scholarly prose, I recommend that they first take a look at the poetry section in Theology Today. It contains some of the most sickening examples of what can happen when scholars consider themselves wordsmiths.
4 March, 2012 at 7:59 pm
The George Slanger is quiet a, well, frustrated something.
4 March, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Each example I gave has no relation to any actual scholarly writing, or rather, any connection is purely accidental … but one does concern a swimming tuna
5 March, 2012 at 6:23 am
I thought I had caught your fish.
5 March, 2012 at 7:00 am
Looks like it got away. I’m looking forward to an autobiographical reading of plankton, or perhaps a sea-sponge.
4 March, 2012 at 6:29 pm
[...] If you haven’t yet discovered the highly entertaining, satirical series of blog posts “A Typology of Scholars” by that gleeful gadfly and Calvinist Marxist Roland Boer, it’s well worth a look. Check out The Encyclopaedist, The Scientist, The Unnoticed Genius, The Put-Downer, The Self-Seller, Big Fish in a Slimy Pond, The Snob, The Colonialist, The Politician, The Lord of the Manor, The Borrower, The Turbo-Prof, The Thin-Skinned, The Best Friend, Bitter and Twisted, The Intellectual Hit-man, The Legendary Pisspot, The Name-Dropper, The One in the Position of Superior Knowledge, The Chardonnay Socialist, Doceo, ergo predicabo, The Petty-Bourgeois Life-Styler, The Businessman, The Onion-Grower, The Seducer, The Grantsman, and The Wordsmith. [...]
12 March, 2012 at 9:44 pm
[...] pretentious wordsmith at work: What was written in prescribed form and in the archive’s margins, what was written [...]