The Mental Floss feed I run on the Around the Net page led me to discover the American writer Neal Stephenson. Apparently, he’s something of a geek cult figure and has been The New York Times‘ #1 top-selling author, so you almost certainly know about him already, in which case you can put this down to another case of old Uncle John finding out about modern novelties like biros or cell phones and stop reading. But I’m quite excited (in an entirely platonic way, you understand). You can tell: this is my first blog post in eons.

The Mental Floss article is a review by house blogger Chris Higgins (who also writes damn well) of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Reamde (sic). This seems well worth reading, but where the review really did it for me, was a) enumerating Stephenson’s ‘obsessions’: currency (not money, currency); technology; cultural differences; family ties; and time, geology, & geography (grouped just so), and b) linking to an old Wired article of his. If I tell you that the last book I really fell head-over-heels in love with was Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and that the Wired article, called Mother Earth Mother Board, was 56 (no less, cub’s honour) riveting (and I mean that) pages about (get this) transcontinental cable-laying, you’ll understand that I felt stirred, as if meeting a kindred mind.

Written in 1996, the Wired article, though verging on brilliant, was decidedly outdated, for fifteen years is an eternity in the world of technology – the telecom wars were a recent occurrence if not ongoing, racks were not standard-sized, he feels it necessary to write out ‘graphical user interfaces’ in full, and a long etc. So I longed for something more contemporary, and fortunately Wikipedia led me to a Slate article called Space Stasis. I was not disappointed. Though Stephenson has evidently learned something about time-management efficiency and Space Stasis is only three pages long, it has the same qualities as Mother Earth Mother Board: it is funny, interesting, informative, immensely intelligent, has an original thesis, and the qualities of the intervening characters are skilfully and sympathetically drawn. In short, much like Bill Bryson, just a tad more geekish.

Stephenson has been writing fiction and mostly technology-related non-fiction for over twenty years, and been acclaimed to the point that it is extremely embarrassing for me to be discovering him at this late stage. Oh well. Evidently, this time, he has felt the desire to garner some serious revenue, for Reamde is an international thriller with all sorts of up-to-date attention grabbers (the hero is a tech entrepeneur, the villains are hackers or government agencies…), and a thick one (what Chris Higgins calls “1 kilopages”), destined to be stocked by every airport book stall in the world, and retailing at $35 – I’d say it should gross mega-if-not-tetramillions without counting e-book downloads and film rights* and tilt Neal Stephenson’s bank balance so far in the black he should never have to think about money again. Except as currency, an obsession being an obsession, after all.

An e-book will probably be my own choice, a reader being, precisely, third on my shopping list for this week, after groceries and a digital SLR camera. It’s a toss-up between a Kindle and a Nook at the moment, according to the advice of the ‘Configurator’ at Top-Ten Reviews – if only deciding which camera were as simple. Any recommendations on either? Do leave a comment if you have one, or if you have anything to say about Neal Stephenson or his works.

*Though there’s a YouTube video of him talking about why his books have never been filmed – basically, they’re too long.

More:
Neal Stephenson talks about his new novel, Reamde:

Neal Stephenson’s website
Buy Reamde

To begin, I’ll confess that I don’t get the title: “Orwell’s Liar.” Is this a reference to Orwell’s work (the expression “Stalin’s liar” seems to be his), is it directly calling Orwell a liar as other commentors have interpreted, or is it something you have to be a linguist to understand? Never mind, I expect I am being slow and I don’t think it is central in any way. The text of the post begins:

“Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law.”

The parallel between “language crime” and Orwell’s famous “thought crime” is clever, but Orwell’s essay pretends nothing of the sort. It is a complaint, one repeated thoroughout the ages by many cultured but less-than-young people, that things are worse than they used to be. The body of the essay, which Mr Beaver discusses only cursorily, is a discourse on what Orwell sees as vices in the use of English, with a few guidelines thrown in at the end to help writers avoid them.

“Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.”

Come on, David, is Orwell “laying down the law,” or giving feeble style suggestions? It is true that Orwell does not prove that things had been better before then, and I don’t really see why he should, for the examples he gives to illustrate his thesis would have been instantly recognizable to his readers of 1946 as a kind of modern-speak (an effect they may have lost). And Orwell does say in so many words that the English language is in decline. Or, I insist, was, in 1946. Mr Beaver does not agree, and while I am not a linguist and much less a linguistic historian, I would venture to suggest that the English language has had many ups and downs since then, and 1946 could well not have been a high point – the best young minds in the English-speaking world had been involved in the war for the preceding seven years or so, bureaucracy was ingrained, and so on. British English could well have been in especially poor condition, for one thing because its influence was contracting. The world had yet to come to the universal conclusion that English was the business langage of the future, the injection of dynamism that came with immigration and the expansion of English in the not-yet-former colonies had not happened, and the explosion of English that would come with rapid technological progress, television and the Internet was decades away.

“Customers who buy into Orwell’s shit also buy Strunk and White…”

Now this is objectionable in different ways, the least important of which is the scatology, though that alone was pretty well guaranteed (calculated?) to provoke a number of strong protests in the post’s comments. As a Brit, I had never heard of Strunk and White, looked them up and found that they and their work are poorly seen in circles of descriptivist linguistics (as opposed to the prescriptive kind, the sort that tells people how they should use language. Language Log is firmly in the descriptivist camp). Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style seems to have been the standard grammar book in the US for the last half-century and more, so I am not surprised that it is loathed by some. I won’t defend it, or any other grammar book (here), but I must point out that to say “Strunk and White stink, therefore so does Orwell” is nonsense.

And this is where David Beaver’s thesis is essentially wrong. His argument is not against Politics and the English Language so much as against rules about the use of language – prescriptivism. He targets Orwell’s essay in order to support his position – “Orwell is wrong, so I am right.” And to do so, he makes assumptions about Orwell’s thinking which are not supported by the text. Orwell does not says “these are rules English users must follow,” but “follow these rules to avoid using English in the ways I have described.”

David Beaver has managed to highlight the two basic flaws in the anti-prescriptivist case. The first is that it is obsolete, for the battles have been fought, won and lost and to be strictly descriptivist today is like a classically minded music school lecturer acknowledging that “There may be some merit in pop music” – it is redundant, no-one cares. The other (which may well be a contradiction of the first) is that people want rules. Not we’ll-send-you-to-the-headmaster-if-you-split-an-infinitive rules, but helpful rules, how-to rules. And they want them now as much as ever or more so. Running a Google search on “how to write” (complete with quotation marks) returns 18,500,000 results: how to write a novel, how to write an essay, an abstract, a resume, for the web, a dissertation, headlines, a scientific paper, plain English, and so on. Orwell’s essay could almost be retitled “How Not to Write Bad, Pretentious or Overtly Politically Manipulative English,” and there is no need to read into it a desire to dictate how people should use language. Instead, it points out how dreadful English can be when misused. Who could argue with that?

I recognize that not everyone can tune in instantly to Orwell’s wavelength, and it may be that David Beaver is simply (deliberately?) listening in on a different frequency (I take his posting with the tags “Peeving” and “Prescriptivist Poppycock” to indicate that we should not take him entirely seriously). I once explained Orwell’s admiration for what he termed the “decency” of the working classes to my convent-school educated mother. Entirely missing the point, she said, in her plummiest voice and with not a trace of irony, “How very condescending of Mr Orwell.”

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat).
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. One should never generalise.
10. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
11. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
12. The passive voice is to be avoided.
13. Eliminate commas, that are not necessary.
14. Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.
15. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forward earthshaking ideas.
16. use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
17. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
18. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
19. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
20. Proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

Norman’s cv is here, if you’re looking for a professor of computing and expert in risk assessment and decision analysis with a great writing style and a sense of humour.