re: nascient
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:25:14 -0500
Grover dares Scottie:
> Isn't e-mail functional rather than intentioned and
> scrutinized over?
Is email a single homogeneous substance without variation? Surely you
will allow for contending traditions in electronic media.
It may be argued that email is transient by nature and that a person
ought to squash any rebellious gestures his conscience makes toward
things like clarity or cohesion or "craft" when he is writing email.
Or it may at least be argued that a person is justified in squashing
any such rebellions. But even supposing email is strictly transient,
why shouldn't a person labor over his email anyway?
Would you drain language of all its charm and flair so that electronic
writing could achieve pure communication? While not everybody on this
list is a Sophist, I doubt any one of us still sits on the Royal
Society. Charm, flair, trope, figure and metaphor inhere in all
language use--even language use that seeks to efface itself by
appealing to "functionality" rather than style. After all, there is
no such thing as the absence of style. If one aspires to
"un-stylized" writing, one has in mind a style. The absence of style
is itself a style. The appeal to non-literary language is as absurd
as Thomas Sprat's use of tropes and metaphors to condemn tropes,
figures and the trick of metaphors.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu