| Words to Annoy, Circumlocutions, Artificial Intelligence & "a Textureless Glob of Sexist Cliche" |
Critical Christmas Cracker |
| Things That Caught the Attention , Culture & Media in 2023 , December 22, 2023 |
Every day brings a swirl of information. I keep a note of things that are just a bit different. So in 2023. JANUARY Catch up with a discussion on Radio 4's “Front Row”. The topic is critical language. The participants include Bob and Roberta Smith who say “It is a curatorial cadre talking to each other.” The word that gets the most votes for being most irritating- “liminal”. * * * * FEBRUARY Art and artistry are all in the detail. Never forget the hyphen. The Arts Council of Wales declares its resolve to appeal to a cross section of the people of Wales. * * * * MARCH A review of “In Love with Hell” by William Palmer recalls a drink enjoyed by Anthony Burgess. It is prepared by pouring doubles of gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy into a pint glass. A small bottle of stout is added and the drink is topped with champagne. Burgess: "it tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover." * * * * APRIL A theatre production launches an assault upon a classical Greek dramatist with ostentation and increasing absurdity. We read that the director “likes to take pieces from the standard theatre canon which he reworks into intimate, almost cinematic performances.” This shows the writer has small idea, as acting for stage and screen are distinct. “He often works from improvisation creating an entirely new script through which the original play nevertheless shines.” The shine is so great that my companion, once of Lampeter, whose judgement I trust entirely, cannot face the second half and departs. Strangely, after all is past, a cast member joins me in the homeward train carriage. We talk about this and that and I get to ask what it was like working with the director. A pause. Then: “He has his own way of doing things.” It is a diplomatic answer, as she has no idea who I am. It is a good answer too in saying everything while revealing nothing. * * * * MAY Bartleby is the pseudonym for the columnist on writing style and language at the Economist. An article "The Woolliest Words in Organisations” starts “Innovation. Sustainability. Purpose. Yuck.” “Fire-fighting foam starves the flames of oxygen. A handful of overused words have the same deadening effect on people’s ability to think. These are words like “innovation”, “collaboration”, “flexibility”, “purpose” and “sustainability”. They coat consultants’ websites, blanket candidates’ CVs and spray from managers’ mouths. They are anodyne to the point of being useless.” “These words are ubiquitous in part because they are so hard to argue against. Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? "Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful. “Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy as well as utility. A word like “sustainability” is so fuzzy that it is used to encompass everything from a business that thinks sensibly about the long term to the end of capitalism. This column may well count as sustainable because it keeps recycling the same ideas. “Collaboration” is another word that repays closer scrutiny. It can be marvellous: boundaries dissolved, expertise and ideas flowing. But collaboration can also run wild. It often means having more and more people on every email thread and in every meeting. It can paralyse decision-making, as everyone and their dog gets to weigh in with their view." * * * * JUNE “Aspects of Love” gets a revival and the critical kicking of the year. “A seething ethical mess” says Andrzej Lukowski for Time Out. “Inescapably creepy” says Marianka Swain for LondonTheatre. “Deeply weird” says Theo Bosanquet at WhatsOnStage. It worsens. Nick Curtis for the Evening Standard “buttock-clenching bad taste”. Matt Wolf on The Arts Desk: “prevailing preposterousness”. Sam Marlowe, a good voice, at the Stage: “What a gooey, oozy, gaudy box of stale chocolates this is. What’s most howlingly problematic is the plot: a textureless glob of sexist cliche that surely must have seemed faintly nauseating even three decades ago, and now looks creepy and, at its most flagrant, startlingly offensive.” She signs off; “thinly written, mawkish, and meandering”. For the record Michael Ball and company sing wonderfully, and the critics are captivated by the design, expansive painted backdrops of Paris, Provence, Venice. “Macfarlane’s huge painted sets are ravishing,” writes Lukowski. * * * * JULY I come across a lecture given by Raymond Williams at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. “The civic tradition which in terms of European history has a much finer record in a record of cultural policy than that of any State” * * * * AUGUST “Six By Sondheim” is shown on TV. Half an hour into the documentary Sondheim says: “There are so few words in a lyric that each is the equivalent of a scene in a play or a chapter in a novel. Unless every word is right it stands out like a sore thumb, becomes much bigger than you had intended it.” Lines sublime like: “It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.” * * * * SEPTEMBER Planet Magazine describes an artist. They are “an activist and creative, work in several mediums [sic] but mainly focus on spoken word poetry and apothegmatic collages.” They speak of their art: “understood in Derridean terms is aligned with the notion of rupture and is therefore resistant to systems, structures and stasis. The work I produce is conceptually premised and always comments in some way upon the decentring of human authorship. “The authors combine, craft and valorise lay, literary, visual and academic bodies of knowledge in presenting their core arguments but by failing to reinterrogate.” This is an interesting one. Philosophers and historians present arguments. But whether art as a representation, presents an argument, core or otherwise, hmm. The point of it all is to be uncertain, because that is us, we are uncertain. * * * * OCTOBER The Barnardo's shop in Gorseinon asks customers to "refrain from donating your used and unused marital aids". It adds that donors should "be mindful that we are a children's charity" and "have a range of ages on our wonderful volunteer team. We would like to remind you that the branch has CCTV.” It is not the first time charity shops have reported receiving unusual donations. A shop in Aberdare reported receiving a prosthetic leg "with the shoe still attached", while the British Red Cross had received used sex toys, stuffed family pets and false teeth. * * * * NOVEMBER Insufficient train carriages can be a horror. At their worst they make the trains so full that people cannot board at all. Transport for Wales has its days but the worst offender is in the north. A radio interview with a company senior manager uses plain words like packed-in and jam-packed. There is agreement from the interviewee executive, but the language is converted to emollience: “Short formations affect the customer experience.” * * * * DECEMBER The Cambridge Dictionary adds 6,000 new words and definitions for 2023. “Hallucinate” is the Dictionary's word of the year. It gains an additional definition beyond "to seem to see, hear, feel, or smell something that does not exist". It now includes "when an artificial intelligence (AI) hallucinates, it produces false information". Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary's publishing manager: "The fact that AIs can hallucinate reminds us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these tools. "AIs are fantastic at churning through huge amounts of data to extract specific information and consolidate it - but the more original you ask them to be, the likelier they are to go astray." * * * * I receive an item promoting an event. Unusually, it asks for £10 for a flint. I look to the original which reads “flaendal.” It looks like a compound of “ymlaen” and “talu”. That sounds like a deposit. So onward into our new algorithm-defined universe. * * * * The Stage in its last issue of the year recalls some events in theatre. At a performance at Theatr Clwyd the stage had a pair of shoes thrown at it by an audience member. Front-of-House enquired. “The audience member apologised and said they were too caught up in the moment.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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