Going Nucular Read online

  I Have Seen the Future, and It Blogs

  The Diary of a Nobody is a curious comic classic. It was published in 1892 by George and Weedon Grossmith, two well-known Victorian music-hall performers, adapted from a series of pieces they had written in Punch. It purported to be the diary of a clerk named Mr. Charles Pooter, who lives in the drab London suburb of Holloway. Mr. Pooter is a bumbling, self-important, and slightly pathetic character who dutifully records his daily encounters with tradesmen, neighbors, and co-workers. You can get a sense of the tone from the chapter descriptions: “A conversation with Mr. Merton on society. Tradesmen still troubling. I make a good joke, but Gowing and Cummings are unnecessarily offended. I paint the bath red, with unexpected result.” That density of humdrum detail is what fixes Mr. Pooter’s diary in its particular historical moment, and it’s also why people are still reading it more than a hundred years later.

  If the Grossmiths were living today, I feel sure they would have written Mr. Pooter’s chronicle as a blog. For those who still associate that syllable with the French word for “joke,” I should explain that blog is short for weblog. Weblogs began their lives as a cross between news digests and clipping services—regularly updated sites where someone put up links to other sites of interest, often with comments and personal asides. Most of the early blogs were dedicated to specialized interests like programming, motorcycles, or martial arts, and lately there have been a number of blogs coming from journalists and political commentators.

  Fresh Air Commentary, December 10, 2001

  But the great boom in blogging came from people who put up personal journals at their home pages, updating them daily. Bloggers linked to other bloggers. Blogrings formed, then blog registries, blog hosting sites, and metablogs. There are blog divas, who receive thousands of hits a day, and the wannabes called blog whores, who inveigle other bloggers to link to their pages. There are racy blogs and philosophical blogs and depressive blogs—there are quite a number of depressive blogs. There are blog groupies and blog stalkers. And there are quarterly blog awards.

  To get a sense of the blog world, you’re best off following links aimlessly, or clicking on the “random blog” link at a hosting site like OpenPages. A sixty-year-old poet in Somerset ruminates on Robert Frost and gives his recipe for corned beef hash. A nineteen-year-old boy frets over having only ten months left as a teenager. A Sacramento lawyer named Elizabeth dilates divertingly on the differences among “Beth,” “Betsy,” and “Betty.”

  Like most of the phenomena of the Web, blogging is connected to a lot of things that have been going on on the other side of the screen—the journaling that has been part of the self-help movement, reality TV, the mimeographed Christmas letters that people send out to friends and family. For that matter, there’s nothing new about publishing a daily journal—that’s a tradition that stretches from Defoe and Boswell to Edmund Wilson and Anais Nin. But journal publishing has never been a democratic option before, or something that was carried out with so much collaboration and corroboration. Readers write in with encouragement for an AIDS-infected singer-composer in Los Angeles. A woman in San Francisco puts up a webcam and asks readers if they think she ought to streak her hair. A college freshman posts a blog recounting his painfully inept day-to-day quest to find a girlfriend, as readers offer him dating tips.

  People often talk about “blog communities,” but “community” is too vague to have much meaning here. Blogs aren’t written for friends and family—in fact a lot of the sites warn off anyone who knows the writer from reading further. But they aren’t really public records, either, at least not in the sense that the word has in a phrase like “the reading public.” It’s more a question of someone writing a journal in public—it’s not addressed to everybody so much as to god-knows-who.

  What’s most compelling about the blogs is their incessant dailyness. The other day I was looking at an entry in the blog of a young woman from Boston. She described a trip to Baltimore that she had made with her boyfriend, in numbing, mile-by-mile detail, and accompanied it with photographs of the Dunkin’ Donuts where they had breakfast, the flag they saw on the George Washington Bridge, and the copy of Cosmopolitan she was reading on the road. When I mentioned that entry to my friend Lisa, who keeps a blog of her own, she said, “That’s what we call oversharing.”

  I could see her point, but the entry had a certain Pooterish fascination, too. There’s something very familiar about that accretion of diurnal detail. It’s what the novel was trying to achieve when eighteenth-century writers cobbled it together out of subliterary genres like personal letters, journals, and newspapers, with the idea of reproducing the inner and outer experience that makes up daily life. If ever any literary genre that interesting should emerge from the intimate anonymity of cyberspace, it will probably grow out of offhand forms like the blog, not the “migration” of the novel to digital form.

  But that doesn’t really matter, as long as people are having fun. And in the meantime, we can visit the blogs for glimpses of other lives, in all their humdrum glory. Or if we’re looking for an older sort of collaborative journal, we can call up George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. It’s on the Web, too.

  Prefixed Out

  I did a piece on blogs a couple of months ago. After it ran I got an e-mail from someone who objected to my use of the word, particularly using it to describe the records that people post on the Web of their daily thoughts and doings. I should have called them “e-journals,” she said. I could see her point, but blog is a syllable whose time has come. Who can resist that paleolithic pizzazz? It’s the tone you hear in a lot of programmer jargon, in words like kluge, munge, and scrog. That’s how insiders demystify the technology—it sets them apart from the digital parvenus who lade their speech with technical-sounding language. When we use blog, it’s as if to say we’re all geeks now.

  Anyway, there’s something a little vieux jeu about the whole business of naming online phenomena by tacking a qualifier onto the name of some predigital category. First there was cyber-, which had its efflorescence in the first half of the ’90s. Those were the salad days of cyberspace—not the noirish locale that William Gibson had in mind when he coined the word, but more like something out of C. S. Lewis, an enchanted kingdom on the other side of the screen where everything had an ethereal cyber-counterpart: cybercrime and cyberpolice; cyberpoetry and cybernovels; cyberpets and cyberhippies. Cyber- connoted a place that was freed from the trammels of materiality and distance, where people would slip on new identities as easily as they changed their shirts. You think of the caption on a widely reprinted cartoon that Peter Steiner did in The New Yorker back in 1993: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Fresh Air Commentary, May 17, 2002

  By the mid-1990s, though, the cyber- talk was sounding awfully naïve. The net was becoming crowded, noisy, and above all lucrative. And it was turning out to be anything but anonymous—it was more like, “On the Internet, everybody knows what brand of dog food you buy.” After 1996, the word cyberspace became less frequent in the press. The gold rush was on, and people migrated to the new prefix e-, which seemed to be short for Eldorado.

  The e- prefix had a promising beg inning—in 1998 the American Dialect Society voted it the new word that was most likely to succeed. Like a lot of predictions about the Internet that people were making back then, that one would turn out to be excessively optimistic. When you track the frequency of e- in the press, in fact, its fortunes almost exactly parallel the NASDAQ index—by 2001, it was 60 percent off its peak. And e- isn’t likely to make a comeback even when the tech sector reemerges, no more than most of the companies whose names began with it. It will stick around in e-commerce and of course e-mail, the way cyber- is still around in a few words like cybersex—maybe the last thing in digital life that has a touch of intrigue to it. But we’ve left off thinking of the online world as a remote or separate place. For the time being, at least, the new economy is going to
be just a neighborhood of the old—and one with a higher vacancy rate, at that.

  Anyway, most of those distinctions are unnecessary. Why the prefix on cyberessay and cyberpoetry—are essays and poetry really transformed once you no longer have to send them to the printer? Ditto e-statements and e-bills, not to mention all the increasingly desperate names that were coined with i- and k-, as companies started to switch prefixes as rapidly as business plans. For that matter, what’s the point of talking about a “virtual bait-shop,” so long as the crawlers are real?

  Of course a lot of the things that have emerged online are genuinely novel, but then why strain to find their offline counterparts? That’s the beauty of blog. You could call these things virtual journals, e-clipping services, or cyber-Christmas-letters. But why can’t they just be unique in all their bloggy essence?

  We go through this every time a new technology emerges. It took a while before people could stop talking about horseless carriages, electric iceboxes, and electronic brains, but in the end those hybrid names always wind up sounding quaint, and so will all those compounds with cyber-, e-, virtual, and the rest. If we were smart, we’d drag them all to the trash icon of history right now. But that isn’t likely to happen. They’ll end their days attached to useless computer accessories and get-rich-quick schemes, the same way the suffix -omatic migrated from the names of all those proud postwar Fords and Buicks to the tacky gadgets they sell on late-night TV.

  The Icebox Goeth

  This was one of those upstairs-downstairs exchanges we have in our house when my twelve-year-old daughter Sophie is getting breakfast. “Dad, where’s the maple syrup?” I yell back, “I put it in the icebox.” A pause, then Sophie yells back, “Dad, it’s not there.” And I answer, “Yes it is, on the top shelf, next to the milk.” “Oh,” she says, “you mean down there. I thought you said it was in the ice box, on the top.”

  I apologized to her. It wasn’t Sophie’s fault that her dad is behind the curve in the nomenclature of domestic life. Actually, what’s curious is that I or anybody should still be saying icebox. That fixture started to disappear from American kitchens in the 1920s, when electric and gas-powered refrigerators first became available for home use. The new machines went by names like Coolerator, Frigerator, Coldak, and most famously Frigidaire, but at the time most people just referred to them as gas or electric ice boxes. A joke in Life magazine in 1925 poked fun at the vogue for newfangled household appliances: A bride at a telephone says, “Oh, John, do come home, I’ve mixed the plugs some way. The radio is all covered with frost and the electric ice box is singing Way Out West in Kansas.” And icebox has persisted since then, even though the last iceman hung up his tongs long ago.

  Fresh Air Commentary, January 24, 2002

  That’s usually the way things work when a new technology or new way of doing things appears—we tend to keep calling it by the name of what it replaces, even long after it’s appropriate. We still refer to the luggage compartments at the back of our cars as trunks—not even Sophie objects to that one. And we’re still talking about dialing telephones, even though the old sort of dial has become such a rarity that we’ve had to invent a new description for it, the “rotary dial.”

  Rotary dial is what some people call a retronym, a term that expresses a distinction that didn’t used to be necessary. Analogue watch is a retronym, and so are natural turf and Mainland China. You can get a good sense of the pace of change over the past century just by looking at the retronyms we’ve accumulated. New technologies have forced us to come up with terms like steam locomotive, silent movie, manual transmission, AM radio, day baseball, conventional oven, and acoustic guitar. Cultural changes created retronyms like physical therapy, heterosexual marriage, and men’s wrestling. And now we’ve had to introduce another set of terms to distinguish things in the material world from their virtual counterparts—surface mail, face-to-face conference, brick-and-mortar retailer, and—God save us all—paper book.

  You could think of this torrent of retronyms as a reflection of the pliable metaphysics of modern life. Nowadays everything can be estranged from its essence: We can make watches without hands, beer without alcohol, grapes without seeds, ovens without heat, and babies without sex. But the phenomenon also has a lot to do with simple linguistic laziness. We start by calling a microwave an oven because it’s too much trouble to come up with a new name, then later we have to go back and find a modifier like “conventional” to distinguish the old sort of ovens.

  And yet sometimes we’re curiously reluctant to let an old word do new tricks. We may talk about “electronic mail,” for example, but we don’t describe the online messages we receive as “electronic letters,” maybe out of nostalgia for the smell of ink and paper. We’re reluctant to stretch broadcast to cover the cable transmission of television programs. And while we allow that photos can be digital, we still reserve the phrase “home movies” for images recorded on film—otherwise they’re videos.

  Why do we refuse to extend some names to new categories while readily extending others? Is it out of a sense that the new thing is essentially different from the old one? Is it nostalgia? Marketing? Or just linguistic inconsistency? Those sound like the kinds of questions my friends and I used to idle our evenings away with back when we were in graduate school. But sometimes a lot hangs in the balance.

  Take the word copy. When we say that a computer makes a copy of a file to your hard disk, are we talking about the same thing as the copy that we make when we take a book to the Xerox machine? If they’re the same, then the major publishers have a lot more power in the digital age than they had in the age of print. Time Warner or Bertelsmann can’t stop you from lending a hard copy of a magazine article to a friend, but they can stop you from sending it around as an e-mail attachment, since you can’t do that without making an electronic copy of the document. But some legal scholars argue that a digital copy isn’t at all the same kind of thing as a physical copy, no more than my new Amana is the same kind of thing as the wooden box that sat in my grandmother’s kitchen dripping ice water into a pan. I may use the same name for both of them, but Sophie isn’t fooled for an instant.

  Watching Our Language

  Deceptively Yours

  I had a call from a friend, a Belgian linguist who does a lot of work on idioms in English and other languages. She asked me what I thought on the up and up meant. I told her it meant “above board” or “on the level,” as in, “Are you sure these intelligence reports are on the up and up?”

  “Does it mean anything else?” she asked.

  “Not as far as I know,” I told her.

  “Not so fast,” she said—“go look it up on the Web.”

  So I googled the phrase, and damned if more half of the first hundred hits for on the up and up didn’t have it meaning “on the increase,” or “improving,” as in “Hong Kong’s trade is on the up and up.” True, a number of these came from sites in the UK and other foreign countries—it turns out the Brits have been using “on the up and up” like this for more than seventy years. (The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the phrase includes the sense “steadily rising, improving,” but no American dictionary has cottoned to that sense.)

  But I was surprised to see how many Americans use the expression that way, too. I found newspaper stories announcing that school activities fees were on the up and up in Minnesota, that sales were on the up and up for a Chicago publisher of datebooks,

  Fresh Air Commentary, October 13, 2003

  and that tourism was on the up and up on the Delmarva Penninsula. A defensive end for the Tampa Bay Bucs says that his career is “still on the up and up . . . still on the rise.”

  Out of curiosity, I sent a question about the expression to a discussion group that’s populated by dialectologists and other devotees of word-lore. I had an e-mail back from someone in Berkeley who told me that he had been surprised to hear that on the up and up could be used to mean “on the increase.” But when he asked his wif
e about it, she said that for her that was the only thing it could mean—she never knew it could mean “on the level.” And what made it odder still was that they’ve been married for more than twenty years and both grew up in Southern California.

  I had this image of the two of them sitting at the breakfast table. He asks, “Is your brother’s new business on the up and up?” and she says, “No, but he’s making do.” And they go on like that with neither of them ever realizing that they’re talking at cross-purposes. Deborah Tannen, call your office.

  Of course expressions are always changing their meaning, and every once in a while one of those shifts trips the alarm of the usage patrols. But more often than not, these disparate meanings live side-by-side without anybody noticing. Not long ago, The New York Times quoted an Air Force major who disparaged the complaints made by American troops in Iraq: “I have real heartburn about the people you see on television griping about how they’re stuck over there.” I had always assumed that when heartburn is used metaphorically, it refers to anxiety or worry, but when I checked I found a lot of people using it to mean “anger” or “indignation”—“Cable’s forced diet of programming is giving viewers heartburn”; “junk e-mail, a source of heartburn and anger for computer users everywhere.” Is that the result of a difference in dialect or diet?