Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Thinking

Killing time because I can't think of anything constructive to do, I looked up some other blog entries. I found these listed in the margin of one of the blogs I regularly read. I clicked on several with intriguing titles and read sme of the entries. The writing was astonishingly similar among them, sprinkled liberally with the words "fart" and "fuck." I remember performing this same experiment when I first started my blog, with similar results. Apparently this is less a conscious effort to create a certain kind of public personality, as I once thought, than a way of thinking. These kinds of words seem to be the mainstay of language perception (is there such a term?). What I'm trying to say is that thought is related directly to language, and the writing I read indicates severe paucity of colorful or creative thought, let alone variety.

What is the most interesting to me is the fact that these writers are mostly well-educated and working in influential positions. I don't know how to respond to this except to say that the world is different from what I imagine it to be. The fact that I am looking back and have very little exposure to more than a few people, all of my own age, is probably significant. Perhaps people don't have time to make more than general observations now. It could be that "fart" and "fuck" are all the vocabulary they need to describe how they see the world. Too bad, so say I, although I have to admit there is less need to find subtlety than I had previously thought. Complicated evaluation of ordinary things is a luxury. There is too much to see. Generalizations and homogenization of what one observes is necessary if one is in a hurry.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do think this type of language found on blogs, despite it being so common, is part of a lot of people's public/casual persona. The blog certainly isn't representative of their whole identity, so swearing doesn't really reflect their entire range of thinking either.

For many people, the blog is a break -- a sort of virtual chat with friends down at the pub.

Cheri Walton said...

You may be right, but in my opinion any conversation reflects one's thought process. No, the wnole personality doesn't come across in blog chat, but the people I'm talking about are not writing about casual subjects. It seems to me that ideas are reflected by the language used to express them.........