Anybody else catch Geoff Nunberg's little bit of linguistic elitism at the end of tonight's Fresh Air (page has links to audio streaming via RealAudio or WMA) on NPR? I usually like Nunberg, a lot (his book is why I like quoting the ceci tuera cela thing from Hugo), but check out his closing argument: his stylistic difficulties in keeping a weblog indicates that weblogs do not use the "high, formal style" of the contemporary news story, but rather engage in the informal "table talk" of the "urban middle class". Which is unfortunate, he believes: he'd rather have the blogosphere communicating in a discourse that's familiar to everyone. I was unaware that those of us who kept weblogs had a single and monolithic style -- and I find his assertion that the contemporary news story is "neutral" rather problematic, and the belief that it's preferable to a plurality of voices, well, like I said, elitist. Other folks' takes on "the blogging style"?
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"the blogging style"
Yeah, I heard Nunberg's commentary last night. I've been reading his book (which I like) recently, so I was a little surprised at his tone--more Stanford than linguist, actually. [And I took lots of linguistics classes at Stanford before Nunberg's time.]
The problem was his generalizing from his particular sampling of blogs. He didn't seem to recognize the teen-age bloggers of LiveJournal nor did he include academic bloggers in his characterization. Good linguists are careful to explain their data se t, the particular selection of language data they have chosen to examine. His report didn't acknowledge that he was only looking at certain segments of weblogs, mostly ones that get a lot of traffic. If Technorati can track 2,000,000+ blogs, could any of us really read as many as 2000 of those blogs? Even if we could, that's only one-tenth of one percent of the total. How do we even know what a fair sample of blogs would be if you wanted to generalize about "the blogging style"?
I know I'm using my blog too document my work as a writing teacher, not a common use of blogs that I have encountered. As a result, I don't do some of the things that are common in other blogs. It seems to me the whole form is too new for us to be confident about norms. Thus, it's unreasonable at this juncture to claim to know "the blogging style."