A very sweet lady who attends my church, a couple of weeks ago, asked me if I’d heard of Dana Gioia. Of course, as my regular readers know, I have. She wanted to know how I knew of him and I spent about 30 minutes filling her ear with the war between New Formalism and Postmodernism and what role Gioia plays in that battle while people like myself are in the crossfire wishing there was a respectable debate going on. I think I may have overwhelmed her with more than she could handle.

The reason she asked was because she had read an article Gioia had written in which he argued that poets are the gatekeepers (my word, not his or hers) of language and that we should preserve language, not reinvent it. I told her that, while I respect that view, I don’t agree with it.

I have a huge problem, first off, with anyone telling me what I should be doing with my mode of expression. I am what I am and you can like it or not. But even more importantly, the world is in a constant state of change. As such, culture itself is always evolving. Art and literature are not only reflections of culture, but also co-creators of it. As the culture around us changes, we must be willing to change along with it, and that change manifests itself in two ways.

1. As recorders of culture and history, poets and literary artists struggle to paint the world as it is. There may be ideals communicated in the practice and pursuit of this, but even in the most fantastic of tales and verses, you can often find hints and evidence of the cultural influences that go into an artists work. This is as it should be.
2. The other way in which culture manifests itself in literature is through the personal eyes of the artist. Writers often come up with ideas before anyone else and communicate them in such a way that they leave a mark. Readers pick up a certain phrase or borrow an idea and share it with their friends. There are countless examples of writers who have coined a phrase or injected a culture with an idea that went viral.

You could easily call these two manifestations of culture in literature as impression and expression. First, the literary artist receives an impression of the surrounding culture then writes about it. The expression resulting from this can range in form from the very creative to the technical, from obscure to plain. But the expression is the writer’s way of giving back to the culture what the culture has fed him. The culture in turn rewards the artist with acceptance and approval. Sometimes, rejection can be its own reward as communicated in this quote from Normal Mailer:

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. (from Armies Of The Night)

Even rejection can be a form of approval for a writer.

My point is that language changes. As culture changes so do the modes of expression. This is natural. Once, man drew pictures on the walls of caves. Now we digitize nearly everything. Our cave is a worldwide network of machines, not far from the Borg. Someday, it will be something else.

I respect the idea that artists are in the business of preserving language because, in a certain sense, it is true. We can’t just go around willy-nilly changing the meanings of common words and expecting people to understand what we are saying. If we use words in a different way than what is normally accepted, there should be a good reason for it. Otherwise, it’s just gibberish.

I don’t know if that’s what Dana Gioia meant. I haven’t read the article that my friend mentioned (though I’m quite familiar with Gioia’s ideas).

All of this is to say that I recently discovered that Webster’s New World Dictionary has selected its word of the year as it does every year. This year’s word is a newly coined word and isn’t in the dictionary at all. “Overshare” is a word that could only be used in a culture such as ours that is infatuated with making the personal public. Here’s a video that gives a little insight into the choice of the word. It’s interesting to hear what college students are saying and how they express themselves in struggling with a definition for this word. It will be interesting to see just when “overshare” makes it into the dictionary and how many different definitions it will garner for itself by that time.