a grammar

and now the book jargon

Well of course: I posted about one site’s “music review cliche” list the other day, and now I stumble across one regarding book reviews.

It is not my aim to be a jerk or anything — a lot of general-audience book-review jargon really is pretty limp, no question — but if one is going to write an article calling these well-worn* terms “a black hole that sucks in meaning” and “a substitute for original thought,” here are some things you’d think one would avoid doing in said article:

calling them “tired old cliches,” a combination of words as well-worn as any other
saying they have been “used to death,” which ditto
mentioning the “rarefied atmosphere” of the Times Book Review
saying the black hole “sucks in meaning faster than I can down a gin martini (no vermouth, three olives)”
then saying in the next sentence that publishers are “cutting employers quicker than you can type ‘stimulus package’”
saying you’ve “officially sworn off” certain worn terms
saying that if you’d ever personally used certain other worn terms, “then I would really be on suicide watch”
talking about something stabbing you in the eye

I mean, I agree, especially when it comes to newspaper general-audience book reviews, which often reads more like catalog-listing than actual criticism — but possibly the moral I’m shooting for, once again, is that this sort of jargon tends to activate actual common ideas we have about art-experiences, and in any kind of language or communication it can be substantially trickier to just leap outside that circle than we sometimes imagine. Sometimes we can’t even complain about well-worn language without marching out whole battalions of our own tired soldiers to do the complaining for us.

* From the Old English wyl woarn, used to describe special ceremonial robes Saxons wore exclusively during the digging of wells. A severe drought in the summer of 974 AD led to a run of emergency well-deepening, during which a lot of people’s robes got really messed-up and muddy, hence the sense of “well-worn” I’m using here. Maybe.