Hyper specificity has become a fashionable device

November 8, 2024 12:36 AM

And true, it’s never been so easy to look up an unknown term. But there’s a reward if you get the reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same shows, reading the same books, reposting the same posts as you. from IYKYK: When Novels Speak a Language Only Part of the Internet Gets [The Walrus]
posted by chavenet (42 comments total)

Metafilter: A Language Only Part of the Internet Gets
posted by otherchaz at 1:30 AM on November 8 [21 favorites]

Not all that unusual for a writer to invent new language - I think of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in Clockwork Orange - but using real slang is risky. If you make a mistake, the community whose lingo you’re using is going to be merciless in its mockery.
posted by Phanx at 1:49 AM on November 8 [5 favorites]

eesh, I already needed a moment to decipher IYKYK... -_-
posted by bigendian at 3:01 AM on November 8 [2 favorites]

YDKYK
posted by Captaintripps at 4:10 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

idk ttyl
posted by HearHere at 4:10 AM on November 8 [4 favorites]

Books today make references to hyper-specific pop culture and it's such a shame because it cheapens their writing with exclusion. Literary works should only expect their readers to know timeless, universal knowledge like Shakespeare, important white men in America and the UK from 1955 to 1975, and Latin.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:29 AM on November 8 [38 favorites]

I don't know these writers, but I have a feeling my rent would immediately go up by 15% if any of them moved into my building. (IYKYK, amirite)
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:31 AM on November 8 [6 favorites]

IYKYK

AIYDTFBNEHTBFY

(and if you don't that's fine because not everything has to be for you)
posted by parm at 4:44 AM on November 8 [7 favorites]

Any novel with too much of this stuff in it is going to age very poorly. Even the hippest of the hip in ten years time will have no idea what you're talking about.
posted by Paul Slade at 4:53 AM on November 8 [4 favorites]

Did she just say Shakespeare is full of references for a medieval audience? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder!
posted by mittens at 4:57 AM on November 8 [10 favorites]

Groovy, man!
posted by TedW at 5:06 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

full of references for a medieval audience?

see janega iykyk...
posted by HearHere at 5:18 AM on November 8 [4 favorites]

What the frell? I feel this the meevonks.
posted by snwod at 5:50 AM on November 8 [7 favorites]

You can be inclusive only as much as your language is inclusive. Jargon and slang is a way of denoting pretty specific groups of people and within those groups, their jargon or slang may be used to both define the group and to exclude those not deemed to be part of the group. Your language defines who you are trying to speak to and who you are not trying to speak to. And languages are very dynamic, they change, specific speech can be of the current moment, and thus transitory. If your message is only for specific groups and specific times, that’s fine, but don’t expect it to last. So, is all speech, whether spoken or written, doomed to become as ephemeral as text messages?
posted by njohnson23 at 6:14 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

It was the best of skibidis, it was the worst of skibidis....
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:14 AM on November 8 [21 favorites]

Stories age and not always well. I recall one "edgy" novel from the mid-1980's which included the "shocking reveal" that one of the characters was gay. I read the same chapter now and my response is, "yes, and...?"
posted by SPrintF at 6:16 AM on November 8 [8 favorites]

...how the hell do you not know what doing nangs looks like even after you've been told what it is?
Anyway this reminded me of Kevin Kwan's writing - a hyperspecific social niche in a hyperspecific tiny country he's clearly very familiar with - but I find it charming and I'm more than happy to Google things.
posted by ngaiotonga at 6:32 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

It's okay if novels don't age well. It's inevitable that novels don't age well. There is value in naming something precise about the moment that we are in, even if it inevitably doesn't speak to the moment people are in three years from now.

There is value in the books that say something precise about a time and place that is not your own, in a way that excludes some readers and makes them feel like outsiders - to try to catch up with all the references is its own kind of fun (and the feeling of being on the outside looking in can be instructive in itself!)

I haven't read the books referenced in the article, but Patricia Lockwood's "No One Is Talking About This" is a book that hasn't necessarily aged particularly well - it is very much of the time before Elon bought Twitter - but for a brief moment was exactly right. And how rare is it to write a book that's exactly right, even for a brief moment?
posted by Jeanne at 6:34 AM on November 8 [20 favorites]

Bernstein, Sondheim, and Laurents invented the teen slang in West Side Story precisely to avoid the show ever feeling dated.

So it's just sounded weird and awkward from the get-go.
posted by humbug at 6:55 AM on November 8 [7 favorites]

because internet needs daily updates to keep up with what's hip cool fnord jojojo with kids these days.
posted by autopilot at 6:57 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

“Nangs” I had to look up. An Australian term for nitrous oxide as a party drug—Baxter is Australian, and Woo Woo is set in Melbourne—I figured it was something like that with the clue that they could be “done.” This reference, though, doesn’t speak to me.

I wondered it came from the fact that the initials for nitrous oxide are 'N O' and saying "no" in a really over-the-top extreme Australian accent comes out sounding kind of close to "Nang". ?
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 7:07 AM on November 8 [2 favorites]

Well what's the alternative? Write stories exclusively set in or before the offline millennial early childhood? Or stay within the narrowing bounds of an anemic, aesthetically regressive, and profoundly alien "mainstream" culture that only counts as such because of the sanction of old (dead) media and old (dead) money?
posted by jy4m at 7:16 AM on November 8 [8 favorites]

I wondered it came from the fact that the initials for nitrous oxide are 'N O' and saying "no" in a really over-the-top extreme Australian accent comes out sounding kind of close to "Nang". ?

I think it may be related to the audio hallucinations that nitrous oxide can cause, where everything starts sounding echoey and metallic. If you're well under the influence and somebody tries to talk to you, it can sound like "nang nang nang."
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:23 AM on November 8 [6 favorites]

hahaha [paris review]
posted by HearHere at 7:28 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

I have not read the article, but is it about the Locked Tomb books? I found them impenetrable and frankly the work required didn't seem worth it to me.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:03 AM on November 8 [1 favorite]

Sounds to me like the complaints of a jealous cob nobbler, president-elect of the tom-tom club, always too bound-and-hagged to be truly with it. Get out of your harsh realm, lamestain.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 8:12 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

To let our imminent politics creep in, we will be discussing what this all means and whether it's good or not, meanwhile writers gonna write readers gonna read
posted by ginger.beef at 8:29 AM on November 8 [2 favorites]

Maybe I'm used to gleaning implications from made up references in sci-fi and fantasy but this seems a lot of frumious galumphing over borogoves.

“Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words,”

They're... people's names? I get that they're also brands in this context but that's still an odd comment.
posted by lucidium at 8:30 AM on November 8 [7 favorites]

The examples were all drawing to a conclusion that is likely to be interesting to Mefites: that the saleable “reference novels” are reinforcing specific consumerisms, and that there are alternatives.

Reference novels work because of globalized digitization; the danger in them is the possibility of further narrowing our taste to revolve only around what we encounter online, often as things to buy. The books themselves operate within the market[…]

Also cropping up in contemporary fiction, potentially in reaction to “reference novels,” are descriptions of modern phenomena that aren’t name-checked, as if the author went out of their way not to. […] In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write.

posted by clew at 8:58 AM on November 8 [4 favorites]

Groovy, man!

Reet, Jackson!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:00 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

I'm just glad to stick to my narrow little space of alt-historical fantasy novels, where the jargon changes only over decades - and the gods' names don't really matter anyways.
posted by jb at 9:30 AM on November 8 [3 favorites]

"has become" is doing some pretty heavy lifting. I just cautioned a friend that a Victorian novel I read and loved "is really great but they do kinda do that thing where a lot of it is in French because they just assume anyone educated enough to read a novel also reads French".

The nice thing about modern times is that it's never been easier to look up shit from a book you don't understand. But literature always has and always will assume some amount of shared cultural context with its readers? It kinda doesn't work at all without it?

Eventually history will decide whether these novels are important enough to require annotated editions that attempt to explain the context people are missing. Most of them probably won't merit that level of labor and that's okay. Most literature has also always been pretty ephemeral.
posted by potrzebie at 10:23 AM on November 8 [7 favorites]

A lot of French passages are the bits racy enough to risk public outcry or censorship, IME. Not all, but you didn’t have to get very racy by our standards.

I ran across a 19th c translation into English of Chinese classics that had sections in French, apparently for this reason.
posted by clew at 10:44 AM on November 8 [2 favorites]

I think it may be related to the audio hallucinations that nitrous oxide can cause

100 percent onomatopoeia for the subjective effects of nitrous, yeah.
posted by atoxyl at 12:28 PM on November 8 [3 favorites]

I was ready to enjoy the Lascaux cave paintings, but turns out the authors expected me to get references to auroxes and bisons! I looked them up but all I could picture was a dairy cow.

2 stars, would not visit again.
posted by Dr. Curare at 1:49 PM on November 8 [7 favorites]

Okay, IDKWTTA*, and that just means that the book doesn't speak to me. I doubt it was ever intended to. That's okay. I get that it's fun to be in on the joke. Perhaps the cited works are of sufficient literary merit that someone not au courant can still enjoy them.

I loved the occasional Spider Robinson story set in my hometown. I just read one of Thomas King's novels in which he referred to a family I know of. I agree: there's a frisson of recognition that enhances the experience. But I don't think the audiences of those works are restricted to people who know Halifax from a certain era, or know the Goodstriker family of southern Alberta and that some members of the family compete on the rodeo circuit.

Clueless was moderately more fun for those of us who've read Emma. O Brother, Where Art Thou? made a slightly bigger impact for those of us who'd read The Odyssey. But Wikipedia says that neither of the Coen brothers had read it, and of the entire cast and crew, only Tim Blake Nelson had actually read it, and it didn't seem to be any impediment to the making of the movie.

Every piece of art or expression emerges from the culture of its creator. (And it must be a Sign of the End Times that I refer to Robert Heinlein twice in a single week) but for every grok or waldo, there's bound to be a tabi or a nang.

*I Don't Know What They're Talking About
posted by angiep at 2:19 PM on November 8 [2 favorites]

I have not read the article, but is it about the Locked Tomb books? I found them impenetrable on the first approach but absolutely worth the numerous rereadings to catch the details from different perspectives and to catch the injokes.
posted by Iteki at 9:40 PM on November 8 [1 favorite]

Point 1: Once someone pointed out that "lol" is from 1993, and seeing it in nearly every text I send, I shriveled into a mummified skeleton for archaeologists to find in future centuries.

Point 2: You owe it to yourself to click the review's link to Christian Lorentzen's Literature Without Literature (archive), especially if you like the crunching sound of someone gnawing on modern criticism's bones.
posted by mittens at 5:37 AM on November 9 [1 favorite]

GSV Hyper Specificity Has Become a Fashionable Device
GCU None House with Left Grief
posted by bcwinters at 10:54 AM on November 9 [6 favorites]

Having given it a little thought, I think what this writer is responding to, even if they aren't articulating it clearly, is an unfortunate convergence between heavily referentialism and other aspects of present dominant literary style. As others have noted here, it is impossible to write fiction set in any existing society that doesn't make references later readers might find opaque. The history of modern literature tells us this even if somehow common sense fails to inform us that people five hundred years from now won't know what "iPhone" means. However, a specific cultural reference in, say, Thackeray would generally be set in a welter of other detail more easily decoded, providing at least some context from which meaning might be inferred. He did this, not for the convenience of twenty-first century readers, but because his style, like the style of most novelists before the early twentieth century, was wordier and his attempts to depict human consciousness more comprehensive and wide-ranging. In some modern novelists, "it's giving none pizza" is all you get, both as description of "it" and as characterization by the narrator of "it." The flatness and elision of "MFA style" thus marries poorly with heavy referentialism and makes everything feel like coterie writing even if it isn't intended to be.
posted by praemunire at 12:28 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

I point to James Joyce's Ulysses as a literary work (masterpiece!) that is hyperspecific but which has maintained its freshness for over a century now. The Annotated Notes by Gifford is 700 pages long. Rabbit holes galore on Irish history and politics, Shakespeare, mathematics, Catholicism, the history of English literature and a dozen other themes and side stories, all of it embedded and woven through the minutiae of one specific day in Dublin.
posted by storybored at 8:13 PM on November 9 [5 favorites]

Oh they’ll probably know what an iPhone was, but they might not know the relevance of describing a potential beau as having “green texts”.
posted by Iteki at 6:13 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]