For a while, it was "problematic." Which means puzzling, open to doubt, baffling, even enigmatic. Confusing. Hard to solve.
And how is the word used? To mean "filled with problems." A problematic thing is supposedly a thing filled with problems. How did it come to mean this? Who knows?
For that matter, how the hell did "verbiage" (which means prolixity or verbosity) come to mean word choice? And why did my supervisors at my next to last company misspell it "verbage"?
Leethinks that people are ceasing to give a hoot what words mean.
Anyway, the new word in the "problematic" category--and one that's driving me nuts--is "nuance" (or, even worse, "nuanced"). The actual meaning of the word? It has to do with subtle shades of meaning, slight differences therein. Ah, but what are people MAKING it mean? Complex. Layered with meaning. Containing many meanings, even.
It's none of those things, but why get technical about definitions when we're defining something? That's too much like paying attention. We Boomers never do that.
Nuance involves subtle differences in things. It has nothing to do with context, as a richard dawkins fan tried to suggest recently. And it has zero to do with some deeper meaning lurking beneath a seemingly simple surface--to wit, if you think my analysis of something lacks depth, don't tell me I'm missing the "nuance," or however NPR puts it. Unless you want to babble.
Oh, and I forgot "irony," which has somehow come to mean saying the opposite of what you really mean. It's like, "Hey, nice car," when what you're really doing is making fun of the car. "Nice" being sarcastic (a word used, anymore, to mean satirical).
How that qualifies as irony is anyone's guess. In fact, saying the opposite of what you mean is... saying the opposite of what you mean. There's nothing ironic, in and of itself, about mocking someone or something. Nor anything ironic about the other person (or his car) not knowing he's being made fun of, unless we presume that the other person should know he's being mocked. But why would we presume that? Just because we think he should know?
How is our perception correct and his not correct? Or vice versa? In a piece of literature, the reader knows which perception is correct and which is not. In real life, there's no text. (Text-messaging, yes, but no text.) Literary devices can fall flat when taken out of their natural environment.
No, irony is more nuanced than... erp... I mean, more complex than that. The disconnect between the expected outcome and the actual outcome, or the intended vs. received meaning, has to have a point. The irony consists of the point in, or of, the disconnect itself.
To put it another way, where there's irony, there's a disconnect. But where there's a disconnect, there isn't necessarily irony.
In other news, a Huff-Po blogger has written about Rep. Stark. Cool. Saturday morning, and HP is writing about something that happened Thursday morning. And.... Oh, this is nice--the blogger doesn't agree with Stark's statement. No, probably not--Stark spoke his mind, and he did so directly. And with his ego in park. The HP'ers are ego first, honest stand second, if at all. They're trying to impress someone, and that never entails putting your heart and soul into your utterances. Too uncouth.
Many on the so-called progressive side are downright annoyed (in Junior High School fashion) by honest and direct communication--you should read, for example, the nasty things said about Cindy Sheehan by some of them. Cindy speaks up, and she does so in simple (but elegant and eloquent) English. But she should use bigger words, presumably. And more "nuance." Always more nuance.
Meanwhile, they're the first to bitch because Dems in Congress (or elsewhere) aren't speaking up. Ohhhhhhh-kay.
Fit these folks for straitjackets, lace them in, and cue Napoleon XIV's great novelty classic.
(Remember when you ran away, and I got on my knees, etc.--Jerry Samuels)
Which reminds me--I need to finish They're Coming to Make Me Pray. More on it later.
Lee
2 comments:
Well actually when a person states that something is not nuanced, it is actually to point out that something is roughhewn, and has not taken into consideration the sublte differences in the subject matter.
Nuance means one thing, to be nuanced means something else yes. But look at the entire sentence before dismissing it ;)
My experience has been that, when people cite lack of nuance, they mean lack of depth. Depth relates to layers of meaning, not to subtle shades of same. "Nuance" as a generalization (as in, something lacks nuance) is so unspecific, it's akin to a critic saying, "Your piece lacks... um... er... something."
A piano student gives a robotic reading to a passage marked Cantabile. His teacher says, "Singing... singing.... Make it sing." Or he plays a rubato passage in strict tempo. Nuance, both.
A piano student plays a complicated contrapuntal passage, omitting half the notes. His playing lacks substance, literally. Depth is missing in action.
I suppose that, in modern usage, his note-deficient playing in the last example would "lack nuance"?
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