buckdata – news and views for an unquiet age

In the age of instant messaging, trends in literature which have lain dormant since the telephone began to jangle are again awakened. Constrained by length limits of 140 characters, we turn for literary inspiration to the past–this time to the golden age of the telegraph–when users paid by the word and changed language by writing compressed and oddball prose.

This fall, America’s entering college students will attempt to convince computers and academic gatekeepers of their proficiency in English by creating product of ample length and erudite grammar in response to standardized prompts. Meanwhile, in their personal lives-pupal forms of the adult lives they will lead until the next technological breakthrough extinguishes the need for character counting–they are harking back to the one-liner. Compelled by the constraints of texting, the young are developing, new, telescoped language, as did Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and other writers of the telegraph age who became champions of the bon and not-so-bon mot.

Like their 19th century forbears who had to pay by the word for communicating over the new found marvel of the telegraph, the young today are developing dexterity and brevity as they thumb their ways through instant messages. Like their ancestors, constrained by a new technology’s limitations, they are creating new language as they compact the flow of prose with spelling shortcuts and creative abbreviations, much as did the users of the telegraph.

Today’s texters may instantly recognize such abbreviations as wtf, lol, and g2g. Would-be texters must write short, or potentially pay more for SMS. This constraint has resulted not only in new language, but also in squeezed literary forms which at their best can come to resemble poetry at its most austere: high-tech haiku in the form of microblogs, instant messages, and even tiny tweets.

Since Morse code had to be keyed in, and telegrams were charged by length, yesterday’s telegraphers were also urged to write short–to use @ instead of at, strip away articles, dispense with lengthy honorifics, and acknowledge receipt of a message with ii (for “aye-aye”).

Writers like Dickens, whose career began earlier, may have grown wordy under the nurturance of the pay-by-the-word magazine publishers. However, writers more firmly of the telegraph age, like Ambrose Bierce, learned to adapt the compressed telegraph style into missile-like prose sallies–fast, caustic and often terminally explosive.

Can we prove that Bierce, knight-exemplar of the devastating one-liner, the cynical aphorism, and the zinger, actually based his style on the telegram? No, but it’s probable. A Union civil war veteran gone west, Bierce arrived in San Francisco in the same decade as the transcontinental telegraph. A newspaper columnist, before long he was peppering his readership with savage and often hilarious criticisms. Later the nation, too, came in for a barrage of Bierce’s micro-lacerations–often delivered with the vigor of  tiny stiletto thrusts–with the publication of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary in 1906.

No friend to technology, this man, who struggled with learning to type as late as 1902 and defined the phonograph as an “irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.” The telephone, to Bierce, was an “invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.” Yet his work remains at times more modern than the wordiest Gonzo journalist’s. Bierce’s dictionary contains pungent listings for “Wall Street,” “Un-American” and even “W.” “War” was defined as a “by-product of the arts of peace.” “Peace,” Bierce noted, was “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”

We might not have liked his views much. He attacked entrepreneurs, punctured poets, and spat on feminist ambition. An enemy of traditional wedlock, he defined “Marriage” as follows: “n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” Yet, even in his creepy and disturbing recollections of traumatic war experiences, Bierce is somehow a man for our time.

Bierce dropped from sight in Mexico in 1913 in a mystery which has never been solved, after writing cryptically, “To be a gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia.” Media-savvy even in his tabloid-style exit, Bierce managed to package his own presumed demise into an evergreen story to be dredged up on nearly a century’s worth of slow news days–no mean accomplishment in the newsroom then or now!

Will texting drive literature as vigorously? It’s too soon to tell. We have not yet finished adjusting to Bierce. We don’t know what to make of him or how to memorialize him, except briefly: “Bierce lost in Mexico. OMG, stop.”

Note to readers: Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for a download of the Devil’s Dictionary at the usual wonderful Project Gutenberg price–free. Also thanks to Wikipedia for thoroughly documented information on the telegraph age. For additional information on the language of telegrams, see www.telegraph-office.com.