20131002.0649

One of the things that I and those who, like me, are involved in the academic study of languages and literatures do is to look for good language.  We seek out clever phrasings, embedded multiple meanings, referentiality, and pleasing cadences, edifying ourselves thereby and pointing out to those few who listen to us that this, this is the way to put words together.  We trace out what works to what end and try to puzzle out why it works the way it does--and then we go further to look at what it reveals about the writers, the readers, and the contexts in which both exist that it is so.  Ultimately, we look at what we do to find out about part of who we are--and that is, I think, a worthwhile field of study, regardless of what some sets of people may think.

Conversely, we look at what works badly in the use of language, plumbing it for the same things that we delve into the good to find.  The kinds of mistakes that get made reveal much about those who make them, and the fact that they are perceived as mistakes says a thing or two about those who look upon them and find them lacking.  (What it says about me, I am not sure I want to know.)  And it is unfortunately the case that the bad far outweighs the good in terms of frequency; finding fault is a damned sight easier than finding excellence, as I am sure that many who read this know from the trauma of graded papers now and in the past.

Among those errors are trite phrases--hollow, empty bits of wording that "sound good" but do not actually add to their surroundings.  They are wastes of the time spent in "crafting" them and reading them, and they annoy me greatly--although they also allow me the opportunity to vent a bit of my spleen in jest.  I have done so in this web-space before, I think (I am not going to exert my search-fu to find when I have done so), and I have cause to do it again.

There is, at present, a trashy romance novel in my house (at least one; there may be others).  As is usual for such things, the words between the covers are poorly put together; they are vague and shapeless, offering escapism through affective identification as they foist upon their readership heteronormative presumptions of conduct nobody can effectively emulate, thereby creating dissatisfaction with current circumstances while promoting attempts to embody an "ideal" society whose implications are not explored but which tend to restrict participants to narrowly prescribed roles likely to abrogate their agency.  But it is not with those words--or the bloviating I use to discuss them--that I have to do today.  No, my gripe is with the words on the cover: "Some memories really are unforgettable" [emphasis in the original].  And my gripe can be pointed out well with but a single, simple question: Can something forgotten be called a memory?

Discuss.