"I of my own knowledge…"

This is pretty informative, and pretty witty. I like writing that includes phrases like “so full of sociological meaning they hurt your eyes when you read them” and “all threaten to represent trends that are the very height of zeitgeist.” And most of these terms are new to me (naturally!) though some are things I know well enough. I like “enoughism,” particularly.

From http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/do-you-speak-2009-the-iiosi-buzzword-glossary-1224219.html

IoS, BTW, means Independent on Sunday.

Do you speak 2009? The IoS Buzzword Glossary

Sunday, 4 January 2009

The New Year was so young it was barely on solids when the words reached us. And they were not just any old words. These were buzzwords – words so trendy they squeaked; expressions so full of sociological meaning they hurt your eyes when you read them: micro-boredom, digital diet, energy dashboards, negawatts, geo-fencing, GRIN Tech, instapreneur, and many more.

They were in a chart produced by Future Exploration Network, trend-spotters to American cutting edgistas (our own feeble attempt at buzz-word coinage). A few were faintly familiar; most were new; all threaten to represent trends that are the very height of zeitgeist. Intrigued, we went in search of more upcoming words and phrases. The result is this, the IoS 2009 Buzzword Glossary.

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My friend Emerson (and he is a friend, though we live so far apart in time) lends reassurance across the years, this morning, via Emphatically Emerson, page 174. Writing in 1848, he says:

“Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale — who writes always to the unknown friend.”

It could have been written this day expressly for me, the writer of books that few buy but some few treasure — or for you, regardless whether you write or blog or speak and regardless whether you have an audience.

Or, to paraphrase Henry Thoreau, “write not the times; write the eternities.”

Back in 1945, when America was fresh from its victory over the axis powers, Ernest Hemingway offered the following advice, which went mostly unheeded. This is from Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: a Life Story, page 453.

“Now that the wars are over and the dead are dead,” he wrote [in an introduction to an anthology called A Treasury for the Free World], “we have come… into that more difficult time when it is a man’s duty to understand his world.” In war, men needed “obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage, and resolution.” In peace, their duty was “to disagree, to protest, even to revolt and rebel” while still working always “toward finding a way for all men to live together on this earth.” The United States had come out of the war as the strongest of the powers. It was important that she did not also become the most hated. Among other achievements, American armed forces had probably “killed more civilians of other countries than all our enemies did in all the famous massacres we so deplore.” The atomic bomb was the sling and the pebble which could destroy all the giants, including ourselves. We must avoid any trace of the mentality of the Fascist bully. Nor should we fall into the fatal errors of hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, or vengeance. Instead we must educate ourselves to appreciate the “rights, privileges, and duties of all other countries.”