964. From Nietzsche's writing ball to word processors and beyond, we look at how technology can change the way people write. Plus, we unpack the origin of the phrase "Goody Two Shoes" — it didn't start out as an insult.
964. From Nietzsche's writing ball to word processors and beyond, we look at how technology can change the way people write. Plus, we unpack the origin of the phrase "Goody Two Shoes" — it didn't start out as an insult.
The "technology" segment was by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum a professor of English and digital studies at the University of Maryland. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. Read the original: https://theconversation.com/technology-changes-how-authors-write-but-the-big-impact-isnt-on-their-style-61955
The "Goody Two Shoes" segment was by Brenda Thomas, a freelance writer who enjoys writing about a variety of topics in the humanities and education.
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By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
“Our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts.” Nietzsche wrote, or more precisely typed, this sentence on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a wondrous strange contraption that looks a little like a koosh ball cast in brass and studded with typewriter keys. Depressing a key plunged a lever with the typeface downward onto the paper clutched in the underbelly.
It’s well-known that Nietzsche acquired the Writing Ball to compensate for his failing eyesight. Working by touch, he used it to compose terse, aphoristic phrasings exactly like that oft-quoted pronouncement. Our writing instruments, he suggested, are not just conveniences or contrivances for the expression of ideas; they actively shape the limits and expanse of what we have to say. Not only do we write differently with a fountain pen than with a crayon because they each feel different in our hands, we write (and think) different kinds of things.
But what can writing tools and writing machines really tell us about writing?
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Stick around because after the first segment, in which Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about how technology changes the way we write, we'll talk about where we get the phrase "Goody Two Shoes." Professor Kirschenbaum continues …
Having just published my book “Track Changes” on the literary history of word processing, I found such questions were much on my mind. Every interviewer I spoke with wanted to know how computers had changed literary style. Sometimes they meant style for an individual author; sometimes they seemed to want me to pronounce upon the literary establishment (whatever that is) in its entirety.
Style is at once something tangible – built up out of individual words and phrasings, with the academic specialization of stylometry devoted to its study – and elusive, associated with a writer’s “voice” or the unique “feel” of their prose. Doubtless this is why it fascinates us, and why we’re so concerned to know what computers are doing to it. And yet I think the question is misplaced.
We know a lot of things about how computers changed the nature of literary writing: revision, obviously, became easier, and in fact the distinction between revision and composition began to erode entirely. (There are now dedicated writing devices that force you to power through a draft without stopping to revise.)
We also know that word processors found their way into plots and settings, as typewriters had in novels like William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” or Stephen King’s “Misery.”
And we know that the circumstances of literary production changed: In 1983, as I detailed in my book, John Updike used his typewriter to fire off a note dismissing his secretary because he had just gotten a word processor. A year later Primo Levi wrote to an English friend that he was “in danger of becoming a Mac bore.” When she wrote back that it was merely a “clever new typewriter,” he replied: “It’s a lot more than that! It’s a memory prosthesis, an archive, an unprotesting secretary, a new game each day, as well as a designer, as you will see from the enclosed centipede picture.”
But none of these are really observations about style.
Style is the sum of many different influences – the instrument the author is writing with, to be sure, but also market trends and editorial dictates, what an author is reading that week, his or her emotional state and much else besides. (Nietzsche himself had chosen the word “Gedanke” in his original German – “thoughts” – not anything so particular as style.)
Recently, in fact, two researchers tried to determine whether literary style could be measured based on whether or not writers had been through an MFA program, another deterministic variable seemingly easy enough to isolate. They failed.
Sitting at a typewriter, we are always in the present moment as the carriage trundles forward character by character, line by line. Word processing, by contrast, allowed writers to grasp a manuscript as a whole, a gestalt. The entire manuscript was instantly available via search functions. Whole passages could be moved at will, and chapters or sections reordered. The textual field became fluid and malleable, a potentially infinite expanse, or at least limited only by the computer’s ever-expanding memory.
The result was a new kind of control over writing space, a sentiment shared by early adopters of the technology otherwise as different from one another as National Book Award winner Stanley Elkin and queen of the vampires Anne Rice. “Once you really get used to a computer and you get used to entering the information from that keyboard, things happen in your mind, I mean, you change as a writer. You’re able to do things that maybe you never would have thought of doing before,” concluded Rice. Elkin extolled his renewed appreciation for plot after acquiring a word processor in 1979: “Plots have become very interesting to me,” he told an interviewer at the time. “You put the machine into the search mode, and you find what the reference was earlier, and you can begin to use these things as tools, or nails, in putting the plot together.”
What Elkin and Rice are describing, each in their own way, is what composition theorists like Christina Haas have called the “sense of the text.” It means the mental model of the words on the page (or screen) and how the writer perceives his or her relationship to them. Word processing, as the testimony of countless writers suggests, profoundly altered their sense of the text, both in terms of how they approached their writing and what they thought possible. But all of that is a far cry from “style,” typically defined as an author’s individual word choices and sentence structures or arrangements.
Which is not to say that kind of analysis couldn’t be done. In fact, specialists have been doing it for decades. You would begin by choosing a writer like Isaac Asimov, someone who wrote a lot and for whom we happen to know the exact day on which he acquired his first computer: a TRS-80 Model II on May 6th, 1981. You would want a digitized corpus of his books from before and after, and then you would see what you could find with your algorithms.
Even then, though, the question would nag: What would those algorithms tell you? They might reveal some heretofore unimagined master key to Asimov’s oeuvre. But you might also be left with something like stylometrist Louis Milic’s contention about Jonathan Swift, famously demolished by literary theorist Stanley Fish: “The low frequency of initial determiners, taken together with the high frequency of initial connectives, makes [Swift] a writer who likes transitions and made much of connectives.”
As it happens, a couple of researchers a few years back performed exactly this exercise with Nietzsche; tantalizingly, they were apparently able to distinguish between his earlier and later style, pivoting around the onset of his blindness and the acquisition of the Writing Ball. Their results were based on word frequencies, an analysis of which showed the philosopher’s writings to cluster into different groupings based on dates in which the texts were composed.
And yet, a table of word frequencies has nothing to do with sentence length, which was the impetus for the philosopher’s own comment in the first place. Nietzsche, after all, was remarking on the way in which the Malling-Hansen lent itself to brief bursts of text (not unlike tweets) – not the evolution of his personal vocabulary. And we also know that the Writing Ball was only one of several workarounds Nietzsche was eventually forced to adopt – he also dictated prose aloud to secretaries, for example.
Anne Fadiman once claimed she could detect the “spoor” of word processing in other writers’ prose. Using computers to sniff out other computers may yet tell us fascinating things about the delicate membrane between thoughts and the written word. Indeed, it may be that the best way to measure the technology’s impact on literary style is in aggregate, through big data approaches: assembling dozens or hundreds of authors’ bodies of work. It would be fascinating to know, for example, whether the dictates of the grammar checkers built into modern word processors have had a measurable impact on literary prose.
But we’ll still be left with all the imponderables of hands on keyboards. Writing machines may be complicated, but writing itself is always infinitely more so.
That segment was by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum a professor of English and digital studies at the University of Maryland. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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by Brenda Thomas
Have you ever been called, or have you called someone else, a “Goody Two Shoes?” If so, it probably wasn't a compliment. But did you know that the name “Goody Two Shoes” was not originally used in a negative way or for an insulting purpose? Its origin and original meaning can be traced back to an anonymously written children’s story published in England in the mid-1700s.
Many versions of that “Goody Two Shoes” story were subsequently published, but the main story line remained the same: Margery Meanwell’s family becomes destitute due to the cruel treatment of Sir Timothy Gripe and Farmer Graspall. Soon after the Meanwell family’s demise, Margery’s father and mother die leaving her and her brother as poor orphans. Her brother is taken in by a gentleman in London, but Margery is left behind in Mouldwell. At first, she walks around town crying, wearing ragged clothes, and missing one shoe. But it turns out the gentleman caring for her brother had paid the shoemaker for new shoes for Margery, and she is so delighted to have two shoes that she goes around town showing them to everyone she can. As a result, the townspeople start calling her “Little Two Shoes.” They also saw that Margery was a well-behaved and pleasant girl so they soon changed her nickname to “Little Goody Two Shoes.”
As Margery grows up, she continues to have a good, pleasant, and helpful demeanor even though she is of little means. One night, Margery had to take shelter in a barn during a thunderstorm. A gang of robbers also sought protection in that same barn but didn’t know they were not alone. Margery overheard them plotting to rob two men, one of whom was Sir Timothy Gripe. Margery tries to warn Sir Gripe that he is about to be robbed, but he refuses to listen. Margery then seeks out his wife who heeds her warning. Because of Margery, the robbers are caught when they try to steal from their intended victims. Sir Gripe, when he realizes that Margery has helped him, is unthankful and mad that she had saved him.
Margery later marries a noble widower, and on her wedding day, her brother returns to town a rich man intent on sharing his fortune with his sister. For Margery and her brother, their life was a rags-to-riches story. But for Sir Timothy Gripe and Farmer Graspall it was just the opposite. Both Gripe and Graspall eventually lost their wealth and ended up having to live off the charity of none other than Margery who happily assisted them even though they had caused her family’s demise when she was a little girl.
Margery Meanwell, as her surname implied, was kind and good, not critical or judgmental, toward others regardless of how they treated her. Her nickname “Goody Two Shoes” wasn't meant in a disapproving way like it is often used today about people who are obnoxiously self-righteous, arrogantly virtuous, and haughtily think they are better than others. In the “Goody Two Shoes” story the surnames Meanwell, Gripe, and Graspall were good names that aptly fit the people bearing them. Therefore, we could say that those names were euonyms.
The term “euonym” literally means “good name” as in a name that is well suited to a person, place, or thing. Incidentally, euonym was the winning word in the 1997 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Other words with a similar meaning to "euonym" are “aptronym” and its variant “aptonym” that refer to a name appropriate, sometimes humorously so, to a person’s career or character. Some examples of that would be a dentist with the name Dr. Molar or a gentle person whose last name happened to be Dove.
In the “Goody Two Shoes” story, Mary Meanwell’s name and nickname were well suited to her praiseworthy character, which demonstrates that the phrase “goody two shoes” previously had a positive meaning and usage. All the townspeople, except for Sir Gripe and Farmer Graspall, appreciated Margery because of her character.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was during the mid-1800s that the word “goody” and phrase “goody two shoes” started to be used more broadly in a negative way. However, when the “Goody Two Shoes” story was first written, that name had a positive meaning. The surname Meanwell and nickname “Goody Two Shoes” were euonyms because they appropriately fit Margery’s upstanding character. Sir Gripe’s and Farmer Graspall’s names were also euonyms reflecting their surly and greedy personalities and behavior.
Imagine, for a moment, if real life were like the fictional “Goody Two Shoes” story, and people’s surnames were a euonym reflecting their character. What might your name be? Or, on a lighter note, what could be a humorously appropriate last name that aptly fits your current occupation?
Although the name “Goody Two Shoes” has changed in usage over time so that now it means the opposite of when it was originally used, the story of Margery Meanwell continues to be a good example of what a euonym is.
That segment was by Brenda Thomas, a freelance writer who enjoys writing about a variety of topics in the humanities and education.
Finally, instead of a familect story this week, I have a fun follow-up to our segment about the word "mansion" last month. A couple of people have told me that in Japanese, a mansion is essentially a nice apartment. For example, David said, "In Japan, a mansion is an apartment that uses steel-reinforced concrete while an apartment uses low-grade steel or even wood. Mansions tend to have more stories to them as well. So, they are made of better quality than apartments, so I guess [that's] why "mansion" is used. I still hesitate to say the name of the building I live in when talking to someone from outside of Japan without first having to define what a mansion is." And I thought that was so interesting. Thanks for sharing that story.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and in my email newsletter every week, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
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