/lit/ - Literature

>almost all discussion moves online
>put a lot of thought into a statement
>everyone either skims it or doesn't read because attention struggles to be focused for more than 15 seconds
>shorthand and low-effort reigns supreme

>>20324983
Information can be conveyed though other mediums? Even pictures via memes?
As social media is the modern day equivalent of the public fourm, than are video essays the equivalent of speeches in the public fourm in our culture?
How do you know your perception of the way people talked in the ancient world is even correct? What of the speeches you're thinking of are the cream of the cream of the cream of the crop of a certain culture?
Just spit-balling here.

>>20324983

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

>Do people just not value language anymore?
no because whats important now is if you say the same thing they say or if you say otherwise and it is easier to have bad quality of writing than to have a good one, so people communicate well enough to be understood and the recipients of the message are content with that as far as they can tell if you are a friend or an enemy

btw beautiful pic

>>20325016
Thus spake Capital.

>>20325060
Not really. I don't see how you can blame capitalism for this one, there's really no connection. If eloquence was à la mode and you found that fact regrettable you would say that eloquence is just a tool for signaling education and class and for denigrating the language of the lower classes, but as for now you say eloquence is being destroyed because capitalism tends towards the destruction of art. It's kind of stupid.

>>20324983
There are plenty of eloquent speakers.
It's just that you average retard has access to the internet and is not limited in his idiocy to a local pub.

>>20324983
>Where Did Our Sense of Eloquence Go? Will It Ever Return?

>>20325060
>It's capitalism's fault people want to be efficient
>It's capitalism's fault people don't care for my Marxist word salad

>>20325060
capitalism fostered the publishing industry. get bent.

>>20325782
Leftist word salad is the opposite of eloquence and yet leftist word salad has ironically replaced eloquence. It's why so many people will use buzzwords and theoretical concepts--which have no basis in fact despite being completely materialistic in nature--just to sound smart. It's because unis have moved from a "diet" of real literature to shit like picrel which is what now passes for scholarship.

>>20325516
I'm simply observing the language used in workplaces and the relentless bombardment of nigger slang from media and advertising interests. Their end goal is a brown wave of colour that lacks the language to even frame the plight of their degradation.

>attempt to speak eloquently
>get called a psued
there's your reason

>>20325942
>I'm simply observing the language used in workplaces
a lot of this started in the mid '80s to '90s under the influence of universities. It really wasn't always like this. Eloquence in general, however, fell off around the '20s and '30s for whatever reason.
It's the Faulkner vs Hemingway prose debate:

> In April 1947 William Faulkner was invited to visit the University of Mississippi. While conducting a question-and-answer session in a creative writing class, Faulkner was asked to name “the five most important contemporary writers.” He listed (in order) American novelists Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck. When asked to rank himself among his contemporaries, Faulkner responded:

> 1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn’t have long to live; 2. William Faulkner; 3. Dos Passos; 4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used; 5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him—now I don’t know.

> Notably, Faulkner placed himself first among living writers. At the time of the ranking, Wolfe had been dead for almost nine years. Faulkner’s remarks were eventually transcribed and published. Marvin Black, the public relations director for the University of Mississippi, wrote a press release summarizing his comments, including his claim that Hemingway “has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb.” Black’s press release ran in the New York Herald Tribune in May 1947.
It is unclear whether Faulkner intended his comments to be provocative. (He had, after all, been told that students would not be allowed to take notes and that professors would not be present during the question-and-answer session.) Regardless, the hypercompetitive Hemingway could not or would not let them go. Hemingway—responding to a paraphrased version of Faulkner’s comments—reportedly replied:

> Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

> He went on insinuate that Faulkner was an alcoholic whose talent had, as of late, been lost in “the sauce.”

> https://www.britannica.com/story/was-there-a-feud-between-william-faulkner-and-ernest-hemingway

> and the relentless bombardment of nigger slang from media and advertising interests.
Yeah, and it wouldn't even be so bad if it wasn't considered desirable to start speaking like that even if you don't naturally speak like that (and worse yet, to start writing like that in tweets and stuff). Funnily enough, from what I've read, blacks that don't speak that way are ironically treated worse for it when amongst peers.

>>20325942
fr? not gucci my nigga

>>20324983
The British still value it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=titzI1z74qo

>>20326008
>Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used
kek

probably won't come back unless something fundamental changes. Like everyone stops using tv and phone, or maybe just socioeconomic conditions will allow us to leave a dark age so to speak artistically (which we've been in since pop music and film stopped developing in the 80s).

>>20326008
Still, it seems strange to attribute the death of eloquence to capitalism per se or even the internet really. Eloquence survived abbreviations; shorthand; the telegram; low, mass literature (e.g. penny-dreadfuls); and generations of slang; and I'm sure it could have survived the internet too if society and perhaps the way we interacted with the internet was different. There are clearly forces more specific than our economic system at play here, though, I would imagine.

>>20326200
>There are clearly forces more specific than our economic system at play here, though, I would imagine.
Who?

>>20324983
Your perception of the old shit is filtered through academicians who themselves tend to have large vocabularies. You really think niggas like Cicero are busting out three-dollar SAT words at every chance while they're trying to get the point across? Fuck no they understood that rhetoric requires you to dumb it down a bit. Stuffing Marcus Aurelius's writings with big words is more about the reverence his scholars have for the man than it reflects his actual diction

Whatever it is. It probably parallels the change from the autism of people wearing suits literally everywhere to the cringe of modern day athleisure.

>>20324983
Things move too fast nowadays for people to even have the patience with eloquent speech. It also means things have to be as utilitarian as possible which means stripping down all adornments, be it from architecture or from language.

>>20326309
>Things move too fast nowadays for people to even have the patience with eloquent speech. It also means things have to be as utilitarian as possible which means stripping down all adornments, be it from architecture or from language.
Rage, RAGE against shapeless writing!

>>20326082
If only the Brits could pronounce words without chewing half the syllables it would be perfect. Alas

>>20325740
Where do you think you are?

>>20326302
Well even in your picture there's a man in a shirt and shorts on the left.
Suits and hats are kino though. It's still somewhat alive in business casual but nowadays it's all looks > comfort. And on the other end of the spectrum you have everyone wearing hoodies and puffy coats looking like drug dealers.

I think what I'm trying to say is I want suits to come back but have more variety. I'm not sure if them going out of style has anything to do with costs? Seems strange since a lot of people were wearing them even in the 1900s when they were harder to manufacture. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

>>20326605
Greentexts are basically modern day poems I am aware yes.

>>20324983
Don't take for granted how eloquent we still are.
Your grandchildren will be speaking in memes. Look at twitch culture; how they post ironically (i.e unironically) replace words and phrases with emote names. That is what language will become.

>>20326652
To elaborate, my 3 year old cousin can't count to 10 but is perfectly able to slap the shit out of his sister screaming "I like ya cut, G"

>>20326621
>I want suits to come back but have more variety.
It was called the 1980s and it's over now.

It all went into rap music.

>>20324983
>Since formulated knowledge is inseparable from language, the desacralization of knowledge could not but affect the use of language. If European languages have become less and less symbolic and ever more unidimensional, losing much of the inward sense of classical languages, it is because they have been associated with thought patterns of a unidimensional character. The antimetaphysical bias of much of modern philosophy is reflected in the attempt made to divest language of all metaphysical significance, a process which, however, is impossible to achieve completely because language like the cosmos is of an ultimately divine origin and cannot be divorced totally from the metaphysical significance embedded in its very roots and structures. Nevertheless, already in the seventeenth century the rise of rationalism and the mechanization of the world began to affect European languages almost immediately in the direction of secularization.

>Be that as it may, the secularization of language and the attempt to substitute pure quantity for the symbolic significance of language in the reading of the cosmic text also reflected upon the language of sacred Scripture itself, which until now had been considered as a gift from God and which had been connected by certain Catholic and also Protestant theologians with the book of nature. But now that human language had become degraded and mathematics considered as the proper language of nature, the language of sacred Scripture began to appear as “more the slipshod invention of illiterate man than the gift of omniscient God.” The link between divine language and human language broke down, leaving the latter to undergo the successive “falls” or stages of secularization which have resulted in the various forms of bastardization of languages today and also, on another level, to the sacrifice of the liturgical art connected with Latin in favor of vernacular languages which have already moved a long way from their sacred prototypes and become only too familiar as the everyday languages of an already secularized world filled with experiences of triviality. There is an almost one to one correspondence between the depleting of knowledge of its sacred content and the desacralization of the language associated with it; and also vice versa the attempt to elevate language once again to its symbolic and anagogical level whenever there has been a revival or reconfirmation of sacred knowledge or scientia sacra which would then seek to have itself expressed in the language available, but also appropriate, to it.