In 1984, George Orwell created newspeak, a language "whose vocabulary gets smaller every year."
While newspeak exists only in fiction (or does it?) an even more pervasive, destructive language-killer has infiltrated the newspapers, news sites, and literary blogs of the world — reviewerspeak.
The purpose of reviewerspeak is to force every free-thinking book, movie, and art reviewer into the submissive parroting of only a handful of approved reviewer words to describe any item that may come their way. Call it laziness, call it the incessant demands of the ever-wakeful internet, call it fear of the wrath of Harold Bloom, but reviewers — particularly book reviewers — spew out these same, tired old clichés with the force and regularity of Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist.
The problem of reviewerspeak is not a new one; Strunk and White addressed the bane in The Elements of Style:
- The world of criticism has a modest pouch of special words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. Of these critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote: '...they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons.' The young writer should learn to spot them — words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
But how to identify, and avoid, these little balloons of bright sound? Let's take a look at the 20 most annoying clichés book reviewers use (and I am a chief offender here, though I am entering rehab even as we speak) as a substitute for original and substantive thought:
1. Gripping
2. Poignant: if anything at all sad happens in the book, it will be described as poignant
3. Compelling
4. Nuanced: in reviewerspeak, this means, "The writing in the book is really great. I just can't come up with the specific words to explain why."
5. Lyrical: see definition of nuanced, above.
6. Tour de force
7. Readable
8. Haunting
9. Deceptively simple: as in, "deceptively simple prose"
10. Rollicking: a favorite for reviewers when writing about comedy/adventure books
Article comments
1 - MarkSaleski
i can't decide if it's 'lyrical' or 'luminious' that bothers me the most. since they're both so common, i suppose it hardly matters.
2 - Christopher Rose
What a rollicking good read your Blogcritics début makes!
Seriously, that was highly readable, sorry, and welcome to Blogcritics!
3 - Dr Dreadful
I have a lot of time for anyone who knows where their towel is.
4 - duane
A real tour de ... oops. Ummmm ... you done good.
5 - Dr Dreadful
Duane, you possibly should not seriously consider pursuing a new career as a movie critic.
6 - anonymous
I can't even read this article. It's cut off for me on the left. How annoying.
7 - anonymous
Oh, but I can read the second page. Hmmm...
8 - Christopher Rose
Looks fine to me.
9 - Rodney Welch
Does she say anything about negative cliches?
Let's not forget uneven, crass, murky, lazy, sleazy, vile, clumsy, addle-pated, dreary, boring, sentimental, corny, rubbishy, reprehensible, trashy, smarmy, dated, cowardly, crude, commercial, "intellectually shallow," morbid, sensational, ham-fisted, lame, uninspired, loathsome, ill-researched, stupid, "marginal at best," retread, repetitive, derivative, imitative, shrill, "shadow of his former self," tin-eared, overlong, tasteless, mean-spirited, prudish, fraudulent, brutish, smug, poisonous, unintelligible, self-indulgent, shoddy, dopey, and, of course, that sturdy old warhorse without which no hack review is complete, "This thing really could have used an editor."
With that kind of paucity of language, it's no wonder that critics can no longer be relied on to wound the deserving and discourage the untalented.