I examine his square face.  He stands with a single arm outstretched, reaching out for something ever-changing.  With his vacant eyes and through gritted teeth he inquires, “Meep?”

I am of course talking about The Lit Drift Robot who resides about a third of the way down our home page.  If you’re a regular reader, you know that Robot just wants to learn how to love.  “Meep?” he calls!  “Meep?” he asks.  “Meep?” he pleads.  Though the word is unfamiliar to me, judging from his body language and the context of his statement, I can only assume meep to mean “Will you teach me? Will you take me under your wing? Is there hope for me?”

Rather than assume that I interpreted Robot’s statement correctly, I looked up the word meep online.  According to Urban Dictionary, meep is a word of many meanings ranging from “an exclamation akin to ‘ouch’ or ‘uh oh’” to an exclamation that “can be used for any purpose whatsoever” or “sums up everything.”  Its origins are believed to be of The Muppet Show’s Beaker.

Though a versatile word indeed, meep is not as commonly used as… let’s say, blurgh. Unlike the more flexible meep, blurgh has a negative connotation and is often used to express frustration or disdain.  There is no real instance in which you can use the word in a positive manner.  What’s craziest is that when you hear the word blurgh, there’s almost no question as to what it means.  It’s not even really necessary to be a fan of 30 Rock to have a full understanding of its definition and application.

How is it that made-up words are sometimes so much more expressive than the real ones? Read more »

Sometimes I feel like a broken record.  I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less.  (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).

Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

Read more »

Escape!

There comes a magical time in many young writers’ lives, generally a few months after they graduate college and move to the “big city”, where they find themselves temping for some huge corporation, alone in a tiny cubicle, filling invoices or entering numbers into an Excel document. Most writers mitigate the depression that comes with this by telling themselves that they are secretly biding their time until they can just finish their novel, screenplay, poetry compilation, psychedelic pop-up book, whatever, their masterpiece that will catapult them out of this awful white-grey world of coffee and horrible inside jokes into a trendy, intellectually stimulating lifestyle where they get laid far more frequently. My advice though, if you find yourself working in a situation, is to take a deep breath and relax. It could be worse. In fact, in one way you’re incredibly lucky, because you have a magic portal that can take you out that office window, up above the clouds, past the city to anywhere you want to go.

You’ve got the Internet.

Read more »