Slang dates your writing. And that's OKAY.

I'm following the facebook page for Just Write Chicago, a group where I used to be an active member but these days not so much.  Mostly, I ignore what they post, so I probably shouldn't be following them, but every now and then they link to an interesting article about craft.  A couple weeks ago, though, they linked to an article called "Writing with Slang."  It's from Grammar Girl, which has the lay/lie chart that I always google and gives some good tricks for remembering homophones, which I suck at.  This article, however, gave me THE RAGE.

It's about how using slang in your writing dates your writing.  Yes.  This is true.  Using language particular to a time and place, sets your work in a time and place.

HORRORS!!!

The article starts with a list of slang phrases, all of which are either derive from African American communities or from teen girls.  Huh.  It's almost like their language shouldn't be taken seriously.
It goes on to give an example of Lord Buckley, who translated Marc Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar into slang used at the time by beantniks. 

A screenshot

I beg your pardon?

That passage is great!  Do you feel the way it flows?  How it perfectly matches the meter?  How it's poetry that washes over you, even if you don't know what every word means?

It reminds me a lot of listening to...what am I thinking of?...hmmm...oh wait.  Shakespeare.

Is this article serious telling me that Shakespeare, with its many many footnotes, makes more sense?  Surely they're not saying that Shakespeare's writing is more timeless because he doesn't use slang.  Surely they're not saying that his writing isn't dated by the language it uses.  They're saying here that Shakespeare is easier to understand (I would argue it's not), and they're arguing this without getting into the fact that we have accepted Shakespeare's slang due to linguistic imperialism: slang from cultures that beat all other cultures into submission ends up not being considered slang anymore.

I'm so mad.

 

Then it goes on to tell me not to use slang in my writing, except sparingly in dialogue.  Because this person has never heard of a first person or close third person perspective.  Or maybe they have, but they've only thought about it if an upstanding character who does not use slang (or whose slang is not considered slang) is the point of view character.

I get it.  Language changes fast, and there's a chance a new term or a phrase won't survive more than a few weeks or months, or that it won't find a place outside the niche culture in which it was conceived.  There's a real threat that no one's going to know what you're talking about by the time the book you wrote gets published. 

However.  Sometimes those niche cultures need representation.  Those people need to see themselves.  They need to see the way they talk and the way they think.  And anyway, teen girls are not a niche culture.

I'm also done with this idea that your Great American Novel can be timeless by making it not apparent what time period it's set in.  I run into this idea a lot in writing meet ups, and I'm sick of it.  Let's look at the white dude cannon: Hemingway, Falkner, Fitzgerald, etc--they set their books in a particular time and place, which gives their settings and characters a distinct richness.  Let's look at sci-fi set in the future or in second-world fantasy not set on Earth.  Within a decade, these become clear products of the times in which they were written.  They can bring baggage of biases about race or sex or gender or colonialism, or they can date themselves with ideas about where technology will progress or with the lack of technology that has progressed, or they can date themselves by what they see as a threat: fascism, nuclear annihilation, climate change...Okay, maybe that one's a bad example as those threats have all made a comeback. 

This idea that you could possibly write something that wouldn't show its age is the height of hubris.  That's not what being "timeless" is about.  To attempt to do this, you would have to suppose a world where you could remove all things that would change, where biases and power structures remain stagnant or are so far removed from the characters' experience as to be non-existent.  Or both.

Yeah, it's natural to cringe away from things that feel a decade old, things that are at the point of being embarrassing instead of nostalgic.  It's easy to make fun of Elaine Benes's shoulder pads or the language in Clueless.  But if the things that set your story in a certain place and time are too much to look past, maybe you have bigger problems. 

And by the way, Clueless?  Still a great movie.  Know what else?  Similar to the example that started off this rant, it's a retelling of a classic work of literature.