Channel your inner dead white epigrammist (with Twitter!)

Think you can't get your 18th-century literati fix from Sh*t My Dad Says? Think again. Boing Boing’s Nathan Pensky parses the geneology of Alexander Pope and today’s social networkers:

Consider this tweet, by comedian Rob Delaney (@robdelaney), one of the funniest people on Twitter: "Got a pretty bad burn on my arm. I was putting a pie in the oven & my dad came up behind me & put a cigarette out on my arm."

Now here's an epigram by Alexander Pope, entitled "Epigram Engraved Upon the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness," "I am his Highness' dog at Kew / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"

[…] Content-wise these two are very different, yet formally they are similar. They both require the use of only a short statement as a set-up, then another short statement to offer a reversal. While short forms have probably always been ideal for jokes, the Tweet and the epigram are an extreme case of this marriage of form and content.

Still think the tweet is all machine and no muse? Don’t be fooled, says Pensky:

It can be hard not to think of Twitter as more "technological" than epigrams. They are a newer form, written on a machine, and so it might be easy to think of them in the context of "things happening faster."

And yet Twitter doesn't actually facilitate the composition of Tweets, only the publishing of them. While Tweets may be presented to the world with a great level of speed, a human being still has to think of what to say, and the cleverness of the individual writer, rather than the technology he or she is using, determines the speed at which Tweets are actually composed. Yelling an epigram out an open window would perform the same function as Twitter, on a smaller scale. The loudness of Twitter's "yell" and the size of its "window" are much bigger, but again these are all matters of presentation, and not of the text itself. Right away, the comparison between a Tweet and an epigram reveals itself to be about the text, not what happens directly before or after the text is created; differences or similarities between the two should not be judged based on surrounding circumstances.

So please, people, don't ever stop yelling epigrams out of open windows:

The point is that all language, whether written by Pope hundreds of years ago, or a Twitterer just a few minutes ago, is a community, being influenced by and influencing others within that community. The society of the epigrammist is not always as direct as Twitter, but it is certainly not as solitary an exercise as one would think right away. Not to mention the fact that, while many Twitter users join the site for social reasons, it is very possible that many do so for reasons closely associated to the formal strictures themselves. Thus, while one may imagine that Twitterers wanted the interaction and not the means of interacting, or that epigramists wanted the form and had no interest in interacting with their fellow epigrammists, neither image really holds water.

Intrigued? Read more! And don’t forget to tweet about it!