Writer should know where the limits are
By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)Updated: 2007-01-13 14:45
Not one month goes by without Han Han creating news of one
kind or another. This time, the 24-year-old best-selling writer-cum-race car
driver hit the headlines when one of his blog postings was used as a negative
example by a high school language test.
Han was not happy. Although he admitted they were grammatical errors, he blamed China's educational system for "meaningless analysis that adds dimensions unthought of by the writers themselves". He wrote of the criticism: "To put it lightly, this has been a ludicrous incident; and to be serious, it is a violation of a writer's rights."
After studying the flawed sentences, I have no doubt that they are indeed grammatically incorrect, but not really serious enough in that they are not misleading. It seems that he wrote the blog so fast as to be a verbatim transcript of an impromptu speech. And if he had read it over and done some editing, he would have caught them.
We all have slips in writing. Typos alone account for much of our embarrassment. Besides, we tend to treat our blogs as semi-private journals, often not holding them up to professional judgment. Speaking of which, we can hardly eliminate all errors from our printed publications.
When I read a friend's blog and encounter some glaring error, I often hesitate over whether to notify the writer. It is often caused by the computer input method which automatically puts in the second character of a two-character Chinese word regardless of whether it's the one you wanted. In no way does this suggest anything about the blogger's writing ability.
I would have excused most bloggers from the burden of editing simply because blogging is more for fun than for publishing. But for Han, things are somewhat different: He is a professional writer and he has a huge following among teenagers, who may not know the way he writes those sentences are too colloquial to pass a school test or for any formal occasion. He has the responsibility to edit his postings before the millions of netizens log in.
Han is undoubtedly gifted. I wouldn't even say his refusal to take criticism is "bad attitude". That's the way he is, and we should refrain from making him "docile or obedient", or in nicer sounding but equally condescending words, "a good boy". But being wild is not the same as being linguistically erroneous.
I have to say whoever chose this blog posting for correction made the right decision. I've known publishers who would delete anything that does not conform to standard writing. They don't know there is a whole set of online slang popular among a large swath of the population yet totally unknown to other segments of society.
When some government departments banned words like "pk" from newspapers and "supergirl" from dictionaries, they often remain blissfully unaware that they are playing, not with fire, but with flowing water, so to speak. Language is like a river, it flows, and building a dam may not work. New words are coined when there's a need. It is the manifestation of a society in constant change. Like all things new, most will go out of fashion but a few will be accepted into mainstream usage.
A linguistic purist is an oxymoron, unless the language one studies is Latin. Even if it's not a slang word but technically wrong, it may become an alternative if a powerful spokesperson adopts it. I've known pronunciations that have been prohibited by dictionaries, but when used on China Central Television, they have graduated to standard usage. Han Han may have to couch his inadvertent blemishes in groundbreaking writing before he has a shot at reshaping the Chinese language. He should know his limits.
raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 01/13/2007 page4)
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