Simple Present Tense on a Rampage
January 27th, 2008 by MarkTonight TC came over to my place to pick up some of his stuff that had been left at my apartment since long before I moved in there myself. He had a tripod, and some random other filming stuff to take, and I also gave returned all the books he’d lent me over the last couple of years. That was my mistake.
Somehow, we stumble across an extra copy of Crytonomicon, which I am currently in the process of reading. He picks it up, thumbs through it and says, “Geez, it’s all in the simple present tense!”.
“What could he be talking about?” I say to myself. I pick up the book and look at a random paragraph. I turn the page. I look at another. Then the realization sinks in… Neil Stephenson writes vast tracts of text entirely in the simple present tense. I try to read another page. It bothers me. It sucks.
TC ruins Neil Stephenson.
:
February 3rd, 2008 at 5:01 am
I had never noticed that. Still Snow Crash rocks.
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:42 am
so when are you coming back?
February 4th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Present tense or not, Cryptonomicon is one of my all-time favorite novels. Of course, I’m a little biased since I specialize in cryptography…
I’ve heard there’s been a trend over the last century or so to simplify writing. If you read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style you see the theme over and over again to simplify. Use enough words to carry the point, but no more. Make every word tell.
From a pure linguistic point-of-view, this is an atrocity. However, I find it convenient because I can spend more time reading to get content than reading for the sake of reading. People don’t have as much time now as they used to have. Attention spans are short.
I commend Stephenson for writing a novel with as much intrigue as Cryptonomicon, but without taxing the reader’s grammar and vocabulary abilities. It’s like the old battle of whether Hemmingway or Faulker is the better writer. For my part, I prefer Hemmingway’s short, concise prose to Faulker’s long, rambling sentences that span pages. Similarly, I’ve tried reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but could never read past the first chapter before falling asleep due to the complicated sentence structure and advanced word choice. In contrast, Stephenson’s Snow Crash was a delightful read that didn’t require having a dictionary on-hand. Cryptonomicon follows in the same tradition, giving an intriguing story in a simple style.
February 6th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Prince Roy,
I can’t tell you yet.
Matt,
I see what you write on Feburary the 4th. I think about it.
February 10th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Mark — I saw your comments and thought you were kidnapped by the Chinese secret police and replaced by an impostor.
The funnier part is that many readers (the language students) will probably look at the comment and ask “what’s wrong with it?”
Languages like Indonesian don’t even have tense — you have to infer the tense based on context. To make a noun plural, you say it twice. There isn’t even the verb ‘to be’ — you just infer its presence by lack of any other verb: I Tarzan, you Jane. With languages like these, I can see how it would be very difficult learning the nuances of English tense.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Oops. Sorry about that.