Once you notice how much of contemporary literature depicts people murdering their children, you can’t unsee it.
This whole way of life we have stumbled into is deeply barren. It can’t create anything. This is what the murders of children in today’s literature symbolize.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m relieved to be so out of touch with contemporary literature!
Just finished reading Belloc’s The Path to Rome. It is a clean font of linguistic refreshment (after a bout of copyediting writers who love the construct: “managed to”). I thought from the title it was a convert narrative, but I’m certain Belloc was Catholic all his life. No, it is a travel diary: he walked to Rome from France, across Switzerland, before motorcars. Never ‘managed to’ walk or ‘managed to’ sleep in the woods or ‘managed to’ cross the Alps: He walked. He slept in the woods. He crossed the Alps. He drank prodigious amounts of wine. Belloc was a man of action, not a weasel: he did stuff. On a quart of wine/day.
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That’s such a great point about the overuse of “managed to.” There’s this idea that a human being must manage himself as a sort of a human enterprise. And the vocabulary reflects that. This is exactly the kind of analysis that I’m doing in my new book. The managerial, consumerist language is polluting how we think about ourselves and the world.
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Weasels.
The world is full of weasels.
Their verb constructs betray them.
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On a less philosophical note (but no less important), this is inspiring me to search for any “manage to’s” in my writing.
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😀 The world is brighter already!
Do your readers a favor and ctrl-F your text for every instance of “just,” “still,” and “only” as well; ask yourself if the word is necessary. Does it read smoothly… or is it is an irritating speed bump? Is it a moral dodge from the subject? Writers often use these words to hold their own assertions at arm’s length: it betrays a reluctance to to say definite things, a fear of stating one’s own beliefs. Cowardice and weaselling.
I’m ambivalent about correcting these things.
If you look through your writing and find a few: yes, correct them.
If you look through your writing and find bucketloads: copyediting won’t help. You need introspection: why are you distancing yourself from your own writing? Are you lying? Are you afraid of what other people might think? It’s a healthy exercise: find a sentence where you have weaseled, rephrase it as a definite statement, say it out loud, and pay attention to how you feel. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, ask why. Find the lie, the reluctance, the cowardice underneath, and fix *that*.
None of that is a personal judgement. It is experience: I am the Queen of Weasels, and I fight this constantly.
Let’s all stomp our inner weasels.
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Even if I wanted to weasel, surely there’s more evocative ways to say it. “I struggled to climb the mountain”
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Exactly!
The texts I’ve been proofreading are fiction. “Managed to” is a passive phrase that sucks momentum out of action prose. A nasty energy parasite. Like turning on the A/C while driving your 20yo Corolla.
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Interesting, I find the term “managed to” to be quite liberating. My family raised me to give up in despair and shame if something wasn’t easy and didn’t come naturally and conceal all efforts that I ever tried. The realization that it was okay to take a step back, identify the source of my difficulties, and “manage to” overcome them in pursuit of my personal and professional goals and interests was a huge positive cognitive step for me.
-YZ
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“Liberating” is another neoliberal term. 😁
We need to start thinking why we automatically position “liberating” as something good. What is the ultimate destination of this journey toward increased freedom?
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“What is the ultimate destination of this journey toward increased freedom?”
In my case, being able to have a career/job, which liberates me from being financially dependent on the parents who think very little of my ability to function in the world. To me, that is important and good.
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That, in turn, enables me to raise my children in line with my values, and to not be subject to the dysfunction and humiliation of my extended ex-soviet family.
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I didn’t mean you personally, God forbid. If anybody understands weird Soviet families, it’s me. Here’s hoping that everything works out for you.
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I appreciate that. But, if not me, who do you mean? And, if we’re talking about politics/religion/culture, what does your vision of a good society going to look like?
I’m not asking you to answer that, but those are questions I ask myself when I’m listening to someone’s critique of the status quo. What do they have to offer that is better? Is it plausible? And what will it mean for me? If I’m being asked to give something up (in this case of giving up “liberating”–presumably I get a worse career?) , am I just worse off, or do I get something that might be attractive in return (perhaps, more fulfilling personal relationships, better infrastructure, whatever?)? And will that thing actually materialize for me or will I just have sold out my interests for yet another feel-good political movement?
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I mean, we, all of us. We have already liberated ourselves into levels of loneliness and depression that are unknown in history, especially in times of peace and prosperity.
I have found, for example, that the concept of duty brings a lot more contentment than freedom from all obligations. Doing things out of duty or because they were always done this way without having to choose and decide everything is actually pretty great.
To give an example, the quality of my relationship improved dramatically the day I decided that this is it, this is the only man for me forever, one of us will bury the other. Literally, nothing upsets me anymore because who cares? We will be together for an eternity, so everything else is pretty small and insignificant. It’s the opposite of liberating because I’m locked into this one man forever but it’s so good.
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Why “managed to” and not “did”?
Not: I worked at it, I practiced, I tried 400 times until I got it right, I learned, I struggled, I overcame, I grew up, I fought, I suffered and was transformed, I conquered, I stumbled, I failed, I refused, I obeyed, I took, I negotiated, I proposed, I maneuvered…
A sad, evasive: “I managed.”
It suggests laziness, lack of agency, and the desire to avoid accountability.
The construct may have a right and proper place. It may accurately reflect one’s internal state: denial and dissociation. But if that is the case, it’s a pathology to overcome, not a fortification to defend.
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I’m an engineer. I don’t think “I managed to achieve this objective by balancing numerous reality-based constraints” is sad or evasive. Its just accurate, and sometimes more concise, and linguistically implies some humility that the constraints were real and challenging.
-YZ
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Say that phrase out loud.
Now say “I achieved this objective by balancing numerous reality-based constraints”. Compare.
“Managed” has no effect on meaning. Why clutter with meaningless verbiage?
I understand wanting to project humility, but it also reads as not fully owning your work. There are better ways to do that: credit your sources and acknowledge your limits.
See also: “It’s just accurate”. Just, as used here, is also a dodge-word.
I coach my kids on this one: as soon as you say “I just” you torpedo your credibility. Everything that follows is a self-justification. Don’t use it, and beware people who do. This word, along with still, only, simply (when used in a similar fashion) is a weasel word used by dodgy people with hidden motives, and by those experiencing cognitive dissonance, who’ll need special handling. When we notice ourselves using it, it’s an indicator that we are not being honest with ourselves, and we need to get our heads on straight. When we notice others using it, we tread with caution.
It’s free advice from a total stranger on the internet: if it’s useful to you, take it. If not, don’t.
It might be profitable to ask yourself why you feel defensive about it. Personal habits we defend reflexively are worth examining!
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As somebody who LOVES “just” and has to weed it out endlessly from my writing, I wholeheartedly agree. It’s a bastard of a word. Weak and weaselly.
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Someone who understands!
I had the worst time with just. It plagued my insecure youth.
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The inability to accept human difference: AI tech bros are currently celebrating because they’ve “democratized art.” How so? They’ve made it possible for anyone to create a “Studio Ghibli style” picture of themselves with an AI filter. Now we are all Hayao Miyazaki!
Some people in the tech world seem deeply resentful that other people can draw well and they can’t.
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We have elevated natural genius to an absurdly high pedestal: the implicit message in huge swathes of our pop culture, particularly that directed at children, is that people are *born* good at stuff, and it is pointless to invest the massive amount of time and effort required to develop skill and expertise. If you’re not talented already, it’s a waste. The (fantasy!) key to success is not practice, screw up, practice more, screw up more, learn from the screwups, etc, it’s find the thing you are already good at and magically leverage it into a vocation. If you are not born good at drawing, singing, playing piano, fixing cars, dancing, carpentry, math, Tagalog, whatever… you can be a disaffected political activist.
This is why we homeschool (reason #589). Nobody’s ever told my kids they don’t have to work for it, and they haven’t absorbed it by osmosis by settling into a graded school program where everything is too easy. I can praise them all day long for how hard they worked, for their determination, for what they’ve learned by their own efforts, for overcoming difficulties. I do not praise them for being smart. They’re our kids and they’re not brain-damaged: of course they’re smart. It’s what they do with it that matters. They read some of the trash literature, and we talk about that: the Born Special with Extra Special Sauce trope (where the only struggle is getting reluctant/envious/prejudiced others to recognize your inherent specially-specialness), and why it’s so pervasive.
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Damn, I had no idea. Can you recall any examples?
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Just finished “When You Disappeared” by John Marrs. It’s in there. “The Last Party” by AB Torre also has it in there. “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray. “Querelle of Robervale” by Kevin Lambert.
Literature in Spanish is similarly strewn with murdered, discarded, and mangled children. It’s actually easier to list books that don’t have this component because they are fewer. And it’s both high literature and the entertainment genres.
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“Literature in Spanish is similarly strewn with murdered, discarded, and mangled children”
Don’t forget children kidnapped and/or trafficked to be raised by people they’re not related to. Some might think of it as a telenovela trope but it’s…. all over the place in Spanish language works (both of a popular and more refined nature).
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Absolutely. It’s almost every book that I read. It’s a huge phenomenon across Western countries. The collective unconscious struggles to make children compatible with the desire to get liberated from everything at all costs.
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