Nasty

I'd assumed that the word "snark", so useful and necessary these days, was of fairly recent coinage. But according to the OED it was being used in more or less the current way well over a hundred years ago (and apparently without any special connection to "snark-hunting", quite a different activity.)

snark, v.

2. intr. and trans. To find fault (with), to nag.

1882 Jamieson's Sc. Dict. IV. 314/2 To Snark,..to fret, grumble, or find fault with one. 1904 E. NESBIT Phnix & Carpet x. 185 He remembered how Anthea had refrained from snarking him about tearing the carpet.

The #1 definition at Urban Dictionary says it's a contraction of "snide remark." I buy that, too.

It's a bit surprising that the word's been around so long, because the behaviour it refers to seems fairly new. In my mind, it's firmly linked to fighting-on-the-internet and other seductive but ultimately unsatisfying cyberspatial foolishness (shouting at the television, etc)

I think the internet is making me worse in this department. Not that I've ever seen much point in keeping myself nice: discovering The Smiths, certain books of Evelyn Waugh's, and critically, Kingsley Amis's, at an impressionable age, meant that I grew up committed to the belief that if you find yourself hemmed in by mediocrity and stupidity and boredom, it is almost sinful to leave off being revolted, enraged by it. From Lucky Jim:

There was a long pause while Atkinson looked censoriously round the room, a familiar exercise. Dixon liked and revered him for his air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses, and of not meaning to let this detestation become staled by custom.

But lately I've begun to suspect that I'm gradually but permanently crossing a line, from quiet and contained and rational detestation, of things which deserve to be detested (for instance, Dorian is right now playing Khe Sahn in my ear, why? why?) into a state of mind where dwelling on the profound shittiness of very many things that really don't matter all that much takes up most of my waking hours.

For instance, child actors. The very worst ones = a rating of about 9546,793,4855,285 on the atrocity meter. I am thinking of Dakota Fanning in particular; that vampiric little infant is a monster of appallingness. It is not just the terrible miniature adultness, the pathetically calculated saccharine cuteness, the masquerade, it is also the whole backstory of what the parents of such children must be and do in order to manufacture these plastic automata out of the materials of a real child. I imagine many right-thinking people would share my opinion on these matters. But if one actually goes in search of other views on the wrongness of child actors, one inevitably gets sucked into a mise-en-abyme of further wrongness of different, yet equally compelling, varieties.



(This is taken from a 1930s book called "What Is Wrong With the Movies"; the chapter is entitled 'Movies break down virtue, inflame lust, definitely cause sex delinquency.')

The real issue I suppose is whether being appalled by appalling things is something one becomes pathalogically addicted to, eventually losing the ability to recognise goodness and merit when it finally does at last struggle through the garbage. But when the national broadcaster is foisting shite upon us like last saturday's Phil Collins: A Life Less Ordinary, or tomorrow night's nonsense about the worst book ever perpetrated on the human race, well, you're either with it or against it, and I am against it.

Tomorrow, I shall post something lovely, nice, and kind.