Links

This blog is now in its second year, so it’s high time it sported a decent set of links. Those already there are fine; what’s missing, rather conspicuously, are blogs. But how to select those when your own blog is a miscellany and your Web-reading desultory?

New bloggers are always told to stake out a subject area and stay inside it. You become identified with a subject and a point-of-view; like-minded people link to you, and you to them, and everybody blogs happily ever after in their little patch of net. This set-up makes it hard for miscellaneous minds.

I began Wordability with two vaguely-conceived aims. One was quixotic – to defend the language against those who abuse it. I also wanted, more positively, to discuss some essayists I admired: theirs, for the record, was the ‘ability’ of the blog title. The first aim, taken seriously, entails a search for abuses and I haven’t the stomach for it. The second turns out to be too weighty an ambition.

Nonetheless I keep going, guided by interest, writing when I feel the need to get something down or get something clear or in the hope of amusing a few friends. Regular writing, I find, drains energy away from those futile loop-circuits in the brain. It sharpens up your talk. ‘Writing maketh an exact man’, said Bacon, and it doth.

As do statistics. Thanks to WordPress, bloggers can compare their aims with their achievement. And it turns out (counting tags, rather than categories) that this blog is mostly about education, language, writers, literature, rhetoric and science. If ‘writers’ are combined with ‘literature’, and ‘rhetoric’ with ‘language’, the pattern is even clearer.

Language
Literature
Education

One of the lessons here, I think, is Occam’s: tags and categories ought not to be multiplied needlessly. I’ll prune and remix accordingly.

Will this small analysis help to select links? Maybe. Topics, tags and categories are only one way to describe a blog. They don’t capture the point-of-view. Reactionary bleatings? revolutionary snarls? The outpourings of a young mind excited by the world, or the weary jottings of someone who has seen it and doesn’t think much of it? Nor do taxonomies tell us anything about the blog’s audiences, real or ideal. A truly useful set of links, useful that is, to Wordability’s readers, should factor those in.

The blogging world, like the Web in general, is dominated by young people. (Garry Gillard, a coeval, noted this recently on his blog.) Even working as hard as I do at self-deception, I can’t pretend that I have much to say to the young. When it comes to audiences, I try to follow Julian Barnes’s advice: write for your equals. After a lifetime of explaining things to students I am now free to go ahead and use ‘ontology’ and to hell with it. Similarly, the Web is dominated by people who are conducting the early stages of their education in public; I’m further down that path and so are my readers.

Summing up, Wordability’ is aimed at older readers who either know what ‘ontology’ means or else don’t give a damn, because they know some words worth two of that.

Are they out there? Garry’s remark -that there ought to be a place on the Web for OAPs – got me Googling. And on a whim, since he’s a bloke and so am I, the first search string I entered was ‘blogs by older men’.

No results found for “blogs by older men”.

In Google’s opinion, we older men are interested in (a) young women and/or (b) prostate cancer.

My path is clear.