Searching for Yoldash

Somebody at Dictionary.com goofed up this week, and it was wonderful. Tuesday’s word of the week was sommelier, which of course is a person who knows how to match the right Malbec with your roast lamb. The correct definition for sommelier was posted online (check 1), and also sent out through Twitter (check 2). But Dictionary.com’s original email notification contained not only the wrong definition, but mixed up the quotations illustrating usage as well (uh oh). To be fair, they caught most of the mistakes and sent out a corrected email later, but the damage was already done. I could not shake this misquotation from my mind:

When you read the above misquote, three things jump to mind immediately. First, Hemingway will have a hard time going online to check a menu if he dies in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, long before the advent of Netscape and the first PC. Second, Hemingway is spelled with only one m. And third, he never wrote like this. Never ever.

And it is this last point that is most interesting to me. As soon as I read the misquote on Tuesday, I started thinking about what it would be like if Hemingway and other writers we hold dear had lived in the age of Facebook and Ning and Twitterific. Would they have a Twitter profile?  Henry James and Virginia Woolf, for example, could not condense the striking of a match into a single sentence, much less 140 characters. Hemingway at least is famous for short, simple sentences, such as, “He liked to open cans.” And you could tweet that easily enough. But out of context, it is essentially meaningless, like a keystone which by itself is a crooked rock lying on the ground, but supported stone by stone from each side is capable of supporting the entrance to a whole cathedral.

Social media applications are great for building connections with other people, but not so great for sharing unfamiliar ideas, especially complicated ideas that cannot be grasped in 60 seconds of video or 140 characters. Some things just require more time, more development, more contemplation. You’ll find a lot of funny jokes and recycled wit in social media. You’ll meet people from around the world who will help you when you least expect it.  But you won’t find many Charles Ives ringtones.