Out of U and Me

Managing Reliance on Shared Cultural Understanding

Lockheed Martin spent some time trending on Twitter yesterday, not because of their stock price or the neverending grind of the American war machine, which they fuel and by which they are fueled, but because the internet discovered that Twitter personality Ana Mardoll works there, in a part-time capacity, in a job he got via a family connection. I don’t know much about Ana Mardoll outside of his Twitter escapades and I don’t want to pass any kind of judgment on him here, I just want to describe the situation so readers can understand what happened. 

Mardoll, who has gone viral in the past with proclamations like “it’s ableist to say that writers should read books,” has positioned himself on Twitter as a purveyor of controversial, hyper-progressive hot takes. Sometimes I have agreed with them and sometimes I haven’t. In the wake of above-mentioned “reading is ableism” drama, someone else on the bird app leaked that Mardoll works at the LockMart—where I myself once worked for eight whole weeks, so again I’m not judging—and many people have found it hard to square Mardoll’s online persona with the real-life person who works at the world’s biggest and most sophisticated developer and manufacturer of death.

There’s more to this story, but I think I’ve related enough of it for the purpose of today’s Shelf Life. Good morning and welcome to the wide world of Twitter discourse, if you’re not already familiar. As Twitter user, uh, maple cocaine famously tweeted, “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”

maple cocaine @maplecocaine

Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it

Yesterday the main character was Ana Mardoll. All publicity is not good publicity. This was not good publicity. Spending a day in the glare of the Twitter’s spotlight is never good publicity.

I’ve told you all this because I would like you to transport yourself back in time to three minutes ago, before you read all the above, and pretend you don’t know it, and pretend you’re reading a book or a short story or some other piece of narrative fiction or creative nonfiction, and come across this sentence:

She rounded on him like the progressive Twitter community on Ana Mardoll.

What would that sentence have meant to you before reading the opening of today’s Shelf Life? Versus what it means now, knowing what you know?

Without the background knowledge of yesterday’s Twitter situation, the sentence above would not have its intended effect on you as a reader. Writing it, I intended to demonstrate that she (whoever she is) rounded on him (whoever he is) with a complete about-face. Someone who was friendly before is now furious with you. Someone who was an ally is now an enemy. Without the advantage of knowing the Ana Mardoll reference, though, you might not make the right inference about what’s happening there.

Now: It’s unlikely that the Mardoll situation will become a cultural touchstone; it’s obscure and likely to blow over as quickly as it blew up. That’s why I chose it as an example. I was looking for something most readers would not have heard about.

On the flip side, how about this sentence:

The last slice of pizza disappeared as suddenly and completely as Amelia Earhart.

That is a reference I suspect most English-speaking readers will understand right away. Most of us know—or rather, don’t know—about what happened to Amelia Earhart. Just as we don’t know what happened to the last slice of pizza—we just know it’s gone and at this point we’re not going to see it again.

Using references to cultural touchstones as shorthand in writing is a tricky business, because it only works if you can be sure your reading audience has touched those same stones. Let’s talk about semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how we make meaning from them. You learn about this during the course of getting your English degree because words are like humanity’s favorite type of sign. We like them so much that even when we have a sign that everybody recognizes, for instance a red octagon with a white border, we still put a word on it just to make sure.

Analogy, allegory, metaphor, and symbolism are all studied as part of semiotics. Although individual words are building blocks of meaning in language, you can string words together and create direct or indirect meaning. For instance, “she ate all kinds of food” is a string of words with a direct, literal meaning. “She was a human garbage disposal” is a string of words with an indirect, metaphorical meaning. She’s not actually a garbage disposal. I’m saying she consumes food with the speed and indifference to type as a garbage disposal.

What happens in that second sentence is I use words as signs to invoke the mental impression of a garbage disposal, which I’m then asking the reader to take as itself a sign for the metaphorical way the subject eats food. A sign within a sign: Signception.

If the above nonsense word “signception” meant something to you in the context of “a sign within a sign,” then you and I share a common cultural touchstone: We both recall the movie Inception (2010), in which the concept of “inception” referred to creating “a dream within a dream.” If you didn’t already know that, then my signception joke fell flat. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a joke can never funny once the joke-maker has begun to explain it.

If the phrase “it is a truth universally acknowledged” rang a bell for you, then you and I share a common cultural touchstone. And so on, and so forth.

Anyway, when you use referential writing as a shortcut, you’re relying on each and every member of your audience to share a cultural touchstone with you, without which they will not have the tool handy to use analogy, allegory, metaphor, or symbolism to understand the meaning of what you’ve written. You put a lock on the meaning and you gamble that your readers—all of them—have the key.

Briefly, before I continue:

• Analogy: The process of transferring congruent information from one subject to another. For instance, “Square is to shape as red is to ____?” If you consider the relationship that “square” has to “shape” and then transfer that relationship putting “red” in the place of “square,” you can figure out that the blank space should say “color.” That’s an example of deriving meaning through analogy.

• Allegory: A representative narrative or image in which character, setting, or plot conceals a hidden moral or political meaning. Animal Farm by George Orwell, in which farm animals overthrow their human masters and then recreate the conditions of their serfdom under the rule of pigs instead of people, is an allegory (for the Bolshevik Revolution). Reading the story of the animals’ revolt, you can extrapolate moral and political meaning by considering the ways in which humans do the same thing.

• Metaphor: Refers to one thing by likening it to another thing, causing the person reading or hearing the metaphor to draw additional meaning about the first thing by considering the ways in which it is like the second. If I said, “All the world’s indeed a stage, and we are merely players,” you can understand what I am trying to tell you about the world, and the way people exist in it, by comparing it to a stage and the actors upon it. Simile, which creates an explicit comparison using the words “like,” “as,” and so on (“her smile was like the sun, her eyes were as green as emeralds”), is a type of metaphor.

If you feel the urge to tell me I misquoted Shakespeare above, then you and I do not share a cultural touchstone in this instance.

• Symbolism: The use of an image to represent a concept or complex idea. For instance, in the culture I live in the image of a white dove is a symbol for peace, an image of three crescents overlapping a circle is a symbol for hazardous material, and a red-and-white striped pole is a symbol for a place to get your hair cut.

If you’re employing any of the above literary devices to create a sign for your reader to derive meaning from, you have to be sure your reader understands the the sign the same way you do.

Let me give you an example informed by my real-life experiences. Back when I used to drink alcohol, my go-to beer was Yuengling. This was the ubiquitous beer during my twenties because my ex-spouse’s family was partial to this beer like the Fast and the Furious franchise is partial to Corona, which is to say, quite partial. Yuengling is not the cheapest of beers, but it’s not expensive either. I think of it as up there with the best of the “everyday” beers. It doesn’t need to be a special occasion to drink a Yuengling, but it’s not pisswater swill like Natty Light or PBR. If I wanted to depict someone kicking back after a hard day of work with a solid beer, I might portray them drinking a Yuengling.

I tried to order a Yuengling one time at a bar and the bartender said they didn’t have it. I said, “Do you have anything like Yuengling?” meaning “another decent lager?” and the bartender said, “Are you asking if I have any crap beers?” That bartender, were he reading my depiction of someone kicking back after a hard day drinking a Yuengling, would interpret it to mean “this character enjoys crap beer, they have bad taste, or maybe they are poor.”

When I was living in California, there was no Yuengling to be had, because it’s not sold west of the Mississippi (or at least it wasn’t, then). A guy one time asked me my favorite beer and I said, “Yuengling, but they don’t have it here,” and he said “Oh, a Chinese beer? Would a Tsingtao do?” Yuengling, pronounced YING-ling, sounded like a Chinese word to that guy. Were he reading my depiction of someone kicking back after a hard day drinking a Yuengling, he would interpret it to mean, “this character enjoys fancy import beers from Asia” even though that’s not what Yuengling actually is.

To conclude this line of reasoning, when you use a cultural touchstone symbolically, you run two risks. First, that the reader will know the thing you’re referencing but have a completely different interpretation than you do; second, that the reader won’t know the thing you’re referencing and will guess incorrectly rather than try to find out.

What can you do to avoid references your readers may not understand? 

• Write what you mean: You can avoid the problem by finding text that relies on cultural knowledge and rewriting in such a way that no background understanding is needed. Write simpler.

• Double up: Don’t rely on just one reference to drive home your whole point. Layer in multiple references that all hint at the same thing, or mix references with plain explanation, so your meaning is unmistakable.

• Know your audience: Understand who your audience is and what shared cultural knowledge they’re likely to have. The wider your audience, the less cultural knowledge you can count on to be universal.

• Recruit diverse betas: I don’t just mean racially diverse, but also diverse in age group, cultural background, religious background, linguistic background, and so on. A wider range of perspectives will theoretically have a narrower shared understanding and therefore be more likely to notice references that don’t resonate.

The moral of the story is, you can never assume the reader has the same understanding of cultural touchstones as you do. After all, when we assume, we make what out of whom?

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