Imaginative leaps
Comments: 2
Visting Malcolm Gladwell’s site for the first time in a while I was dismayed to see no new articles from The New Yorker (with any luck it’s because he’s busy writing a new book). So I started poking around looking for something to read and came across links to older pieces he’d done for Slate.
A discussion with Wendy Kaminer contains a great line from Gladwell, always very quotable:
Things that are ethical lapses in writing are merely imaginative leaps in conversation.
I’m not quite sure what that means, but I like the sound of it. It seems worth thinking about.
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Posted to General Rants • 2004.08.21 (Sat) • 17:16
Comments
Posted by Richard 2004.08.21, 20:38
I think he means that if all of us used fact checkers in our online communication no email or weblog posts would ever happen.
Just prior to his writing this two big time American Historians were given a public flogging for having (possibly) plagerized material from other sources without properly citing them. Fact checking might have caught this too but alas, maybe book editors, even historical book editors are not as sharp as the folks at magazines where there is more possibility of a lawsuit.
By the way, I poke around gladwell’s site too and love the fact that those earlier pieces are up there (6 Degrees of Lois Weisberg is one of my favs and it was incorporated into The Tipping Point).
Posted by Liz 2004.08.22, 08:53
certain things written out can be proved unethical or considered absolutely false, ridiculous, impossible, etc. but the same things when spoken add to the cleverness, intrigues, and amusement of a pleasant conversation. writing is often scrutinized to find “ethical lapses”, “grammatical errors”, things of that nature. but conversations and banter certainly can’t be taken too seriously and formally. if i were to write an essay on the existence of the loch ness monster in that it is actually the plesiosaurus which had been incorrectly dubbed extinct i’m sure people would accuse me of spreading a ridiculous and far-fetched lie. but if i were to casually point out that the loch ness monster could actually be the once-considered-extinct plesiosaurus i would probably sound clever or cultivated or just plain interesting. people would not remember what another says verbatim and attempt to disprove it.
does that make sense? i think i’ll leave literal interpretation to the adults. but i tried =)
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