The magical world of ‘Variety’
One of the daily duties of running a top-notch entertainment site (I’m laughing a little bit too) is scouring the Web, looking for the best and worst of what’s out there. Basically, we have to find it before we can filter it. Sounds easy enough, right? Not so fast.
Third-grade grammar and spelling is rampant on the web as it is, and having to decipher pages full of “lololz ur 2 funE” is never as much fun as it sounds. So why would any professional organization intentionally make it worse? That’s a question I’m forced to ask myself every time I visit Variety.com..
For those unfamiliar with Variety, they use a seemingly arbitrarily made-up vocabulary of “slanguage.” which is pretty much just slang that they’re really rigid about using. Some of it makes sense, but most if it just seems unnecessary. “Preem” is a perfectly reasonable abbreviation for “premiere,” but in your head, you’re going to take longer to read it as your brain processes it and translates it. Imagine a trade publication about the pizza industry referring to pizza as “‘za” on every reference. It would be annoying — just like reading Variety.
If Wikipedia is to be believed (and on occasion, it is), part of the purpose of slang is to exclude others not in a particular group. I can’t comprehend why Variety would want to do that, but it is written for a small audience. On the other hand, I can’t imagine entertainment executives actually having a conversation about the “The crix are talking about the new skein on the Alphabet web affils, it’s a click suspenser about a Chantoosie who chirps.” I could have made that last sentence even worse if I really wanted to. Really.
The worst part about all of this is that they often make things more difficult than they already are. If brevity is the goal of Variety’s slanguage, then they have failed. The result ends up being obfuscication more than anything, and I can imagine that only the writers who have been there for a very long time are actually proficient in using it. Either that or they’re just good at doing find and replace in their word processors.
This isn’t really a rant about how I hate it (I do hate it — a lot); I don’t expect Variety to stop using thier silly slanguage just because I don’t like it. It’s just a little something about some of the ridiculous stuff out there in the entertainment world. Now aren’t you glad you have us to translate?
January 30th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
We need to devise our own Crap Filter slanguage, like “gowboy” for gay cowboy… we could call it… well I guess I’m not creative enough because I don’t know what we could name it.
January 30th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I’ve already decided on “gaybot,” which will cover both gay robots as well as anybody who disagrees with anything I write.