Online comments - gentility, grace ... and censorship?

The Vancouver Sun reported this week that online news providers -- like AOL, Huffington Post and others -- are taking steps to tone down some of the rhetoric in comments regarding stories. The growth of social media like blogs and Twitter has coincided with (or contributed to) the rise of the Age of Nasty. Having been part of TransLink's cutting-edge rise in direct communications with the public, I've seen how easy it is for someone to launch a day-destroying (or even job-destroying) salvo and then duck-and-cover.

The main part of the solution described in the Sun article is exactly what we need: require commenters to use their right names. Nothing tones down rhetoric like making someone publicly accountable for their words. My mother used to advise me, "never say anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times", and there were moments in my career in broadcast and media relations that I rather wished I'd remembered that.

But the part that gives me concern is the suggestion that moderators on these sites screen out "offensive" comments: you know - racism, bigotry, violence, etc., etc. I get the notion of preventing blowhards from dominating a conversation or ensuring the follow-up discourse stays on-topic, but monitoring against "offensiveness" smacks of censorship. I've long maintained (and believe me, I used to be all-for stifling people whose views didn't square with my own) that truth is its own defense and doesn't need to hide behind rules and regulations. One person's bigotry may be another person's strongly-held belief; it's only when those beliefs are aired-out fairly that the truth becomes clearer.

About 20 years ago, the late Sam Kinison brought his standup comedy act to Victoria. A crowd of protesters -- including the Member of Parliament at the time -- picketed the Royal Theatre, demanding the show be shut down. I went to review it for Monday magazine, which at the time was an "alternative" weekly. "Are you going in?" I asked the MP. "Absolutely not!" he said. "I'll have no part of that bigotry." "Then how do you know what it is?" "I've heard."

And truth to tell, I found his act horrific. Certainly, the people who went enjoyed it, and unfortunately, they appeared to represent a particular mentality and lifestyle. Maybe Sam was out to hold up a mirror and get us asking why we found it funny to put down people of different ethnic groups, the homeless and impoverished, and so forth. Sadly, Sam didn't live long enough to tell us.

Maybe through being able to express even the most misguided of opinions, the person expressing them can get an idea of how misguided their thinking is. That doesn't happen if they're being suppressed, driven underground, or forced to yell their thoughts into a paper bag.

Make someone responsible for what they say by requiring them to associate their name with it, fine; moderate against domination and name-calling, great; but that should be all we need to improve the level of online discourse.

"Speak the truth in love," says the Apostle Paul; and "I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," said Voltaire. The Internet is "growing up," as the Sun article says, and those two quotations can help make sure it matures, as well.

Sarah and the morphologisms

Sarah Palin may have gone viral with her apparent malapropism on Twitter -- "refudiate" -- but she's also created what I (ahem) have dubbed a "morphologism".

That's based on a contest run by the Washington Post a few years ago, in which readers were invited to create new words from existing words using just one letter. You could add, delete or change a letter to make this new word. My favorites were:

• karmageddon -- that's like, a really bad scene? where all the bad stuff that everyone's ever done comes back on them? and people get killed? and everything's destroyed? and it's, like, a real bummer? and
• reintarnation -- the belief that when you die, you come back in the next life as a hillbilly

Another example is one the British humourist Denis Norden coined: tauntering. He described that as a "labour-saving word to describe one man tottering (carrying a load of stuff) while another was sauntering (and carrying nothing)". Of course, the fact that he had to expend so much labour on explaining what the word meant rather defeated the labour-saving intent, but there you go ...

Anyway, the Post didn't really have a name for this type of new word, so I came up with one: morphologism -- from a couple of Greek words meaning changing a word.

Alas, I don't think the Post ever re-ran the contest, which is personally disappointing because not only had I coined a term for these words, I'd started thinking of some of my own, to wit:

• pestulence -- the state in which your home is overrun by teenage girls
• decafitation -- in which, until you've had that first cup of coffee, you just can't get your head into things

And now comes the ex-gov., with refudiate. It may come across initially as a malapropism -- named after Mrs Malaprop, in Richard Sheridan's 1775 restoration comedy, The Rivals, who mangled the language with such remarks as "promise to forget this fellow - to illiterate him, I say, from your memory" and "Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!". (Other examples include the weasel character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who said that all his information had been "duly corrugated" and the sportscaster who commented on a contract dispute with a player that was settled when the club president stepped in: "xxxxx has a way of getting involved and exacerbating the situation".)

But refudiate actually makes some sense, AND it's a one-letter change in an existing word. The definition is a bit of a challenge, but that's not what's important right now. I'd like to have some fun with this and see what others come up with. Submit your suggestions as comments, and please make sure I know how to reach you. Might even find a prize to send to the best one -- although that's a little like tying a pork chop around my neck so my dog will play with me.

And I don't even have a dog.