I have mixed feelings about the Found section in general. It's not hard to find bad writing to make fun of, especially in an era in which 15-year-olds encounter no barriers to putting their Supernatural fanfic in front of a worldwide audience. There's not much point in digging up this kind of stuff just to kick it. It's not even a "punching up" vs. "punching down" thing — I'm usually similarly uninterested in poking through poorly written bestsellers to make fun of the multimillionaire hacks whose names are on the covers. But, y'know, sometimes you're just going about your life and happen across a line that is perfect for this contest, and it seems like a shame to pass up the opportunity to showcase it.
So one day my email jingle sounded, and I found the following submission in my Lyttle Lytton inbox:
It was February. I was wearing winter white, my hard nipples poking through my Polo sweater like middle fingers to the haters. |
Boni Mata, dailycal.org, 2014.0923 |
And I thought, yeah, that's a contender for the Found division — a novel whose second sentence focuses on the erect nipples of its protagonist is dubious enough, and the "middle fingers to the haters" part could hardly be more callow. And it's just trying too hard; it seemed like it'd function as a companion piece to the "cuz it can be bitchin' sometimes" entry in the Original division.
But then a few months later some more excerpts from the same article appeared in my inbox. This happens from time to time — people on a message board will get hold of something and several of them will submit passages within minutes of each other. And a couple of these seemed even more clearly to belong on the list than the first one did. So in my original draft of the 2015 Lyttle Lytton page, I wrote them up, as follows:
What brought me to this point — what you could consider a full 180 from my previous “Girls Next Door” affinity — is no mystery. |
Boni Mata, dailycal.org, 2014.0923 |
There are a number of issues here. The phrase "full 180" is weird, insofar as 180 degrees equals half of a full rotation; I guess it's not necessarily wrong, but it's like a coach telling a team to compete for the "whole half". "'Girls Next Door'" should be "girl-next-door", without the quotation marks; I'm guessing that the author was conflating the correct phrase with Girls Gone Wild. And "affinity", which does not mean what the author seems to think it means, is an example of what Mark Twain had in mind when he instructed writers to use the right word and not its second cousin. In a different way, so is this:
It’s 2014, and I’m not dumb enough to have accidentally left my brasier on the bus stop. “#FreeTheNipple, asshole.” I smiled. |
Boni Mata, dailycal.org, 2014.0923 |
That passage doesn't look as much like the beginning of a novel as the previous two, but I can see why it was submitted, because it's the worst of the lot. The author first discusses the whereabouts of her bucket of burning charcoal — for, even though it shares its letters with "brassiere", that's what a brasier (also spelled "brazier") actually is. This sort of thing is why it's best to stick with words you actually know. Then the narrator speaks a hashtag, which is either a mistake (i.e., she forgot that in this account she was talking rather than tweeting), or, if she did say the hashtag aloud, insufferable. And, uh, what does it being 2014 have to do with anything? Was it commonplace in 2013 to leave one's bra at the bus stop (or, in the author's version, on the bus stop — I guess maybe she's imagining the bra draped over the sign indicating which routes stop there)? I suppose it's true that people were more likely to leave brasiers around in times past (e.g., 800 BCE) than in 2014, but I don't think that's what the author actually meant. But perhaps the submitters and I are all just "haters" for caring about these niceties.
But before I put the post up, I looked it over, and I started to have second thoughts. I don't think anything I said was unfair: this is indeed really bad writing. Nor were these sentences written by a middle school kid, or plucked from someone's Tumblr; they were published in an actual newspaper, the Daily Californian. But… that's a university newspaper — the newspaper of my alma mater, as it happens. I have to think that there's a lot of similarly inept writing published in university newspapers across the country every weekday. Would including three different sentences from the same article make it look like I was bullying some poor 20-year-old columnist? I have no idea who Boni Mata is, and have nothing against her. I actually strongly agree with the point of her piece, which is that society really needs to stop freaking out about the human body. I just thought these were three examples of cringeworthy prose. But would anyone believe that?
I got to wondering about where these submissions had come from, given that they were anonymous. Had there been some thread on 4chan in which a bunch of boys decided to use my little contest to gang up on this author — purely in the name of ethics in journalism, of course? I didn't want to wind up inadvertently becoming a party to anything like that. On the flip side, self-censorship can be taken too far. This year's winner in the Original category pokes fun at the sorts of people who amass huge collections of weaponry in hopeful anticipation of a race war, and I thought there was a chance that some online hub for right-wingers might get huffy about that; instead, a few minutes after I put up the post, I got a panicked email from someone saying that this satire of racism might be misinterpreted as an expression of racism, and I could be the target of a storm of misdirected outrage from the left as Stephen Colbert was. I kept the post up; as former NAACP chair Julian Bond once noted, in defending a government official who had been hounded out of his job for using the word "niggardly", "You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding." But I did decide to scoop the Boni Mata material out of the Lyttle Lytton post and move it here instead. And I amended the 2016 rules to specify that while the Found division is sticking around for the time being, the bar is being raised. We'll let the misplaced buckets of charcoal slide. But if you try to take my Chaos Emeralds away, I'm unleashing the bees.
