{"id":1008,"date":"2008-07-28T17:25:19","date_gmt":"2008-07-28T21:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/28\/i-think-this-is-the-wrong-word\/"},"modified":"2008-07-29T09:53:39","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T13:53:39","slug":"i-think-this-is-the-wrong-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/28\/i-think-this-is-the-wrong-word\/","title":{"rendered":"I Think This is the Wrong Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

People who know me know that I love words and language. I’m not one of those people who gets all uptight about the misuse of the word “ironic” or who loves archaisms, but I do mourn the transition of meaning for “begging the question” and I read Fowler’s English Usage<\/a>\"\" for fun.<\/p>\n

When Variety uses the word “maven”<\/a> to describe their list of influential people in the gaming business, a little piece of me dies. A maven is someone who is an expert on something, who has a deep, wide-ranging knowledge and appreciation of a topic and who seeks to pass that knowledge on to a wider public. The word gained currency from William Safire’s language column in the New York Times in which he would explain the origins, meanings and distinctions between words; he dubbed himself a language maven and, no matter what you think of his politics, the man knows words.<\/p>\n

So in what universe is anti-violent game crusader Leland Yee a gaming maven? You could even quibble about whether many of the designers on that list are mavens, since their expertise is in performance not passing knowledge onto others; I mean you wouldn’t call Bruce Springsteen a rock and roll maven would you? Is Michael Crichton a literary maven? And how is a film director a “vidgame maven”?<\/p>\n

Variety seems to equate maven-ness with influence and that’s not necessarily wrong; a maven with no influence or potential to effect change isn’t much of a maven. But knowledge comes first, and nowhere do the articles convincingly communicate maven stature.<\/p>\n

And don’t get me started on “vidgame”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People who know me know that I love words and language. I’m not one of those people who gets all uptight about the misuse of the word “ironic” or who loves archaisms, but I do mourn the transition of meaning for “begging the question” and I read Fowler’s English Usage for fun. When Variety uses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-gg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}