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Originally Posted by Ransom
If there's one thing clear from these last three posts, it's that the commentator(s?) have not read much LF whatsoever and are just making things up as they go along. Chaucer? Good grief. Yeah that's what I said—LF is about writing nothing but 14th century English....
Gee, I don't remember Eco or Williams using many terms exclusive to 14th century. I don't remember any 14th century writers using the term--threadbare although that's about the time it was invented. As I said before, had you been paying attention, it's about obscure terms and outdated words whether they be 75 years out of date or hundreds. Boggles the mind is right.
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Who was the one going on about 14th century English a couple posts back? It's very difficult to tell when you're employing hyperbole, because you've already stood by several claims that I initially took for deliberately absurd exaggeration.
The 'obscurity' of terms is very much a matter of opinion. Of your examples:
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If you read modern LF, you find words like "espy", "remonstrate", "objurgation" etc. that fell out of use a hundred years ago.
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The only one that could be called outdated is "espy," which however is not obscure, and the only one that could be called obscure is "objurgation," which cannot really be called outdated given that there was no period in which it was less obscure. "Remonstrate" is both current and commonplace. All of these words are primarily encountered in works of general fiction with weak prose, where the words are employed less to "put on airs" than to avoid repetition.
The only contemporary(ish) literary author you've mentioned is Eco, who is a medievalist, linguist and philosopher, whose work is strongly informed by all of those fields. He doesn't write like a plumber or an English (in his case, Italian) teacher because that's not his background. Demanding that he write for, as Prestidigitweeze said earlier, "some projected normative reader," is asking him to put on airs of populism. Personally, I couldn't get into
Foucault's Pendulum, either, but very much enjoyed
The Name of the Rose.
Forty-odd pages of Eco aside, it appears that your impressions of contemporary literary fiction are based primarily on a few of the more florid authors of mainstream and genre fiction. You've already mistaken Neil Gaiman, who made his name writing comic books, for a literary author. Please name two living authors of literary fiction (I can probably stop there but...) besides Eco, whose work you've read and found to conform to your allegations of "showing off" and "putting on airs."