Reference Communication

From reading about the ancient Greeks and other historical works, it’s become clear how many words in our language are merely references we more or less remember.  Describing a room as spartan is a fairly obvious one, referencing Sparta.  There’s laconic, which is a reference to the habits and personalities of the Lacedemonians.  Meander was once the name of a particularly winding river.  Sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic are all words referencing an idea of humors which most of us no longer remember.  These are references baked into our language, in many cases so long integrated that few of us remember they are references at all – they’ve simply become words with definitions that may or may not accurately echo the original sources.  We haven’t stopped using references for communication, though.  Explicit references are a key way we continue to communicate complex ideas.

You almost certainly do this all the time without even realizing it.  When with our friends or our families, we will often allude to past events and shared experiences to explain or discuss the present.  It might be as explicit as saying “this is like that time we did nnn,” which then communicates all the information associated with whatever nnn was, or more subtle and implicit.  There are references we can make with other groups of people, too, depending on what contexts we share with them.  If we’ve all read the same book or watched the same movie, we can discuss ideas related to those media without retreading the ground already covered therein.  This is why it’s so common to use certain cultural touchstones, like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars as examples, because they are more likely to be familiar to most of the readership.  I could use examples from my own work for from other books I’ve read, but they would be far less helpful and/or require me to spend a lot more time explaining what I’m trying to get at than would be the case with a more commonplace allusion.

References don’t have to be to other pieces of media – they can be to shared human or cultural experiences, too – but references to media enable a kind of shorthand for entire worlds of information and ideas.  Not so long ago, referencing the classics, like Dante, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, and so forth, was an effective way to communicate entire worldviews with just a phrase or a word.  The Divine Comedy remains a key source of allusions, even if many people don’t realize they are referencing it, since it is arguably still the dominant basis for the modern conception of the Christian afterlife (the Inferno part, anyway).  However, the decreasing prevalence of classical knowledge makes those references less useful.  Do we have modern equivalents?

I worry that we do not.  Oh, the amount we communicate with references has not decreased, but the overall relevance of those references is less.  When it comes to media – books, movies, et cetera – there are far fewer pieces that we can confidently reference and expect a significant majority of the potential readership to understand.  Even something as famous and foundational as The Lord of the Rings, and in circles who read genre fiction, there are a great many people I’ve met who only have watched the movies, and will therefore have no idea what I’m talking about if I reference Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the Shire, the barrow wrights, or other elements which did not make the transition.  This is reflective of many factors – the explosion of content (in abundance, diversity, and accessibility), increasing specialization, expanded cultural understandings – and is not a negative, per se, though it may have some negative implications.

Communicating via references is a powerful tool precisely because it speaks to deeper meanings than can be readily and succinctly expressed; however, they are dependent on elements of shared context and understanding which cannot be assumed to be universally present.  The more references upon which you build an argument, the more you are limiting the potential reach of your argument, and this same is true for stories.  Indeed, this is why I tend not to enjoy stories that are too grounded in the present – I find they become too readily irrelevant.  They are inescapable, and the goal should not be to escape them; as with most of the techniques and concepts we ponder in these posts, it is more important that we are aware of how we choose to deploy them.