Speaking in Tongues

“Then he spent the rest of the night with her in embracing and clipping, plying the particle of copulation in concert and joining the conjunctive with the conjoined, whilst her husband was a cast-out nunnation of construction. —Arabian Nights, 1706”

“It follows that the collusion of grammar (of rhetoric or scholasticism) and the erotic is not only ‘funny’; it marks out with precision and seriousness a transgressive site where two taboos are lifted: that of language and that of sex. —Roland Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric,” 1970”

“As the writer said, as so many newspaper writers have said, we’ve sacrificed conversation for “mere connection.””

“Most of us can remember a time before constant Internetting, and most of us have had, conservatively, a million IRL conversations, but all we remember are connections. The connection isn’t mere. The connection—the electric feeling of “getting” somebody else in the relative simultaneity of them “getting” you—is the viscera, the elan vital of conversation. What matters isn’t whether you’re talking (out loud) or texting (into your phone), but what you have to say.”

“The medium isn’t the message. I don’t entirely believe that, but I believe it a little more every day.”

“Privileging face-to-face conversation makes a virtue of proximity and reduces the wide world to a set of hyper-literal possibilities.”

“It’s so obsessed with the real that it’s unrealistic, atavistic, and just silly. There is nothing like talking to somebody IRL, it’s true. There is also nothing like body language or like the feeling of being looked at when you want to be. But when it’s good there’s really nothing like sexting.”

“Well, nothing that is, except for all the earlier and other instances of codifying desire in a future-perfect way, like erotic letter-writing, like sex-room chatting, like getting illicit with it on AIM.”

“Seduction is language, bodily or verbal, not action. It is ritual with sacrifice and challenge with or without goal, which is why it’s easier to do well when the smartphone, not the object, is at hand.”

“Erotic grammar is good grammar.”