Feed

The language in Feed is one thing that really stuck out to me. It makes a lot of sense, since the story is set so far in the future, that the language would be different and that they would have different slang. Although most of it could be translated through context clues, I found myself unsure of what some of the words meant, since they were used in different situations and contexts, which I actually thought was more impressive than just substituting words in for other words. It meant that the author had a good grasp on this fictional language that he had created, and it made the story that much more believable. I also noticed that language seemed to be linked to intelligence, which is something that is also very true today; people tend to judge the intelligence of others based on the way they speak, and whether they use a lot of slang versus bigger and more varied words. Most of the characters speak almost exclusively using slang or informal language- even the narration is incredibly informal, like we are simply seeing the feed of Titus's thoughts, which is likely the point. We see many comparisons between the characters in the novel who we are supposed to see as more intelligent and the characters we are supposed to see as less so. For example, Titus's father speaks like a teenager, frequently using words like "dude" and "like," in contrast with Violet's father, who studies and teaches dead languages. Violet tells Titus that he is "only one of them [his friends] that uses metaphor" the way she also does. We see a lot of Titus summarizing other people's conversation by replacing words and phrases with "da da da," as if what they are saying isn't important enough to bear repeating. The girls' favorite feed show is called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", a very vague and simplistic title that could refer to anything and that sounds childlike. Many of the slang words used in this futuristic language are just words that we have now, but shortened to sound more informal and to become easier to say. Even the doctor says things like "Could we like get a thingie?" This is normal and common vernacular for the time period shown in the novel, even among people we assume to be very intelligent, like doctors. Even if we don't agree with the idea that the language a person uses necessarily correlates to how intelligent they are, the book seems to be trying to use that assumption to make a point or to get us to feel one way or the other about these characters, or perhaps even the society as a whole. Titus at one point mentions that everyone is super smart now because they can look up anything in their heads, but I wonder if the author is trying to show the opposite: that having any knowledge in your head without having to retain any of it requires less intelligence.