(08-21-2015, 04:06 PM)Verad Wrote:(08-21-2015, 03:41 PM)Ignacius Wrote: Wit isn't necessarily the tool of the snob. Â Just recall that wit was the province of the literate and the educated, and for the better part of a few thousand years, the only people getting taught to read, in fact taught at all, were the rich and privileged. Â I figured it was sarcastic because it hasn't been that way for a long time. Â With universal education comes the concept that wit is actually the province of the intelligent. Â We just weren't teaching all the intelligent to read or write, so we have no record of the zingers told between the cobbler and the ferryman.
However, these days, wit is perceived as a trait of raw intellect, not education. Â Knowing a statistic that might derail someone's argument is effective, but not necessarily witty. Â Being able to logically deconstruct someone's argument in real time without the statistic certainly is. Â Wit is just a measure of mental reaction time, sort of the time it takes to process a response.
That makes it VERY obvious in conversation, even in RP-lapse, who thinks of a good response in a few minutes, who needs a few hours, and who needs a few days. Â And none of these three people are more effective, more knowledgeable, or even more right. Â Wit, and by extension intelligence, are measures of speed. Â They're not easily faked unless you can insert a good response six posts down the line, and that's only if you can come up with the response while it's relevant.
That's not as easy as you might think it is. Â Hence the line I drawled about time. Â Maybe if I gave people a few days to think up the best response possible, they could mimic it better, but giving people a few extra minutes before typing generally doesn't turn someone who isn't very good at turning phrases into a rhetorical machine. Â It's not as easy as you might think it is. Â Some people really have a hard time with it.
We have no lower-class zingers because people chose not to record them as much as they couldn't be recorded. Their speech was low, and to be corrected, because it lacked the linguistic markers of upper-class wit. They might have referred to vulgarity directly, rather than obliquely; their wordplay might have lacked the appropriate grammatical structures to be worth recording (a serious concern in 19th century Britain in particular, where correct speech is seen as a marker of moral character) or it might have been accidental. What value, then, was there in recording them?
Now this is admittedly much more true for Britain than for the United States, where it's possible to have a "folksy" wit and the lower-classes, or the rural ones anyway, are seen as respectable in their own right. But a lot of our markers for witty speech come both from the educational opportunities for the upper classes and how they policed what speech was considered intelligent. That we perceive wit as a sign of raw intelligence rather than education is a holdover from that period.
Knowing that the notion of wit in the modern day is an accident of history and culture, why are we telling people they can't be witty instead of questioning our own perceptions of wit?
Because wit isn't inflicted, it's received. Â Lower class wit, just because no one recorded it, didn't suddenly cease to exist. Â It had nothing to do with proper speech, even in England (especially because the nobles and countrymen weren't even speaking the same language). Â If my friend turns to me and says something witty about a local building commission, his wit didn't just vanish or never exist, his wit just wasn't recorded for everyone to hear.
So it's existed since the dawn of complex conversation. Â It was certainly already happening, pretty much in the form we receive it as today, in ancient Greece (which is where we got the tradition).
And when you say you want your character to be witty, as per the OP, you're writing towards that standard. Â And when you fail, it isn't a matter of just broadening our horizons to make "lol u dum" a superlative repartee considering the writers' perceived education, either it resonates or it doesn't. Â And when it doesn't, and someone keeps pushing it, of course people are going to call it trolling. Â They'll OOCly tell this guy to stop, that they're trying to RP, that interrupting them to troll them isn't funny. Â And they won't care whether that player is trying as hard as he can or actually is trolling them because they can't judge the writer, just the effect.
However, as you can see, that effect clearly depends largely on the writer's ability. Â If he thinks he knocked it out of the park and everyone else found him boorish, he's not witty any more than I'm six feet tall. Â He just doesn't understand the effect as it's received. Â If people thought he was intelligent, but unlikable, they're likely to RP with him figuring he's being played straight up. Â If he doesn't sound intelligent but wants to, he's not meeting his goal.
And, again, the issue is whether we should say he's witty as long as he's intending it to be read that way. Â Can you, essentially, meta in subjective conversational perception. Â I'd say no, not in an open social context. Â You can only shoot for the top and understand if you can't make the bar you set that it isn't the audience's fault.