This Week: Reporters gonna report. What can you do? The difference is in how and where they're doing so. We discuss it. There are some interesting links after that and a small pile of footnotes, so buckle up and let's get to it.
Let's get this out of the way up front: it's report season for me which means I've been eyeball deep in book reports, spoken reports, research reports, and, yeah, news reports, and my brain is completely fried. Nevertheless, it's Monday and the show must go on, and I realized that there was one word that perfectly matched the intersection of call-to-action words and collections-of-words words1 - report.
We start as we often do with a look at Merriam-Webster's definition. Which has a whopping 26 different definitions for report, including both "to present oneself" and "an explosive noise." But, of course, that's not what we're talking about this week. We need only two definitions:
(n) detailed account or statement
(v) to give an account of
Unusually, both meanings arose around the same time, in the 14th century, meaning an account or the telling of an account2, and both acquired the formal nuance less than a century later, stemming from use in the courts, by journalists, and, by the 1800s, in classrooms.
As a verb, report is interesting because it shades over into phrasal and prepositional verb territory on a regular basis - report in, report on, and report to, etc., all have distinct feelings that could be used to argue that these combinations are, in fact, separate words (i.e., they should have separate entries in dictionaries distinct from report by itself.) And, as we've been discussing words that demand a call to action, report is way up there on the list. Not only can it mean "talk," like so many others, but it is also more or less a demand by itself. No one tells you to report in, on, or to, without expecting that you'll do so post-haste.
As a noun, however, it gets modified all over the craic. Across my classes alone, students have to do book reports, cinema reports, media reports, and research reports, while I have to do attendance reports, participation reports, curriculum effectiveness reports, and TPS reports3. One of the things that makes it so effective as a word-that-means-a-collection-of-words is that it is so modifiable. Middle managers, high-ranking officers, members of the clergy, baseball team back-office analysts, and, god help me, school principals can tack any old adjective or noun on the front to make up a new form and file for us peons to muddle through on our lunch breaks.
So, where does that leave us? On TikTok, naturally.
As I've said before, I'm fascinated by social media in general and by TikTok in particular. Its users are evolving new genres and content formats in real-time and it is awesome to watch. I mean that in its original sense by the way - it is terrifying and fascinating and I can't look away. As awareness of the app has spread to the far corners of the world, we're seeing representatives of overlooked communities and cultures stand up and announce themselves.
This is not new. This is, in truth, the culmination of one of the promises made by the advent of the internet; in the early days of the internet, one of the biggest and most profound impacts was that suddenly, everyone could have a voice and everyone could be heard. No longer were you subject to having your voice filtered and fractured by those who controlled distribution channels, you could get your point of view to anyone with a modem and some time to kill4.
Time moves on. The powers that be lured us onto their platforms with promises of community and fellowship then locked our voices behind paywalls and monetization5. And then, enter TikTok. Now, don't get me wrong - TikTok is a product of Web 2.0 just like Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and every other social media product. But, tellingly, by letting users post videos and by giving them the tools to remix other users videos, there is a wave of reportage, both good and bad, that is taking social media in a new direction.
A lot of this can be seen in "call out" videos, where one user will duet6 a problematic video and explain why and how it is problematic (yeah, this can be good or bad, which is a problem in and of itself, I know), but, more interestingly for me, we're seeing a lot of explainer style videos where a person with deep knowledge of a topic presents a short video where they report on an aspect of that topic.
Some concrete examples are members of various Native American tribes explaining issues that affect their communities or demonstrating parts of their culture. Or the Maori people explaining their facial tattoos, or the Hindi people demonstrating parts of their religious practices, or the...you get the idea.
And that's where report comes back into the picture. A lot of these videos, carefully produced and edited into a one-minute package, come across as short reports, just as we all made in our classrooms back in the day. It's not uncommon to see one of these videos begin with, "Good morning. Thank you for your question. Allow me to show you..." and I swear to you, I've done school reports that began that exact same way.
Is this a tentative connection? Perhaps. Conjectural? Of course. But I'm going to drop a few links below so you can see for yourself. If I'm right, if I'm wrong, let me know in the comments.
Stay curious,
J
TikTokery
Linguistics is my field of (nominal) expertise, so the videos I’m going to link below are all examples of how I think TikTok users are reporting on interesting areas of language usage and documentation.
In this video, user E.K., aka, @Whatsgoodenglish reports on the biases inherent in standardized testing against Black and other BIPOC people. His posts are professional, educational, and informative. In other words, they’re good reporting.
Abraham Piper, (@abrahampiper) on the other hand, covers more than a few topics. And some of them may not be to everyone’s taste. However, when he gets into linguistics, he does so with charm, humor, and, again, good reporting (by citing his sources!) as in this one where he reports on the origins of the humble hashtag symbol.
Finally, Maxwell Paule, aka @profmaxwell, has a pretty good report on what Latin may have actually sounded like when it was a living language. Good to know!
Er, surprise! The next overarching topic for Learned will be words that represent a collection of words. It's a weird, meta-topic that seems just about perfect for the end-of-semester moment I'm in.
I'm not quite sure how the meanings evolved, but, "a loud sound" is from the 1580s; "to accuse someone of doing something wrong" is from just over 300 years later, in 1885. I've said it before, the older a word is, the more baggage it's going to carry with it.
The next phase of the internet's history led to walled gardens and media silos, but, in the beginning, at least, information wanted to be free and by god, we were going to make it so.
Don't forget you can subscribe to this here newsletter on this here monetized media platform!
One of TikTok's key features, which allows a user to record a video of themselves over the top of another video.