Did the millennium end on December 31st, 1999, or did it end on December 31st, 2000? Since there was no year 0, technically there hadn’t been two millenia worth of years according to this calendar until the end of the year 2000. Nevertheless, Prince (thank god the man got his name back!) titled his album and song 1999
and billions of people counted themselves among the millennium revelers on December 31st, 1999. Were they wrong?
Hell no!
Given that I’m generally a nit-picky kind of person, readers may assume I would fall on the other side of this argument. We must be precise about our definitions! In fact, I’ve learned to live with my disappointment. Of course, what people should do is to make things precise enough to understand. Or rather, what people should do is make things precise enough for me to understand! It would have made me very happy had the world decided to end the millennium on December 31st, 2000. Millennium
would then have had the same definition everywhere. It would mean 1,000 years. Right now it means, 1,000 years except when we’re measuring since the start of our calendar.
That’s confusing!
But really, it’s fighting a losing battle. Language, generally, is something owned collectively by it’s speakers. I do not hold the notion that self-appointed experts get to decide these things. So while timekeepers may forbid the popular definition of the word within their scholarly journals, their clout does not sway me generally. If I say the end of the millennium
people will generally assume it’s 1999, and they own the language. I’ll just have to deal.
Similarly, when the question arises which is the greater work of fiction, Of Mice and Men or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I would answer similarly. Personally, I would probably like the Steinbeck better. In my library, it would be the greater work. But far more people have read Harry Potter than have read Steinbeck. Far more people prefer Harry Potter to Steinbeck. With my arithmetic, in a broader scope it’s the greater work.
What defines great
in literature? I posit that it’s the number of people who have read and enjoyed a work. A handful of literature professors in our universities do not get a greater say in what is great
than the millions of people in the public. Perhaps if our definition is eminent
or distinguished
. And that argument does make some sense. But I think that definition only provides use to a limited number of readers. Namely the snobby ones. Only if a book is written specifically for the snobby people (hello New York Times book reviewers!) should that matter.
There’s no point in educating the rest of us, teaching us to read, and then telling us we don’t get a say in determining what is great for us and what is not. Screw that! And in fact, this is one reason why I do not bemoan too much the slow death of book reviews in newspapers. Screw you N.B.C.C.! You don’t represent us! If you did, we all would have read Gilead.
Of course, most of the time when someone asks me whether I think a particular work is great or not, I’m living in my own universe, population one. I get to be god. I get to pick. I get to use whatever definition of great
I want. The best part? I don’t even have to be consistent!
Photograph (via Flickr) taken by Beto Sanchez, licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0 license.
One Comment
My definition of great is how much it affects someone after they’re done reading it. So for a personal definition I’m the only one that matters, but for an “absolute” definition it would have to do with the impact on society. So classics like Great Gatsby or 1984 that still influence us today would count. Or even something like the Simpsons that’s insinuated itself so much into our language.