Meatocrite

A Meatocrite is a meat-eating writer who dares to pass any moral judgement whatsoever on a vegetarian writer.

Example: a meatocrite called M may accuse another writer called V of being "insensitive", "aggressive" and "unpleasant." But if V is a vegetarian, then M is automatically more insensitive, aggressive and unpleasant than V could ever be.

The brilliant Nobel Prize winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said:

"When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard."

And that's exactly how I feel too.

Writer

A writer is a former norm.

There are two broad categories of writers:

Fiction Writers: who tell deliberate lies.
Non-Fiction Writers: who tell accidental lies.

Despite what is generally believed, it is possible for writers to revert to being norms again. All that is required is to fail to publish anything for a period of five years or for one's Beerbohm rating to fall to exactly zero.

Permashades

A Permashades is a writer who wears sunglasses all the time, even indoors.

Dorkvice

Dorkvice is advice given by a less experienced writer to a more experienced writer.

Not to be confused with badvice and sadvice, both of which are malign, dorkvice is generally given sincerely. The only problem is that the writer giving it has far less experience of the world than the writer he is giving it to, rendering it ludicrous, embarrassing and worthless.

An extreme example of dorkvice: a baldie hackling weirdminger telling a metamature vanderkat that the best way to impress girls is to write convincing weepy boo-hoo.

Semisult

A Semisult (alternatively, halfsult or hemisult) is the first half of an insult, although frequently it is mistakenly regarded as a whole insult by itself. But without the application of the second half, there is no real insult.

The truth about insults is that they are taken, not given. The last time I was in Morocco a group of children shouted at me in Berber, a language I don't speak. They might have been verbally abusing me for all I knew! But did I feel offended? Not in the slightest! Why? Because I didn't convert their words into an insult in my own head. I didn't provide (through my own volition) the second half of the 'insult'.

And that essentially is how an insult works, that's the mechanism: it's the person who feels insulted, not the person who casts the 'insult', who completes the insult, who brings it into being, who makes it a proper insult. Without the contribution of the insultee, there is no insult. There is only a semisult. In fact the insultee (or semisultee) is more responsible for creating the insult than the insulter (or semisulter). If it ever became the case that insults were made illegal, it is the person who feels insulted who logically ought to be arrested.

Writers and hacklings semisult each other all the time; almost always the recipient of the semisult provides the second half of the insult as a reflex.

Baldie

It's a curious but true fact that most male writers of great ability have good heads of hair. Baldies are male writers without much hair on their heads (sometimes none) and they tend to be grotesquely untalented.

However, there are exceptions to this rule. Aristophanes was reputedly bald.

A bald male writer who is nontheless imbued with great ability is called a Watson, after the writer Ian Watson, who is shockingly bald but massively talented.

Weepy Boo-Hoo

Weepy Boo-Hoo is any kind of writing that attempts to make a reader squirt sentimental eye juice.

Slipstreamers often include passages of Weepy Boo-Hoo into their prose works. In contemporary literary culture, Weepy Boo-Hoo is considered in a more positive light than formerly and is inexplicably associated with 'maturity', a fact noticed and exploited by maturity wankers, many of whom are Lit.Tharios.

The truth of the matter is that it is foolish to waste pity on the tribulations of fictional characters for the simple reason that fictional characters don't exist. Their sufferings are therefore illusory. Every individual with a mortal lifespan logically has only a finite amount of pity inside them (let's give this amount the number P) and on each occasion that pity is expended, this value decreases. When P reaches zero it will be impossible for the individual to feel pity thereafter; but circumstances may subsequently arise in which pity is needed. Why waste your pity on non-existent 'characters' when you could save it for living people or animals, or even yourself? Don't spend your P willy-nilly!

Empathy Problem

Few 'problems' in the literary world cause as much inexplicable anger among writers as the Empathy Problem. Attempts to discuss the Empathy Problem are generally met with extreme hostility and exposure to the full arsenal of tactical twatism.

Breifly stated, the Empathy Problem runs as follows:

How do we manage to feel empathy for fictional characters? How can the plight of beings that don't exist affect us emotionally? The question isn't whether or not we feel empathy for fictional characters: patently we do. The question is how? What is the mechanism that makes such empathy possible? This is a genuine philosophical problem that still hasn't really been solved.

Consider two characters created for the sake of this argument: Sea Tiger and Ramphastos. They are fictional characters. Do you already have empathy for them? Unlikely: you don't know enough about them yet. But that's not the point. The point is that I could make Sea Tiger and Ramphastos into characters that a reader might have empathy for if I wanted to; or at least I could try to do so. And in such a case, and if the reader did indeed end up feeling empathy for them, what exactly would be going on? There is a profound mystery here. Sea Tiger and Ramphastos don't exist. That's unarguable. And it's impossible to feel empathy for beings that don't exist.

It is often suggested that this basic premise is faulty. But it is difficult to see how. It's impossible to feel empathy for beings that don't exist. Where's the fault in that statement? Surely the proof is in the definition of the word 'empathy' itself? To have empathy means to identify with some other individual, to put yourself in their shoes, to see the world from their point of view. But fictional characters don't exist and something that doesn't exist is a void, a nullity. So when you empathise with a fictional character, you are logically identifying with a void. If may be stated that we gradually develop empathy with fictional characters as we read about their lives, but we should take care to remember that fictional characters don't have lives, for the simple reason that they don't exist.

To restate the problem again: fictional characters don't exist and it's impossible to empathise with beings that don't exist (can you have empathy with the number 0 or with a cubic metre of vacuum?). Stop for a moment and try to imagine what would happen if you did manage to successfully empathise with a being that doesn't exist! By empathising and therefore identifying with a void, you would become that void, and the only way back out would be to empathise with something else quickly, but this would be impossible because to empathise you need a brain and a void doesn't have one, so you would be stuck in that condition forever, an empty space where your body had once been, a black shapeless non-mass like one of the characters in Jack London's short-story,'The Shadow and the Flash'. Briefly stated, turning into a void is a one-way trip.
And yet we do empathise with certain fictional characters. As a personal example, I often identify with Jack Vance's protagonists: they are often individualists trying to surmount social obstacles and make their mark on the cultures they live in. I feel empathy for those imperfect heroes, but how? What is the mechanism by which I do so? What is the mechanism by which you identity with your own favourite fictional characters? Whenever I posit this question I never get a straight answer. I mostly get a grumpy reaction that seems to consist of variations of the response, "Well, I'm capable of empathising with fictional characters even if you aren't." And yet, at no point have I said that I don't empathise with fictional characters. What I'm asking is simply how do I empathise with them?

It was pointed out to me that even though Anne Frank doesn't exist, we can't fail to be moved by her diary; and that Bertie Wooster also doesn't exist but that we feel an emotional resonance with him too. But these examples don't belong in the same category. To put them together is a category mistake. Anne Frank doesn't exist now, true, but she did once exist, and we must bear in mind that although her internal ego has vanished, her external ego persists (the concept of the external ego is less well-known than it deserves to be; simply put, what we are is not just what we think we are, but also the effect we have had on our environment). Proof that Anne Frank's external ego exists is demonstrated in the fact that you know whom I'm talking about and know that she was a real person. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, has neither an internal ego nor an authentic external ego. And yet it's true that we can empathise with both of them. But the mechanism must be different, at least if we accept that Bertie Wooster is a fictional character and Anne Frank isn't.

Suspension of disbelief may be cited as a mechanism to enable us to feel empathy for beings that don't exist. We simply stop believing that they don't exist. But this doesn't change the basic fact that they don't exist. I can believe in a wide variety of things, that the moon is made of glass, that unicorns work in pubs, that a dandrum's favourite hobby is to forestall a bugaboo, but that doesn't make any of those things true. Even if I convince myself that Bertie Wooster really lives, the fact of the matter is that he doesn't. It would seem that the most we can really feel for him is quasi-empathy. And quasi-empathy isn't empathy, in the same way that a quasi-blurb isn't a blurb.

So is all empathy for fictional characters really just quasi-empathy? Is the whole process of feeling empathy for a fictional character some sort of mistake or unsolvable paradox? I don't think so. I have a feeling that the empathy we feel for fictional characters is real empathy; and yet if that is so, a viable mechanism is needed to explain it. I would like to suggest such a mechanism, namely the 'many worlds interpretation' first developed by Hugh Everett in 1957 as a solution to the quantum mechanics problem of what act of observation could collapse the wave function of the entire universe, a problem that Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation was unable to resolve satisfactorily.

In plain language, Everett's theory allows for the coexistence of a vast number of parallel alternative realities in which every possible outcome of every potential action is real. So in trillions upon trillions upon trillions of universes, Bertie Wooster doesn't exist, just as he doesn't exist in this universe; but somewhere, in at least one parallel reality, he does exist, he's real, a living person with an internal and external ego and therefore someone we can empathise with without violating logic.

This seems to me to be the most plausible and satisfying solution to the problem of how we manage to empathise with fictional characters. The answer is that, yes, they are fictional in our universe, but elsewhere they exist. So when we feel empathy for them and identify with them, we aren't identifying with a void (which could be dangerous) but with beings that have substance, life and purpose. It just happens that those beings exist in another dimension. The logical outcome of this happy reasoning is that Sea Tiger and Ramphastos are also real, somewhere, and probably enjoying a series of absurd but charming adventures together.

Simper Bunny

A Simper Bunny is a writer who produces or promotes Weepy Boo-Hoo.

Slockley

A Slockley is a reviewer who never reviews the free books he receives but sells them on eBay or other online auction sites.

Slockleys have been known to actively request expensive hardcover books by the same author from publishing houses, sometimes failing to review the entire corpus of a particular writer's career but making money by selling the 'not for resale' review copies.