“Wuthering Heights”: The strokes that changed the moors

Small things can have big consequences. Take the dodgy O-ring on the 1986 space shuttle. Or watch the butterfly flap its wings, each beat fanning a distant cyclone. Even the campus T-shirt makes the point: “Grammar is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.”

Details count. Words matter. Consider those two dots above each Brontë sister’s name in Westminster Abbey. For 85 years, Charlotte, Emily and Anne lay misspelt in Poets’ Corner, eternally filed under a flaw, their mutual e naked as Jacob Elordi in Euphoria. Lobbyists pushed for an engraver to add the critical diacritic in 2024.

As for Emerald Fennell, the auteur behind “Wuthering Heights”, punctuation is equally vital. Her reimagining of Emily Brontë’s novel, where two Queenslanders roam the moors in search a root, carries inverted commas, a mandatory warning issued by Warner Studios.

The squiggles caution fans of the book. Tacitly the marking says, “Do not expect fidelity to all who enter here.” Just as air quotes can subvert a statement like “I love work” to I “love” work, draining the enthusiasm. Jane Sullivan, my fellow columnist, itemised the differences between page and screen last week, from a narrator reshuffle to the massaging of character traits. The list goes on, encapsulated by Fennell’s four strokes, where small details declare big changes.

Journalist Gideon Haigh appreciates the maxim. Last month, in his Substack Cricket Et Al, he suggested how a missing preposition spoke volumes about the State Library of Victoria. Sorry, State Library Victoria, the one-time “of” banished to the abyss. Haigh had thoughts:

“One imagines a consultant got paid and the board patted themselves on the back for imparting a little sheen of corporate modernity to their ancient establishment. Which, of course, is how change happens, little by little and mostly unnoticed, until one day people twig: something is wrong here; something is off …”

Meanwhile Adam Aleksic, on his own Substack The Etymology Nerd, also noted a preposition trend. His beef was the subtle way TikTok and other platforms peddle “on” over “in”. A minor quibble, perhaps, but Aleksic detects a deeper deflection.

As a metaphor a word like platform implies a public space for “marketplace of ideas” and yet, “We forget that there is an asymmetry toward ideas that benefit the tech company. We are using ‘physical platform logic’. A physical stage doesn’t do anything; it is there for us to use it. A digital platform does everything: it decides what qualifies as an acceptable message and who gets to hear it.”

More than a stage, where hired actors tread the boards, TikTok is a multibillion curation interface that profits from user engagement. Less a podium than a private party, the “on” preposition sustains a bogus metaphor. Either you’re in, or out, and never on.

As Aleksic argues, “Unlike a soapbox, a digital platform has agency, yet [social media apps] use soapbox rhetoric to absolve themselves of responsibility. Any problems with radicalisation, or misinformation, or slop, are the fault of creators who make it. We’re just a platform!” The message versus the medium, embedded in a preposition. The original versus the adaption, signalled in squiggles. Small things, added strokes, can spell big things, folks.

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