Welcome to dA

WELCOME TO dA
DeviantART – defined as the world’s largest online art community. We the users know it as a place for art to flourish, a home away from home, a place where creativity shapes a strong and caring community. Today, however, we shall deviate from deviations to talk language and the words we use to communicate in this fine community.

Language has the most incredible power to bring people together. Over 29 million deviants speaking more than 200 languages and yet we all share a common understanding across so many topics. How many of you even batted an eyelid at the title of this little piece? dA – those two tiny letters that hold a special meaning to the people of this site may hold no meaning to someone who has never visited the familiar green-walled pages. A friend recently mentioned to me that whenever I spoke of dA with this initialism, her first thought was not of galleries and llamas but rather of Dumbledore’s Army – though in all honesty, a community of magical people, forging paths of freedom and discovery could describe both worlds. We probably shouldn’t call non-members ‘muggles’ though.

From the moment we all clicked the big, green “Become a Deviant” button, we connected with a community, which in terms of population, is about the size of Peru. A community the size of a small country, united by common interest. Whatever language we speak, we all share a common title: we are all Deviants. This title we chose for ourselves defines us as creative, unusual; our imaginations are not bound by the constraints of “normal” society.

Whatever their meaning outside of the internet, and whether we use them or not, we all know what is meant by deviation, deviantWATCH and deviousness. More experienced users can speak of plz accounts with ease, and even refer to our CEO as Herr Llama Emperor.  This language is ours, and ours alone. We know the convoluted stories that lead to these nicknames, our own superhero origin stories.

Sometimes words spill fourth, fully-formed, and sometimes a great deal of thought and effort goes into their conception. It’s the little things that make this place more homely: we send notes to our friends with a nod to the child we once were, passing folded scraps of paper across the classroom with a hissed “don’t look” to the chain in between. We store our work in our Sta.sh, our own little treasure chest of sketchy gems, one step away from the busy traffic of deviation pages.

With “twerking” and “selfie” being added to the English dictionary, we as a culture are more aware than ever of the swiftly evolving nature of language. Words are created, change, evolve, disappear and reappear. With the evolution of modern technology, this is happening faster and faster. Remember when an apple was just a fruit? Or the # symbol was just a weird little button at the bottom of your phone? Words that were once taboo are now used daily and vice-versa, with the advent of politically correct language, words that were once used daily are now taboo. To be labelled a “Nerd” or “geek” has become something of a fashion statement where it once  was used to insult or alienate.

Deviant, most of all, has its own tale to tell. To us, deviant comes with connotations of discovery, creativity, and divergence from the standard work of everyday life. And yet that is not the definition shared by the world. To some, “deviant” had a different meaning: departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behaviour. This re-branding of the word from positive to negative has had a profound effect. To tell someone you are a part of a site named “deviantART” can come with looks of concern and disapproval. But just as with nerd, geek and even labels such as queer, it is up to the party involved to take the word and make its value. Just as these terms have been reclaimed, “deviant” is ours to recapture, to define how we want. Our deviance is artistic, imaginative, powerful and will not stand to be degraded. And we can do it too – with a 29-million strong community sharing the new definition, it is likely that the word will once again metamorphose into something new. Something different. Something deviant.

Questions for the reader:
1. On joining DeviantART, how did you adapt to new terms? Did you pick up new phrases quickly, or do they still feel alien to you?
2. Do you feel communication can be can be better presented in art or words? Could the language we speak every day be described in pictures, and visa-versa, could words convey the tale a picture tells?
3. Language is an ever-changing art. Have you observed the evolution of a word’s meaning?  What was its meaning originally?