Number 13
If you go to a craft store and buy artificial flowers and wired ribbons and a Styrofoam wreath and a shopping cart full of other doodads, and you take them home and make a decoration for your front door, that thing on your door is not “creative.” A hand-crafted (why don’t we say hand-made anymore?) object is not a creative craft. In this example, it’s doubtful whether the maker is creative either, but for the sake of argument, keep in mind that “creative” refers to the source or producer of the object ~ a creator. The imagination might be creative. The mind is creative. People are creative. Maybe even hands are creative. The things made are not; they are creations, they are created. You could look it up.
“Imaginative,” however, can be applied to both the maker and the thing. It doesn’t seem reasonable, does it, that creative and imaginative should have this distinction in usage? But there it is. Maybe it’s because any interesting artifact displays the imagination that went into it, but because every artifact is created, i.e. made, it wouldn’t and doesn’t say anything to call it creative. It’s redundant: “Oh, look, what a creative wreath! It looks so ~ made!”
The meaning of “creative” is becoming blurred, but it should be easy to remember because many things people call creative are along the lines of the Styrofoam wreath ~ pretty but quite unoriginal. When you see a “creative” item made from a kit, keep in mind that any creativity occurred before it was purchased. You can’t buy creativity.
Remember:
Suddenly I’m wondering ~ can an idea be creative? One idea can spawn another. Nevertheless, a thought must have a thinker, so my answer to myself is no.
I found this online in an article on book reviewing in the London Evening Standard (3-3-03, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/entertainment/books/articles/3530579):
‘. . . Now, A.N. Wilson believes all journalism to be a form of imaginative literature rather than “an exact science”, so this incident, too, may have been somewhat shaped by the crebadative impulse. But we must believe him, when in the same piece, he cheerfully announces: “I have lost count of the number of dull books I have hailed as masterpieces, rather than trouble myself to finish.”’
I feel sure that “crebadative” is a glorious typo, and yet … I’m not sure. Maybe it’s an invented word, used in England to denote bad creative impulses.
Note too the punctuation in those sentences. I have added single quotes around the selection, which includes double quotation marks. British practice for quotation marks and quotes within quotes is the reverse of ours (doubles inside singles rather than singles inside doubles). In this online article, there were no outside quotation marks, of course, but the quoted text had double quotes, just like U.S. punctuation. Are the English changing this custom?
Also, notice the quotation marks inside the comma after “an exact science.” This too is a British style of punctuation, a sensible one that I adopt sometimes, when I think I can get away with it. A story goes that in the United States, early American printers began placing quotation marks outside the period and the comma, so that the small piece of type containing the period was less likely to fall out of the type tray. I don’t think this is a very believable story, and I don’t remember where I read it. Why didn’t English typesetters think this was a problem? Does anyone know anything about this?
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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