The literary form of the essay in English is something almost everyone does a very poor job thinking about, because most people’s defining thoughts about it are done as a middle-schooler trying to complete homework assignments. The word does not merely mean “expository nonfiction writing that advances its point in a prescribed form, especially or usually a five-paragraph form.” That’s a subtype of essay, the analytic essay. Generally, while most lettered people are perfectly comfortable thinking of the various literary forms within poetry that come from different places and times (ode, limerick, haiku, sonnet, etc.), the essay is less clearly taxonomized.
The funny thing about the word “essay” in English is how heavy and snooty it has become, since it is an inherently humble word, etymologically. It’s much like how “journalism” was once a word for, well, a journal of what was going on around the writer but published — whereas it now is held up as an abstract civil virtue that sits above the clouds on a throne between Democracy and Goodness. But all “essay” means, in its original form, is a “try” or “weighing.” To write an essay is to turn an idea over in words or to probe around in some subject a bit. It’s the same word, just anglicized differently, as “assay,” and it comes from Montaigne, who famously wrote some very good “essais.” They’re a little ponderous, and very humanistic, and you wouldn’t really think the guy who invented this form was trying to sound like a fancypants: “Even when mounted on stilts, we walk with our own legs. And perched on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own arse.”
Then, Francis Bacon brought it to English, and the great William Hazlitt isolated the combination ruminative-and-authoritative stylistic form whose only rule is keep it interesting. All halfway-thoughtful English essay-writing, from George Orwell to piddling word columns, is at least partly of his descendancy.
In April, one of the prominent children of the essay was killed off. Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion chief at the New York Times, announced the term “op-ed” was being “retired” (like a replicant in Blade Runner, not like a valued employee). “Op-ed,” she argued, is now inapplicable, since it means “opposite the editorial page.” Most readers now being digital, their pages don’t fold at all. But it’s hard not to feel this is pretextual. The New York Times is concerned about its subscribers’ intolerance for opposing views, not about nonliteral terminology about opposing pages. The opinion pieces from outside contributors that run roughly 700 words and make a polemical or stimulating point, as “op-ed” used to mean, will now be called “guest essays.”
Kingsbury says that she is still committed to publishing a “diversity of opinions,” just as was the vision of her predecessor John B. Oakes, who set up the section and who never wanted regular, in-house opinion writers doing weekly essays to be part of the concept, perhaps foreseeing that someone such as Thomas Friedman might stink up the place by embodying the contradiction of being a professional essayist who doesn’t even try. I, for one, will miss “op-ed” because it was one of the literary forms of essay that people actually broadly understood. “Guest essay” just seems like a way to assert that the opinion page is only hospitable to friends, and anyone else is trespassing.
