Category: Words and Language

Peeves of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Because deadlines make me peevish.

One:  The past tense of tread is trod.  Not treaded — trod.

Two:  Even in its extended sense of “to inflict great damage,” decimate applies to countable things, like people, not to solid and singular things, like buildings.  (In the strict sense, decimate refers to the old Roman punishment meted out when an entire military unit had done something disgraceful, like mutiny — lots were drawn, and one man in every ten was clubbed or stoned to death by his fellow-soldiers.)

Three:  And the past tense of shine is shone.

So there.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 7 Comments

If you’re writing a story in the past tense — as most of us do — then events and actions that took place in the past of the story go into the past perfect tense.  You know, the one with all the “haves” and “hads” in it.

If you’re writing a story in the present tense — not so common, but it happens sometimes — then you can put past events and actions into the simple past tense.

(What about all the verbs with all the “mights” and “shoulds” and “oughts” and stuff in them?  Those are the so-called modal verbs, the ones that are principally responsible for the observation that looked at one way, English only has two verb tenses, but looked at another way, it has roughly thirty-odd.  If you feel uncertain about dealing with them, your best bet is probably to find yourself a beta reader with a really good feel for language and prose style and run everything past him or her.)

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The past tense of sneak is sneaked.

No, it is not snuck, except in dialogue, or in certain kinds of first-person narrative.  (The technical term for these cases is “privileged speech,” in case you ever need to win an argument with your copyeditor.)

The philologist in me is fascinated by the fact that an English word appears to be in the process of changing from a weak verb — one where the past tense is signaled by the -ed ending — to a strong verb — one where the past tense is signalled by a change in the root vowel — when usually the process goes the other way around.  But the writer in me simply bangs her fist on the table and says that snuck is wrong, dammit, and that’s that.

Why Translation is So Hard

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

It isn’t the literal meanings of the words that make it difficult.  It’s the connotations — all those associated ideas that hang around a word like shadows of other meanings.  It’s connotation that makes house different from  home, and makes scheme into something shadier in American English than it is in British English.

A good translator, accordingly, will try to convey the connotative as well as the literal meanings in the text; but sometimes that can be a whole bundle of meanings at once, and trying to fit all of them into the space available can be like trying to stuff a down sleeping bag back into its sack.

A couple of my favorite examples, from Old English because that’s what I studied:

“Cold” in Old English (and in the older Scandinavian languages in general) has, in addition to its literal meaning, connotations of “fated” — usually “ill-fated,” because nobody in the old Germanic literature ever had good luck — and “unlucky.”

So in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” when the poet says, Ongan ceallian þa ofer cald wæter Byrhtelmes bearn (“Then Bryhthelm’s son began to call out over the cold water”), the listener/reader knows that bad stuff is about to go down . . . as indeed it does, because what happens next is that the raiding Vikings wade across the ford — the cold, unlucky water — to engage with the Essex fyrd (the militia, more or less), and heroic disaster ensues.

Another of my favorites comes in the closing lines of Beowulf, after the hero is dead and everybody is explaining to everybody else just how bad things are going to get now that he’s gone (this is known as the Old English elegaic mode, and J. R. R. Tolkien stole large chunks of it outright for the poetry of the Rohirrim):   Forðon sceall gar wesan monig, morgenceald, mundum bewunden, hæfen on handa… (“Therefore shall many a morning-cold spear be grasped in the fingers, hefted in the hand…”)  That passage gives us the ill-fated “cold” again, and adds “morning” to it — morning, in Old English epic poetry, was a bad time of day, the time for surprise attacks and general low spirits.

All you need after that are two ravens flying past, and the wolves howling.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

“What’s today’s peeve, Dr. Doyle?” asks the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Proper dialogue punctuation,” I reply.  “You will have noted, I presume, that your line just now ended in a question mark, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb — in this case, ‘asks’ — in lower case?”

“Um . . . yeah,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“And you will have further noticed that your next line of dialogue does not end with a period, but with a comma?”

“I guess so.”

“Sockpuppet, you have eyes — I sewed the buttons on myself.  It ends with a comma, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb in lower case.  Capisce?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Then for the love of literacy, Sockpuppet — next time, get it right.“

Local Option

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

The big difference between grammar and syntax, on the one hand, and punctuation and spelling, on the other, is that grammar and syntax are part of the essential nature of language in the same way that bone and muscle are part of the human body, but punctuation and spelling are human-made, artificial, and arbitrary.

The spoken language is first, and primary.  The written language is a secondary construct, a device for pinning down and freezing in time the transient and ephemeral spoken word.  Spelling and punctuation are imposed upon the language from the outside, in the interest of reducing confusion and supplying at least a few of the non-verbal language components that are lost during the spoken-to-written changeover.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that some these externally-imposed cues can vary from region to region, or even among native speakers in the same region.

A couple of cases in point:

Grey vs. gray.  According to the dictionaries and the handbooks of usage, gray is the “preferred” American spelling and grey is the British one; but “preferred” is not the same as “required,” and a number of American writers use the grey variant.  (Full disclosure:  I’m one of them.  If I’m making up a style sheet for a copy-editor who’ll be working on one of my books, that’s one of the things I’m going to tell him or her.)

The serial comma.  (Also known as the Oxford comma, or the Harvard comma.)  This is the comma that comes before the “and” in a list of items in a series:  “three cheers for the red, white, and blue”; “send lawyers, guns, and money”; “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”  Some writers believe in the serial comma with an almost religious fervor; others don’t like it at all and never use it.  This one really is a personal choice; just be consistent, and let your copy-editor know.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

I know you’ve heard this one before.  And I concede right now that there’s no logical reason why “already” should be spelled as one word with a single “l”, while “all right” is two words and a double “l”.

Language isn’t consistent, okay?  It’s in a constant state of change, and not all the bits of it change at the same rate.  At some time in the future, “all right” may well have finished mutating into the single-word, single-“l” form — but that time is not now.

There.  I’ve got that off my chest, so it’s back to the word mines.

Buried Tech

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Language is full of buried tech.  For the writer of historical or created-world fiction, this poses some interesting problems.

On the one hand, you’ve got the language of tech that hasn’t been invented yet (for historical fiction) or that flat doesn’t exist (for created-world fiction.)  Consider, for example, all the resources of vocabulary and metaphor that come from living in the world after the discovery of gunpowder:  We speak of people going off half-cocked, and of plans hanging fire; we talk of loose cannons; we say that someone has a hair-trigger temper.  None of these expressions make sense in worlds where gunpowder and firearms are absent.  Using them in those contexts is sloppy writing — it may not bother most of your readers, but the ones that it does bother, it will bother a great deal.

Another example of not-invented-yet tech causing language problems:  In a pre-clockwork world, you aren’t going to have people saying, or even thinking, things like “in a few seconds” or “a couple of minutes later” — the resources didn’t exist to divide time into pieces that small.  In most parts of medieval Europe, for example, you’d be lucky to get things pinned  down to the nearest canonical hour, and that only if you were someplace where you could hear the church bells ringing.  (For really brief intervals of time, a person might think in terms of breaths or heartbeats, or in terms of how long it took to recite a particular prayer, such as “a Pater-Noster while.”)

The other language problem you get with buried tech comes from obsolete technology — things that were once common enough to pass into metaphorical use, but that have fallen into desuetude while their metaphorical use continues.  For a good example of this, take a look at this entry over at Making Light, in which the actual mostly-disused process behind the still-common phrase “batten down the hatches” is explained and discussed.  The question for writers in this case is, how long does it take before the metaphor becomes completely detached from the object or process that it once referred back to, so that it can function simply as a bit of vocabulary in its own right?

“Batten down the hatches,” even used in its figurative sense of “to make ready for possible disruption ahead”, still implies a world and a society in which sailing ships once existed; but if you’re writing about a created world in which — for whatever reason — there isn’t enough open water to make sailing ships a part of its past history, can you get away with using “batten down the hatches” in its figurative sense?

My guess is no — not for a couple of centuries.  Possibly longer, if people keep on writing adventure stories about the Age of Sail, and other people keep on reading them.

It’s a fraught thing, vocabulary.

Word Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Today’s word peeve (I can’t help it; deadlines make me peevish): a couple of not-exactly-homonyms, affect and effect.

People mix these up a lot, and it’s not really surprising.  They look exactly alike except for that initial vowel, and in spoken English the difference between those unstressed vowels becomes even more obscured.  Just to add another layer of confusion to the vocabulary cake, each of them can function both as a verb and as a noun.

It works like this:

Effect has its ancestry in the Latin verb facere, meaning to make or do or bring about (plus a host of related extended meanings), plus the Latin prefix ex-, meaning from or out of (among other related things.)

Effect-the-noun, accordingly, is something that is made or done or brought about:  One effect of the hurricane was a prolonged power outage.

Effect-the-verb is less common; it means to cause or bring about something:  The new mayor hopes to effect some changes in local disaster response policy.

Affect also goes back to that same Latin verb facere, this time with the prefix ad-, meaning to or toward.

Affect-the-verb is the more common one here; it means to do something or cause something to happen to someone or something else:  The hurricane will affect the east coast from Maine to the Carolinas.

Affect-the-noun is the least common of the lot; it’s mostly used in psychiatry and related disciplines, and refers to the outward manifestation of someone’s inward state.  A person who isn’t showing much by way of such outward manifestation has a flat affect — his/her affect, in this case, is the behavior that he/she is turning toward the world/the observer.  Most of the time you won’t need to worry about this one.

(As you probably have guessed, I’ve got hurricanes on the mind right now.  I’m not in the storm’s current path, but I know people who are.)

More on Names

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

A couple of thoughts on names, as I surface from the depths of deadline madness:

Avoid alliteration and echo.  (I know — you saw what I did there.)  If you’ve got one character named Fred, don’t name his best friend Frank.  The same goes for his worst enemy, his favorite second cousin, or any other major character he’s likely to interact with on a regular basis.  And don’t name his sister Frances, either.  Your readers will thank you.

In the real world, of course, you’re likely to find clusters of alliteration all over the place — we’re all of us likely to know more people than there are vowels and consonants in the alphabet.  But fiction isn’t the real world.

Also: When inventing names for characters in a created-world fantasy, it’s generally a bad idea to borrow names wholesale from an existing or past this-world culture — your readers may make assumptions about your imagined culture that you didn’t intend, or may decide that you’ve borrowed more than just the names.  This is a can of worms you don’t want to open by accident.  (Cans of worms should only be opened deliberately and after considerable forethought.)

Making up your own names out of nothing but a handful of phonemes is a tricky process, depending a lot upon having a good ear for such things — and fewer people have a good ear for such things than think they do.  There are computer programs these days that generate English nonsense-words, meaningless but pronounceable collections of phonemes that can be sifted through for potential names:  Gammadyne’s Random Word Generator is a full-featured program with a lot of customizable options; or if you’re looking for something quick and free, the nonsense word generator on this page will display you a list.  Of course, you’re still stuck sorting through lists of words like Acenmithok, Cegraen, Heunara, Seligis, Cersposhe, Lis or Ellets, Michapere, Abiled, Aliger, Dernald for the ones that’ll actually work .

My own keepers out of that bunch, if they were all going to be characters in the same story, would be Heunara, Seligis, Lis, and Dernald; Heunara and Lis would be female and Seligis and Dernald would be male.  But that’s mostly because I’m arrogant enough to believe that I do have a good ear for such things.  Or at least a trained one.

(A quick-and-dirty shortcut, if you don’t want to go the computer-generated route:  Look at the names of minor characters in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.  They’re pronounceable, they’re in the fantastical vein, and they draw on the raw material of the common French/English/Celtic name-hoard without being obvious about it.)