Category: Words and Language

Peeve of a Summer’s Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

The air is thick with humidity and allergens, and I am peevish.

Listen to me, O People, when I say unto you, the phrase is not “mother load”, it is “mother lode.”

The term comes from mining, specifically gold and silver mining, where it refers to a principle vein or group of veins of ore.  The Mother Lode, in the United States, is an area of hard-rock gold deposits in California’s Sierra Nevada, running through a zone 120 miles long and in some places almost 4 miles wide.  (It was, unsurprisingly, discovered during the California Gold Rush.)

A mother lode of something, then, is an abundant source or principle supply of that thing.  The “mother” part comes from the use of “mother” to refer to a source or origin:  “Mother of pearl” refers to the substance known as nacre, with which a mollusk encases the bit of irritant which forms the center of a pearl; “mother of vinegar” is the naturally-occurring bacterial culture which, when added to wine or other substances, causes them to ferment into vinegar; and “mother” or “mother dough” is a term sometimes used in baking to refer to a naturally-cultivated yeast starter.

And the “lode” part?  That’s from the Old English lād, meaning “a way” or “a course” – usually a watercourse of some sort.  So a lode is a way or course that ore runs through, like water runs in a stream.

Summertime, and the Living Is Sneezy….

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

We’re now well into the time of hot, oppressive days and high pollen counts.  The cats, instead of sitting like little furry meatloafs with tails and paws neatly tucked in, are stretched out into longcats, and can be reliably used to find the spots with the best cooling cross-drafts.

Which are no good to the rest of us, because the cats own them.

Summer is not the most enjoyable time for doing work, but work nevertheless must be done (this is where I point, in a discreet parenthesis, to the “Editorial and Critique Services” link up at the top of the page), so I’ll leave you with a handful of links to amuse or interest you during the days when you’re not on vacation at the beach, or in a mountaintop cabin, or in a hermetically sealed and thoroughly air-conditioned hotel room, if such is your pleasure:

First, a clip of Jim Macdonald, my co-author, in his other role as a magician (complete with top hat!)

Next, a good (and funny) explanation of the context rules for the use of bad language, and a report on the discovery of the earliest known use of the f-word in written English.

And finally, a video demonstrating how to put on a set of late 14th-century armor.

Stay cool, and enjoy.

Sometimes the Transmission Gets a Bit Fuzzy

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

As a tool for getting ideas out of one person’s head and into another’s, language (whether spoken or written) is a poor substitute for telepathy . . . but it’s the only tool we’ve got.

It’s not surprising, then, that writers often have an ambiguous relationship with language.  It’s both the tool we use and the medium we work in, and we admire its beauties and cherish its quirks at the same time as we curse at it for its limitations – not least because we can never really be certain that the worlds and characters which we use language to create are being re-created as we intended in the minds of our readers.  (Who, after all, speak their own personal  subsets of our common language, which of necessity are not the same as ours.)

For an interesting example of this phenomenon, consider this post on the Oxford English Dictionary’s blog, which discusses J. R. R. Tolkien’s description, in the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, of Lúthien dancing in “a mist of hemlocks.” The blogger points out that English and American readers may well visualize that scene differently, since the English “hemlock” is a flowering plant and the North American “hemlock” is most commonly a tall coniferous tree.

Really, given the different word-hoards and world-views that we all carry around inside our head, it’s amazing that language works as well as it does.

A Source of Amusement and Some Good Advice

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I first encountered Wolcott Gibbs’s “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles” in James Thurber’s The Years With Ross, Thurber’s memoir of the early days of the New Yorker magazine.

In many ways, it’s a relic of its moment in time (1937, to be precise); it was an internal memo, intended to bring new fiction editors up to speed on the magazine’s general style and tone.  Unlike most such documents, though, it’s fun to read.  A few samples:

Our writers are full of clichés, just as old barns are full of bats. There s obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one, and had better be removed.

Mr. Weekes said the other night, in a moment of desperation, that he didn’t believe he could stand any more triple adjectives. “A tall, florid and overbearing man called Jaeckel.” Sometimes they’re necessary, but when every noun has three adjectives connected with it, Mr. Weekes suffers and quite rightly.

Among other things, The New Yorker is often accused of a patronizing attitude. Our authors are especially fond of referring to all foreigners as “little” and writing about them, as Mr. Maxwell says, as if they were mantel ornaments. It is very important to keep the amused and Godlike tone out of pieces.

The piece is available in its entirety here, and I highly recommend it.

Peeve(s) of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Because this is a season for feeling peevish about so very many things.

Peeve #1:  The phrase is not “been through the ringer” – it’s “been (or put) through the wringer”, with a w.  Wringer comes from the Old English wringan, meaning “to press, strain, wring, or twist”, and it refers to a now pretty much obsolete laundry appliance used to extract the water from clothes that have been washed.   (But if you really want one, Amazon will sell it to you.)

So looking like you’ve been “put through the wringer” means that you look like you’ve been pressed flat between the appliance’s upper and nether rollers and squeezed dry.

Which is how a lot of us feel these days – I can’t imagine why.

Peeve #2:  “Diffused” and “defused.”  Something is diffused when it is dispersed or spread out over a large area or in a large volume of something:

The smoke from the burning incense was diffused throughout the room.

Something is defused when it has had its fuse removed, often in order to prevent it from doing something undesirable, such as exploding.

The bomb tech defused the explosive device.

  Metaphorically speaking, something is defused when somebody does or says something to reduce the tension or head off unpleasantness:

The dinner-table conversation on Christmas Day was on the verge of turning into an argument, but Jane defused the situation by bringing out the plum pudding and setting it on fire.

Because there’s nothing like a little creative arson at the dinner table to redirect people’s attention.

Things Seen and Unseen

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Let’s talk for a minute about point of view. In fact, we could talk about point of view for considerably more than a minute, because it’s a complex and many-layered thing – not to mention being, for some writers, the key to making everything else click into place. (For other writers, the key might be something else. Nothing about this job is universal, except maybe that if you don’t write you won’t ever have written.)

I’m assuming right now that if you’re reading this you’ve already absorbed Point of View 101: Third Person, First Person, and the Weird Stuff. (I’ve blogged about those already, here and here, if you want a quick refresher.)

What I’m thinking about now is a bit more subtle – it’s one of the failure modes of point of view.  Point of view is implicit in a narrative, even if it isn’t directly specified, and sometimes the narrative “sees” things which nobody is observing.  This results in clumsy writing, or in writing which, while not precisely clumsy, nevertheless has an off-center sort of wrongness to it that can have a cumulative effect on the reader’s sense of immersion in the story.

An example:

As Joe looked at the kitchen door, it was angrily thrown open.

There are a couple of things wrong with that sentence, starting with having the active observer relegated to a subordinate clause, and the important action – the throwing-open of the door – occurring as an agentless passive verb. (Who is throwing open the door? The narrative doesn’t let us see them.) Those wrong things, though, are made worse by the point-of-view failure we get in that adverb “angrily.”

Anger is an emotion, a state of mind; somebody is experiencing it as he/she/they throw open the door.  But we don’t see the door-opener, so we’re not in a position to draw inferences about their state of mind.

Fixing that sentence requires either showing us who is on the other side of that door – As Joe looked at the kitchen door, Jane angrily threw it open – or replacing “angrily” with a verb, or verb+adverb, that doesn’t have an implied state-of-mind attached – As Joe looked at the kitchen door, it was abruptly thrown open/jerked open.  (In this case, I’d probably go with the latter fix; that is, if I didn’t decide to rewrite the whole sentence from scratch, and possibly the paragraph it was part of as well.)

In a similar vein – don’t refer to a character as holding onto something with a white-knuckled grip if that character is wearing gloves.  Nobody, including the character, can see the knuckles in question.

As a general rule, when you’re writing description, it’s always good to pause every so often and query yourself:  Where is the (named or just implied) viewer standing?  Is everything you’ve just mentioned visible from that point?  If you’re doing the verbal equivalent of a tracking or panning shot, is your observation moving smoothly from point to point, or is it jumping around at random?*

Point of view may not, as I said at the beginning, be the key to everything.  Nevertheless, if you’ve got a good handle on point of view, you’ve probably got most of your other ducks lined up and quacking in formation as well.

*Yes, there may be occasions when you want a sense of jumpy and random observation.  But there, too, point of view rules:  your reader is going to draw inferences from that jumpiness about your observer’s probably-confused state of mind.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Because a peeve is like an itch that you just have to scratch….

Exactly like, in this case.

Itch, the noun, is a physical sensation:

Starched clothing against the skin can cause an annoying itch. 

Itch, the verb, is the act of feeling that sensation:

Joe’s skin itches where his starched collar rubs against his neck.

The verb for what the starched collar is doing against Joe’s skin, on the other hand, is scratch:

Joe’s starched collar scratches the skin of his neck.

Scratch is also the verb for what Joe does to relieve the annoyance:

Joe scratches the itch caused by the starched collar rubbing against his skin.

The starched collar, on the other hand, does not itch Joe’s skin.  It scratches it.  Which makes it itch.  Which makes Joe scratch it.

Get it?  Good.

 

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 6 Comments

Maybe I’ve been reading too much paranormal fantasy lately, because you wouldn’t think this would be a thing I’d run into often enough to make me peevish.  Nevertheless, I do, and it does.

Listen to me, people.  Nephilim is not – I repeat, not – a singular noun.  It’s a plural noun (that –im bit is the marker), and the singular is naphil.

The same goes for seraphim and cherubim.  They’re plurals, too, and their singular forms are seraph and cherub, respectively.

If you’re going to mess around with Judaic and/or Christian esoterica, at least get the words right.  (Or as right as reasonably possible, anyhow, given that we’re talking about words that wouldn’t have been written in the Roman alphabet to start with.)

Listen to Me, People.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

“As” is not a co-ordinating conjunction.

It does not join two independent clauses of equal weight.

It does not link actions that happen in sequence.

It is a subordinating conjunction, and it links a primary action to a secondary action that takes place at the same time as the primary action.

So for Pete’s sake, don’t commit sentences like this one:

“I think this is the main road,” said Joe, as he surveyed the landscape around them, as he stood next to Jane.

Break it down into its components:

  • Joe said, “I think this is the main road.”
  • Joe surveyed the landscape around them.
  • Joe stood next to Jane.

Then decide which parts are primary and which are secondary, and rewrite your paragraph accordingly:

Joe stood next to Jane and surveyed the landscape around them.  “I think this is the main road,” he said.

Or, if you decide that the fact he’s standing next to Jane is more important in the overall scheme of things than the fact that he’s looking around, you could write it this way:

Joe stood next to Jane as he surveyed the landscape around them.  “I think this is the main road,” he said.

Don’t just string your clauses together any which way.  Think about their relative weight and importance first.  This will make your sentences a lot less monotonous; as a side benefit, it will also make your writing clearer and more effective.

Matters of Definition; or, Why Definitions Matter

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 5 Comments

Let’s talk for a minute about this petition in support of Congressional Resolution 642, and why it’s a good thing.  The petition asks for Congress to declare magic – stage magic, that is – an art form.  That’s all.  (And if dance – which also requires a high level of skill, and takes years of practice to learn, and is performed for the benefit of an audience – is an art form, then stage magic certainly is, too.) The resolution doesn’t ask the government for money, or for special laws; it only asks for a definition.

What difference, one may ask, will an official government definition make?  It means protection, for one thing:  Everybody who works in a creative or performing field knows that “art” gets more respect, and gets cut more slack, than “entertainment” does if it happens to upset the powerful or well-connected – or just the easily-offended – people of this world.   It also means preservation: It’s a lot easier to find sponsorship and funding and archival resources for the history of an art form than for ephemeral entertainment.  (We pause here to weep for lost Dr. Who episodes, and early movies where the only surviving film stock was destroyed for the sake of retrieving the silver nitrate, and the countless comic book collections thrown away in the spring-cleaning trash.)  And it can mean promotion, especially in the form of funding:  If stage magic is an officially-designated art form, then it becomes a lot easier for magicians to apply for grants and similar programs that will allow them to develop and refine their art, and to pass it along to another generation.

Which brings me to another, related matter of definition (or, strictly speaking, orthography).  I used to get vaguely irritated by the use of the alternate spelling “magick”, as used by Wiccans and other pagans to refer to an aspect of their spiritual practices, mostly because the sorting-box in my brain kept putting it into the same container as “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” and other faux-forsoothery.

But over time, I’ve come around to an appreciation for the alternate spelling.  If its use can keep stage magicians from being denounced as tools of Satan by the sort of people who think that Satan has nothing better to do than seduce people into iniquity with a linking-rings routine, and keep practitioners of Wicca from being asked to pull rabbits out of hats or do card tricks . . . then I say it’s a good distinction, and we should keep it around.