Category: Words and Language

Today’s Peeve…

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…is a spelling peeve:  the confusing duo of capital and capitol.

Capitol is the building: The state capitol is an imposing granite structure with a golden dome.

Capital is the city that’s the seat of government for a country or state or similar region.  The paperwork needs to be sent to the state capital.

Capital is also the spelling for just about every use of the word that doesn’t refer to the big building with the fancy dome.  Usually, these words have something to do with being at the top or the head of something:  capital ships are the most important ones in the fleet; capital funds and assets are the ones you start with; capital crimes are the ones that you could lose your head over; and so forth.

As for the fact that the state capitol is usually in the state capital . . . these things are sent to test us, and to remind us that while the spellchecker may be our good friend, it’s not necessarily our most reliable friend.

Somebody Else Explains it So I Don’t Have to

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Over at The Toast, a clear and excellent explanation of why English pronouns are the screwed-up and confusing things that they are, and why grammatical gender isn’t the same as actual real-people-doing-real-things gender, and how we got the confusing mess we have today:

A sample (on the subject of how third person singular “they” fell into grammatical disrepute despite a long history of pre-existing usage):

But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy.

The rest of it is just as good. Go, read, have fun.

Fun Stuff for Word Nuts

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And aren’t we all?

Go over to the Games with Words page and have a jolly good time.

So far, I’ve discovered that I speak American English – big surprise there, right? – and have a large vocabulary.  (No surprise there, either.)

Imposter Syndrome, in Full Cry

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To be a writer is to have imposter syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really.  Our vocation, and often our livelihood, depends upon convincing people whom we will most likely never meet to put credence in things which we have cobbled together out of our experiences and the experiences of others (if we have not, in the case of us genre romancers, made them up out of whole cloth – having first also made up the cloth as well.)  Small wonder, then, that we tend to lie awake in the grey hours before dawn, fretting that this time will be the time when our knack fails us, and the readers will see us for the shameless fakers that we are.

(The Anglo-Saxons had a word for that sort of grim insomnia: uht-ceare, meaning “the care or worry that comes in the period just before dawn,” or as a modern-day shrink might put it, “pre-dawn anxiety.”  Smart people, those Anglo-Saxons.)

This is why literary writers worry that they are writing for a narrow and diminishing audience, and their works will never find the wider recognition that serious writers got in times past; and why writers of popular and genre fiction worry that nobody is ever going to see anything in their work except the surface of it, and all their thematic and, yes, artistic concerns will go forever unnoticed and unappreciated; and all writers, everywhere, worry about money.

(This post brought to you by the short story rejection that arrived in yesterday’s e-mail, and by the concomitant necessity to nerve myself up for picking another potential market and sending it out again.)

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

(What can I say?  Storm-and-pollen weather makes me peevish.)

Today’s peeve is another entry in the Homonyms to Watch  Out For competition:  alter and altar.  Not the same thing, folks.  To start with, one of them’s a verb and the other’s a noun.  Beyond that—

To alter something is to change it.  The adherents of the Arachnophagic Heresy of the Cult of the Great Spider angered the orthodox Spiderians when they attempted to alter the liturgy.

An altar  is a table or flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual.  The orthodox Spiderians disapproved of the Arachnophagists’ practice of setting up the main altar as a dinner table, with the centerpiece being a platter of deep-fried tarantulas.

It all ended badly, of course.  The attempt to alter the Spiderian altar resulted in the terrible and bloody Spider Wars of the Fifth Age, at the end of which the Cult of the Great Spider was no more.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

“Waive” and “wave”, people.

To waive something is to refrain from using or insisting on it.  A speaker can choose to waive his or her customary fee for a good cause; a school may choose to waive a particular entrance requirement for an otherwise promising applicant.

To wave something, on the other hand, is to float, shake, or move it back and forth.  The homecoming queen on the parade float will wave her hand at the crowd; the kids at the Fourth of July picnic will wave sparklers in the air.  (Or at least, they used to wave them.  For all I know, juvenile sparkler-waving is verboten these days in the name of safety.)

Not the same word.  And the spell-checker won’t help you – you’ll have to check for this one with your own two eyes.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 11 Comments

That’s right, people . . . it’s one of those days when Dr. Doyle waxes, if not wroth, at least a little bit cranky about the latest writing-related pebble in her metaphorical sandal.

Okay, then.  Listen up.

The phrase is not “free reign.”  It’s “free rein.”

Why?  Because it’s a horsemanship metaphor.  In equestrian usage, “free rein” refers to a rein held loosely to allow a horse free motion, or to the freedom that doing so gives to the horse.

(It refers, in other words, not to having control or power over somebody or something, but to having self-determination or freedom of choice in a particular situation.)

Stringing Ideas Together

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Or, actually, not.

When you’re building up a sequence of ideas (which generally results in a paragraph, and a whole bunch of paragraphs together generally results in a completed story, or an essay, or a letter thanking your Great-Aunt Euphemia for the half-dozen silver fish forks in a pattern that isn’t yours), you don’t want to just string the ideas together as they occur to you.  You’re constructing something that has to stand up when you’re done with it, not just lie there on the carpet like a string of Christmas lights after the tree has come down.

This means that you need to think about the relationship of your ideas to each other, and put them together in ways that indicate those relationships – while at the same time making sentences that have good sound and good rhythm and good grammar.

Take a simple example.   Here’s a little paragraph where the sentences are all (mostly) grammatical, but it’s still a bad paragraph:

As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This is, as I said, (mostly) grammatical, in that a native speaker of English can read it and understand what’s going on at the softball game.  But it isn’t good.  It’s clunky, the ideas are in the wrong order, and there’s a dangling participle lurking in there as well.

(Also, entirely too many present participles, period.  Writers get told at some point in high school or thereabouts that they need to vary their sentence structures, and for some reason, the method that a lot of them latch on to is the introductory participial phrase.  People, I’m here to tell you – too many sentences starting with participial phrases is just as monotonous as a bunch of simple subject-verb-direct object sentences lined up in a row.)

But I digress.  Let’s fix that little paragraph, a bit at a time.

Sentence one:  As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  This is bad because one, it takes two ideas of roughly the same weight and makes one of them subordinate to the other; and two, it puts the actions into the wrong order.  First Jill hits the ball; then she runs for first base.  So we can fix this sentence by changing it to:  Jill hit the ball and ran for first base.

Sentence two:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  This sentence is also bad for a couple of reasons and not just one.  The biggie, of course, is the dangling participle right at the beginning:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her.  This is wrong because it isn’t the foot that’s running for first base, it’s Jill.  The first thing we do to fix this sentence, then, is to break that part off from the rest of the sentence and rewrite it:  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  (We also ditch the repetition of for first base, because the reader’s seen that already and we don’t need to have another iteration of it cluttering up the page.)

This leave us with spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  There are a couple of different ways to fix this part, depending upon whether you think that the sprained ankle or the benching for the season is the more important idea, or whether you want to give the two ideas approximately equal weight.

You could throw the emphasis onto the sprained ankle:  She sprained her ankle, which put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

You could emphasize the fact that Jill has been put out of action:  Because she sprained her ankle, she was put on the bench for the rest of the season.

Or you could get fancy and use a semicolon to hook up two equivalent clauses, giving them both equal weight and letting the reader determine their relationship:  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

I like that last one – but then, I generally like semicolons.  Let’s use it anyway, for maximum sentence variety.  That gives us a new, finished paragraph:

Jill hit the ball and ran for  first base.  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This still isn’t one of the world’s blue-ribbon paragraphs – but it’s better than the one we started with.

And the voice from the back of the lecture hall asks, “Do I have to think like that about all my paragraphs?”

Sadly, yes.  But not until the second or third draft.  Finish the story first, then work on making the sentences better.  Because pretty sentences will get you nowhere if you haven’t got a story for them to tell.

As I Write This…

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…I am moved to peevish comment.

People, don’t use “as” to string clauses together when you’re narrating action.  Save “as” for linking together actions which are simultaneous or nearly so, and are directly related – “He leaped aboard the train as it pulled away from the platform’’ or “As he wandered about the room, he absent-mindedly rearranged all the knick-knacks and framed photographs.”  That sort of thing.

Don’t use it for joining clauses which would be more appropriately connected with “and” or “then.”

And remember, also, that “as” is a subordinating conjunction.  If you use it to join a clause to the main body of your sentence, the grammatical setup implies that the action of that clause is less important than the action of the main verb.  Don’t do something like that unless you really mean it.  (Which is a pretty good all-purpose piece of writing advice, in case you ever wanted one.)

In general, important actions deserve to star in their own independent clauses, rather than being supporting players in somebody else’s sentence.

Today’s Peeve

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

I thought for sure I’d mentioned this one before, but a quick search informs me that in fact, I haven’t:

People, be aware that you don’t “fire” arrows.  “Fire” is a term from gunpowder tech, and the days when the person in charge of making a bullet or other projectile come out of the business end of the weapon had to apply literal flame to the powder at the other end.

The proper verb for arrows is “loose” – as in, the arrow is set free from the drawn bowstring.

“Shoot” also works. The verb goes back to Anglo-Saxon scēotan, meaning “to shoot” (it was also applied to the action of throwing a spear, but mostly to bows and arrows – sceotend, literally “shooter”, usually referred to an archer.)  When firearms came along, the old verb carried over to the newest entry in the category of “weapons that work by propelling something through the air towards a target.”

But talking about “firing” arrows will lose you credibility points with every medieval-weaponry geek and archery purist out there – and there are more of them out there than you’d think.