Today I am made peevish by people who say things like, “This begs the question…”, when what they actually mean is, “This raises the question….”
Begging the question is one of the logical fallacies; it’s what you get when you start out by assuming as true the thing that you’re trying to prove. (It’s called petitio principii in Latin; or more informally, in English, circular reasoning.)
An amusing page on logical fallacies can be found here; a more detailed, if less amusing, page is here.
I’m back in town after a long weekend in Montreal (lovely city, and in fact closer to us than Boston); in lieu of anything more substantive, have a couple of amusing links:
Life Beyond Words, a blog post by Judy Tarr about equine perception and communication. Horses are one of the things aspiring fantasy and historical writers tend to get wrong. Reading all the posts on the horses tag on this blog would go a long way to remedying the matter.
And then there’s Shady Characters, a blog about the history of punctuation marks. It’s a book now, too, and most of the more recent posts are concerned with that, but you can dive into the archives for discussions of pilcrows and interrobangs and octothorpes.
Maybe I’m just being more than usually peevish this week . . . but for the love of Mike, people, it’s “for all intents and purposes”, not “for all intensive purposes”!
That is all.
Today’s peeve, gentlethings of the reading audience, is “seemed” (with a guest performance by its close cousin, “appeared.”)
Nine times out of ten, “seemed” is unnecessary. This means that you’ll encounter ineffective sentences that say things like, “He seemed to be enjoying the party” when “He was enjoying the party” would do — the “seemed to be” doesn’t add to the force the verb, but detracts from it. “Appeared to be” works the same way.
Q. All right then. So when is it appropriate to use “seemed”?
A. Mainly, when there is in fact some kind of contradiction between the surface appearance of something — its outward seeming — and its inward reality:
“He seemed to be enjoying the party. (But inwardly, he was a seething mass of nerves and insecurity.)”
Seamus Heaney has died.
He was Ireland’s first Nobel-laureate poet since W. B. Yeats, but I — being a medievalist at heart, rather than a modernist — remember him with gratitude for his translation of Beowulf, which did so much to bring new readers to a work I’ve always loved.
For every reader, I think, there are some books that aren’t just books, they’re part of the permanent furniture of the reader’s mind; Beowulf was one of those for me. I liked the brightly colored world of Middle English poetry well enough, but the sepia monochrome of the northern thing, with its occasional smear of red and flash of gold, was the landscape that I really loved. It always disappointed me when modern readers would see it only as a primitive tale of monster-fighting — almost as much as it would disappoint me when critics failed to appreciate the monster-fights as much as they should have. (Those are some damn fine monster-fights.) Heaney’s translation may not have been scrupulously accurate; no poetic translation is ever going to be, and only a silly person would use a poetic translation as a crib sheet. But it did much to convey the mood and the feel of the work, and showed the reading public why Beowulf is a major work of world literature and not just an interesting historical artifact.
And for that, as I said, I am grateful.
A post from harm·less drudg·ery about descriptive and prescriptive grammarians, and what (in the opinion of a reasonable descriptivist) a reasonable prescriptive grammarian ought and ought not to do.
Full disclosure, here: I’m firmly in the descriptivist camp, both by training and by inclination. A language that doesn’t change is dead; the spoken language is primary and the written language — however much I may love it — is secondary; and trying to stop language change is like trying to stop the tide from coming in.
(Nevertheless: it’s sneaked, not snuck, in written discourse; alright is a barbarism; and orientated instead of oriented is wrong, wrong, wrong. We all have our bits of beach we want to keep dry.)
For a long time, I was — to put it mildly — skeptical about the value of classroom writing instruction, if by “skeptical” we mean “unconvinced of its utility and halfway convinced that its influence is largely malign.”
I blame early-writing-life trauma.
Picture me, in the eighth grade, bookish and awkward and laboring under the further social burden of being a new kid in the sort of town where everybody has gone to school together since first grade. I wanted desperately to be — well, not popular, because popularity looked like it came with more strings and preconditions than I felt like dealing with, but ordinary.
At the same time, I was already a beginning writer, turning out lachrymose poetry and lumpy prose and working hard at my efforts to improve both (harder, in fact, than I ever worked at any of the “draw one line under the subject of this sentence and two lines under the verb” exercises in our English textbook .) And I was as hungry for outside validation as any writer, beginner or established pro.
Unsurprisingly, there came a day when I had a finished story in hand and wanted somebody else’s opinion on it. (Needless to say, the story sucked. I was, after all, only in the eighth grade.) So I screwed up my courage to the sticking-point and showed the story to my eighth-grade English teacher, hoping to at least get some useful commentary out of the deal.
This was a big mistake, because she liked it.
She liked it so damned much she read it out loud to all her English classes. Which put paid to any hopes I might have had of appearing ordinary, and got me out of the habit of trusting English teachers about anything.
There are two ways to end a line of dialogue that isn’t meant to stand as a complete sentence. One is with a dash, the other is with ellipses (those three spaced dots, remember?)
They aren’t interchangeable.
Ellipses are for utterances that trail off in some manner:
“Well,” she said, “if that’s what you really want . . . .” (That’s the ellipses, plus a period.)
“Well . . . if that’s what you really want, I suppose it’ll have to do.” (That’s just the ellipses, showing how the speaker lets his or her voice trail off into a significant pause before going on to the rest of the sentence.
Dashes are for utterances that are broken off or are interrupted:
“I told you I wanted–”
“I know what you told me, but the store was all out of them.”
Or:
“And the winner is–”
(Drum roll.)
“Anastasia Oddfellow of East Drumstick, New Jersey!”
Got it? Good.
Or, One of the Ways I Knew I was a Novelist and not a Mathematician.
(Other than, you know, the fact that I sucked at basic arithmetic.)
It was the logic puzzles — the kind that feature islands occupied only by liars and truth-tellers, or by sane and insane vampires and non-vampires; or streets of varicolored houses occupied by persons of various nationalities who own zebras, smoke cigarettes, and drink tea; or all the variations on the one about the man with the drawer full of black and white socks who wants to know how many times he has to pull out a sock from the drawer if he wants to find a pair of matching socks in the dark.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t work them; I usually could, if I put my mind to it and followed out all the lines. (Though I mostly found the process not entertaining enough to be worth the trouble.) It was that I kept getting distracted.
Who on earth, I would wonder, keeps a zebra for a pet, anyway — and what do the other people on the street think about it? And how does day-to-day social and economic life function on all those strangely-populated islands? (If a liar and a truth-teller get married, how do they raise the kids? And if they have four kids, do they get one liar, one truth-teller, and two kids who sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth?) And for heaven’s sake, why doesn’t the guy with the drawer full of mismatched socks go ahead and turn on the light?†
Those aren’t the sort of questions that logicians and mathematicians ask; but they are very much the sort of questions that are going to occur to novelists and other storytellers.
†I know why he only has black socks and white socks in his sock drawer — he’s in the Navy, and those are his uniform socks. And maybe he’s dressing in the dark because he doesn’t want to wake up his significant other. But I’m still at a loss as to why he hasn’t done the normal Navy thing and rolled his pairs of socks up into tidy little balls, so that all he has to do is make at most two dips into the drawer.
Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.
People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”
People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”
People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”
So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat. All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.
And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.
But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.
And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep. Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?
Alas, no. Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty. All I can offer are some general guidelines: don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try. But don’t stop trying. It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.
We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.
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