Category: Words and Language

The Perils of Lexicography

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Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper of harm•less drudg•ery has an entertaining but pointed blog entry about dealing with the sort of people who take the dictionary as an authority on things for which it isn’t one.

Ten years ago, we added a second subsense to the noun “marriage” that covered uses of “marriage” that refer to same-sex unions. Someone eventually noticed.

Outrage! screamed about 4,000 emails, all flooding my inbox in the space of a week. How dare you tell us that gay marriage is okay now?

I was not surprised, honestly: I drafted a long, thoughtful reply about how words get into the dictionary, noting that this sense of “marriage” had been used by both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage since at least 1921, and finishing with the caution that the dictionary merely serves to record our language as it is used. I spent the next two weeks doing nothing but sending this reply out to everyone and their mother.

But that wasn’t the line that made me laugh out loud at my computer. That line was this one:

As for the dictionary being a moral guide, it never was and it never should be. We enter the words “murder” and “headcheese” into the dictionary, but that shouldn’t be read as advocacy for trying either one of them.

Anyhow — go read the whole thing. It’s good.

Another Thing Not to Do

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Don’t cut the ground out from under your own feet.

There are some words and phrases that, while they’re meant to intensify the meaning of a word or phrase, more often have the effect of weakening it.  Very is one such; instead of adding a stronger punch to whatever it modifies, it suggests instead that the writer didn’t think the idea was mportant enough to spend time finding a better word.

Rather and somewhat have a similar effect; they undercut what’s being said.

And then there’s seem.  Most of the time, seem is better avoided — also seemingly and apparently and appear to be.  Don’t shilly-shally; if something is hot, say that it’s hot, not that it seems to be hot.

(This brief bit of crankiness brought to you by the temperature outside, which is currently -20 F, and by the question, “How warm can you keep a two-story house with a full basement in deep snow country?”, to which the answer is, “Never quite warm enough.”)

Who Said What When How?

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I said I was going to talk about dialogue attribution.  Right, then.

By “dialogue attribution” I mean those “he said” and “said John Doe” and (less fortunately) “he commented/answered/stated/retorted/other-verbed” tags that get applied to lines of dialogue so that the reader can tell who’s speaking.  And I have a few points to make about them, in my peevish way.

First, you don’t need nearly as many of them as you think you do.  If your dialogue is doing its job properly, you aren’t going to need to identify the speaker every time the talking-stick gets handed over, because your speakers will sound like individuals and not all like each other.  If you’ve got an extended stretch of two-person back-and-forth, you can throw in an attribution every few lines just to keep things anchored; and if you’ve got a multi-person conference you’ll need to identify people as they jump into the discussion, and as often as necessary to keep your reader up to speed; but even in those cases, you don’t have to tag every single line of dialogue.

(How often is enough?  How often is too many?  Sadly, I have to tell you that you need to play it by ear — and if you haven’t got an ear for it yet, you’ll need to work on developing one.)

Second, you don’t need to get fancy with your verbs when you’re tagging dialogue.  When in doubt, remember that it’s hard to go wrong with a plain vanilla said.  Beyond that, you mostly want volume indicators — shouted, whispered, murmured, muttered.  (And for the love of Mike, don’t have your characters hiss things that don’t have an s– sound in them!)  Anything more than that comes perilously close to over-writing, and sometimes crosses the line.

And third, you don’t have to place the tag at the end of the line of dialogue every time.  You can put it in front:  Joe said, “It’s time.”  Or you can break up the block of dialogue and put the tag in the middle.  “It’s time,” Joe said.  “Let’s get going.”  In fact, if Joe doesn’t just have a couple of sentences of dialogue, but an entire paragraph’s worth of inspiring speechifying or careful instruction or closely-reasoned argument, don’t undercut its effect by slapping down a Joe said at the end of it with a dull and leaden thud.  Break up the block of dialogue early on to slip in the tag, then let the rest of the speech roll on to its effective climax.

“That’s it, then,” she said.  “We’re done for the night.”

And Another Thing…

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The only characters who should be allowed to “bark” their utterances are characters of the four-legged, canine variety.

(And possibly drill sergeants, but no more than once per story in that case.)

Say It

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

The simplest and best verb for dialogue attribution is said.  Plain and simple, and — as I think I’ve mentioned here before — effectively invisible.  Other verbs like replied, stated, mentioned, affirmed, and the like are also valid, but should be used sparingly and in proper context.  Replied only works when the speaker is responding directly to something somebody else has just said, for instance, and stated goes with declarative sentences in which a fact or opinion is being asserted.

And then there are the verbs which are not meant for dialogue attribution at all.  Smile, for example.  People don’t smile things, they say them.  They may say them smilingly, or say them, smiling, but smile does not equal say and shouldn’t be used as if it does.  The same goes for any other gesture or facial expression — no shrug or wink or grimace is the equivalent of speech.

I’m just sayin’.

To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate

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…that is the question.

English isn’t quite as fond of togetherstuck wordpairs as some languages, but it still comes close to loving them not wisely, but too well.  Creating new words by compounding old ones is one of the main ways English expands its vocabulary (the other being outright piracy.)  What this means for the writer is that at any given moment there are a number of English terms sitting uneasily on the hyphenated/unhyphenated fence.

The usual progression, in modern written English, goes from two separate words to a pair of hyphenated words to a single word:

hand held becomes hand-held becomes handheld
stand alone becomes stand-alone becomes standalone
hand book becomes hand-book becomes handbook

Handbook is a fascinating case.  It started out in Old English as handboc, translating the Latin (liber) manualis — a book of a size to be held in the hand (as opposed to a honking great codex.)  The word was replaced in Middle English by its snootier French equivalent, the Latin-derived manual, and manual remained the word of choice until the early 1800s, when hand book (or hand-book or handbook) was reintroduced by word lovers who wanted to return English to the purity of its Anglo-Saxon roots.  The move was opposed, of course, by other word lovers, who regarded handbook as an ugly and unnecessary upstart, but the new (old) word caught on anyhow, and now we have handbook and manual both in our vocabulary as terms for more or less the same thing.

(A slight shade of difference does remain, however.  Consider:  given a Handbook of Emergency Procedures and a Manual of Emergency Procedures, which of the two books is more likely to fit into the pocket of a pair of cargo pants?)

So which spelling should you, as a writer, use?  For those terms where there is a settled version, go with that one unless you have a firmly held preference for doing it the other way and are prepared to defend it.  For the terms where the hyphenation issue is still in flux, pick the one you prefer and be consistent with it.  Otherwise your longsuffering (long-suffering?) copyeditor† will end up counting all your uses of standalone versus stand-alone in order to figure out which one you’ve used the most — and cursing your name all the way.

†Another example of the hyphenization process in compound words. Most spell-checkers (spellcheckers?) will give a choice of copy editor or copy-editor, but all the practitioners of that trade whom I’ve had the good fortune to know have spelled it copyeditor.

It’s Snowing, and I’m Feeling Peevish

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Listen up, people.  It’s not hone in on, it’s home in on.  Like a homing pigeon, or a heat-seeking missile, or one of the assortment of other things that pick out a home base, or a particular target, and are drawn or guided to it.

Also:  The past tense of the verb to lead is led.  If it’s spelled lead and pronounced the same as led, then it’s a noun not a verb and it’s a metal.  On the other hand, the past tense of the verb to read, which rhymes with to lead, is read, which rhymes with led.  English spelling is not logical.  There are a lot of reasons for this; one of them is that the language started taking on its modern written form while the spoken language was still going through some heavy changes, particularly where the vowels were concerned.

And it isn’t orientated — it’s oriented.  (If you’re disoriented, you don’t know which way is east.  If the history of European cartography had gone differently, you might have been disoccidented instead, but fate decreed otherwise and a perfectly good adjective never even existed.)

Pick One and Stick to It

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Or, what to do about variant spellings.

This advice brought to you by OK/O.K./okay, that typically American and variously-spelled affirmative.  All of the above spellings are acceptable, but you will not make your copyeditor happy if you use more than one of them in your manuscript.  (And using ok in lower case is also iffy.)

Which one you prefer to use is your own business, and you can make the choice on the grounds of what you think looks good, or what you were taught in fifth grade, or what you will.  (I chose “okay” on etymological grounds, because I prefer the theories that derive “okay” from either Native American or African terms to the theories that derive it from abbreviations of various American English phrases such as the humorously-misspelled “Oll Korrect”†or the nickname “Old Kinderhook”‡ — if you’re interested in the arguments on the subject, there’s a pretty good summary here.)

Just be consistent in using whichever one you decide works for you.  You can get away with a great deal, at least in dealing with editors and copyeditors, so long as you make consistency one of your virtues.

†Well, people thought it was humorous at the time. Fashions change, and a good thing, too.
‡Martin van Buren.

Blogs for the Word-Obsessed

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If, like me, you’re a member of the legion of the word-obsessed, here are some websites to keep you going on the long march:

Take a look, for starters, at harm•less drudg•ery, the blog of an actual working lexicographer.  It’s literate, amusing, and full of the inside-dictionary baseball.  A sample quote:

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

From there, you can go to separated by a common language, a blog that deals with the differences between American and British English.  Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post on the difference between American and British mattress sizes, and the terms for same:

The short version: the basic sizes for American beds are twin, full, queen, and king, in ascending order. The basic sizes for British beds, respectively, are single, double,  king,and super-king. Single bed and double bed are understood and used in the US, but they are not precise bed sizes there. For example, in AmE I could say that a (AmE) cot/(BrE) camp bed is a ‘single bed’ (it fits a single person), but not that it’s a ‘twin bed’, because twin is a particular size. Two twins make an AmE king–as one can find to one’s back-breaking and love-dampening horror in hotels where they make AmE-king-size beds out of two twins and a king-size sheet. (You said king-size bed! Singular! I want my money back!!)

So, if you buy king-size fitted sheets in one country, they won’t work as king-size in the other. Will the other sheets transfer? Probably not exactly.

Finally, there’s languagehat, the most venerable of the three — its archives go back to 2002.  It’s full of interesting stuff on word histories and origins, along with a lot of good book reviews.  A sample:

I’ve started Gene Wolfe’s Peace (recommended by Christopher Culver in this thread), and on the very first page he used a phrase unfamiliar to me: “I took the cruiser ax and went out…” (It’s not at all unusual to have to look things up when reading Wolfe; he has an extensive vocabulary and is not reluctant to deploy it.) There is definitely such a thing (here‘s one for sale: “2 1/2 lb. Double bit axe head 28″ Hickory handle. Overall length approximately 28″. Weight 3.63 lbs.”), but it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, and I wanted to know where the name came from. Google Books told me it was sometimes called a cruiser’s ax (“And don’t forget to bring a light ax—a cruiser’s ax. Where you’re going, you could freeze to death without an ax and matches”—John Dalmas, The Reality Matrix, 1986), but that didn’t help much, since no definition of “cruiser” seemed appropriate… until I heaved my ancient and well-used Webster’s Third New International up from its honored place on my dictionary shelf and found definition 4a, “one who estimates the volume and value of marketable timber on a tract of land and maps it out for logging.” I’d still be interested to know exactly why and how that particular job description got matched with that particular ax, but the general idea is clear, and I am satisfied.

At all of these blogs, the comment sections are as lively and full of good stuff as the entries themselves.

It’s Different When It’s on Purpose

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In writing, there are some things you never want to get caught doing by accident.  These are three of them.

One: being funny.  Intentional humor is hard to do — humor, like horror and erotica, is a genre that works or doesn’t on the basis of the emotional effect it has on the reader, and if that effect is missing, no other virtues in the work will make up for its absence — and failed humor is flat and leaden, but accidental humor is downright embarrassing.

Two: being ambiguous.  Artfully handled ambiguity can add richness and texture and layers of meaning to your story.  All accidental ambiguity does is confuse your readers, who will not be happy with you any more.  And no, you can’t get away with claiming after the fact that you did it on purpose when you really didn’t, because your readers can always tell.

Three:  using internal rhyme and alliteration and other sound effects.  This one’s especially tricky, because the same things done well and on purpose can be wonderful.  What you don’t want is for your reader to think that those rhymes (or whatever) crept in while you weren’t watching, and that you didn’t notice them.

It’s the difference between looking in control of your medium and looking like it’s too much for you to handle.