If a little learning is a dangerous thing, then a lot of learning is, well . . . pretty damned neat, actually.
For example: Gothic for goths.
Because, face it, what up-and-coming young goth — or anyone else, for that matter — wouldn’t want to know how to say, “My fancy new black underwear is chafing”?
(Sa feina niuja swarta undarklaiþs meina gneidiþ mik, in case you’re curious.)
God, I love the internet.
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.
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.
Because the looming deadline grows ever loomier, today’s post is a pointer to the estimable John Scalzi, saying some very true things about why it’s never a good idea to ask a professional writer to write you something for free.
The comments are also worth reading, since they point out that the same sentiments apply to, e.g., knitters and other craftspersons; and also make it clear that the friends-and-family exception to the rule is just that, an exception, and one that’s made at the discretion of the one granting it.
Not that I think anyone reading this would be so tactless as to ask a professional of any sort to do their job for free; but I do think that apprentice and journeyman professionals need to take Scalzi’s words to heart. The time to start practicing your “I’m sorry, but I don’t work for free” speech is before somebody comes around and asks you to do it.
Charlie Jane Anders, over at io9, provides a helpful list of ways to tell if the first draft of your novel is worth salvaging.
If you decide that in fact it isn’t worth revising, don’t despair. First, just by finishing it you’ve accomplished something that most people never do. Second, you’ll have gained some insight into your artistic obsessions and thematic concerns (“Hello, traumatic high school experience– nice to see you showing up again in yet another story!”) . And finally, it all counts for practice, like the scales and Hanon studies and Czerny études that a concert pianist does before he can play at Carnegie Hall.
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.
Or, somebody who isn’t me, saying something useful and interesting. This time, it’s John Barnes, on the subject of what to do about Mary Sue when she (or he — Barnes also makes a convincing argument for why he, at least, applies the term to characters of both genders) turns up in your story. Good stuff, and it goes beyond the usual alternatives of “give her a couple of cosmetic flaws” and “terminate her with extreme prejudice.”
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