If you’re a Scrivener user, and like to play around with the Name Generator tool, here’s a web page with a bunch of importable name files compiled by the owner from various sources.
Tag: words words words
Peeve of the Day
Because it’s hot and humid this evening – great weather for feeling peevish.
Today’s peeve, writers and gentlethings, is that pair of not-quite homonyms, flout and flaunt. Not only do they sound sort of alike, the definitional territories they occupy are close enough together that it’s no wonder they’re often confused. (That’s not going to spare you my peevishness, though. Nobody promised you this writing thing was going to be easy.)
To flout something is to recklessly disregard something, or to openly disobey or act against it: Maisie chose to flout convention and run off to Paris with Duke Roderick in his private zeppelin.
To flaunt something is to display it in an ostentatious or deliberately provocative manner: The gossip-mongers were quite put out when Maisie returned two weeks later flaunting an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a cut-glass doorknob.
Got the difference now?
Good.
A Handy Trick
Naming characters is always a hassle – I can’t get mine to settle properly in my head until they’ve been correctly bemonickered – and most writers have their favorite resources for the job. Baby name books and web sites are always good, especially for tales set in contemporary consensus reality, and if your interest is more historical, sites like the Social Security Administration’s Popular Baby Names page will let you search for popular American names by decade going back as far as the 1880s. I’m sure that other countries have similar resources; the SSA page just happens to be the one I know about firsthand.
If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, though, you’ve got problems. Good science-fictional names, if you’re going to put some thought into them, are part of the worldbuilding: You have to make some complex calculations about the probable ethnic makeup of your future society, for example, and about possible changes in naming styles (the all-whitebread science-fictional future is, if not yet completely dead, definitely moribund, and a good thing, too; and while it’s not likely that we’re ever going to see a resurgence of multi-word Puritan-style virtue names of the Praise-God Barebones variety, there’s always the off-chance that some future society may produce dimpled tots named Respect-for-the-Rights-of-Others Herrera or Earth-is-not-the-Only-Planet Jones.)
But if you’re writing fantasy, at least of the pseudo-western-medieval variety, there’s at least one good cheap trick out there: Grab a copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and steal from there. Go right past all the too-familiar major characters, and head for the ranks of (sometimes literal) spear-carriers, of which there are a good plenty. This will give you lots of names which look vaguely western-medieval without belonging to any specific name-hoard, and which can usually be sounded out and pronounced by the average reader.
Today’s Peeve…
…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
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
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
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
(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
“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
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.)
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