Tag: words words words

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

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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.

Peeve of the Day

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‘Tis a great day for the peevish . . . grey and clammy and chilly from dawn until dusk.

Perhaps it is the general greyness of the weather that moves me to say the following:

Gentle writer, if you’ve described a character as wearing “a colorful t-shirt”, pray employ your eraser or your delete key, as appropriate, and instead tell the reader what color that t-shirt actually is.

A “colorful” t-shirt is just a vaguely-tinted smudge in the reader’s mental vision.  A red t-shirt, now, or a black t-shirt, or a red-green-yellow-and-purple tie-dyed t-shirt . . . all of those different t-shirts don’t just make specific images in the reader’s head, they also carry information about the person wearing them, and a lot of other cultural data as well.  (We’ve got the vintage hippie, and the emo kid, and the guy who – depending upon his t-shirt’s hastily-glimpsed logo  – is a fan of either the Communist International or the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.  All that, from a t-shirt.)

Specificity is your friend.

Wordwatching

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If you’re a writer, one of the first things you learn is that not all words are created equal.

Some words are so common they might as well be invisible.  They do their job and go unnoticed, like the waiter in a really good restaurant who tops up your water glass with such utter transparency and perfect timing that you never notice he or she is there at all . . . but you come away from the evening with the impression that you were, briefly, in possession of one of those ever-filled chalices of legend.

Said is like that, for example.  For ninety-nine percent of your dialogue attribution purposes, said will work just fine, because your reader will never notice that it’s there

Then there are the common run of words, which attract only as much notice as they need to, and come and go doing their jobs without disrupting anything. Sometimes they can accidentally draw too much attention to themselves, if the same word or its near-variant are used in too close proximity to one another, or if two or more of them accidentally rhyme or alliterate, but for the most part they can be used freely without concern.

After that, you get the words that stand out enough, or call enough attention to themselves, that you can only get away with them once or maybe twice in a particular project: squamous, turpitude, eleemosynary.

At the extreme end of that last spectrum, you get the words that stand out so much that you’re probably only allowed to use them once per career.  I used phantasmagorical once, in an early novel, and I think I’ve used up my lifetime allotment for it.

Peeve of the Day

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“Glimpse” and “glance” are not the same thing.  Don’t use one when you mean the other.

If you glimpse something, you get a quick look at it:  Jane glimpsed something moving outside the window.

The noun indicates the product of  a quick look at something:  Jane caught a glimpse of something moving outside the window.

If you glance at something, on the other hand, you look at it briefly:  Joe glanced at the window.

Likewise, the noun form refers to the action of looking:  Joe and Jane exchanged meaningful glances.

(What’s lurking outside that window?  I don’t know.  But Jane and Joe don’t seem terribly surprised to find out that it’s there.)

Peeve of the Day

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Look.  Look there.  See that?

Don’t tell me your character “noticed” it.  Not unless it was something already present that he or she picked up upon in passing, or after a casual glance, or after letting an awareness of their surroundings percolate for a while in the back of their mind.

Which is to say, people don’t “notice” boulders rolling downhill towards them, or the sound of massed gunfire just over the next hill (though they might “notice” the sound of an isolated gunshot, provided that they aren’t in one of the lines of work where that particular sound is going to bring them at once to full adrenaline-charged awareness), or a mob of villagers waving torches and pitchforks.

They’re going to notice other, more subtle things: The envelope lying on the desk in front of them is addressed in a familiar hand; the object of their affections is wearing a new perfume; the gnomon on the sundial is cast in bronze in the form of an antique drop-spindle.

Most of the time, though, “saw” is a perfectly good and serviceable word.

The Better Part of Valor

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If you’re going to get into an internet flamewar, my first word of advice to you as a working or aspiring writer is . . . don’t.  No matter what you say, you’re going to alienate at least some of your potential readers, and not necessarily the ones that you’d want to alienate, either.  You can just as easily get ripped up one side and down the other by the people you think you’re supporting.  Better to keep your mouth shut and let your work speak for you.

That said, even if you don’t go looking for a flamewar, sometimes the flamewar finds you.  Resist, in that case, the urge to leap at once into the fray in your own defense, or in defense of a friend.  Hasty words in the physical world vibrate in the air for a moment, and – absent the intervention of recording technology – are gone; hasty words on the internet will stick around and haunt you forever.  Some variation on “You make/[Name] makes some telling points; I’ll need to think about them for a while before I can respond properly” is a useful reply, and the kind of thing you can keep ready against a time of need.

Sometimes, though, neither silence nor delaying tactics will do.  In that case, here are a few things to remember:

There may come a day, possibly in another century or so, when the words “strident” and “shrill” can be effectively applied to human discourse, but that day is not now.  For the foreseeable future, the use of these terms should be restricted to descriptions of fire alarms, police whistles, and piccolo solos.  Their deployment in any other context will result in Critical Argument Fail.

There was a time, for a couple of years several decades ago, when the term “politically correct” was an effective descriptor of a certain attitude and outlook on the world. At that time, it was an in-group term for the excessively zealous and doctrinaire who were, nevertheless, on the speaker’s own side — but it didn’t take long for the word to escape from that closed circle into the wider community, at which point the other side seized upon it and made it their own.  The use of the term in its original sense is no longer possible; any attempt to deploy it will, again, result in Critical Argument Fail.

And if you don’t know by now that the use of “hysterical” will generate an automatic Critical Argument Fail, then I will charitably assume that you’ve had an incredibly sheltered internet upbringing.

Either that, or you’re doing all of this stuff on purpose, in which case you’re on your own.

From the Good Folks at the OED

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Some interesting blog posts about words and related trivia:

There’s one about champagne (did you know that the big 30-liter bottle is called a Melchizedek?) and another about spies (or intelligence officers, as some of them prefer to be called.)

Or have a peevish post on reflexive pronouns (I like this one, myself.)  Or one about OED citations from film scripts and transcripts (the latter for words which appear in ad-libbed dialogue, rather than in the written script.)

Then there’s this one, on the difficulty of translating book titles (Mockingjay gets translated into Spanish with a similar bird-name portmanteau word, Sinsajo, but the German translator opted for Flammender Zorn, “Flaming Fury.”)  Or this one, on German idioms (eine Extrawurst verlangen, “to ask for an extra sausage,” means “to expect special treatment.”)

I could mess around on that site all day.

Peeve of the Day

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Listen up, people.

A tic is a small involuntary or habitual motion:  Only the nervous tic in his left eyelid betrayed his agitation.

A tick is a bloodsucking arachnid:  After his walk in the woods, he found a deer tick just above the top edge of his right sock.

They mean two different things, and they have two different spellings.

Got it?

Good.

Another One from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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When it comes to typography, there are people who like to mess around with fonts (I plead guilty as charged) and then there are people who are obsessed with fonts . . . and those people can get just plain weird.

Consider the case of the Doves typeface, created in the late 1800’s for the Doves Press, a small press associated (like William Morris’s Kelmscott Press) with the Arts and Crafts Movement.  The typeface’s creator, after a falling-out with his business partner, dumped all of the type — and the matrices for casting more — into the Thames River, in an effort to insure that no other press would ever use them.  A century later, a digital font designer spent three years working from copies of existing books in the Doves typeface, re-creating the font in digital form.

It’s a fascinating story; you can read the whole thing here.