Tag: words words words

Another Nifty Thing

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People at the University of Turin (and at the University of Pisa, and at the University of Mississippi, among other places) are digitizing the Vercelli Book, and the beta version is now on-line.  The Vercelli Book is the Old English manuscript that contains, among other things, the poem known as “The Dream of the Rood” — “A Vision of the True Cross” would be a more accurate title, in my opinion, but custom is custom.

Seriously, folks, I would have given my eye-teeth for something like this back when I was studying Old English in graduate school.  And the on-line grammars, and the on-line dictionaries . . . I counted myself fortunate, in those days, that I was able to convince my parents that copies of Bosworth-Toller (the big fat dictionary for Old English) and Cleasby-Vigfusson (the equivalent for Old Icelandic) made excellent Christmas and birthday presents.  Given their size and weight, they also made excellent doorstops.

Why are Italian universities spearheading the Vercelli digitization project?  Well . . . the Vercelli Book is called the Vercelli Book because it lives in the library of the cathedral in Vercelli, Italy.  How a collection of Old English poetry ended up in Italy nobody is certain, but it’s been there since the 11th century at least.  (Things became unsettled, to put it mildly, in England during the latter part of the 11th century; it’s possible the manuscript left home at that time.  But nobody knows for sure.)

We’ve come a long way since the days when putting together a grammar or a dictionary or a variorum edition meant working with stacks and stacks of index cards.  God, I love technology.

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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Why didn’t I know before now that the Oxford English Dictionary has a blog?

(Where I learn, among other things, that my birth-year new word is “noshery.”  I suppose I could try again and get a different one, but that would be cheating.)

And then, from YouTube, there’s this:  a song about Jólakötturinn , the Icelandic Christmas Cat (who is Not a Nice Kitty):

I think we have here an explanation for the Christmas Sweater tradition….

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve, gentlebeings and fellow wordsmiths, is that pair of weasel words, “somehow” and “something.”

We’ve all used them, at least in our first drafts.  Our hero is engaged in breakneck pursuit of the villain, and his energy is flagging while the villain has wings on his heels (possibly literally, if we’re writing fantasy) . . . but somehow, our hero finds within himself a last reserve of speed and collars the miscreant.  Or possibly our hero is fast overtaking the bad guy, but somehow the bad guy pulls ahead by just enough to swing aboard a passing garbage truck and make his escape.

Later in the same epic, our hero is about to enter his home through the front door after a hard day’s work . . . but something prompts him to go around back and enter through the kitchen door instead, thus allowing him to get the drop on the waiting villain.

This is lazy writing.  It implies causation (thus taking the curse of random coincidence off the turn of events), but it does so without bothering to be specific about anything.  The alert reader — and it never pays to assume your reader is anything but alert — will notice that an actual cause or agent is missing, and will lose a certain amount of faith in the writer because of the omission.

Most of the time, you can jettison the “somehow” and no one will miss it.  The hero puts on a burst of speed and catches the bad guy, or the bad guy pulls ahead and makes his getaway — state it with confidence and your reader will believe you.

As for that stealthy entrance through the kitchen door . . . ditching the “something” isn’t enough to help you there.  For that one, you also need to come up with a reason.  If your hero goes round to the back based on the promptings of his intuition, you had better have established already that he’s an intuitive sort and that his intuition works in his favor more often than not.  Otherwise, you’d better have him noticing that the doormat is no longer lined up squarely with the edges of the front step, or that his cat is not dozing on her favored late-afternoon spot on the living-room window-sill, or that the burnt-out match stub he normally shuts between the door and the doorjamb when he leaves in the morning isn’t there any more (depending upon whether your hero is obsessively tidy, or a cat person, or professionally paranoid.)

The two general rules that apply here:  one, don’t dither; and two, specificity is your friend.

Amusing Stuff on the Internet

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As a renegade medievalist and lapsed philologist with a bad case of Tolkien’s Disease (I haven’t yet had a novel break out into appendices full of invented language, but give me time), one of the things I keep an eye out for on the web is sites maintained by and of interest to word nuts like myself.

Today’s find is All Things Linguistic, where one can find links to discussions of what is and isn’t a sandwich (ham-and-cheese yes; paninis maybe; s’mores are an edge case) and Katharine Hepburn’s accent and translating Jabberwocky.  My favorite at the moment, though, is a Tumblr devoted to sample sentences — you know, those example sentences in language and grammar books that are mostly just dull but every so often seem to have been radioed in from another, stranger planet:

If there is both a direct object and an indirect object, then the indirect object precedes the direct one:

You should never have fed   that fish   steroids.

(To which all I can say is, Mad Science for the win!)

Argh! A Peeve!

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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.

Peeve of the Day

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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.)”

A Poet Passes

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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 recording of Heaney reading from his translations at the opening of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Conference, at University College Dublin.

Today’s Link of Interest

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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.)

Thought for the Day

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Advice on writing — if it hopes to be at all honest — really needs to have a sign posted over it in flashing letters of bright red neon:

THIS IS STRICTLY MY PERSONAL OPINION.

IT’S WHAT WORKS FOR ME.

And that definitely goes for anything that may be posted here.

(I will admit that I’m vain enough to think that my personal opinions are generally valid, at least for fairly large subsets of the writing population.  But I’m not so vain as to think that they are, or ought to be, universal.  One size definitely doesn’t fit all, in this business.)

Tales from the Before Time, Part the Next

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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.