Idle Chit-Chat Biloogy
Obviously I was trying to type “biology” but the above is a great word in need of a definition. Suggestions?
Posts Tagged ‘English’
Reality, of course, being a subjective term.
I got a lead balloon from an old friend tonight. Heavy, but miraculously buoyant. The first part was an answer she gave to an essay question on a test. Mechanically, well, it was her runaway style. I’ve seen poet laureates try to manufacture her voice, and fail. Her emotions are felt so hard it’s impossible to write her off as sentimental.
(Somehow nowadays sentimental is a bad thing. I often disparage my own work for being sentimental. Here I am styling myself as a writer unconcerned with what other folks think, yet I can’t raise a sentimental middle finger to the Art Establishment.)
Anyway, tonight I was fortunate to hear from her. She has mastered the run-on sentence. No, more than mastered, she has made the run-on sentence her groveling minion and her flaming sword. I would not dare construct her sentences, and I am less for it. She is a verbal avalanche, and the only thing worse than being swept away by her is to wonder what you missed if you somehow got out of the way. In this way her language is an honest reflection of herself.
To all English teachers out there: Be true to the kids. Be true to the language. Style counts, and when style is backed by passion… well, you dream about that already. There’s art nearby.
WritingMy spelling checker didn’t like pissant. Stupid spelling checker. It suggested piss-ant. Just to make sure I wasn’t completely insane I consulted my dictionary (oh, dictionary, help me enumerate the ways I love thee…) and sure enough there it was. Origin: the noun piss+ant. So of course I looked up piss. It comes from the Old French verb ‘pisser’, which the dictionary theorizes is imitative of the sound. But then I had “French” and “pissant” in my head at the same time, and I typed in “puissant”, a fine word if ever there was one, and opposed to pissant on more than one axis. Not only do they mean pretty much the opposite, but people who are likely to use one are unlikely to use the other.
A challenge to the muddleverse: a bit of doggerel that will fit in the header above that uses both words, preferably next to one another. You may work individually or in groups.
A travesty of language.
Help me out. Glide is a graceful word, but in the past tense glided is particularly ugly. Glid? Glode? I could substitute floated, and in my context I could even use slid (see glid), but glide is the right word. Or it would be if the past tense didn’t have two abrupt stops in it that undermine the meaning of the word. The word serves as the antithesis of its own definition.
Here we have one of the hallmarks of English, its strength and weakness all in one, that rules are made to be broken. Yet we have a case where an irregular conjugation would vastly improve the word. How could Shakespeare’s inventive tongue ever have allowed glided to happen?
This word only gets better with age.
I was sitting in my accustomed corner at the Little Café Near Home, and having secured permission to unplug the television so I could jack in the laptop I was rolling along. Of course, with any writing adventure, there are the blue times, when you are letting things spin in your head, and typing would be a waste of time. It’s like bottling a cloud. It makes a lot more sense after things have condensed.
I was in such a state, moving the big Lego bricks in my head, a long way from the technical bits, when I was politely interrupted. I had peripherally noticed folk at the bar carefully poring over the labels of a couple of thin bottles. It turns out they were pooling their English knowledge to translate the propaganda on the bottle. Like a team solving a puzzle, they had it figured save for one critical word. “This word, chilled, does it mean a little hotter or colder?”
I answered “zima”, he was thankful, and that was that. Except… chill. It’s a reflexive verb now. (I trust my sister to correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just a guy chillin in a pub.) It’s an adjective. “That guy’s chill.” No matter how you use it, chill is good.
For well you know that it’s the fool who plays it cool, when all you have to do is chill.
Of course, by now teenage kids are rolling their eyes when their parents make awkward attempts to use chill. I’ve been a fan of chill for some time now, which means the the days of chill are long past. So it goes. This is one flash in the pan I will miss. Because, come on, “Take a chill pill, man” is poetry. American Haiku.
Czech It's time to do some tidying up.
In Czech, there are seven forms for every noun and pronoun. These different forms provide important information about the relationships between the elements of the sentence. In English, most of those forms have been weeded out over the centuries, replaced by helper words and word order conventions. We still have the possessive form and the plural, but that’s it.
Except in pronouns. Now I call the English-speaking world to action, to hasten the inevitable and beat down those who would hold our language in stasis. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do. Let’s put the wooden stake through the heart of ‘whom’. No ambiguity is introduced when you use ‘who’ instead, English has developed all the mechanisms to keep the sentence clear without declining the pronoun. We just don’t need whom.
While we’re at it, let’s not stop there. I, me, my — it’s time to straighten all this out. We only need one pronoun to express the first person singular. All we need is ‘me’. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” is not at all ambiguous, and even introduces an implied ‘to be’ which can come in handy. “All for me grog” is not open to alternate interpretations. All these extra pronouns running about are causing more harm than good.
Granted, getting rid of ‘my’ may be pushing things a bit much, as English still uses the possessive form. If we really want to disdecline the language, we would have to resort to using ‘of’ a lot: “the pants of Jerry”, rather than “Jerry’s pants” (in the phrase “Jerry pants” mine name comes out as an adjective). Me not quite ready for that. Before you know it people would be writing “pants o’Jerry”, and the possessive would be back, only this time an o’ prefix rather than an ‘s at the end. Even so, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ could be consolidated without any loss. It’s already happened for nouns and most other pronouns. Kiss ‘my’ goodbye, and flush ‘yours’ down the drain.
These silly pronouns are holding us back. They remain mired in days gone by, the subjects of rules that are based simply on properness, not effectiveness — all they do is prove you paid attention in school. (Ironically, one pronoun we already have shed, ‘thee’, would still be useful to reduce ambiguity. Me therefore also call for the recognition of y’all to be what ‘you’ once was.)
Me not ready to embrace this principle in me everyday writing, as, alas, there are many who would judge me based on outdated ideas of correctness. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? If me were to go it alone, me would be quickly written off as an ignorant buffoon, not a force committed to making the English language better. What can me do?
Although no reference at hand backs me up, I still want to use this
word.
“Have your eyes ever glown red?” sounds so much better than “have your eyes ever glowed red?” I have no reference that would allow me to use this, however. Any help out there? (Keeping in mind that I’ll use any word I want, but going against the grain is a conscious risk.)
I'll be relieved when I'm done reading the archives, some time next
year.
I mentioned before that I have added a link in the sidebar for Language Log, a blog that is the product of the musings of some (I am led to understand) pretty heavy names in the linguistics biz. That their writing is (generally) as accessible as it is interesting is a credit to them and a drug for me. It’s nice to find eggheads with a sense of humor.
Today I was drifting through the archives brushing up on profanity — how it’s encoded, and how it’s legislated, and what makes something taboo in the first place. Recently they have been posting comic pages that go “meta”, stepping outside the frame to look at just what is coming out of their mouths, as when Beetle Baily asks Sagre how a little flower symbol snuck into his invective. It reminded me of a time I actually laughed at The Wizard of Id:
PEASANT: I’m here about the job in the stables.
STABLE BOSS (holds out small object): What’s this?
PEASANT: Shinola
STABLE BOSS: You’re hired.
I laughed because a clean, family-oriented comic made a joke that was funny for no other reason than it made the reader think of the word “shit”. (It’s like saying to someone, “You’re full of something, and it’s not shinola.”) Certainly the lads in the stable refer to shoveling and various other animal waste-related activities, but this time, there was no escaping the shit — not the substance, but the word. The word is far more taboo than the offal it represents.
After that I read some stuff on recent debates about the nature of language. Some heavyweights in the field, including Chomsky (whose value to the science seems to be his ability to start fights), have proposed a definition for human language that damn near rules out Hemingway’s version of English. Some of those arguments were, admittedly, beyond me, but there is no doubt that my writing here, wandering and layered, a double-jointed drunkard lost in the desert (“recursive” is the word the wonks are all going on about these days), qualifies as human. The argument is that no other animal has true language, because other animals are not able to embed ideas within other ideas, and this embedding makes a language able to convey an infinite variety with a finite number of words. Or something like that.
Personally, I’m new to this game, and dangerously ignorant. As far as I can tell these arguments are all about the mechanics of the language, not what is done with it. If those guys asked me, the two distinguishing characteristics of humans are the ability to misuse tools and the ability to use metaphors. Other animals have developed primitive tool-using behaviors, but only people have invented screws and screwdrivers yet still pound screws in with hammers. Similarly, if you told Koko the gorilla, “You’re pounding a screw in with a hammer,” meaning she was going about something the wrong way, she would be confused because she did not even have a hammer. (Don’t give gorillas hammers. Trust me on this one.)
I’m pretty sure the folks in Language Log Plaza would consider the metaphor bit not to be germane to the current argument, which is OK for now as they are finding plenty of things to argue about already. But if they ever run dry, I’ve got a reservoir they can tap.
What a great job to have, where a major part of the job description is to sit around arguing about esoteric shit. To Koko, there is no shit that can’t be thrown.
One literary sin, dodged, once.
Yesterday morning I came slowly out of the Land of Nod with a phrase resonating in my head: gaseous as Persephone. I toyed with it a bit, kind of liking the cadence and the classicalness of it. “She sat across the table, lost in the shadows, gaseous as Persephone…” Persephone’s got that whole underworld thing going for her, to boot. (She’s the first snowbird, finding a warmer place to spend winters.)
There’s only one problem with the phrase: it makes no sense whatsoever. Sure, I like imagery and metaphor as much as the next guy (maybe more), but Persephone was never reputed, to the best of my knowledge, to be gaseous. (Gassy, perhaps, if pomegranate seeds cause flatulence, but that’s hardly the image I was shooting for.)
Stooping to using nonsense like that is what we in the business call “putting on airs”, and writers do it all the time. Some are better at it than others; some can even make drivel like that into poetry. Those few only encourage a host of others to try their hands at it, and most of them suck. I’m sure I could go back and find plenty of times I’ve committed this very sin, but this time I managed not to. For that we can all be thankful.
While we’re on the subject, I’ve added a new link over in the “Blogs for Writers” section, to a place called Language Log. Warning: it cost me several hours of my life the other day. It’s a blog by a group of respected linguists across the US, created for non-linguists. Most entries are very interesting and well-written, and some are downright fascinating. The essays about Dan Brown are entertaining, as they look at his use of the English language. Although “gaseous as Persephone” isn’t linguistically horrible (or maybe it is — my ignorance of the field is staggering), I’m sure they would have something to say about it.
The latest addition to my personal dictionary
“For your deliction” might more awkwardly and less precisely be phrased “to be enjoyed by you as a delicacy”, or “for you to find to be delicious”. “For your indulgence” is a common enough phrase, but there are different nuances that leave the substitute inadequate. I’m not indulging you. Deliction is about the simple pleasure of a moment, and has none of the decadence implied by indulgence. I’m not asking for your indulgence, either. If you don’t find this delicious, blow me. “For your delight” is closer, but less tasty.
The closest standing word in Mr. Oxford’s American Dictionary is “delict”, a legal term, a noun, something about breaking laws. Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas (“The Empire”), its author, flunkies, hangers-on, sycophants, functionaries, yes-men, no-men, toadies, and armies of brain-hungry zombies do not condone or encourage any legal misdeeds by using the word “deliction” in the “What’s New” section above.
Observations A new entry in my personal dictionary.
It was a typo. I wrote whorker rather than worker. I looked at the word. I liked the word. I’ve been savoring it for a couple of days now, searching for the best way to explain it.
Tonight, Soup Boy gave me the answer. I haven’t seen much of him lately, and moments ago I got a message from him about how working thirteen-hour days was beating him down. I nodded, understanding. That’s a hell of a long work day.
Only, I’m on hour thirteen as I write this. I’m tired, but although today was uphill, good things came of it in the end. I made some real progress, mostly identifying problems I will need to fix later, but you have to do that sometimes.
I am a slacker, apparently, simply because I love what I do. (True, I make almost no money at it, but when was that ever a measure of success?) I spend my days working, to the exclusion of my frustrated friends and bemused family members, but because I genuinely enjoy what I do to a degree that may not be healthy, to many of them I am not working. Today, part of my job was to read a fascinating piece by Milan Kundera about Franz Kafka. It was not an easy read; there was much to think about with each paragraph. It was fun, but it was work. I work every day. Enter whork.
If you’re watching the clock, pining for the whistle that marks the end of your shift, you’re not working. You are whorking. I had a blast building a software company, but eventually my work became whork. It took me a long, long, time to realize that, and in the meantime I whorked myself into a position where I can work for a while now, without worrying too much where the next slice of pizza is coming from. No, I am not in any way above whorking; I have done it and will almost certainly do it again. I simply wish working was given as much respect. Suffering on the job has been elevated to the point where your job can’t be worthwhile if you don’t feel trapped and suffocated. Suffering on the job has become a virtue. Somewhere along the way whork has become more meaningful than work.
That’s messed up.
And I probably have it all wrong. Blame Kafka. [Let us pause for the moment while the author clinches down really hard to repress the urge to compare Kafkan bureaucracy to modern America, where the state is granted the right to define existence, and privacy is unpatriotic. Must... avoid... insane... rant!]
There are plenty of days I don’t work thirteen hours. Every now and then there is a day I don’t work at all (not seriously, anyway—there’s no way to stop a writer from testing words and savoring phrases). The most magnificent part of my life is that I am not whorking. Not for the moment, anyway. When I find myself muttering, “ah, crap. Astounding wants another Tin Can story,” then perhaps I will discover my inner whore once more. (It’s there. Don’t let my pompous language fool you. My whole career is a campaign to sell out.)
Crazily, happily, there are accountants who love numbers, who work rather than whork. There are probably damn few teachers who are whorkers. I’d even go so far as to say that there are more workers out there than there are whorkers. And now, by gum, I’m one of them. It feels great.
