King Arthur and Vince McMahon?

 My current Audible listen is Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. It's the earliest complete telling of the King Arthur legend in the English language. Written near the end of the Hundred Years War (just in time for the Wars of the Roses! Oh, those whacky Norman monarchs!), Malory, of whom there is little known, renders the tale of the legendary king as a treatise on the Chivalric Code. It's also a transitional time for the English language. Gone is the bizarre Anglo-Saxon tongue of Beowulf. By now, poet and royal in-law Geoffrey Chaucer has normalized writing literature in English. (The Normans, originally Vikings who became French, considered Anglo-Saxon a degenerate tongue in their early days. Henry IV decided an English court should speak English. I know. Radical.) But Malory's Middle English looks like Shakespeare trying to forge new entries into The Canterbury Tales. However, after the most recent reading of a Knight of the Round Table going out and doing feats of daring-do, I can only hear one phrase as I start a new section.

LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!

Sony

Strange, isn't it? That sounds like something more out of the movie A Knight's Tale (with Chaucer as a character and a 90s rock soundtrack) than a Norman coopting of a Saxon forgery of a Welsh legend originally based on the life of a warrior from the waning days of Rome. Malory tells a familiar tale of Uther Pendragon taking an enemy's wife, Igraine, and conceiving Arthur, who is raised in secret, pulls Excalibur from a stone, then conquers all Britain and Ireland before marching down to Rome to give the Emperor Lucius what-for. (Historians will note that was actually the Vandals and the Visigoths, not Graham Chapman and the Monty Python troupe.) And then we get into the Knights of the Table Round, of which Malory says there are about 150. And each one goes out to fight whomever they will fight. Sometimes, they run afoul of Arthur's incestuous sister, Morgan Le Fay, and fight each other. In listening, I noticed knights will be the hero in one book, the villain in another, and sidekick in yet another. Doesn't that sound like WWE?

Le Morte d'Arthur is episodic and tends to repeat itself. It's not the post-World War II spiking of the ball for England like TH White's The Once and Future King (and by extension, the musical Camelot), which followed more modern storytelling. Nor is it the more complex, feminist reworking that is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which has more in common with Dune than Malory, aside from the characters. No, these tales were not meant to be a single novel or play like Shakespeare in his day or even today's ten-episode streamers. Nor was it intended for the elite few who could read. Like Homer before him, Malory and Chaucer wrote for their stories to be read piece by piece to the masses, who didn't really care about which god slept with which goddess or... Well... Let's just say Greek and Roman mythology is less complicated than Phonecian. (Moloch? Seriously?) No, the masses gravitate toward action. Fight scenes. Heroes with a code. Damsels in distress. (Though these days, the damsels often come armed with brains or weapons or both and usually cause or relieve distress more often than be in it.) They want adventure.

Heroes and villains. Like pro wrestling. And the heroes swap places. One chapter Sir Tristram is the boldest knight, save Lancelot. The next, he's dumped his damsel for another and off living like a Duke in Brittany, earning several knights' enmity. But wait. A rival to Arthur has kidnapped or killed one of the knights of the Round Table. Or Morgan Le Fay (who also switches sides a lot) has hexed one of our heroes. Another knight comes in to save the day, but he needs help. "Oh, um, Trist? Why don't we settle this with a joust a Pentecost. I could really use a hand right now." 

Even Lancelot becomes the villain eventually. Many of the knights lust after Queen Guinevere. Lance actually does something about it. It's the precursor to pro wrestling. Andre the Giant is the good guy. Then he's not when he battles Hulk Hogan. Roddy Piper is a heel. Then he's the wise old man of wrestling. (Also, a guy with really cool sunglasses that expose capitalism's faults. I'd have thought $200 for a non-prescription pair of Oakleys was a hint, but that's a couple of other columns.)

Malory, I've come to realize, was a pulp writer. So was, to some extent, Shakespeare, but he wrote long, (usually coherent) plays. (And someone should have let him completely rewrite Edward III. Is it really his canon if he's the obvious script doctor on a polished turd? I digress.)

Even Dickens and Twain wrote this way early on. The Pickwick Papers aren't so much a novel as a serialized forerunner to Freaks and Geeks minus the MST3K cameos. Even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two of the most influential American novels ever written, read like a newspaper serial or, to our modern eyes, a streaming program. But unlike Dickens and Twain, who spent a fair bit of time fleshing out even their most one-dimensional characters, Malory has simple good guys and bad guys who are interchangeable. It was Twain, White, Bradley, and a host of movie directors and novelists who gave the various knights deeper motivations. Read The Mists of Avalon, and you wonder why Merlin didn't get smacked around by an angry Morgan Le Fay. 

Malory picked up where Chaucer left off in terms of language, bridging the gap between the nascent Middle English of the Plantagenet Era and Elizabethan style we see in Shakespeare and the King James Bible. But Chaucer was writing a cross-section of English society that would inspire later classics, including Dan Simmons's classic Hyperion. Malory wants you to throw some popcorn in the microwave (or it's 15th century equivalent, in a pan over an open fire.) Or maybe, since Arthur was pilfered from the Welsh, stick the Orville Redenbacher in the popty ping. (Which remains my favorite Welsh slang of all time.)

And besides, if it weren't for Lance, Gawain, and Gallahad, we'd have never had Holmes, Phillip Marlowe, or Jim Rockford. 

Or WWE Raw. 

LCC Seattle: A Love Letter

 This year I attended my tenth Left Coast Crime conference. This in and of itself is unremarkable. Before 
COVID knocked the world off its axis I could usually be found at every year’s Left Coast Crime.

This year was different for a couple of reasons.

First off, LCC 2024 was my first conference of any kind since the advent of COVID.

Secondly, this time around I helped plan the whole thing in my capacity as one of LCC 2024’s three co-chairs.

My major endeavor was to set up the panel schedule, and populate said panels with panelists/moderators.

Here's a bird's eye view:

Sixty-four panels. Three-hundred fifty panelists (give or take). Mix and match. Rinse and repeat.

A cast of hundreds!

Not a daunting task at all.

But you know what? Working on the panels for Left Coast Seattle 2024 helped bring home to me all over again why I so very much love this conference.

It's the people.

Beginning with the members of the LCC 2024 Organizing Committee: Laurie Rockenbeck, David Schlosser, Scotti Andrews, Kate Jackson, Larry Keeton and Lesley Hall. Long-time friends and colleagues, we prepped for planning and running a LCC conference by running a number of writing events over the years as members of Mystery Writers of America's Northwest Chapter board.

Over the course of the year we spent planning this event, no task went unaddressed. No request for assistance went unanswered. Rinse and repeat thousands of times.

And then there were the volunteers. Dozens of them, especially the indomitable Theresa from Texas! Talk about a group stepping up and going above and beyond!

A quick shout-out to LCC's national board, too: Stan and Lucinda, Les and Leslie, Mike Befler, and Janet Rudolph (who was unfortunately unable to attend). There is a lot of institutional here, and boy, did they pit it to good use!

And let's not forget our Guests of Honor (Robert Dugoni and Megan Abbott), Fan Guest of Honor (the Indomitable Fran Fuller), and our hard-working Toastmaster Wanda M. Morris (whose dance party was the hit of the conference!). You all showed up, shared with us, laughed with us, and make this conference such a wonderful experience for so many!

Toastmaster Extraordinaire Wanda Morris!

Circling back to the panels for a moment:

I didn't have a single interaction with a potential panelist or moderator that was anything other than pleasant. Questions proved both probing and insightful, and the conference went so much better for the input of the folks on the panels. Is it any surprise that the con went off so well and a good time was had by all, in light of the splendid contributions of these authors/editors/aspiring writers and fans? If you attended even a single panel, I think you know what I'm talking about.

We had around 550 attendees-so many old friends, and so many new faces to get to know! All in all, just a great, fun experience.

Just as we have come to expect from Left Coast Crime!

More in two weeks!

Get Carter (Brit noir)

 

Another movie post, because I’m still in the geosynchronous orbit of Tarantino’s brain candy, Cinema Speculation.

Brit noir hit its stride in the immediate postwar years, just as American film noir did, but the Brits had an extra serving of world-weary.  American tough-guy pictures in the late 1940’s laid on the cynicism and corruption, with no small helping of conspiracy and nuclear paranoia (Kiss Me Deadly took the atom bomb metaphor literally); the British style was more inward and furtive, and just plain creepy.  American noir was about lost innocence, Brit noir was about losing your soul. 

Carol Reed directed Odd Man Out in 1947, The Fallen Idol in ‘48, and The Third Man in ‘49, which is three for three.  Along about the same time, Brighton Rock, with a screenplay by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan, made Richard Attenborough a star in his early twenties.  No Orchids for Miss Blandish – called “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever shown,” a review that only baits the hook - broke box office records. 

 

They were doing something right.  This was the period that saw David Lean’s two terrific Dickens adaptions, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and the heartbreaking Brief Encounter.  The famous and successful Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Passport to Pimlico, and Whisky Galore! – released in the U.S. as Tight Little Island – all of them did well in the States.

Crime pictures seem to come in cycles.  Heist movies are always in fashion, for example, but after the late 1940’s, Brit noir took a sabbatical, and then came back with a roar in the early Sixties.  Stanley Baker in The Criminal (why was Stanley Baker never that big a star outside the UK?), a picture Joe Losey made after he was blacklisted and left the States.  The very strange and violent Never Let Go, with Peter Sellers as the psychotic heavy – Sellers later said he was channeling Rod Steiger, but didn’t mean it as a compliment.  All Night Long, Patrick McGoohan as Iago, in modern dress, a jazz drummer.  The Mark, Stuart Whitman an accused child molester; Night Must Fall, Albert Finney an axe murderer; and Victim, a ground-breaking noir, with Dirk Bogarde a gay lawyer who allows himself to be blackmailed. 

Not to mention the beginning of Bond, with Dr. No, and spy stories suddenly in vogue.  Again, the more kitchen-sink, hard-luck, wiseguy pictures took a back seat, glamorous and exotic was in. 

And then came the ‘70’s. 

Villain, Richard Burton in a remake of White Heat, all the gay subtext upfront and center – with Ian McShane, of all people, as Big Dick’s boytoy.  The way McShane tells the story, Richard told him, “You remind me of Elizabeth.”  McShane lets a beat go by, all innocence.  “I guess that made the kissing easier,” he says.  (Burton has to be seen to be believed, in Villain: the heavy gold jewelry, the paisley loungewear, open to his navel, the chest hair and the florid jowls, it’s a gay parody, pathetic and offensive and real as a dime, in its own crazy way.)

Which brings us to Get Carter, released in 1971.  First off, Michael Caine.  Introduced to major audiences in Zulu, he slipped effortlessly through the keyhole with The Ipcress File (not to be upstaged by seasoned pros like Gordon Jackson and the impeccably reptilian Nigel Green), and Alfie made him a bankable star.  The thing to remember about Michael Caine is that he was ours, it felt like he belonged to us, that cheeky attitude, and the accent.  For a generation of a Brit kids (not that I’m one), he turned the class system – where the way you speak is destiny – inside out.  He was a bloody Cockney, and he was suddenly the new archetype, much to his own surprise.  Secondly, the source material, a hard-boiled pulp novel by Ted Lewis called Jack’s Return Home, which rocketed to commercial success, and almost single-handedly established the Brit neo-noir.  Third, there was the director, Mike Hodges.  Carter was his debut feature, and truth be told, he’s never made another movie as crackling and acid.

The story’s a revenge tragedy.  Jack, the Michael Caine character, is muscle for the London mob.  His brother Frank is killed in a car crash, back home in Newcastle.  Jack travels up from the Smoke, to go to the funeral, and once he’s back, he smells a rat.  Somebody staged Frank’s murder to make it look like an accident.  Things go downhill from there, Jack being an agent of chaos, and by far the meanest bastard in a place seething with snakes.

Two things in particular stand out.  One is that Michael Caine plays Jack without any apparent emotional affect.  He isn’t simply remorseless; he has no sympathy for anybody.  I’d never seen anything like it, and certainly not from Michael Caine.  Almost always, a name actor will play to the audience, a nod and a wink, to show you the guy’s got a heart of gold under his gruff exterior.  (There’s a moment in Sharky’s Machine, where Burt Reynolds breaks character and goes all Aw, Shucks! on you, and almost blows the whole picture.  Burt, the director, shouldn’t have allowed Burt, the movie star, to pander.)  Caine is having none of it.  He doesn’t even pretend that Jack has an ounce of pity.  There’s one moment, late in the story, where Jack is watching a dirty movie, and recognizes who’s in it – I can’t tell you who, without giving it away – but his face is impassive, while his eyes leak tears.  Amazing bit, too.  In context, it shows you that Jack isn’t in control, that his stony mask has a fatal cost, but even so, the mask never really slips.  Jack has such a tight grip on himself, he can’t see he’s let his soul slip through his fingers.

The second thing is the visual affect of the picture, the way it’s shot.  The cinematographer said later his main contribution was the lighting and the exposures, and that it was director Mike Hodges who was responsible for the camera work, the shot setups and the look of the film.  (Which might remind you of Ridley Scott, on The Duellists, working as his own cameraman.)  The visual style, in Get Carter, is foreshortened and claustrophobic.  The movie starts with a zoom in, against the London skyline, at night, and ends with a zoom out, from a lonely shingle of beach.  In between, the tight zoom shots squash you up against the lens, shot from a distance, but pulled in close.  The whole picture has a Peeping Tom feel to it, and since a major plot point turns out to be pornography and sex traffic, it follows that the visual context is voyeuristic.  The sudden, savage violence has that same pornographic quality, that we’re watching, but more disturbing because it just boils up out of the earth, the random nature of the characters, bad luck and bad genes and bad choices.  You’re too close to look away.     

Get Carter cast a long shadow.  You see its influence.  It turned a corner, and afterwards you couldn’t go back.  Probably its most direct heir is The Long Good Friday, with that other Cockney, Bob Hoskins.  That’s another column.

The Magic of Malice

When Stacy Woodson offered to write a pre-Malice guest post, this isn’t what I was expecting. You’ll understand why when you read it.

— Michael Bracken

The Magic of Malice

By Stacy Woodson

My first Malice Domestic was in 2018. The day of the convention I overslept. Yep—right through the alarm (which is unusual for me). I’m an early morning writer, at the computer, fingers poised by 4 a.m.

Not that day.

Stacy Woodson surrounded by other writers
at Malice Domestic.

Flustered, I dressed quickly and rushed downstairs. The first event of the morning was author speed dating. Inspired by the formalized matchmaking process, this literary version has authors rotate between tables to meet readers and chat about their latest projects. I heard wonderful things about author speed dating and was determined to attend. But when I finally arrived at the ballroom, it was well-underway, and seats were full.

And the authors were talking.

And the organizers were organizing.

And the newbie (me) was searching, from table-to-table, hoping an empty seat would magically appear. (Experienced speed daters reading this are thinking fat chance.) But that day was different. That day a seat did magically appear.

Just not at a speed dating table.

A kind author offered me a chair at a small break table—a stop on the speed dating circuit where authors sit to catch their breath for seven minutes until the horn blows, and they rotate to a new table with readers. This kind author said I may not be able to hear pitches, but sitting here still offered an opportunity to remain in the ballroom and connect with authors. He handed me a flier and chatted about his projects. Then, the whistle blew, he wished me luck, and rotated to the next table.

This was a key moment in my literary life because that kind author who threw me a speed dating-lifeline was Michael Bracken.

That was six years ago.

Since then, I’ve appeared in over a dozen of Michael’s anthologies and magazines. Three of these stories have been nominated for major awards, and one will be included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024. Today, we are also collaborating on projects, co-editing two anthologies, teaching short fiction for Outliers Writing University, and organizing ShortCon (along with Verena Rose and Shawn Reilly Simmons). If that isn’t amazing enough, Michael and I also co-wrote “Dogs of War,” my first short fiction collaboration, which is nominated for a Derringer Award this year.

The kindness Michael showed me that day isn’t rare for him, and I’m not the only author he mentors. He has a mission to elevate short mystery fiction and create opportunities for short mystery fiction writers. He does this by editing a growing list of anthologies and publications, writing columns and blogs, sharing wisdom on panels, advocating for the short mystery fiction community as a board member with Mystery Writers of America, and by creating ShortCon.

Magical moments happen when creative people gather and talk about what they love. My wish for other writers is that they attend mixers at conventions, volunteer to work at the registration desk, seek out someone new and have a conversation (maybe a lost soul in the speed dating ballroom) and create space for their own Michael Bracken-moment.

Thank you, Michael, for offering a port in the speed dating storm six years ago. I know my writing journey would be remarkably different if you hadn’t.

* * *

“Dogs of War,” co-written by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, appeared in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir Volume 4. A death letter read at a military funeral unearths a secret, and an unexpected hero ensures justice is served in this Derringer Award-nominated story.

ShortCon is a one-day conference emphasizing crime fiction short stories—how to write them, how to get them published, and how to sustain a long-term career as a short-story writer. It will be held at Elaine’s Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, on Saturday, June 22, 2024. Learn more about ShortCon at https://www.eastcoastcrime.com/#/.

Punctuated equilibrium. Also capitalized.

I love France, and many of the French, though they can be annoying like anyone else.  I find their language confounding, even as I love the way it sounds.  One of my good friends is fluent, as is my niece, and I’ll always marvel at their achievements.  The problem with French, to me, is there are far too many vowels, which to my ear all sound the same.  Though while I understand virtually nothing French people say, I respect their determination to preserve their native tongue, to maintain it exactly as it is for all eternity.

I also think they are completely, foolishly and historically wrong in this, though you have to admire their grit. 

The term Lingua Franca means universal language, which it used to be, but not anymore.  This is because they refused to let the language evolve, and thus the world passed it by, in favor of my language, English, which almost everyone on Earth knows “a leetle.”

I learned this traveling around Europe and other continents, and working with people from all over everywhere.  I’d ask if they spoke English, and they’d all say “a leetle”, and then display a mastery of the form far surpassing most of the knuckleheads I grew up with in Philadelphia, Pa.  USA. 

The secret of this success, aside from being spoken by the predominant global military/economic powers of the last two centuries, is unlike French, we could care less about preserving linguistic purity.  If French has the moral rectitude of Mother Superior, English would embarrass the Marquis de Sade.  Anything but pure. 

So this is a good thing, overall, though the process of change can be irksome, and exhausting.  New English words are created, often pilfered from others, in such profusion you feel like you’re in a swarm of breeding may flies.  Usage is entirely fungible, and no army of authoritarian schoolmarms could ever staunch our various and sundry populations’ creative misuse, mispronunciation, garbled grammar and syntactical sin.

Though change is inevitable, you don’t have to always like it.  A favorite pastime around this household is gritching about popular degradations of proper speech.  That is, proper by our likes, but in the future these preferences will be considered archaic.  Using the noun “impact” as a verb has achieved such widespread acceptance it’s a fait accompli.  That written, to me the only correct use of impacted relates to wisdom teeth, or when Carl Sagan described a giant asteroid slamming into the side of Jupiter.

But I console myself from such fretting by thinking of language as perfectly mirroring natural history.  Both evolve relentlessly, in the same fashion.  Species arise, dominate, splinter into sub-species, some wither away, others become entirely distinct.  It’s fair to bemoan the loss of a particular dialect, or even an entire language, but realize that thousands have arisen and died off over the eons, and any field left fallow will soon be bursting with new life.  Most of New England was once farmland.  Now you can barely see the forests for all the trees.

The natural historian Stephen Jay Gould defined a phenomenon he called “punctuated equilibrium”.  This describes how a portion of a certain population becomes isolated from the main herd (which could have been in a stable state for thousands of years), and then very quickly, evolves into something notably different.  Language does exactly the same thing. 

Everyone thinks American English is a corrupted, devolved version of the genteel speech we hear on Downton Abbey.  In fact, during the Revolutionary War the British sounded pretty much like Americans do today.  We’re the ones who’ve stayed the locutionary course while the Brits have moved on.  No one had a Southern accent as defined today until sometime after the Civil War.  The South was, and still is, bursting with distinctive dialects and styles of expression, but only the flattening of mass media could bestow upon us a fully regional inflection.

There used to be an American accent called Mid-Atlantic, sort of a hybrid British/American contraption.  The most useful exemplars were FDR and William F. Buckley, though it was so common in old movies – think Katherine Hepburn or Errol Flynn (an Australian, for Pete’s sake) – that few realized Cary Grant was actually an Englishman.  Since this manner of speaking signaled a kind of aristocratic superiority, we’re well rid of it.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans were quite eager to put Bernie Sanders in the White House, and while the majority rejected his politics, no one thought his Brooklyn accent was a disqualifier. 

Disparaging how other people speak is snobbish at best, 

and at worst, bigoted, since there is no rational or scientific justification for ascribing character flaws to styles of speech.  As with any social construct, accent discrimination is used by those with the upper hand to bludgeon others they’d prefer remain in their disfavored social class. Luckily, our language itself has a way of slipping out from under these predations, dissolving advantages and disadvantages alike. 

And churning out new words like Twinkies at a Hostess factory.

Merriam-Webster added 690 new words to the dictionary last year.  And that doesn’t include thousands more candidates.  James Joyce made up seventeen words, though only “quark” survives to this day, and only because Murray Gell-Mann used it to name a subatomic particle.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, invented over 1,700 English words, most of which are still in use. 

I’m pretty sure I invented the word “rictify”, which I used to describe what happens to some people whose attitudes and beliefs become rigid and fixed in place as they age, suggesting some sort of combination of “petrify” and “rigor mortis”.  A psychologist friend of mine liked it so much, he started using it in his practice.  Haven’t seen it in the dictionary yet, but keeping an eye out. 

Your turn.   

The Tintinnitus of the Bells, Bells, Bells

My parents used to rebuke us: “Enunciate!”

Humph. I didn’t think I spoke badly, but they would’ve instructed the nation with resolutely precise enunciation if they’d had their own Discord and YouTube channels.

A couple of decades later found me in France at a colleague’s dinner table talking about the weather. I mention the harsh winter in Minnesota and my French friend stopped me.

“The harsh what?” he asked.

“Harsh winter,” I said. At his request, repeated it yet again.

He said, “I don’t understand.”

“Spring, summer, autumn, winter.”

He looked puzzled. “I thought winter had a T in it.”

He was right. I wasn’t pronouncing the T. Same with ‘plenty’. Likewise, I pronounced only the first T in ‘twenty’'. Some words with an ’nt’ combination – but not all– lost their ’T’s coming out of my mouth.

Banter and canter, linty and minty seem fine, but I swallow the T in ‘painter’. Returning after a year overseas and more conscious of enunciation, I sounded like a foreigner. “I just love German accents,” said my bank teller, cooing and fluttering her eyelashes.

Language in Flux

By age 8 or so, I’d become adept at soldering and still use the skill for repairs, projects, and mad scientist experiments. Pitifully, it took me decades to realize I didn’t know how to pronounce it.

I’m not sure if it’s a Midwestern thing or an American attribute, but I leave out the bloody letter L. Most people I know pronounce that compound of tin, lead, and silver as “sodder.”

I don’t do that with other LD combinations like bolder, colder, and folder. Even with practice, solder with an L does not trip readily off my tongue.

The Apple electronic dictionary that comes with Macs shows North American pronunciation as [ ˈsädər ]. Interesting… no L. Then I switched tabs to the British English dictionary where I learned it’s pronounced [ ˈsɒldə, ˈsəʊldə ]. Okay, there’s an L. But hello… What’s this? What happened to the R? Whoa-ho-ho.

Speaking of L&R, when was the R in ‘colonel’ granted leave? Kernel I understand; colonel, not so much. What about British ‘lieutenant’? The OED blames the French, claiming ‘lievtenant’ evolved to ‘lieutenant’ but pronounced ‘lieftenant’.

Finally, what happened to the L in could, would, and should? They seem to have broken the mould. The Oxford lords giveth and they taketh away.

Sounds of Silence

I know precisely why another word gave me difficulty. I tended to add a syllable to the word ‘tinnitus’, which came out ‘tintinnitus’. I’ve puzzled an otolaryngologist or two, because I conflated tinnitus with tintinnabulation.

(Otolaryngologist? Speak of words difficult to pronounce!)

Which brings us to a trivia question all our readers should know: How does ‘tintinnabulation’ connect with the world of mystery?^†

Rhymes Not with Venatio

Before Trevor Noah became a US political humorist, his career began as a South African standup comic. On one of his DVDs, he altered words to sound snooty and high class, such as ‘patio’ rhymed with ‘ratio’.

Junior high, Bubbles Mclaughlin: nineteen months and three days older than me. Like Trevor, this ‘older woman’ had no idea how to pronounce another word ending in ‘atio’. For years, neither did I, but she could have rhymed it with ‘aardvark’ and I wouldn’t have minded.

C Creatures

I’ve been listening to ebooks recently. Almost all text-to-speech apps claim to use buzzwordy AI, but most don’t, not when ‘epitome’ sounds like ‘git home’. Similarly, ‘façade’ does not rhyme with ‘arcade’.

When making the Prohibition Peepers video, I altered spelling of a few words to get the sound I needed, such as ‘lyve’ instead of ‘live’. What a pane in the AIss.

I wondered if ebook programs would pronounce façade correctly if their closed captions were correctly spelled with C-cédille, that letter C with the comma-looking tail that indicates a soft C. If you stretch your imagination, you can kinda, sorta imagine a cedilla (or cédille) looking a little like a distorted S. (For Apple users employing text-to-speech, a Mac pronounces it correctly either way.)

Our local Publix grocery (when their founder’s granddaughter and heiress isn’t funding riots) spells the South American palm berry drink as ‘acai’, which meant both employees and I sounded it with a K. If they’d spelled ‘açai’ with the C-cédille, I would have learned the word much sooner.

I could say ‘anemone’ before I knew how to spell it. The names of this flower and sea creature are spoken like ‘uh-NEM-uh-nee’, which rhymes with ‘enemy’.

Bullchit

Permit me to introduce you to Rachel and Rachel’s English YouTube channel. She kindly explains we often learn words through reading and don’t learn their sound until much later. I was shocked that three of the words she led with have given me trouble including one I hadn’t realized I was currently mispronouncing– echelon. I was saying it as CH (as in China) instead of SH (as in Chicago).

Those other two words: In grade school, I became confused how to say mischievous and triathlon, requiring more careful attention.

Rachel also discusses how modern usage omits syllables. I say ‘modern’ because my teachers would have rounded smartly on us had we dared abbreviate, so I tend to fully sound out several of her examples. One she doesn’t mention is ‘secretary’, at times said as ’SEK-ruh-tree’.

When is a T not a T?

The phrase ‘can not’ has been shortened and shortened again over time:

• can not
• cannot
• can’t
• can’

What? Rachel enters extreme territory beyond my ken, explaining the ’stop-T’. Listen to what she has to say about it. That’s all for now!

 

 

 

 

© SleuthSayers

 

^† Answer to trivia question: Edgar Allan Poe famously used the obscure but wonderful word ‘tintinnabulation’ in his poem, ‘The Bells’.

Dryer Is a Noun

  

We all know that. It's the big appliance that sits beside your washing machine. If you want to compare the moisture content of things like two climates, towels, cakes, underwear, etc., it's drier, not dryer. Drier's an adjective. 

Dreyer is also a noun (proper noun). Five years ago, a former Random House copy chief named Benjamin Dreyer published a book called Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which lists a lot of language-related rules on things like dryer vs. drier, and it has come in handy for me more than once. In fact I wrote a column here at SleuthSayers about the book soon after I discovered it, and I think I've mentioned since then that I consider Dreyer's English second only to Stephen King's On Writing in terms of usefulness and readability. After all, it's utterly correct.

Ever since then, I've been considering doing another post about this book. So, if you have time, take a look at the examples in my previous post, appropriately titled "Dreyer's English," and then see what you think of the following additional rules and pointers that I discovered when I re-read the book not long ago. Some of this stuff I already knew (and so would you), but some of it I didn't. It's all good advice, by an expert who's studied our language from top to bottom.

Here are some of those (paraphrased) observations:

- Feel free to use contractions, even in formal writing. On this, Dreyer says, "Contractions are the reason God invented the apostrophe, so make good use of both." 

- Feel free to use sentence fragments. He mentions, as an example, the first three sentences of Charles Dickens's Bleak House: "London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather." Sometimes sentence fragments work perfectly, when writing fiction.

- It's okay to accompany "whether" with "or not." According to Dreyer, in the sentence "Whether or not you like movie musicals, you'll love Singin' in the Rain," try removing the "or not" and see what happens.

- Feel free to use "like" instead of "such as" when introducing a list. Either one works just fine.

- Don't punctuate acronyms and initialisms (abbreviations pronounced letter by letter) with periods. Examples: NASA, FBI, CIA, IBM, etc.

- Don't feel you have to use a comma before the recipient's name when beginning an email or a text: "Hi John" works every bit as well as "Hi, John."

- Use a comma in a sentence like "He traveled to Pompeii with his daughter Clara" only if he has more than one daughter. If she's the only one, say "He traveled to Pompeii with his daughter, Clara." 

- In my earlier SleuthSayers post, I mentioned never using an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation (CDs, IDs, ATMs)--but that also goes for dates (1860s, 1920s, '50s, '80s, etc.). I'm not sure if it's stated in the book or not, but I couldn't resist bringing it up.

- Use "farmers' market" instead of "farmer's market." Assuming, of course, that there's more than one farmer. I can't help thinking about the titles of two popular writing magazines I used to see on bookstore shelves: Writer's Digest and Writers' Journal. One of the mysteries of the universe.

- Sentences beginning with either "I wonder" or "Guess who" (I wonder who's kissing her now, Guess who's coming to dinner, etc.) should be ended with a period, not a question mark. They're not questions.

- Don't begin a sentence with a numeral or numerals. (1967 dawned clear and bright.) Instead, spell it out or reword it. Nineteen sixty-seven dawned clear and bright, or (better) The year 1967 dawned clear and bright. 

- Numerals are usually avoided in dialogue. Spell 'em out. I'll meet you at three-thirty.

- Set foreign language words and expressions in italics.

- Avoid "misplaced modifiers." Examples: "Strolling through the park, the weather was beautiful," or "Arriving at the garage, my car was nowhere to be found." This mistake is surprisingly easy to make. 

- As for substitutes for "said," don't write "Hello," he smiled, or "I don't care," she shrugged. You can't smile or shrug words.

--Know how to properly position dashes when indicating interrupted dialogue. Incorrect: "I can't possibly--" she set the jam pot down furiously "--eat such overtoasted toast." Correct: "I can't possibly"--she set the jam pot down furiously--"eat such overtoasted toast."

- Don't use semicolons in dialogue. Period.

- As for "Everyone should make up their own mind," etc., Dreyer says. "The singular 'they' is not the wave of the future; it's the wave of the present." In other words, he doesn't like it. But a lot has happened in the world in the five years since he published the book, and that now seems to be a sticky subject. I realize that "Everyone should make up his own mind," or even "Everyone should make up his or her own mind" is probably taboo these days, but the things we learned long ago die hard. I guess I would choose to rephrase the sentence.

One last "rule":

- Avoid the overuse of words like blinking, pausing, smiling, snorting, sighing, and swallowing in passages of dialogue. I confess that my speaking characters do these things all the time. But I'm working on it . . .

Again, these are only a few of the many writing rules I found in my recent re-reading of this fantastic book. If you don't already have it, consider picking it up. (And no, I receive no kickbacks.)

In closing, what are your opinions about the above snippets of "style" advice? Do you agree with most of them? Disagree? Please let me know, in the comments. Meanwhile . . . 

"I'll see you in two weeks," he smiled, snorting.