16 September 2024
Words, Words, Words
First, the unnecessary new locution to replace a perfectly serviceable one.
tasked with for being assigned, ordered, told to do something, or having a job
going forward for from now on
gifted with for given, esp a gift or present
curated for picked, chosen, or selected
role for job or position
Example: In her role of assistant office manager, Eloise was tasked with gifting everyone with a personally curated token of their birthdays and promotions going forward.
Anachronistic example (alas, they exist in today's historical fiction): "Soldiers of the legion!" the centurion said. "Going forward, you will be tasked with representing Rome at all times. I am gifting each of you with a pilum and gladius to kill the enemy, a shield to defend yourself, and a shovel curated by the camp prefect to dig a latrine every time we make camp."
Now let's move on to my second topic, this one not a peeve but an object of fascination: the expansion of the English language around the globe, definitively replacing French at the twenty-first century lingua franca, as it were. How do I know this is so? By watching TV via streaming services in a multitude of languages—with subtitles, on my laptop, in my own home. It's become one of my great pleasures, along with reading, for an evening's relaxation.
I started with French crime shows, such as Candice Renoir, Astrid, and Lupin, since I'm fluent in French and need only a glance at the subtitles now and then to keep up, though I'm glad they're there. I noticed immediately that Candice and her colleagues in Sète in southwestern France, who are very slangy, and Lupin, who's in Paris but very "street," since he's a gentleman crook, use such terms as le blackmail and le kidnapping, even though there are perfectly good French words for both: le chantage for blackmail and l'enlèvement for kidnapping. Astrid, who's neurodivergent and very formal—she won't even tutoyer her best friend, police detective Raphaelle—doesn't take these handy shortcuts. Raphaelle and her Parisian police colleagues speak a classier, more careful French too, though they've been known to say a potential suspect is clean after doing a background check.
Since then, I've watched multiple shows, mostly police procedurals or political thrillers, in Danish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Luxembourgeois (in which the characters occasionally spoke four languages within a single sentence), and others, and in every one, the dialogue was heavily larded with English, even when the characters were not, as they sometimes were, communicating in English in order to speak with native speakers of a language other than their own. As you must know, the English word, an Americanism, that's become most universal is a simple okay. The same for cool. But some others are also popular, and some, as used in certain countries, are just plain fun.
sorry seems to be used universally in German and Finnish
thank you used interchangeably with other languages; everyone understands it
Christmas Korean for Christmas
shopping Korean for shopping
marketing Korean for marketing, as far as I can tell
spindoctor Danish for speechwriter, publicist, or political official's communications director
On Dicte, about a Danish police reporter, I caught safe house and network but was too absorbed in the show to write down others that I heard.
And on Luna and Sophie, my favorite German show, about two delightful police detectives in Potsdam, I managed to get a whole list:
control freak
spooky
blackout
end of story
nice try
shit happens
one stop shop
And there was one proverb I loved. Luna used it to turn down a new colleague who asked her out for a drink after work.
"Schnapps ist schnapps und job ist job."
In fact, so deeply has English sunk in its hooks that the German dictionary lists "job" as a synonym for arbeit (work), saying it's used umgachschpratlich (colloquially). With words like that, the most dedicated English language chauvinist surely doesn't want German and other languages to die away altogether.
15 September 2024
At Loss for Words
by Leigh Lundin
Mom and Dad spoke in a secret language.
So does my house phone (VoIP for those interested). Mere words into this article, it rudely interrupted to snarl. “Lobotomy. Lobotomy.”
I’ve previously mentioned an older resident of my childhood hamlet, one of those men crushed when the wife left, and emotionally unrecovered. He had a speech impediment when combined with abbreviations made his sentences difficult to decipher. Kids, however, learned to understand him and leveraged their translation skills into a private language.
Pity their poor teachers, a common target of childish insults. These days adults can check suspect words and phrases online. AFAIK, many are acronyms but IDK some slang terms. Nut? Seriously? 304 or 403? Make up your minds.
A Word from our Sponsor
Back to my parents’ private language when secret codes favored grownups. When adults didn’t want children to understand, parents of a certain era could rattle off conversations, helping to maintain a united front against the young and obstreperous. For example:
“Ettybay usway eanmay (o)otay erhay istersay. Iyay oundedgray erhay.”
Recognize that? It translates as:
“Betty was mean to her sister. I grounded her.”
In early grade school I read everything and stumbled upon Pig Latin. At last, I knew what my parents were up to. It’s dead easy to learn and for me at least, I could speak Pig Latin much faster than I could comprehend it.
And so I waited. (heh heh, maniacal laughter ensued) Next time Mom and Dad spoke Pig Latin at the dinner table, I casually interjected with a comment in Pig Latin. My parents stopped using their secret language. Had I been smarter, I should have pretended I couldn’t understand the conversation.
Igpay AtinLay
Here are Pig Latin rules (although algorithm might be a better word).
- Detach leading consonants from each word.
- Append them to the end of the word followed by ‘ay’.
- Thus “perfect children” becomes “erfectpay ildrenchay”.
- For words with leading vowels, say the word followed by ‘yay’ or ‘way’.
- Thus “I am useful,” becomes “Iyay amway oosefulyay.”
- Go by sound rather than English spelling, especially in rare instances of writing.
- Thus “To be or not to be,” is written “Ootay eebay orway otnay ootay eebay.”
[Grownups, don’t reveal to Generation Alpha! Eizesay eethay advantageway.]
Final Word
About my outrageous phone. It took a while before I realized it was trying to say, “Low battery. Low battery,” instead of “Lobotomy.”
By the way, the full English version of the above statement, “Betty was mean to her sister,” would more likely be spoken with asperity as, “Your daughter Betty was mean to her sister,” thereby disavowing parental knowledge of begatting DNA, placing responsibility on the other parent.
Uh-oh. Lobotomy. Lobotomy.
14 September 2024
But Dad, It's Smokey
by Bob Mangeot
- "Ain't That Peculiar," Marvin Gaye
- "Don't Mess With Bill," The Marvelettes
- "Get Ready," The Temptations
- "My Guy," Mary Wells
- "The Way You Do the Things You Do," The Temptations
13 September 2024
The Perils of Pauline
by Jim Winter
Nickolodeon |
The last woman I saw do that was Arlene Sorkin, trading voices with Dave Coulier on America's Funniest People, or some knock-off thereof. For reference, Sorkin is not only the original voice of Batman villainess Harley Quinn, the 1990s writers of Batman based Harley on her. So... Parody?
But I thought about this. I've seen cartoons as a kid referencing this trope and the odd silent movie. But with independent stations airing westerns ad nauseum, I never actually saw a movie where the dastardly villain tied anyone to the railroad track. According to Atlas Obscura, there aren't any real-life cases.
What if there was? Thus came an as-yet untitled short story set in the Celloverse, my name for the fictitious setting for the Holland Bay novels. A train-obsessed suburban cop catches a break on his Saturday night (really, Sunday morning) shift and parks next to the tracks near the town square. He wants to watch the Lakeshore Limited blow by on its way from Cleveland to Chicago. As he settles in with a cup of cheap gas station coffee, he sees something on the tracks. We've all seen that. Limbs blown down by high winds. A dead animal, with deer a real derailment hazard. Trains do not stop suddenly. Even the really short ones way thousands of tons and have too much momentum. I've witnessed one panicked stop where the wheels on every car locked up and the train skidded to a stop. The train still moved several hundred yards, and it's a wonder it didn't derail.
But our intrepid hero, being an on-duty officer of the law and self-confessed train nerd, jumps out of his car, jogs around the fence, and goes to move what he thinks is a dead deer. It's a woman, zip-tied to the track. The explanation involves roofies and a man who can't take no for an answer.
That's a plausible scenario, but where did it actually come from?
Despite what our Saturday morning cartoons suggested, the woman tied to a railroad track did not appear all that often in silent films. In reality, the person who ended up on the tracks was almost always the dashing male hero. In comedies, the damsel in distress might end up tied to the tracks, but this was parody. The hero, a detective or a cowboy, would often be knocked out, landing on the tracks, only to be rescued by...
The heroine. So that's not a Marvel or scifi trope. That's an available character rescuing our disabled hero. It's not surprising the hero falling onto the tracks occurred so often to amp up tension. Trains during the silent and early talkie era were not just the primary means of public transportation, but cars were still not that common until the Depression. And planes? Why that sounds dangerous. Or did until World War II, when Clipper planes and huge bombers became commonplace. Helicopters did not even become common until 1945.
And the dastardly, mustache-twirling villain? The earliest example I saw came from a couple of episodes of The Little Rascals, where the gang put on a show with one of them (usually Spanky) playing the top-hatted villain. And that was a play-within-a-play, deliberately cheesy.
So where did the trope come from? The earliest example came from an 1876 play called Under the Gaslight. In it, our hero is actually tied to the railroad tracks and saved by the heroine.
Credit for the modern woman-on-the-tracks trope stems from the serial The Perils of Pauline, wherein Pauline would get herself into all sorts of over-the-top peril (Hence the title. Clever!) with weekly precursors to the stock Bond villain. It should be noted none of these wannabe Blofelds ever tied Pauline to the tracks. However, comedies poking fun at poor Pauline, did put the woman on the tracks at the hands of a mustachioed, top-hatted villain cackling like Palpatine 50 years later in the Star Wars movies.
And since the 1970s, the trope hasn't played well outside of cartoons. And even then, it died off in Disney and Warner Brothers shorts by the 90s. Ellen Ripley, she of the Alien franchise, found herself not tied to a railroad track but stuck in a lifepod with the most frightening alien monster ever created. (Sorry, Galactus.) But instead of waiting for Tom Skerritt to save her (and anyway, the xenomorph already ate him), she grabs her cat, a pressure suit, and a proceeds to fight the monster in her underwear. As I teen, I naturally found this titillating. As a middle-aged man, I completely identify with this as if you wake me up in my boxers while doing mischief in my house at 3 AM, you will become very familiar with my Lousville Slugger. (Ripley weaponized the airlock, but there ain't a lot of baseball bats in space. Rifles, maybe, but not baseball bats.)
So I had fun writing this story and making it believable. It's still in revision, but it's coming along.
Besides, I'm a train nerd, among other things. I mean, how many more jazz buffs will crimefic readers tolerate?
12 September 2024
Write What You (Don't) Know (Yet)
Write what you know.Sam Clemens, busy NOT being a French peasant girl.
– Mark Twain
Famous advice from one of the most talented and accomplished writers in American history. And if I'm being honest, it's bunk.
I say this as a big, big fan of Mark Twain's (real name Samuel Clemens) work, especially stuff like Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and of course, Huckleberry Finn. And oddly enough, I'm not sure how seriously Twain took his own advice. After all, his favorite, among all of his works, was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte. And need I point out that Twain, while clearly a citizen of the world and a man of some extensive life experience, was not a medieval French peasant girl, never claimed to have a single religious vision or hear a single disembodied voice, never successfully (or unsuccessfully, for that matter) led French knights in battle, and didn't know what it was like to be burned at the stake.
No matter who you are, no matter what you write, you're going to eventually find yourself in a situation where you run out of experience/knowledge. And then what? Research?
Research can help, but again, it's likely to take you only so far. What then?
Well, you can always try to extrapolate. Case in point:
I was walking in from the parking lot to the building at my day gig the other day with a co-worker I know slightly. Great guy, and he's at least 6'10" tall.
And it occurred to me: I don't know how it felt to be 5'4" as an adult (because I haven't been 5'4" since 6th grade, and that was a looooooong time ago), but as I was walking in to my building with my co-worker, it occurred to me that our height differential was something I definitely noticed. And that's not something I usually take note of: people are as tall as they are or as short as they are. I rarely notice, mostly because other people's height usually has no impact either positive or negative, on my daily life.
Who among us hasn't felt like Kevin Hart standing next to Dwayne Johnson at one time or another? |
And again, my co-worker is great. He's not a threatening guy. At all. But with height he can't help but be....well....imposing, I guess would be the word.
And that was my in.
From there it was simple (notice that I said, "simple," and not "easy") to get into the head of a 5'4" character dealing with someone much taller than him. It really helped to shift my perspective and allow me to inhabit a character whose stature (literally) is far different from my own.
And that's just one example.
Another quick one, and then I'd love for those of you taking the time and trouble to read our little blog to share some of yours?
Another scene in my current work-in-progress is from the perspective of an accountant who has uncovered what he thinks is embezzlement by one of his clients. This client's fees are literally putting the accountant's kid through college. So what does he do?
Now, I'm not an accountant, and I've never been on the horns of a dilemma where my client has placed me as a result of my uncovering their bad actions. And said situation has never had the potential to ruin my life.
But everyone has had that sinking feeling when faced with personal or professional disappointment. And everyone on the planet has gotten that nauseating feeling in the pit of their stomach as a result of shocking news. So....... extrapolate!
How about you? Have any sure fire ways to help you lend authenticity to writing a situation with which you have no personal experience? If so, please share in the comments!
See you in two weeks!
11 September 2024
A Man on Fire
I’m reading David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work. If the only thing we remember him for is Deadwood, I’d be okay with that, on my resume. But he wrote 81 scripts for Hill Street Blues (there were a total of 144 episodes, over the run of the series); he wrote and exec produced, with Steven Bochco, NYPD Blue – which it’s fair to say changed the nature of broadcast television in the 90’s; and he was the eminence grise behind John from Cincinnati, a brilliant misfire that sank beneath the waves after airing ten episodes on HBO. He was responsible for Beverly Hills Buntz, Brooklyn South, and Luck, as well, but I doubt if they’ll prove to have the shelf life on streaming media the other shows do.
He was Yale, summa, master’s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and mentored by Robert Penn Warren. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, he was a heroin addict, and he’s got a gambling Jones. Milch is up front about all this, the good and the bad, but the gambling - and in particular the mystique of the track – has a very specific hold on him. He walks it back to his relationship with his dad, which is unresolved. The senior Milch was, ah, difficult.
It’s interesting how Milch engages with this. Art, he seems to feel, is in part a negotiation with the past. He believes you can transform your personal history, through writing, but not transcend. I happen to agree. You can incorporate stuff (how do you not?), but you can’t shed your own skin, that’s soap opera psychology: confront your demons, and defeat them. No. What you can do is repurpose memory, and perhaps undo its darker energies.
Now,
for instance, it probably comes as surprise to learn that the impelling
inspiration for Deadwood is the story
of
There’s a lot more in the book about Deadwood, the writing, the casting, the design, the zeitgeist, and I admit that’s mostly what I was reading it for. War stories about Ian McShane, and Robin Weigert, and Timothy Olyphant, and how certain choices were made, about characters, and storyline. You won’t be disappointed.
But here’s the thing. Spoiler alert. Milch’s brain is crowding up with deposits of amyloid plaque. He’s got Alzheimer’s. The past couple of years, he’s been in an Assisted Living/Memory Care facility. He describes it as a growing solitude, coming unmoored.
In that sense, Life’s Work is enormously brave. How much will he get to tell? “Nothing comes easily,” he says, “in terms of being loyal both to the past and the present,” but he believes that’s the proper place of storytelling. I’m both deeply impressed and terribly saddened, but I don’t think Milch is looking to curry favor, or find redemption, he’s simply setting the record straight. We all want to enter our house justified, naturally enough, and Milch gets to tell the story his way. I wish there were more of it.
10 September 2024
Bouchercon Briefing
by Barb Goffman
Last week I returned home from Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, having walked a million miles while there—not hyperbole, I assure you. That hotel was designed for long-distance athletes. Anyway, I attended a bunch of panels—that involved sitting, after all—and while I didn't take a lot of notes, I did write some things down. Usually it was something I knew but the author or editor had made their point in an interesting way. At other times, it was information I didn't know (Kathleen Donnelly, this means you). Here are those notes. Everything that follows is a paraphrase. Any mistakes are my own.
Mysti Berry - A short story is about a character with a problem and the consequences of the choices made to solve that problem.
It's a Mystery! (Oops, I failed to note who said this) - Cozy mysteries are books with hope, community, and trust--things that make readers feel good.
Clair Lamb - For books or stories with texting, an older character is more likely to use full sentences and punctuation. A younger character is more likely to use abbreviations and emojis. In regard to abbreviations and emojis, the author should try to ensure the reader can at least mostly follow the conversation. If there are small non-vital bits of a text conversation that a reader might not understand but could quickly move past, having gotten the basic gist of the text, that is okay.
Kathleen Donnelly - Dogs can retain scent memories for years. (She writes mysteries involving a K-9 tracker.)
Otto Penzler - To make characters sound different, vary their cadence and word choice.
I am sure I must have said brilliant things on my panel, but it was at 8 a.m., so my memory of that hour is a bit foggy. If you were at that panel and I said anything useful, please share it in the comments. Or if you heard words of wisdom at any of the other panels, I would love to hear them. After all, you might have attended a great panel I missed. At conventions, hard choices often must be made.There were times when I would have liked to attend two panels at the same time, but I haven't perfected that skill...yet.
Next year in New Orleans!