Tag Archives: writing

Books, etc.: Quitter

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Don’t get me wrong. I can’t stop reading, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I’ve read while walking down halls. I’ve read while getting blood drawn.(1) I’ve read under the blankets while sleeping on a sofa and nearly melted the Naugahyde. I’ve read when there was nothing to read but the label on a ketchup bottle.

I have always read books straight through to the end, too, no matter what. It seems wrong somehow not to finish a book that I’ve started.

Then came The Horror Novel.(2) The set-up started okay – it didn’t jump right into gore and heads in the microwave. It introduced the characters, like a good novel should. They were a couple, an architect and a stockbroker. They were extremely good-looking, seriously wealthy, and lived in a fine house with all the amenities. You were supposed to feel good about them and – well, horrified – when creepy things started happening to them.(3) Instead, I was rooting for the monster, whatever it was, to slaughter this ridiculous Ken and Barbie. And prevent them from reproducing, if at all possible. And tear down their marvelous house and set the rubble on fire.

I stopped reading, knowing that, in the end, the monster would be vanquished and I would be disappointed – nay, angry.

Now if a book makes me want to throw it against the wall, I abandon it.(4) I feel just a teensy bit guilty when I do, but I’m getting older and my time is limited. I can’t squander it on mediocre fiction or dry-as-dirt nonfiction.(5) There are so many books in the world that I’ll never get through all the ones I want to read.

Nowadays my to-read stack reaches the virtual ceiling and rivals my three floor-to-ceiling bookcases, plus the stacks in my closets, where most women keep shoes.

But at least now I can carry them around in my purse.

(1) I think they struck ink.
(2) Never my favorite genre anyway, unless it’s by Mira Grant.
(3) The first creepy thing was that they came home to an exquisite candlelight dinner that neither one of them had fixed. Oooh, yeah. Make me shudder.
(4) And not just because I use an e-reader and would be destroying my entire collection.
(5) Though I did keep around a biography of Prince Albert – the most boring book ever about the most boring man ever – in case I should run out of Ambien.

Language Police and the Grammar Nazis

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For most of my life I’ve been a grammar nazi. For part of my life I was a member of the language police. At one point, my business cards even identified me as punctuation czar.

I now have regrets.

In general, I hate the language police. However, I do understand their philosophy, and it’s not wrong. The implementation of it is sometimes questionable and heavy-handed, but the theory is sound. How we speak and the words we choose to use do affect our thinking. The reverse is also true. Our thinking determines our language choices. If you want to change one, changing the other one is one of the easiest routes. You can see its effectiveness in the fact that n-word is no longer acceptable not just in polite society, but in any context. The next to go will be the r-word, a much-used schoolyard taunt in my childhood. The world is better off without both of them.

Does eliminating the terms mean that people no longer think them or think of people in those terms? That’s a tough question, but we hope the change is real and positive. If there’s a chance that it is, the effort is worth it, even if restrictions of language choices seem foolish, feel dictatorial, and are easy to mock.

Indeed they are easy to mock. Hence the term “politically correct,” now a code-word for any words or phrases you think are unnecessary, clunky, or purely propaganda. Who hasn’t laughed at the saying, “I’m not overweight; I’m under-tall”? Who hasn’t winced when nouns (“slaves”) become long phrases (“person who is enslaved”). (The point of that one is to make the hearer think of the person first, and then the condition – slavery – and realize that slaves are not intrinsically slaves and not automatically slaves forever. They may have been free in the past or will be free in the future. I’m not sure that example will be successful. But “person with dyslexia” is, I think, better than “a dyslexic.”)

Textbooks these days are rife with examples, and when I wrote for and edited textbooks, I had to police the language. We couldn’t talk about birthday parties or vacations because some kids had never had one. We couldn’t talk about dragons, even in fiction because that might imply magic and hence Satanism. I once spent hours trying to think of a breakfast food that would be recognizable in most cultures. The best I could come up with was “juice.” Our joke was that the only acceptable words in the title of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea were “the” and “and.”

Being a grammar nazi is a different matter. I used to take delight in knowing all the rules and enforcing them ruthlessly. Gradually I have gotten away from that practice. I felt it was impolite to go around correcting people unless they had asked for my help. I still corrected my family because – hey – it was mentally painful to be around people who misused hopefully or split infinitives. Or who mispronounced “nuclear” or “foliage,” for that matter. But I would keep my cringes inside when my boss mispronounced “sarcophagus,” until he finally asked me, “Is that how you say that?”

Over time, though, I’ve loosened up my standards a little bit. Before I was a prescriptivist (believing in and enforcing rules), but the older I get, the more I am moving in the direction of descriptivism (accepting the way people really talk). (Except in writing, which is more formal. And don’t tell me I just used a sentence fragment and started a sentence with a conjunction. That is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.)

I can thank linguistics for this shift in perspective. In one of my linguistics classes, I disputed with another student about whether a certain usage was sub-standard or non-standard. I was firmly on the side of non-standard. How I reconciled that with my insistence on the Oxford comma, I’ll never know.

The watershed moment in the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate came when one of the major dictionaries decided not to include usage labels like “vulgar” and “slang.” Essentially they were declaring that all words were equal in the eyes of the lexicographers. This caused quite an uproar. If there were no standards for usage, how could we prove that we were better than the people who spoke sloppily or incorrectly?

My soul was torn.

The change that came over me was due in part to a stunning revelation – that the English language and the Latin language are two separate animals. The old bugaboo about not splitting infinitive, to which I was passionately devoted, has its source in the fact that in Latin it is impossible to split an infinitive. Latin infinitives are all one word. It makes no sense to transfer that rule to English. “To boldly go” would not be possible in Latin but now is perfectly acceptable – to me – in terms of grammar as well as rhythm and meter.

I still can’t abide weather forecasters, though. “Rain shower precipitation activity”? What? Do they get paid by the word?

Books, etc.: Remembering Suzette Haden Elgin

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A few days ago a friend informed me that Suzette Haden Elgin had died. This was not unexpected. She was almost 80, and had been in ill health for a while, and suffering with dementia, along with other disabilities.

I never met her, except through her work, but I mourn her passing.

Suzette was a trained linguist, a language maven, and a writer. She is perhaps best known for her books in the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series. Though not as well-known as Deborah Tannen’s or John Gray’s works, Suzette’s are practical, straightforward, and supremely useful.

She was interested in many aspects of language. She thought and wrote about language and religion, language and politics (especially framing), language and women’s issues, language and perception, language and culture, and more.

For many years she kept up a Live Journal and two newsletters. Under the LJ name Ozarque, she stimulated thought and discussion of her many fields of interest. These were lively, educational, interactive, and fascinating forums in the way that Live Journal blogs are meant to be and seldom are.

She was a writer of science fiction novels, stories, and poetry. I was astounded by her Native Tongue series. (Who besides me could possibly be interested in feminist linguistic science fiction? Many people, it turns out.)

In the Native Tongue series, Suzette described a newly created “women’s language” called Láadan. She and others pursued the idea and constructed a grammar, a dictionary, and lessons available online – way before anyone tried to do the same with Klingon.

She worked on new fiction until the dementia descended. In her LJ, she would sometimes post poems and songs (particularly Christmas carols) and solicit feedback from her audience, sometimes incorporating their suggestions into the piece. The Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Elgin Awards are given in her memory.

She attended science fiction conventions, where she could meet and interact with her readers. One she often attended was WisCon in Madison, WI, the premier feminist science fiction convention, and in 1986 was one of their Guests of Honor.

On a more personal note, she once took the time to give me feedback on a piece I was writing about bullying, also a concern of hers.

She was a kind, humane, quirky, quick-witted, creative, varied, engaged, humorous, brave lady and a brilliant scholar and writer. I will miss her and her work. The world is poorer for her passing, but richer for her legacy.

The Worst Sex-Ed Book. Ever.

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Dr. Seuss is my all-time favorite author of children’s rhyming books. He did not write a sex education book.(1)

Shel Silverstein took over from Seuss as my favorite children’s poet. He did not write a sex-ed book either.(2)

IMHO, no one has equaled those two in writing rhyming books for children, though many have tried. Lord, how they’ve tried. And for the most part, failed miserably.

I once edited a magazine called Early Childhood News, which was intended for an audience of child care center owners, directors, and possibly staff. It was occasionally entertaining.(3) I got a lot of children’s books to review.(4)

Which is where the sex-ed and the poetry come in.(5)

One day an amazing book came across my desk. It was titled How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother, which should have been my first clue.

The book was obviously self-published. To say that it lacked the services of a professional editor and a professional illustrator would be a charming understatement.

The text was written (and illustrated) by a real medical doctor, so I guess that was one up on Dr. Seuss, but it didn’t help. The main characters were – I’m not kidding – Stanley Sperm and Essie Egg.

One memorable illustration(6) showed Stanley and Essie sitting on a bench, courting, I suppose. As I recall Essie had long eyelashes and Stanley had either a top hat or a bow tie. Maybe both. Behind them was the gate to a park, with a sign identifying the location as “Cervix.”

You can probably tell from the bow tie and the park bench that scientific accuracy was not the author’s primary concern. Also, Essie and Stanley were the same size.(7)

And now we get to the poetry. Here’s a sample. The author was attempting to tell where Stanley Sperm had lived, before he met the coy and comely Miss Essie. Somewhat confusingly, it seemed that Stanley had come from one or the other of two towns:

The towns are both named “Testicle”
and they look like two round eggs.
They’re not located on a map,
but between your Daddy’s legs.(8)

Do I have to say I did not review the book? (I thought not.)

I kept it for a time, though, to show disbelieving friends. And possibly as the basis for a party game, with each person reading aloud from it until exploding with laughter, when it would be passed on to the next reader.(9)

Of course, given the sex-ed books currently used in schools, there may be other texts out there that are just as bad, or at least as inaccurate. But for sheer unintentional awfulness, How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother has won its place in the annals of scary books that will make kids never want to have sex. Ever. That being the point of most sex education in schools anyway, as far as I can tell.

(1) That we know of. He did write advertising, so who really knows where he drew the line?
(2) Though he certainly could have. He’s the author/artist of Different Dances and the songwriter of “Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most.”
(3) The ad sales department once insisted I add a column about food, as they desperately wanted to attract Lunchables as a client. Yeah, right. Lunchables. For child care centers. I had no choice in the matter, except for the title of the column, which I made as repulsive as possible – “Food Digest.” Well, it amused me, anyway, even if no one else noticed.
(4) Also, sometimes companies sent me samples of toys they hoped I would promote in the magazine. Not sex toys, though. I also received, for some reason, an anti-circumcision newsletter. I used to count the number of times the word “foreskin” appeared in it, just to look busy.
(5) You were starting to wonder, weren’t you? Go on, admit it.
(6) I’ve been told that only shock treatment will erase it from my memory.
(7) Reminder: The author went to medical school and, presumably, graduated.
(8) I hope that’s enough of a sample, since it is the only verse I memorized. I do recall that the conception scene would have been a real production number, had the book ever made the transition to film.
(9) With bonus points awarded for imitating the voice of Bullwinkle the Moose or possibly Daffy Duck.

I’m a General(ist). You May Still Salute.

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The other day I was talking with an old friend about my time at Cornell. I was concerned/regretful/annoyed that I had wasted my time there. There was so much more I could have done if only I had been properly prepared and focused.

Digression: He was excited. “Hey! I had sex with an Ivy League coed!”

Cornell had what they called “distribution requirements,” meant to broaden a person’s education by forcing them to take classes outside their major and even outside their College.

Digression: They also made everyone learn to swim and/or pass a swimming test. I cheated. I can still barely swim.

Of course I was an English major in the College of Arts and Sciences. Here’s what I took in addition to poetry and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Creative Writing and all that stuff:

Astronomy (with Carl Sagan)

History of Science in Western Civilization (with L. Pearce Williams)

Communications

Bee-keeping

Russian

French (Literature. In French.)

Intermediate Archery (twice)

Linguistics

Cinema

Wine-tasting (now there’s a surprise)

And a bunch of other stuff that has been lost that in the Swiss cheese that is my memory.

And what use is all that? Except for being on Jeopardy, which I never have been? Or laughing hysterically at The Simpsons when Ned asks that alternatives to Darwinian evolution be taught and Principal Skinner suggests, “Lamarckian evolution”? What possible career could all that prepare me for? I’m not an expert in anything.

Surprisingly, I realized, it prepared me for exactly the career I have: writer and editor.

I can’t write or edit for specialized or technical journals, but I can write and edit the hell out of general interest material and educational fodder for developing young minds.

I know just enough biology to explain how vaccines work.

I know just enough politics to tell the differences between socialism and fascism.

I know just enough art to differentiate Pointillists and Cubists and Impressionists.

I know just enough Greek and Latin roots to explain words like “apnea.”

I know just enough religion to tell you what “original sin” is. (Hint: It’s not sex.)

I know just enough history to tell about Catherine the Great. (Hint: She didn’t die having sex with a horse.”)

I know just enough psychology to tell you the differences between grief and clinical depression.

I am a generalist. My education may not have been deep, but it sure was broad. (Hint: Do not call me a “deep broad.” I know just enough martial arts to make you regret it.)