Dear sweet English. You’re such an enthusiastic language. You like to grab. But it’s good to take care of the things you borrow from other languages, even if those languages confuse you.

It is unacceptable to fail to pronounce consonants in French words and phrases simply because French has more silent letters than English does.

It is wrong to pronounce “the blow of mercy” “the blow of grease”. Especially on national radio. The momentary blindness of wrath could cause a pedant to crash her car.

Coup de grace. Grahss. GrahSSSSSSSS. Please. For automotive safety.

If, like me, you have a fondness for postal mail and find paper letters a particularly meaningful way to connect with others, perhaps you will appreciate this report from the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake:

…William Burke, the postmaster’s secretary, recounted what happened when he took a U.S. Mail sign from a streetcar barn and mounted it on the top of a car he had pressed into service to collect the mail.

“The effect was electrical. As people saw the machine bearing the mail coming, they cheered and shouted in a state bordering on hysteria. We told them where the collections would be made in the afternoon and asked that they spread the news. As we went into the Presidio there was almost a riot, and the people crowded around the machine and almost blocked its progress. It was evidently taken as the first sign of rehabilitation and, as it proceeded, the mail automobile left hope in its wake…”

— Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World

Perhaps we take the mail for granted, relying as we so often do now on faster, more ethereal transmissions. But think about it — for under two bits (for no money at all, in the generous wake of the earthquake) a man or woman you do not know will take your message and ensure it gets to your friends and family. Your piece of paper, your artefact, can cross all the great miles of this country safely and promptly, and assure your family with its very weight and reality that all is well. That’s civilization.

I have about four different blog posts in various states of construction, on weighty topics like identity, truth, robots, et cetera. But I really should post more often, and give you guys a break from the heavy philosophy, so here is a pie I made this month for Ryan. I may be making another one for GreyStork’s belated birthday bash, too. Only the pie-mad genius of Ken Haedrich could bring you a delicious recipe that uses canned peaches to tide you through the winter.

This has been your carefully constituted content-substitute for today. Happy Lunar New Year!

Today is Blog for Choice day. I don’t have very much to say about this year’s theme, which is pro-choice hopes for the new administration and Congress. I’m proud my state is among the states suing over the vague, sweeping, awful new HHS regulations, but I don’t have anything to say about it that you couldn’t read somewhere with more authority. I thought I’d mark the occasion with an interesting quote I marked with my Book Darts lately. This is from Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, a memoir about her friendship with late poet Lucy Grealy.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, I doubt that many American women were wracked with guilt over having abortions. They were too busy wondering if they were going to be butchered. So when luck went their way and they made it through the procedure safely, it was a cause for celebration rather than remorse. What legalized abortion brought to this country, along with safe medical practices, was the expectation of shame, the need to wonder if you were doing the right thing, even though you knew exactly what you’d do in the end. We could have our abortions but we had to feel horrible for the decision we made, even if it was hardly a decision at all. So while social decency compels me to say that on the train uptown we cried and cursed fate and wondered what life might be like with a baby, the truth is we did not. I could not imagine Lucy looking after a baby for an afternoon, much less a lifetime. She did not try to imagine it at all. [page 128, Perennial trade paperback]

I don’t really have any burning comments on the passage. I just think it’s an interesting perspective from up close.

There are many chunks of writing advice that float around in the academic soup, giving and receiving flavor. (Maybe I need some about metaphor, myself.) One of these is about using Anglo-Saxon words. I’ve no idea if it originated with John Gardner’s classic The Art of Fiction, but he does put it forth:

If the writer says “creatures” instead of “snakes,” if in an attempt to impress us with fancy talk he uses Latinate terms like “hostile maneuvers” instead of sharp Anglo-Saxon words like “thrash,” “coil,” “spit,” “hiss,” and “writhe,” if instead of the desert’s sands and rocks he speaks of the snakes’ “inhospitable abode,” the reader will hardly know what picture to conjure up on his mental screen.

I have historically been doubtful of this stricture, especially since some teachers apply it with less discrimination than Gardner does above. Obviously your aim in writing fiction shouldn’t be to impress the reader with your vocabulary, but cutting out an entire rich swath of our hodgepodge language seems extreme. For instance, you can’t get more Latinate than ‘susurrate’, but the onomatopoeic felicities of its repeated s and soft murmur can’t be overstated. The rule does have its points – choose a word that has auditory punch when possible, and don’t use abstractions when grittiness will communicate better. Luckily, I’ve been given a meta-rule that trumps all the rules and lets me pick and choose – “Find the rules, break the rules,” per Marvin Bell – a one rule to rule them all, if you will.

Which brings me to the true topic of this post. I was tempted by the Tor.com Lord of the Rings reread into undertaking that monumental task myself (thus interrupting my Aubrey-Maturin reread/read, as well as the almost 200 fresh books I have on my list.) But true to form, once I’d caught up with the group reread, I could not stop and plunged headily onwards. Ask any of my primary (and some of my secondary) school teachers about my ability to see, process and act upon a chapter break appropriately. Ahem.

I plunged through Volume One*, The Ring Sets Out and was wrapping up Volume Two, The Ring Goes South, when I ran up against a word. “That night they camped on a small eyot close to the western bank.” [emphasis mine] Now, I’ve read this book on paper before, as well as listening to it aloud, but I’ve never noticed this word before. I attribute this oversight to the fact that prior to taking “History of the English Language” in undergrad, I wouldn’t have had a frisson** of linguistic glee at the word.

You see, while I’d never noticed the word before, I was sure it was related to ‘ea-land’, the Old English word that meant stream-land. The fledgling science of linguistics incorrectly guessed this word was related to the Latin isla, and therefore we have the unphonetic standard spelling ‘island’. It’s the classic example of how goofily English spelling was standardized, and here I was running across another word sprung from that noble root. (Presumably – checking the OED shows that history is unclear as to the exact lineage of ‘eyot’/‘ait’)

Three pages later (after several more repetitions of ‘eyot’) I came across this passage:

The next day the country on either side began to change rapidly. The banks began to rise and grow stony. Soon they were passing through a hilly rocky land, and on both shores there were steep slopes buried in deep brakes of thorn and sloe, tangled with brambles and creepers.

Now, quickly, and without recourse to references, what is ‘brake’ in this context? How about ‘sloe’? I would suppose few of us know, and no more, I would guess, do or did many of Tolkien’s readers. But does it stop you enjoying the story or even make you lose the sense of the sentence? It did not for me. Part of this smooth reading experience is the way Tolkien has embedded these slightly archaic words in context, much as Patrick O’Brian embeds unusual or specialized words in text that allows the reader to gloss them. But I think another part is their very Anglo-Saxonness.

brake, the OED informs, is established in English by the 15th century, and analogous to the Middle Low German brake. It means “a clump of bushes, brushwood, or briers; a thicket.”

sloe is from the Old English slá and is the blackthorn, or its fruit.

Now, we didn’t necessarily know that. But it didn’t confuse us to read it, and I think it enriched our experience. The confusion of plants making a wilderness of the riverbank is made more complex – more literally confusing – by these inclusions. What is more, they fall upon the ear as English, similar in sound to many words we use every day. They work beautifully read aloud, as does the book as a whole. They are venerable remnants of our own language, and give an air of primal familiarity to Middle Earth. And while that’s not among Gardner’s list of reasons to use words rooted in Anglo-Saxon, it’s a beautiful effect to create. And I’m sure, for a linguist like Tolkien, it wasn’t hard to summon the magic words.

*I’m rereading my Millennium Edition copy, which separates Lord of the Rings into its six volumes, rather than the three books in which it was originally published. I like it.

**There I go using Romance languages. Sorry, Gardner and friends. I will not stop. Je refuse!

10. Online access to the OED through Multnomah County Libraries. Oh yes.

9. Shopping Locally. Also see #7. The area of San Jose where I lived had astoundingly few locally-owned businesses. One per shopping center or less. In this area of Portland, the ratio is almost reversed. In t.c.e.c. (the current economic climate), it feels good to know your money is going directly into your community.

8. The roads, and being on them less. Fewer potholes (save for I-5 North after three freezes and a week of chained semis), fewer drivers, lower average speed, and less merging. This also means fewer ‘grouse’ entries.

7. My favorite shops – from tea purveyors to stationers, I know where to go to get what I want.

6. Walks. I haven’t always lived in a walkable area, but I do now, and I cherish it like the dickens. Besides, it’s easy to get somewhere to stroll all the afternoon using…

5. Tri-Met. I never knew how much I loved you until you weren’t there with your low, low fares and convenient routes.

4. Weather. Actual weather. Rain for my amphibian skin. Wind for brisk walks. Clouds to watch as I ponder.

3. Landscape. Dark points of conifers, mist-veiled mountains…this is where I belong.

2. People. I left some good friends in California, but I’m not just talking about my pals, Ryan’s folks across the Water, my uncle in our quadrant of Portland, or my sister up in Seattle. I grew up in the friendly but unassuming civility of the Northwest, and it is my natural habitat.

1. Powell’s. Yes, feel free to be insulted, #2. And no, this is not part of #9 or #7. Powell’s is the center of my universe and the signed pillar in the spec-fic section holds up my sky. I am gravitationally attracted to books. Don’t judge me!

Ryan whipped up the ‘Top Tags’ Thoth plugin for me, to replace ‘Categories’ in my sidebar. Yup, little to the right, little bit down…that’s it. Top Tags. I hastened to taggify many of my articles, so that the Top Tags would be fairly representative. I had a hard time figuring out, at first, which tags I would reuse a lot, but soon I discovered, poring over my archives, that many of my articles were, well, WHINY. Perhaps not so much whiny as KVETCHY. I started tagging these complaints ‘grouse’, and was horrified to discover that ‘grouse’ quickly hit my Top Tags.

I don’t think of Faerye Net as a negative place! I was mortified at the idea that instead of ‘anecdotes, opinions and occasional fiction’, I might be providing complaints, whinges and occasional fiction. I invented the antonymic tag ‘huzzah’, and hastened to apply it. It did not rise into the top tags. I tagged more of the archives. Nothing rose to topple ‘grouse’ off the list. So I resolved to be more positive, to post fewer articles that required the description ‘grouse’ in future.

As of December 28, with this post, I geek over language more often than I complain. Vocabulary is in the top five. My tagging is by no means complete – lots of the archive languish unfolksonomified (and, since the switch to tags also switched us to Textile word-formatting markup, unchecked for formatting blips) and I still think I need to come up with a tag to distinguish posts about writing from posts which contain my writing (like the Grey City chronicles.) But at least I can rest secure knowing that I’ve made Faerye Net a less whingey place. One small step for a kvetch.

P.S. As of this post, ‘huzzah’ ties ‘grouse’ at 30 posts. Ha!

I do my best to avoid these blog-meme thingummies, but if Ryan, King Curmudgeon and Captain Crankypants, has accepted the tag and passed it on, it must be a powerful tag. I absolutely refuse to perpetuate the cycle by tagging people though. I have some scruples. Also, I am not sure there are seven bloggers I wouldn’t feel mean tagging who haven’t done this months ago.

I do, however, blabber a great deal. So you may very well know all of these already.

Seven Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me, yada yada

1. I had a speech impediment for a while as a child. It’s hard to describe. It was rather like a stammer, but not quite, and seemed to be caused by overexcitement.

2. I am allergic to cats, but Qubit has largely cured me. I type this with Her Majesty in my lap (and, ooph, over my right arm.) For most of my life, having a cat in this proximity to my mucus membranes would have made life an unbearable torment. Now I can pet her, scritch her, and give her nose-kisses. Qubit has built up in my system like allergy shots. Or she’s magic, take your pick.

3. As a youngster, I believed Ewoks really lived in the Redwood Forest. When your parents tell you the Endor scenes were filmed there, what are you supposed to think?

4. I have a hard time remembering easy names. Especially simple female names. I think it’s a side effect of growing up in a family with extremely unusual names for all the women.

5. One of my legs is slightly longer than the other. I think it’s genetic, as my dad has the same leg shorter by the same amount.

6. I played the violin and the clarinet for a year each before starting the oboe. After I quit the violin, my parents wanted me to prove I could commit to something before they shelled out for an oboe rental, and the family had a wooden clarinet I could borrow. I also played the piano for five years, but I’m sure more of ye know that.

7. I don’t like touching rough brown kraft paper. It often gives me a flinch, like hearing nails on a blackboard might. Huzzah for cloth grocery bags!

There. Go forth, and be untagged if ye will, and tagged if ye’d rather! And blame Ryan for all this blather.

Official Rules, which I shamelessly disregard:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

My friend Robert Peake, a thoughtful poet gifted in procrastination, recently turned in his MFA thesis and made word clouds of his critical essay and creative thesis (collection of poems, in his case), which you can see on his blog. (Clouds show each word at a size proportional to its number of uses in the text. Wordle defaults to removing dead-common words like ‘and’, and uses the 150 most used words unless you specify differently.) Of course I jumped at the chance to be the next to perform this act of procrastinatory genius, and plugged my opus into Wordle.

Here is my nearly-complete story collection/complete creative thesis, Sea Selves, in cloud form:

I really liked the random font and other options Wordle chose, and the layout that came out first try, so this is exactly what Wordle pumped out, transformed only in color. I took all these shades from photos I’ve taken of the Pacific Ocean. (Pretentious? Moi?)

Here is my critical essay, Sea Change: Visions of the Ocean, which I tweaked a little more:

If for some reason you want to look closer at either, you can click through to the Flickr page and press the ‘all sizes’ button right above the image. My word clouds look very different from Robert’s, which is to be expected. Not only is my thesis prose, but mine is themed. I hope someone with a non-themed short story thesis tries it next to compare! There are a few words I’m slightly surprised by on my thesis word cloud, others I’m glad came through so strongly, and some which were a matter of course. And it’s interesting to see the names of characters from very different stories and worlds nestle so promiscuously together.

For fun, here is a wordle of Sea Selves with 1500 words rather than 150. I think it makes clear why 150 is the default:

In short, I hope Robert has started a fashion. This was fun, and I hope to see other MFAers follow suit.

The Five Geek Social Fallacies were established in 2003 by this dude named Michael Suileabhain-Wilson, and can be read in detail here. They are as follows, in short form:

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together

My friend RockStar and I have come up with another one (as the author has always said is more than possible) which comes up a lot in our lives. It might be a corollary to #5, rather than a fallacy in its own right:

Geek Social Fallacy #6 or #5b: Friends Like All the Same Things.

I definitely am a carrier for this, though my intellectual brain rejects it. Really, people have different tastes and that’s okay. But when someone I cherish, whose opinion matters to me, dislikes something I love, there is a palpable sting. This is, of course, how this fallacy came to be formulated, for RockStar is a man of strong opinions and discerning tastes, whereas I am a woman of strong opinions and occasionally permissive tastes. There are many things I like that he doesn’t like, and it helps that we formulated this rule to remind us that it’s okay for geeks not to geek out over all the same things.

Of course, being sarcastic beggars, it doesn’t exactly play out as:

R: I think [X] is an ultimately shallow and brainless movie.
F: That’s okay, because friends don’t have to like all the same things!

It actually played out:

R: I hate Star Wars.
F: We are no longer friends!

and subsequently:

R: I think [X] is an ultimately shallow and brainless movie.
F: That’s okay, because we aren’t friends.

But we both understand it as meaning the same as the first example.

I’ve been meaning to tell ye about this Fallacy Addendum for some time, but I was spurred into action this morning by yet another Goodreads update e-mail wherein etmorpi gave a horrible rating to yet another Norby book. It’s okay that etmorpi doesn’t enjoy the antics of superpowered, whimsical and supremely confident robots made of barrels of nails. Because people are different, their expectations from literature and entertainment differ, and the landscapes of life and mind that affect any one reading of the same work render it utterly distinct from any other. Friendship is about something more lasting than mere aesthetic symmetry: about compassion, support, and overcoming difference in favor of lasting sympathy.

Or, in other words: Etmorpi, we are no longer friends!