08.31.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 10:01 pm by Administrator
A friend recently told me she’d read somewhere that we should write “with conciseness,” meaning “with not too many words.” “I thought it was ‘concision,’” she said. I wasn’t sure which word was correct (turns out they both are), but immediately wondered, Who says stuff like that? Actually, I think I giggled a little bit because they both sounded like made-up words. You know how that happens sometimes—a real word strikes your ear or eye in some weird way and suddenly looks unreal, even comical?
I’m getting slightly off track now, but I once had a similar experience with the word “blue.” This was back in my landscaping days. One afternoon I was in the nursery dividing some hostas called Blue Something-or-Other. Each newly potted plant—all 100 or so of them—needed a newly written tag. I wrote “blue” over and over and over. Suddenly I looked at the tag I’d just written—the Sharpie ink was still wet—and my mind snapped. I could not remember how to spell “blue.” In a panic, I pawed through all the plastic tags, worried that I had just misspelled “blue” 100 times. I was looking for some sort of clue as to the correct spelling. There was no clue to be found. Then my mind snapped even more. Now “blue” didn’t even look like a word; it was just a nonsense syllable made up by some caveman as he gazed up into a cloudless azure sky (I could still spell “azure”).
My point (one of them) is that any word, no matter how familiar, can suddenly look or feel strange to you if it strikes a particularly soft part of your brain. My other point is that words like “conciseness” and “concision” will always sound weird to me because they’re not part of my style. “Concision” sounds like something that should only happen when you’re under general anesthesia. And “conciseness”—I know it’s in the dictionary, but to me it still sounds funny. I would just never write a sentence like, “One should write with conciseness.” Instead, I would say, “Write tight.” I might even say, “Shut up already.”
And now I’ll prove that I can follow my own advice.
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08.24.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 9:10 pm by Administrator
There is, in the minds of some people, something wrong with wanting to be a writer. Tell your parents you want to be a brain surgeon and they’ll be proud of you; tell them you want to be a writer (or artist or actor) and they will weep for you and take away your books—or kick you out of the house, depending on how strict they are. At least that’s how it seems to work in some families.
Admittedly, writing is not the easiest way to make a living, but some parents do have extreme reactions to their children’s dreams. Take, for example, the parents of Paulo Coelho (the Brazilian author of The Alchemist). He wanted to be a writer; his parents wanted him to be a lawyer. When seventeen-year-old Coelho persisted in his determination to become a writer, his parents committed him to a psychiatric hospital (and you thought your parents were control freaks). When he escaped, they sent him back—three times. Coelho was finally released when he was twenty and agreed to go to law school. Fortunately for his sanity, Coelho left school in his first year and became a hippie nomad and worldwide traveler. He eventually became not just a writer, but a world-famous writer. To date, he has published twenty-six books.
Today, on Paulo Coelho’s birthday, writers should get in touch with their inner rebel and honor the courage and determination it sometimes takes to follow your true calling.
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08.17.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 7:17 pm by Administrator
A friend informed me this morning that I am “the bee’s knees.” I already thought I was pretty terrific, and her pronouncement confirms the fact. I am (at least as friends go) excellent. But then I started wondering about the phrase. Do bees even have knees? If so, are those knees excellent? An exhaustive five-minute search of the Internet answered my question, sort of.
There is some speculation that the phrase refers to the pollen bees collect on their legs as they buzz from flower to flower. The evidence doesn’t support this theory though. I’m not sure how you would get “excellent” out of a little blob of pollen on an insect’s leg—unless you’re either a queen bee or a botanist.
In fact, the phrase may have nothing to do with actual bees at all. The first known usage of “the bee’s knees” was in 1920s America. The phrase was described in one newspaper as “flapper talk,” but it doesn’t seem to appear in any “flapper dictionaries” of the time. Plenty of other strange phrases do appear though. It looks as though coining nonsense phrases to mean “excellence” was fashionable at the time. Think of “the cat’s pajamas” or “the kipper’s knickers.” Okay, maybe you’ve never heard that last one, but you get the idea. It’s just a short hop from the cat’s pajamas to the bee’s knees, right?
Another explanation suggests “the bee’s knees” has something to do with 1920s world champion Charleston dancer Bee Jackson, who has been credited with introducing the Charleston to Broadway. Presumably Ms. Jackson’s knees were excellent. You might even say they were the kipper’s knickers.
For more information:
The Phrase Finder
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08.14.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 5:05 pm by Administrator
Occasionally I get sucked into reading the comments posted to various online articles. This is often a mistake. Some comments are thoughtful and interesting, even helpful, but many of them are just short (or not so short) rants. Even that might be excusable if the rant writers could spell and punctuate correctly. Hey, at least then their writing would look somewhat intelligent.
A few days ago I read a pretty interesting article about pet-friendly cities. I liked it. It was well written and informative. Then I read the comments, most of which were positive. There was one, though, that said something to the effect that the article was a waste of space, blah, blah, blah. The rant writer misused “to” (he really meant “too”) and made a couple other mistakes that I have mercifully forgotten. What a waste of space. I would have commented directly on his comment, but I was afraid he would either blow up my car or send me an expletive-laden message with multiple spelling errors. I don’t think I could handle either of those outcomes.
Speaking of violence, last week I wrote a short article about a kitten that was set on fire by some boys in Baltimore. While researching the story, I’d visited several news sites to read reports on the attack. There were, of course, comments posted on those sites, and many of them said something like “Those horrible kids should be beat up and burned too,” only the wording was a lot meaner—and a lot of it was spelled wrong. I won’t even tell you about the overtly racist comment. Let’s just say my Buddhist nature was slightly upset.
I would not want to censor anyone’s speech or stifle anyone’s opinion. Criticism is fine, anger is a normal reaction to some things, and people are entitled to their little rants now and again. But I think the world would be a better place if the ranters would write things that a) make sense b) are not blatantly mean-spirited and c) are spelled correctly. Or they could hire someone to edit their rants—but not me!
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08.12.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 6:20 pm by Administrator
I’ve been dipping into The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories again. Today I learned that the word clue comes from clew. These two words were once simply different spellings of a word that meant “a ball of yarn or thread.” Now you may be wondering, as I was, how a ball of yarn morphs into something that helps a clever detective solve a mystery. Remember Theseus and the Minotaur? Here’s the ultra-abridged version: The Greek hero Theseus ventured into the Cretan Labyrinth, unrolling a ball of string (a clew) as he went, slew the horrible Minotaur, and then followed the string to find his way out again. In other words, he used a clew to solve a problem. He also later ditched Princess Ariadne, who came up with the whole clew idea to begin with. Hey, heroes can be jerks too.
Later, the spelling clue came to refer to those bits of information used by detectives. A clew is something used by knitters (although I am a knitter, sort of, and wasn’t familiar with this meaning; I normally refer to my yarn as “that tangled mess at the bottom of my knitting bag”). Clew can also still mean “clue” or “a metal loop on a lower corner of a sail,” proving, as if we didn’t already know, that sometimes English is strange.
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08.10.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 8:40 pm by Administrator
I am writing today from my home office, and I am almost ecstatically happy about it. You probably couldn’t tell, but I’ve been away for the past two weeks—and by “away” I mean I was about half an hour up the road dog-sitting for a friend. It was fun. The dog was great, the house was great, the swimming pool was great … working, though, was only okay, and not just because I missed my high-speed Internet access.
Apparently I am more a creature of habit than I realized. Although I worked in a quite comfortable dining room in my friend’s home, at a table with way more space than I am used to, somehow I missed my little office with its stacks of papers and books. I should explain that my home office currently consists of a small computer desk, balance-ball chair, computer and printer, desk lamp, Get Fuzzy calendar, books, and semi-organized files. It’s all crammed into the corner of a basement bedroom. It’s a hovel, more or less, but it’s my hovel. I would take a picture of it to share with you, but I fear no one would ever hire me again if they saw this place. A palace it ain’t.
Anyway, regardless of the physical appearance of my office/hovel, I work well here. It’s easy to focus my mind, and I know where (almost) everything is. I’m comfortable here—physically and mentally. Discipline is not a problem. But when it’s ninety-some degrees outside and there’s an inviting swimming pool just out the back door, discipline is not so easy!
So here’s to hovels, and to those of us who happily work in them. Who needs a fancy office? Give me my comfortable, comforting stacks of stuff!
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08.05.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 7:17 pm by Administrator
This hasn’t happened to me in a while (thankfully), but I certainly remember the feeling of annoyance and disbelief I experienced when it did happen. I am referring to the author who e-mails an editor at 7:30 on a Friday evening, waits several hours for a response, and then sends another e-mail that goes something like this: “You haven’t answered my first e-mail and it’s been a long time so I’m sending you this to make sure you got the first one.” He then sends a couple of new e-mails on Saturday, followed by several more on Sunday. The final e-mail, sent at 11:37 Sunday night, is angry, disgusted, and ends with “WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME?”
Yes, I know we’re all used to getting an almost instantaneous response to our electronic messages. But come on … editors don’t always work nights and weekends. Personally, I usually check e-mail on Saturdays (if there’s anything pressing I’ll even answer it), but on Sundays I often don’t even turn my computer on. And if you send me anything after 7:00 p.m. (Eastern), don’t expect an answer until early the next morning (unless it’s a weekend, in which case you should expect an answer on Monday morning).
I used to worry that I was providing inefficient service by not being available 24/7, but I got over that after a day or so. Hey, I’m not a machine here. I require sustenance, exercise, and sleep. There’s a dog to be walked, cats to be fed, dinner to be cooked, and I do like to take a shower every day. In other words, I have a life. All editors have lives, but sometimes authors seem to forget this basic fact. We get the flu, our cars break down, we (gasp!) take a day off. We’re not ignoring you; we’re just human beings living our lives.
For the nervous author, I recommend a bubble bath, a relaxing walk, or a cup of herbal tea. For the exceptionally nervous author, I recommend all three, followed by twenty minutes of meditation. I do not recommend obsessively e-mailing your editor over and over and over on the weekend. The editor is probably off mowing the lawn or having a nice nap—two more things you might try!
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08.03.09
Posted in Editorial Musings at 7:50 pm by Administrator
Bowdlerize: to expurgate by omitting parts considered vulgar.
An editor should be humble. At least that’s what I think, and I know a lot about this sort of thing. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) was not what you would call a “humble” editor. In fact, he was so un-humble his name became synonymous with the wholesale purging of “offensive” material from literary works.
Bowdler set out to be a physician, but his own serious illness and injury kept him from practicing his chosen profession. So, eventually, he decided to edit and improve literature, beginning with Shakespeare. Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare was published in 1818. He assured readers of a delicate nature that “those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” In other words, he took out all the good parts. Critics howled. The public, however, approved. The book was reissued at least eight times.
Bowdler next took on Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He carefully omitted “all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency.” The editor declared this edition to be an improvement of which Gibbon would have approved. He even believed, most un-humbly, that this sanitized and inoffensive volume would become the definitive edition of Gibbon’s work.
Perhaps I’m judging old Bowdler too harshly. He did live in a different time, after all—a time in which ladies regularly swooned when confronted with the word “damn” or a naked ankle (at least this is what various period romance novels have led me to believe). As children, many of us read abridged versions of the classics with the naughty words and such taken out. Do such sanitized books take anything away from the original, or do they inspire an early love of reading?
Still, there’s something troubling about the notion that “the public can’t handle this, so I will fix it for them.” Personally, I am not a big fan of cursing, graphic sex, or rip-his-guts-out violence. When I’m looking for entertainment, I generally steer clear of books, movies, music, etc., that are filled with such things. Professionally, I’ve read quite a few things that have offended me in some way. And yet, I’ve managed to live right through it. My mind has not been contaminated; I’m still sweet little ol’ me; heck, I didn’t even swoon. And most importantly, I have never arrogantly “Andrewsized” anyone’s book.
(Definition from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Other material from The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories.)
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