Archive for the 'Language' Category
July 2nd, 2011 by jdsawyer
Neurological pharmacology–a fancy way of saying “what drugs do to brains”–is a subject with which I have a special fascination. Some of them accentuate specific aspects of personality, some create hallucinations and religious experience, some relieve depression, some kick the sex drive or the bonding drive into high gear. In a lot of ways, though, for my money, I’d nominate alcohol as the most interesting for one reason:
In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.
National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.
Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.
Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:
This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.
I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.
June 11th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Disclaimer: What follows is a rant about something that can screw up the creative process. This post is more esoteric than is normal for this blog. It contains a lot of jargon, and talks a lot about academic politics and social history, and it won’t interest everybody. Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t signal a change of direction for the blog. I’ll be back on Monday with more stuff about contracts, stories, podcasting, and my general flavor of nutiness.
Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:
A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”
Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:
Continue reading ‘Literary Studies, Anyone?’
January 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
December 27th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
October 15th, 2010 by jdsawyer
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Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:
Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov
Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history
The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris
September 24th, 2010 by jdsawyer
In Peter David’s Star Trek Novel Q-Squared (which is a damn good book that stands well on its own merits), Picard gets pretty damn huffy at Q for being arrogant, as Picard is wont to do. Q replies:
“Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard… not that I’m incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn’t one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So… mortal… what’s your excuse?”
Continue reading ‘They Were Here First’
February 24th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Demographic disclosure: I am an American who likes good adult (note the lack of euphemistic quotation marks) entertainment, and I am disgusted and ashamed at what thirty years of cultural conservatism has done to my country. Perhaps I’d better back up and explain…
Continue reading ‘Blood, Guts, Breasts, and Insanity’
November 23rd, 2009 by jdsawyer
Of the complicated pile of…legacy…that we have to untangle from the cultural madness we Americans indulged in during the Naughties (that’s the ’00 decade, where pretty much every public figure engaged with politics, public policy, economics, social action, environmentalism, culture wars, and foreign policy acted impulsively, childishly, and shamefully), perhaps none is more irritating than the new jargon that’s grown up to obfuscate the different kinds of political violence in the world. When it comes to political violence, the destruction of the language we’ve all ostensibly agreed on is quite shocking.
Continue reading ‘Doing Violence to the Language’
October 10th, 2009 by jdsawyer
by Gail Carriger
[In honor of her new book Soulless, which impressed me with its groundedness in the Victorian world, I asked author Gail Carriger to blog about the art of finding good research sources for Steampunk writing. This is her contribution - thank you very much, Ms. Carriger! -JDS]
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nothing beats primary sources. I hate to be a traitor to the Author Guild’s justifiable objection to the Google Book settlement, but Google books does already have a number of good primary sources from the 1800s available.
* One of my personal favorites, with recipes and other interesting tidbits about domestic management in 1876, is Things a Lady Would Like to Know
* Floote’s Medical Common Sense is another wonderful resource for a historical perspective on the Victorian attitude towards medical science, not to mention a window into scientific, social, and psychological theory. This is an American classic (if non-fiction can be called such).
There are other useful primary sources as well, that you might be able to order through Amazon or a rare books dealer. My two favorites are:
* Baedeker, Karl. 1896. Baedeker’s's London and its Environs. (or any Baedeker’s dated to the Victorian era) for maps, railroad time tables, popular museums and visitors areas, not to mention names of shops, clubs, restaurants, news papers and more.
* Edwards, Amelia B. 1877. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. For language and the Victorian adventurer abroad feel.
As for secondary sources, what you need may depend upon what you’re writing. I write comedy of manners, so my needs reflect this more pedestrian interest level, someone with a more military bent probably has a different list. Never the less, I find myself constantly reaching for the following:
* Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. For the basics.
* Cunnington, C. Willett. 1990. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. For anything to do with women’s clothing
* Flanders, Judith. 2003. The Victorian House. For domestic life questions. The information is not well structured, but it is there.
* Farwell, Byron. 1972 Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. For the quickest insight into the Empire Building mentality and military history of the age.
Aside from Wikipeda, which can be an okay place to start, there are some good, if not particularly well organized, research tools dedicated to the Victorians online as well.
* By far the biggest and the best is the Victorian Web which is a great spiderweb of all sorts of useful information
* The Victorian Dictionary offers up primary newspaper articles on different topics
And here are a few interesting individual offerings online.
* Victorian Slag Dictionary
* Victorian Etiquette
* The Illustrated London News (starting in 1842)
* Victorian servants
* The Ladies Journal
* Godey’s Lady’s Book
* Naval Ships of Victorian times
* Nick Names of Cavalry regiments
* Some ways to tie a cravat
* La Mode Illustree LiveJournal group
Other tips:
* If you have a DVR or Tivo trigger in keywords pertaining to your topic of interest. You never know what the history channel might be dealing with next. It will at least give you a jumping off point.
* Watch BBC costume dramas, and or, rent the DVD and check out the extras, they often have interviews with historical experts.
* Having a really hard time answering a research question? Cold call a local university history department. Experts love to talk about their expertise, perhaps there is someone in the history department you can ask. They may at least give you a book or article to read.
Lastly, of course you can keep an eye on my website, I often put up bits and bobs I’ve discovered around the net.
December 2nd, 2008 by jdsawyer
When writing a period piece, whether that period is past or present, getting your terminology right is essential to maintaining the illusion. It’s also one of the easiest things to miss on a revision. Lest you think the following rant is thoroughgoing self-righteousness, let me preemptively explain that it’s not. It’s actually hypocrisy. You see, in the story I recently sold to Steampod, for example, the alternate history it takes place in had a different name for the appliance we call a “freezer,” and yet there was an instance where I unconsciously reverted to my native tongue, as it were.
Often, fantasy and historical fiction falls prey to this far too easily, because we don’t often question where certain expressions in our language come from. For example, you wouldn’t want to describe a complete package as “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” if the story you’re writing takes place before the seventeenth century when the musket became widespread in Europe. The reason? “Lock, stock, and barrel” are the three major components of a musket, and all three together means that you have everything you need to assemble one.
This kind of thing can shatter the illusion that you work hard to create, as it did for me in Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers” during the sloppiest moment in the film. At the battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn commands a brigade of elf archers to “fire” on the enemy. I can’t emphasize this enough: nobody in the history of the world has ever fired an arrow. The notion of “fire” being synonymous with “activate” was nonsensical before the invention of the first ever fire-powered weapon, the cannon in the 13th century in China (not introduced into Europe until much later). Even so, archers were not commanded to “fire” until many generations after bows, arrows, ballistas, catapults, and crossbows ceased to be used in military combat. When commanding archers, the term is “loose” or, less frequently, “release,” “arrow,” or “trip” – NOT “fire.”
To further the historical literacy among fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction writers, I recommend bookmarking the phrase finder and using it frequently when writing and proofreading. A good etymological dictionary and slang dictionary wouldn’t hurt either.
August 18th, 2008 by jdsawyer
—edit—
Lisa Paul, in the comments, delivered a round bitch-slap to me for missing the obvious possibility that the following faux-pas could be an attempt to emulate the Brooklynite coloquialism “S/he was robbed” and convey their accent. She could be right. However…I like my take on it better 
. Can anyone confirm whether the author of the MSNBC story is from Brookly?
—original story follows—
Nastia Liukin had a bad day yesterday at the Olympics. Not only did she lose the gold due to a scoring decision, she’s the occasion for MSNBC, one of the more prestigious news sites on the internet, deciding to dump English in favor of LOLCAT-speak.
You heard it here first, guys. According to this page, Nastia Luikin “wuz” robbed. And she wuzn’t just robbed once, she “wuz robbed” twice. Once in paragraph two’s lead sentence, which says “It seems that she wuz robbed,” [sic] and once in paragraph three, which restates the imperative as a teasing question: “Wuz Luikin robbed?”
 LOLspeak hits MSNBC |
It’s one thing when a blogger does it – people who are on the net all day sometimes reflexively revert to IM shorthand or lolcat-ese. Dumb, but excusable.
It’s quite another when a professional news organization (one of the biggest in the world), includes this kind of juvenile idiocy in their news reporting. I guess that an eighth grade reading level isn’t low enough anymore for some press corporations – they’re changing their writing standards to “Eighth grade Instant-Messaging level.” |
Now, by the time you read this, somebody over in the editorial department of MSNBC might have gotten a fucking dictionary out or, you know, USED A SPELLCHECKER on their page and caught the review. If not, let’s not tell them, ok? Let’s just spread this meme *everywhere.* Let’s embarrass the hell out of them. Let’s get everyone so hopping mad about it that maybe, just maybe, people will look to see if a journalist, an editor, or a copy editor can spell before they’re hired. Maybe we’ll even get lucky and schools will start requiring (and encouraging) that students demonstrate basic traffic-sign level literacy before promoting them up the academic ladder to be with their friends.
