“The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned.” (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, “Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology.” Continuum, 2000)
Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:
But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.
the sheer offensiveness of rereading something you wrote, discovering that, hey, it’s actually pretty good, and then reaching the end, wherein you realize that if you want more you actually have to write it
fuck’s sake
writers will look at their own WIPs and be like “is anyone gonna finish that” and then close the tab
the sheer offensiveness of rereading something you wrote, discovering that, hey, it’s actually pretty good, and then reaching the end, wherein you realize that if you want more you actually have to write it
fuck’s sake
writers will look at their own WIPs and be like “is anyone gonna finish that” and then close the tab
like, the most compelling ships for me always stem out of one thing: the characters have a profound, ongoing effect on each other’s senses of selves. when they are apart, the characters’ actions are still affected by each other. the way they approach the world changes because of the other.
which is this deeply Austenian view of ideal romantic relationships as mechanisms by which we come to know ourselves better and become better versions of ourselves. good romance, for me, is always tied in with a sense of self-actualization, and the way in which a beloved partner allows a person to know themselves better.
like, the most compelling ships for me always stem out of one thing: the characters have a profound, ongoing effect on each other’s senses of selves. when they are apart, the characters’ actions are still affected by each other. the way they approach the world changes because of the other.
which is this deeply Austenian view of ideal romantic relationships as mechanisms by which we come to know ourselves better and become better versions of ourselves. good romance, for me, is always tied in with a sense of self-actualization, and the way in which a beloved partner allows a person to know themselves better.
Writers of historical fiction set before the advent of gas and electrical lighting should be aware of how daylight and moonlight (including sunrise and sunset times, moon phases, and the like) should affect their story.
* Writers from the southern US often forget that most of Europe and especially the UK is pretty far north compared to where they live, being more on a line with western Canada than the US. This difference doesn’t affect the weather (due to the Gulf Stream) as much as it does the balance of day and night; on 21 June in London, to give an example, dawn breaks at 2:55 AM standard time (they didn’t have daylight saving time until after electric lights existed) and the sun rises at 3:42 AM. On 21 December, on the other hand, dawn breaks at 7:23 AM and the sun rises at 8:03 AM. Days in late June are 16 ½ hours long: days in late December are less than 8 hours long. That difference affects everything from when characters breakfast and dine to when they entertain to how much they must budget for candles to how much natural light they have if they awaken in the middle of the night. The difference is starker in Scotland, Muscovy, or Scandinavia; no one in Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg who woke up at 3 AM in June had two hours to wait for dawn. At that latitude, it’s dawn all night long.
* Country activities held at night such as assemblies, political meetings, and private parties/balls were often tied to the phase of the moon, especially in autumn, winter, and spring. In Pride and Prejudice, Bingley takes possession of Netherfield on Michaelmas (29 September) and almost immediately rushes off to fetch Darcy and his sisters and brother-in-law so they can attend the Meryton Assembly the evening they arrive. This makes a beginning date for P&P of 29 September 1811 plausible, since the full moon in that year fell on 2 October. Your characters are therefore going to know what the moon phase is at all times and plan activities around it.
* They’ll also know where the moon is supposed to be in the sky, as will a large percentage of your readers. The writer who puts a rising crescent moon in the eastern sky in early evening or a full moon low at the horizon at midnight is going to disrupt suspension of disbelief for every astronomy fan who reads their book, in the same way as calling a knight or baronet “Sir Surname” will disrupt suspension of disbelief for history fans.
* Nobody in the 18th century thought eclipses were a sign of the end of the world. Eclipses were understood by this time, even by the common people.
Writers of historical fiction set before the advent of gas and electrical lighting should be aware of how daylight and moonlight (including sunrise and sunset times, moon phases, and the like) should affect their story.
* Writers from the southern US often forget that most of Europe and especially the UK is pretty far north compared to where they live, being more on a line with western Canada than the US. This difference doesn’t affect the weather (due to the Gulf Stream) as much as it does the balance of day and night; on 21 June in London, to give an example, dawn breaks at 2:55 AM standard time (they didn’t have daylight saving time until after electric lights existed) and the sun rises at 3:42 AM. On 21 December, on the other hand, dawn breaks at 7:23 AM and the sun rises at 8:03 AM. Days in late June are 16 ½ hours long: days in late December are less than 8 hours long. That difference affects everything from when characters breakfast and dine to when they entertain to how much they must budget for candles to how much natural light they have if they awaken in the middle of the night. The difference is starker in Scotland, Muscovy, or Scandinavia; no one in Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg who woke up at 3 AM in June had two hours to wait for dawn. At that latitude, it’s dawn all night long.
* Country activities held at night such as assemblies, political meetings, and private parties/balls were often tied to the phase of the moon, especially in autumn, winter, and spring. In Pride and Prejudice, Bingley takes possession of Netherfield on Michaelmas (29 September) and almost immediately rushes off to fetch Darcy and his sisters and brother-in-law so they can attend the Meryton Assembly the evening they arrive. This makes a beginning date for P&P of 29 September 1811 plausible, since the full moon in that year fell on 2 October. Your characters are therefore going to know what the moon phase is at all times and plan activities around it.
* They’ll also know where the moon is supposed to be in the sky, as will a large percentage of your readers. The writer who puts a rising crescent moon in the eastern sky in early evening or a full moon low at the horizon at midnight is going to disrupt suspension of disbelief for every astronomy fan who reads their book, in the same way as calling a knight or baronet “Sir Surname” will disrupt suspension of disbelief for history fans.
* Nobody in the 18th century thought eclipses were a sign of the end of the world. Eclipses were understood by this time, even by the common people.
There’s lots to read in there, but this section reminded me where my particular aversion to Phonetic accents originated from:
“Our northerness was also accentuated in the way our speech was transcribed in newspaper articles. There is a tendency in the music press sometimes to write the speech of people from ‘Oop North’ phonetically – I have never heard anyone say ‘oop’.”
In other words, anyone from the South is written in perfect English and anyone from the North is written as written as an exotic, Neanderthal other. As if someone from London doesn’t have an accent, while someone from Manchester does. And there’s a mass of assumptions in there, none of them pretty.
And that’s why I don’t do it, in a nutshell.
Unless you’re going to write everyone with a splash of phonetics, you’re implying that a number of your characters are so separate from the language everyone else is speaking that you have to bastardise the words to show it.
The exceptions are telling. When I’m working on a pre-existing character who’s always been written with semi-phonetic flourishes, I follow suit. Normally in a relatively minimal fashion, but enough to recognise that I’m playing in the tradition. The second is when I’m explicitly trying to turn someone into the Other, which is really about critiquing that (She in Phonogram 2.7 speaks in a complete mass of gibberish. But she’s just a voice in Marc’s head, and the story is about the way he viewed her, etc.) And thirdly… oh, there’s ways when someone really is completely and utterly unintelligible. I don’t think I’ve written one, but Arseface in Preacher would be a good example of that particular type.
But being a guy with his face shot off is a completely different thing than someone being Glaswegian.
(In passing, Ennis a good example – probably the best in comics – of a writer who pulls off phonetics, because he does it so widely and because he does it so well.)
I play with syntax, slang, structure, whatever – but I consider the words themselves sanctified. It’s the basic level of dignity the characters deserve. And frankly, because it isn’t my strongest card, I sidestep the possibility of just doing a really shit and offensive accent. To me, the rewards are small to negligible and the risk is enormous.
In short: if you’re not really 100% sure you’re hot shit, I’d advise writers to think carefully before going there.
ALT
