Tag Archives: language

213. Borders

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I don’t need to remind you what Europe is like today. Everyone knows her troubles. Refugees, and terrorists disguised as refugees, are flooding in, and once they arrive, they can move more or less freely from country to country. BREXIT came largely as a result of this crisis, with the threat of terrorism and economic dislocation driving the vote.

It was very different in 1989, the year in which the novel Raven’s Run (see Serial) takes place. There were no open borders, even between friendly countries. When my wife and I traveled from Switzerland to Italy during that era, the train crossed the Italian border at 2 AM. It stopped and a cadre of officials came aboard, moving from car to car, waking everyone up and checking passports. Of course, as Americans, it was a formality. Our passports carried us through without strain, but if there had been an irregularity . . .

There was an irregularity later, coming back from Hungary. A young and carefree European, French as I recall, had gotten into Hungary – God knows how –  with a passport, but without a visa. He confessed his lack to everyone in the coach, and laughed about it. Some very surly individuals took him off at the border. I never saw him again, but I had to wonder how funny it seemed a few hours later.

I had my own irregularity, harmless but thought provoking, earlier that same summer. My wife and I were camping at Innsbruck, Austria. When you camped or stayed in a hotel in those days, the owner confiscated your passport when you checked in and returned it when you left. It was the law throughout most of Europe.

We took a day trip from Innbruck to Reuthe, also in Austria. We did not know that the train passed through Germany on the way. As we crossed the German border, some very severe guards, with automatic pistols at their hips, came demanding passports. My wife had hers; I didn’t.

I took German in high school, which is very close to not taking it at all. I tried to ask why, but my one word “Warum?” (Why?) got me nowhere. The border guard repeated his demand for my passport. My weak German “Ins camping.” (It’s at the campground.) must have made sense to him. He had to know that holding passports at campgrounds and hotels was the law. It didn’t melt his icy stare.

Now I have met many people traveling through Germany, both before and after this incident. They were universally friendly and helpful, and they all spoke English, especially after trying to deal with my attempts at German. Not these guys. They just looked pissed. It was probably an act, but they had me convinced at the time.

Those of us with passport irregularities were taken to another car, without explanation, with just gestures and an intense glare, where we were sealed in. We passed through a piece of Germany and back into Austria, and were released.

It wasn’t life threatening, nor the stuff of spy novels, but it was very much a part of the system the Eurozone was designed to overcome. Open borders did away with a lot of annoyance, and allowed a freedom of movement that helped bring prosperity to Europe.

Today, new circumstances are bringing Europeans to reconsider that openness.

212. Old Posts Retrospective

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I would have preferred to post this last Wednesday, one year after the first posts on this website. However, the introduction of Raven’s Run over on Serial took precedence.

I did some of my best post writing during that early period when no one was reading. Everything was fresh and new, and I was introducing myself for the first time. I reposted a few when it was appropriate, particularly in March of 2016 when I began Jandrax over in serial, but most of those early posts are still unread by those who are with me today.

Eventually, I plan an annotated index of all posts, but for now, here is a partial version so you can dip into the past if you want.

2. Turn Left at Chicago – How a fortuitous failure set me on the road to writing.

3. It Was 40 Years Ago Today – The act of sitting down to write a first novel.

6. Planet Oklahoma (1) – From birth to my first encounter with a library.

7. Planet Oklahoma (2) – A library changes my life.

9. Old Libraries – Old libraries, old books, and re-reading.

10. Book Words – Being the only person who reads

11. Why the Tractosaur Wouldn’t Go – Hearing and speaking Okie.

12. Why Okies Can’t Use the Dictionary – Mispronunciation guides.

174. Painfully United

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The UK has a painfully long name – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. How it came to be united is also painful; it is a millennium long story full of warfare, with some significant sore losers.

Since BREXIT, every knowledgable news commentator is predicting at least a partial breakup of Great Britain. A full understanding of why would take a book. I am going to put it into shorthand, with all the inaccuracies that entails. None of what follows is wrong, but it’s a kindergarten primer.

Once upon a time the British Isles (that includes Ireland) were Celtic. During the first millennium AD, Germanic invaders began to raid and colonize. These invaders were speakers of Germanic languages, including the languages ancestral to English. That doesn’t mean they were Germans, as we use the word today. Germany came to nationhood only very recently.

Over centuries, these Germanic speaking invaders came to conquer a good deal of what is now England, and were essentially the native population by 1000 AD. One group, the Angles gave us the name England.

Meanwhile, a  bunch of Vikings (Northmen, Normans) conquered the part of western France which came to be called Normandy. They shed their Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family and took up French, along with wine, clothing that wasn’t fur, and other aspects of a better life style. in 1066, William the Bastard crossed the channel and conquered England, becoming William the Conqueror. He brought top-down feudalism, displaced the local lords, handed out fiefdoms to his followers, and introduced French as the language of the court. Middle English became the language of the commoners; it would take centuries for English to supplant French as the language of the intelligentsia.

The Robin Hood legends with poor Saxon serfs under the hated Norman lords comes from this period.

Wales fell under English domination through simple conquest in 1284. Full union with England took place in 1536, at which time Welsh law was suppressed.

In what would become Scotland, ancestral languages similar to Middle English had already overtaken the lowlands by the time the followers of William moved in. Beyond the highland line, as in Ireland and Wales, Celtic languages remained. Over the centuries, Scotland became a nation, with its own kings, traditions, and court culture. As it did so, the ancestral languages evolved into Scots. Scots is not English with a bad accent; it is a similar but separate language with its own literature, used in the Scottish court.

Scotland and England fought intermittently throughout the centuries. Since England was larger and more fertile, and could field larger armies for longer times, England won more often than it lost. Scotland became sometimes a vassal state and at other times, nearly so.

When Queen Elizabeth died childless, her cousin James the Sixth of Scotland was given the English throne. His proper title became James the Sixth and First, but the English ignored his Scottish heritage. So did he. He was ill used as a child in Scotland, and he couldn’t get to London fast enough. Although a Scottish King on an English throne, his home country was only a bad memory to him. 1603 was called the Union of the Crowns, but Scotland still had its own parliament.

For four generations spanning most of a century, the Scottish/English kings had their hands full fighting against English protestants who disliked their Catholic leanings. Back in Scotland, rabid Protestants had increased their power. Mid-century brought about the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes called the English Civil War, although it was also fought well beyond the English border. It was a complex situation, with the English vs. the Scots, Royalists vs. those who opposed the Divine Rights of Kings, and Catholics vs. Protestants. Individuals found themselves torn between conflicting loyalties, and the changing of sides was common. The planting of American colonies was heavily influenced by these events.

1707 saw the Act of Union. The Scottish Parliament was subsumed by the English one, after English manipulations had nearly bankrupted Scotland. The Scots language was suppressed. At one point, maps labeled Scotland as North Britain.

Events in Ireland were even more harsh, with multiple invasions from England, annexation, the plantation of Scottish protestants in Northern Ireland during the War of the Three Kingdoms, the genocidal Irish Famine, rebellion, partition, and the Troubles. Since 1921 Northern Ireland has been part of Great Britain while the bulk of the island became the separate Republic of Ireland. Ironically, this was done by vote, during which Northern Ireland stayed with Great Britain basically because the mass plantation of Scottish (now Scots-Irish) Protestants three hundred years earlier had shifted demographics.

If this sounds like England bashing, I apologize. It’s a complex situation, but winners tend to be hated by losers, and those feelings can last a long time. Just ask anyone who lives on the route of General Sherman’s march to the sea. England, AKA Great Britain, was the most powerful country on Earth for a third of a millennium. Such a country makes enemies. Unfortunately, some of them live in England’s back yard.

172. Flash Fiction Day

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Today we have a short post on a short subject.

This Saturday, June 25, is Flash Fiction Day in Great Britain. The nice thing about the internet, is that even Americans can click on a British site, so you can check them out.

The term flash fiction is relatively new to me. I discovered it about a year ago while I was writing the blog entry A Very Short Story over on Serial. That entry has since been moved to Backfile.

The story in question was Koan; at 175 words, it would not be eligible for Saturday’s 100 word contest, but it’s short enough not to take itself too seriously, which seems to be important in flash fiction.

I remember, many years ago, one of the science fiction magazines ran a series of vignettes (think of vignette as an old word for flash fiction), then ran a contest for “The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told.” The subject of the contest was, “The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door . . .”

Most of the entries were forgettable, but one stuck in my mind for its cleverness, brevity, and sheer laziness – yes, what else would you call adding only seven words. The entire story read:

The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door. It was the last woman on Earth.

Snicker!

I have to warn you about the British website. There isn’t any science fiction there. It’s all fuzzy and warm and about feelings and relationships. Very academic, very much “literature”, pretty much what you would expect from a site which announces Supported using public funding by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND on its masthead.

If you want another kind of flash fiction, just Google. There are all kinds. For example, National Flash Fiction Day in New Zealand is on June 22, because it’s the shortest day in the year – in the southern hemisphere. I like that.

So, how shall I end this bit? Of course — A flash essay about flash fiction. Eighteen words ought to do it.

Steak is good. Vegetables are good. A balanced diet is admirable. But there’s nothing wrong with potato chips.

100. We Hold These Truths (post 2)

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.  .  .   that all men are created equal  .  .  .

I studied Indian culture for five years and wrote my first master’s thesis on caste based economics. Five years wasn’t enough time to scratch the surface of the complexity of the subject, so anything I say here is a tweet when an encyclopedia is needed.

During the time of my studies, the 60s and 70s, academics were calling black-white relations here at home an American caste system. To see how the differences outweigh the similarities, let’s look as some of the characteristics of caste (jati) in India:

  • Jati groups are exclusive. You can’t join them and you can’t leave them.
  • Jati groups are arranged in a hierarchy.
  • You enter your group at birth and exit it at death. An individual cannot move from one group to another.
  • Upper groups are pure, lower groups are polluted (ritually, don’t look for germ theory in a millennia old culture)

You can see that the first two characteristics fit pre-Civil Rights America. The third fits America except for passing, which was seen as an aberration. We will never know how much it was a norm.

The last characteristic is hugely different between the two cultures, but not absent in America. When I was young, I was told, “If you are ever in a swimming pool and a n—– gets in, get out immediately because they all have V.D..” I didn’t believe it, even then, but you can see how the idea that they are dirty and shouldn’t be touched would reinforce the idea of segregation.

Dirty Jew would have fit well into the two race system of Nazi Germany, as well.

Nevertheless, the caste system in India is overwhelmingly complex. Once you get past the surface, similarities to race are swamped in a myriad of differences. Caste is a bad metaphor for the American situation.

*****

I want to share one caste-race sidelight. There was a massive immigration of Indian workers from the Calcutta and Madras areas to Trinidad, ironically to replace recently freed black slaves who refused to go back the the cane fields as paid workers. When the immigrants were removed from local scrutiny in India, everybody passed for a higher jati; at least that was the belief of the immigrants after they arrived in Trinidad. It was while studying this phenomenon I came across the folk caution:   Beware of the black Brahmin and the pale Chamar.

Two points: When the control from above was removed, hierarchy collapsed. And, even though the racial component of caste is highly attenuated, light-is-good and dark-is-bad still retains a toehold in the conversation.

*****

And now we have come full circle. I began this series of posts by explaining why a white science fiction and fantasy author has an interest in race. Now we return to my novels, which is the original reason for this website. In Serial, the fragment Voices in the Walls is still underway, portraying a young white southerner’s struggle against his own racism. Elsewhere, I am working on the fourth novel in the Menhir series, tentatively titled Mud, which tells the story of a young outcaste fighting to escape his lowly status in the fantasy city of Renth.

Everything that ever happens to a writer is grist for the mill.

I’ll leave you with a riddle:

Question: How many painters does it take to make a masterpiece?
Answer: Two. One to paint, and one to tell him when to quit.

These last five weeks of posts won’t constitute a masterpiece, but it is time to quit. Except for this:  next week I will post here the opening of the novel Mud.

59. Don’t Look at Me

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dont look topDuring my last couple of decades of teaching, my friend Crystal got me into several situations I wouldn’t normally have experienced. She was a teacher of second language students whose dedication went above and beyond what anyone could expect. Because of my respect for her, and my affection for the students we shared, I occasionally found myself doing extra things to back her up.

For several years she had taught a summer writing program for new English learners which included a guest writer. Funding for the guest writer dried up and I was the only writer she knew, so I volunteered to step into that role.

I only had two pieces which were age appropriate, so the first year I taught a poetry lesson using There Am I (see post 8. Written on 9-11). I talked shortly about myself, read the poem, led them through brainstorming, and set them to writing a poem.

One lesson teachers have to learn is when to back off and shut up. I have aquired that skill, but it’s been hard for me. At the appropriate time, I sat quietly at the head of the table for fifteen minutes while they worked.

I knew some of these strudents from having them in large classes, but I did not know them well. Many of them I did not know at all. We had seen each other on campus, but they were sixth or seventh graders who had not reached me yet.

They were under my eye. That is a powerful phrase. They had to produce for a man they did not really know. If they had been students in my regular classroom it would have been easier, but not easy.

They had to write, under my eye, and then they had to submit what they wrote for judgement.

When I was a child, I loved school, but I have no difficulty understanding why so many hate it. As I watched these children try to write, I considered how I would have felt in their place. Then I took up paper and wrote a new poem while they worked.

dont look full

Technical note for fellow bloggers. Since the theme I use does not allow full control of vertical and horizontal spacing, this poem had to be written on a drawing program, converted into a JPEG, and inserted as if it were a picture.

53. Irritants

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Arrggh!Dear reader, batten down the hatches. I am going to rant.

I work very hard at appearing calm, balanced, and of “an equable disposition”. It’s all a lie. I really live at a slow simmer, ready to break into a full boil.

I hate ignorance, complacency, and sloppiness, which makes it very hard to watch TV news and all but impossible to watch commercials. I can’t drink coffee while watching TV for fear I’ll throw my mug at the screen.

Of all the irritants in daily life, probably nothing grinds my gears as much as those who torture the English language while thinking they are speaking well.

So, get ready . . .

Small means little. Little means small. What does small-little mean? Is it smaller than little, or littler than small? Despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever, small-little seems to have completely replaced both small and little in everyday speech.

Arrggh!

First ever — are you kidding me? First ever! First means first. Period. It is an absolute. All reasonable modifiers added to first reduce the field over which it is absolute. The first person to graduate from Harvard is absolute. The first black person to graduate from Harvard is also absolute, but from a smaller set of people. The first left handed, gay, Canadian Mormon to graduate from Harvard is absolute, from a yet smaller set.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Saying he is the first ever man is space doesn’t make the statement more absolute, it just makes the person speaking seem ignorant.

If you’re first, you’re first. Saying first ever doesn’t make you more first. It doesn’t make you any firster.

What next? Infinity-er, followed by infinity-est?

Arrggh!

The English language changes constantly. What is normal today is likely to seem quaint tomorrow. Despite this rant, I have no problem embracing change, but as users of the English language we still have one obligation.

If the change is stupid, don’t use it.

34. A Very Young Teacher

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101One sultry afternoon in late spring the principal came running into my ninth grade classroom and shouted, “Boys, get on the bus. There’s a prairie fire.” All the boys from all four grades – about fifty of us – piled into the school bus and roared off west of town. Local farmers with milk cans of water in their pickups and bales of gunny sacks were already there. We grabbed wet sacks and went to work, and during the next three hours we fought the fire to a standstill.

Not one boy hesitated and not one parent complained. Small town Oklahoma in 1962 was a very different place than anywhere in America today. It was a good place to grow up if you wanted to become a man, and the sooner the better.

Two years later, I was one of two students in second year German when the English and German teacher was severely injured in a car accident. He was out for six weeks. The only substitute teacher in the area was a million years old, and she didn’t speak German. She got the job.

About the second day, the principal pulled me aside and said, “I want you to teach the first year German class.” I said yes. Then or now, I can’t imagine giving any other answer.

He put the substitute into the library during the hour German was taught and pulled me out of the class I was supposed to be in. It was tough. My German wasn’t as strong as it should have been, but it got better fast. Every night I typed up worksheets on my old manual typewriter, and every morning the school secretary made copies. I worked the kids hard and put up with a lot of silliness. A class full of sophomores is never going to really listen to a junior, even when the principal comes in regularly.

Can you imagine the lawsuits if that were to happen today? After about a week, the principal asked me how I was doing. I said, “It’s working. I’m studying at night, staying one chapter ahead of them, and trying to seem like I know more than I do.”

He patted me on the shoulder and said, “Son, that’s how we all do it.”

28. Acronyms

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USELESS

As children, we all learned that the word STOP on stop signs is an acronym. It means it’s time to “Spin Tires On Pavement”. Or was that just an urban legend?

There are quite a few urban legends centering on acronyms. I received an e-mail from a friend purporting to prove that shit is an acronym. Sorry; variations on that word are spread all across the Germanic language family. There is also a supposed acronym derived from Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge, but that seems a bit far fetched as well.

For a long time I was taken in by the urban legend surrounding posh. I first saw it authoritatively stated in a museum display in Shetland that posh stands for Port Out, Starboard Home, meaning that passengers with posh tickets got staterooms on the shady side both ways when P & O steamships traveled from England to India and back. John Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary debunked that one.

Of course everyone knows that NASA is National Aeronautics and Space Administration, scuba is Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and laser is Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

Jack Cover, inventor of the taser, named his device after the novel Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle (1911), with the “a” added to make it pronounceable. That sounds like an urban legend, but isn’t.

Heinlein didn’t invent tanstaafl (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) but he made it popular in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get, pronounced a bit like the name of Ebenezer Scrooge’s old boss) is one of my all time favorite acronyms. My first computer, a Mac SE, was part of a wysiwyg system. The screen had 72 pixels per inch and the matching printer was 72 dpi. Whatever you wrote or drew on the screen transferred to the page with absolute fidelity. Unfortunately, that also meant it was pixelated. As soon as crude bit-mapped fonts went the way of cave paintings, wysiwyg went away as well and it never really came back. When people use the term today, they actually mean “what you see is pretty darn close to what you get”.

I shouldn’t have to point out the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation, but since TV anchor persons no longer seem to know the difference, I will. Acronyms are pronounced as words; abbreviations are pronounced as letters. NASA is pronounced NASA, not N-A-S-A, making it an acronym. The USDA is pronounced U-S-D-A not youse dah, making it an abbreviation. An individual retirement account can be either, depending on whether you pronounce it I-R-A or IRA, like Ira Flatow.

Making up new acronyms can be fun. If you want to join with others in that pursuit, e-mail the United States Emergent Language Expression Society of Schenectady. Or not.

Sometimes the bad joke fairy takes over my keyboard. Sorry.