cj Sez: First, I want
to wish a Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers, step-fathers, great-and-grandfathers,
and adoptive fathers. I hope this day is the start of a healthy and happy year.
I was re-organizing the backup files for my blog the other day, and that means I "had" to re-read every post.
I found a few interesting ones, including one about our dynamic English language. So before I delete my comments , I think it’s
worthwhile to repeat that 2016 post one more time.
***
…. A friend sent me this quote from a fellow blogger, Sol
Sanders: “Perhaps the glory of the English language is that
it so expressive. Its remarkable heterogeneous origins have given it an almost
limitless vocabulary. And American English, particularly, has used that tool
with an enormous flexibility to make it the international means of
communication. One is able with a minimum of linguistic dexterity to capture
every meaning, or almost every nuance.”
 |
| Read it out loud. It does make sense. |
Mr. Sanders’s comments were part of an
introduction to his essay on what today’s journalism and media do with the English
language. The gist of his blog is that journalism and media people over-complicate
their sentences with words that muddy their meanings—changing nouns into verbs and,
perhaps, calling a shovel a “hand-held, earth-moving tool.” (I’ve seen
those descriptions in engineering technical specifications papers also.)
Yes, as a writer, I use nouns as verbs. Yes,
I deliberately obfuscate and happily add the disclaimer that it’s for the sake of
telling the story. I am drawn to the syntax, symbolism, and syncopation of a
well-crafted sentence that is the hallmark of successful mystery/thriller/suspense
novelists. It’s using that “minimum of linguistic dexterity to capture every
meaning, or almost every nuance” that appeals to me, and, I think, to readers
of those genres. They want to try to decipher the code, find the clues, and
solve the crime. I like confusing the issue.
That said, I do have a few
personal dislikes of changing nouns into verbs. One is the word “impactful”—a
noun turned into a verb turned into an adjective by adding ful on the end. What
the Sam Hill does that mean?
Coda: IMHO,
the gloriously expressive English language is what makes the craft of writing so
fascinating.
I’m still working on my craft. How are you
doing with yours?
***
That’s it for this
week’s post. I hope you found a nugget in here that you can use. You-all guys
keep on keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same.
cj
DEADLY STAR excerpt (scene is after a plane crash in the desert): Afraid to
stay and afraid to leave, Mirabel began to shiver in the sweltering heat. She
knew the rules for a crash. Dan repeated them before each time they flew. Stay
with the plane. Searchers can see a plane. A hiker is just another invisible
grain of sand. She stared long and hard at the purple haze of sawtooth hills in
the distance then kissed his waxen cheek.
“I have to go,” she whispered.
For your summertime/vacation reading pleasure, stop by my Amazon Central Author Page = https://amzn.to/2v6SrAj — at the time of this post, CHOOSING CARTER and
DEADLY STAR are free on Kindle Unlimited.
To order an autographed copy of DEADLY STAR, CHOOSING
CARTER, and THE POSSE, contact The Haunted Bookshop here: The Haunted Bookshop
Angela Trigg, the awesome owner and a
RITA Award-winning author in her own right (writing as Angela Quarles) will be
happy to ship you the book(s) of your choice.
If you send me a note, I’ll personalize your choice, and
drop it in the mail to you (cover price plus mailing).
To sign up for my quarterly newsletter go to: cjpetterson@gmail.com
Speaking of nouns turned into verbs...have you Googled lately.
ReplyDeleteTechnically, Google isn't even a word, it's a company name, yet everyone seems to know what Googled means. The English language is so fluid.