Writerly Tics, and The Willy-Billy Touchy Botfly

The careful writer of novels, I regret to report, knows no rest; he can never indefinitely regard a final draft as final. At best, he arrives at the first printing stage. As soon as such a (haha) finished object comes out of the box, he opens it, a-tremble with anticipation… unerringly to a page on which:

• he’s assaulted by that bit of awkward phrasing which, goddammit, he’d been meaning to tidy up ever since that sentence’s first draft, like, fifteen goddam years ago; and/or
• a character named Lewis is referred to as “Louis”; and/or
• a historical or scientific factoid which he knows to be false shrieks at him in mad hilarity, because he didn’t know it was false until last week; and/or
• the Latin phrase pro bono appears as pro boner; and/or
• etc.

All of which weighs on my mind today because even though Seems to Fit‘s first printing remains hypothetical, even as I noodle around with the book’s marketing campaign, such as it is, I continue to tinker with the work itself. Among this morning’s tasks: the global spellcheck.

For the twenty-plus years she’s known me, The Missus has tirelessly catalogued my tics as a writer. One such, she’d happily tell me, shows up in the first paragraph of this post: that prefix in a-tremble. Apparently I do this a LOT, willy-nilly transforming perfectly serviceable verbs into cutesy adjectives: a-tremble; a-shiver; a-roil; a-dance; a-pop…

But hey, we’ve all got our little idiosyncrasies. (It’s not like I torture baby otters or anything.) And — at least for me — many of these show up en masse when I run a spellcheck. On the other hand, I don’t believe the compilers of spellcheck dictionaries are much (if at all) smarter than the rest of us. (Granted, those squiggly red underlines certainly add a few pounds of additional — however bogus — authority to their opinions.)

As I edit this post, for instance, the browser flags the word haha: I guess it’s too informal to have appeared within any “authority’s” horizons of acceptability.

But then willy-nilly shows up in the no-no list, too. For haha, at least, the software suggests reasonable alternatives: ha, a ha, ha ha, and ha-ha. For willy-nilly, though, it suggests: willy-hilly, -billy, -silly, even -filly for chrissake. Seriously? Someone, somewhere, even once used a single one of those suggestions in a real English-language document — hence justifying their appearance in a spellchecking dictionary? But never willy-nilly? Sheesh. (Hashish. Sheepish. Sheep. Sheer…)

The image at the top of this post, obviously, comes from the spellcheck of a word-processed document. (In this case, the word processor is OpenOffice Writer, but similar results probably appear across various platforms.) Now, how I decide to add an unrecognized word to my own dictionary — vs. ignoring it, say — can be a little arbitrary, and no doubt inconsistent. Of course I’ve got a couple of native Welsh speakers in Seems to Fit, and mention Welsh place names as well. I didn’t hesitate to add (say) Carmarthen [1] and St. Teilo [2]; I didn’t expect they’d be recognized, and didn’t want to be nagged about them more than once. But common brand names seem like good candidates, too, because I’m likely to use them more than once — not just in the current document but in many others.

So then, Alka-Seltzer. As you can see from the image, the spellchecker came up with some crazy alternatives. To those, you can add (because they just didn’t show up in the screenshot, but were in the list):

• Alma-Seltzer…
• Alba-Seltzer…
• Alfa-Seltzer…
• Alva-Seltzer…
• Elka-Seltzer…
• Ilka-Seltzer…
• Aka-Seltzer…
• Alga-Seltzer… as well as
• plain old Seltzer and Alkalize

But my favorite — and shorter — list may have been the word processor’s suggestions for touchy-feely: touchy-feedlot and, yes, touchy-botfly.

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[1] Carmarthen, per Wikipedia:

…a community in, and the county town of, Carmarthenshire, Wales. It is sited on the River Towy 8 miles (13 km) north of its mouth at Carmarthen Bay… Carmarthen lays claim to being the oldest town in Wales but the two settlements of Old and New Carmarthen were only united into a single borough in 1546. Carmarthen was the most populous borough in Wales between the 16th and 18th centuries and was described by William Camden as “the chief citie of the country”.

[2] St. Teilo: possibly a friend and cousin to Welsh patron St. David. After Teilo’s death, his remains were claimed by several churches; one of these, a chapel at Llandeilo Llwydiarth, came into reported possession of his skull. Drinking water drawn from a nearby well, and served in St. Teilo’s skull, allegedly cured a variety of ailments:

The water was said to be particularly effective in the treatment of chest complaints and it was doubly so if it was drunk out of the skull. The height of efficacy came when the skull, filled with well water, was handed to the sufferer by the hands of the hereditary keeper himself. After he had acquired the skull many years later Gregory Mathews wrote an article entitled ‘Romance of St Teilo’s Skull’ in which he quotes from a work entitled Wales and the Welsh by Asaph Dar:

…An old inhabitant of the district, Stephen Evans (Hifyn Ifan) used to relate a story to the effect that a carriage drawn by four horses came over to Llandeilo. It was full of invalids from the cockle village of Penclawdd, in the Gower Peninsula, who had determined to try the waters in the well. They returned, however, no better than they came; for though they had drunk of the well they had neglected to do so out of the skull. This was afterwards pointed out to them by somebody and they resolved to make the long journey to the well again. This time, we are told, they did the right thing and departed in excellent health. Such is the great persistence of primitive beliefs that while the walls of the church have long fallen into decay the faith in the well continues in a measure intact.

It would be interesting to know for how long this faith in the efficacy of the well persisted. Francis Jones quotes an old man, alive in 1906, who remembered people coming to the well who ‘were cured by faith’, and said that as a boy he and two other lads were cured of an illness after drinking the water out of St Teilo’s skull early in the morning.

[source]

The appeal of this legend to the author of a Grailish story based partly (but significantly) in Wales should be obvious.

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Addendum: I’ve also today used the spellchecker to find and fix several inconsistencies: a character whose first name, “Sansom,” drifted sideways into “Sanford”-hood for one chapter’s duration; a bunch of grey references (from very early drafts of the story, when I fancied it would add cachet to the prose), corrected to the more common gray; and variations on vernacular terms like whatchamacallit and goddam. Yeah, I know. Tics.