Language – Page 22

Real-Life Dialogue

January 28, 2009 by John 5 Comments

He: So what kind of car did she get?

She: I don’t know, I forget. It starts with an “E.” Some kind of American car.

He: […prolonged thoughtful silence…]

[time passes]

She: I wish I could remember what kind of car it was.

He: Well, the only kind I could think of that started with an “E” is “Elantra,” but that’s a foreign—

She: I’m not sure it starts with an “E.”

He: Oh… Well, since she got it from a Chevrolet dealer, is it a Chevrolet at least?

She: I don’t know!… Name some kinds of Pontiac. A sporty Pontiac.

He: Well, there’s the Firebird but I don’t think they make them anymore.

She: They don’t. And it’s not a Firebird anyway.

He: […]

She: Name some more Pontiacs. Sporty ones.

He: Uh… Grand Prix?

She: No, it’s not a Grand Prix… Maybe it is a Grand Prix.

[dials phone, talks briefly]

She: Yes. It’s a Grand Prix.

“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

January 27, 2009 by John 7 Comments

One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”

Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.

I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.

No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.

Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.

We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)

Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:

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Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

January 5, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

To get tanked up
Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
The grapevine
To frame someone
A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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A Gift of Frozen Words

December 19, 2008 by John 5 Comments

Soundtrack to today’s post: “Some Children See Him”
(piano solo by George Winston from his album December;
click Play button to start, and adjust volume with the little row of bars at the left):

[audio:somechildrenseehim_georgewinston.mp3|titles=’Some Children See Him’|artists=George Winston]

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Story Starters: The Writer’s Idea Bank

December 16, 2008 by John 10 Comments

When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”

My brother-in-law, whom I will here call The BiL, was at the time an electrical engineer. As such, he too knew some things about programming. Like me, he also had (has) a flair for, umm, let’s say for an anarchic sort of jokes. And so we entertained ourselves for a brief time with a a thought experiment: an idea for a proposed software package, never built, which we called “BellPorn.” (In the post below, rather than use the actual P-word and attract all manner of unseemly traffic, I will indicate it thusly: p*graphy.)

It was a simple idea, or so it seemed:
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Why I Read Terry Pratchett

December 4, 2008 by John 5 Comments

Actually, there are a myriad reasons. (And I can’t think of a single legitimate reason not to read him. Uninformed reasons, yes, and/or reasons based on the faulty assumption that fantasy/SF has nothing to do with reality — or that funny has nothing to do with serious. But legitimate ones? Nope.)

This brief bit from Witches Abroad pretty much boils it down for me. The bare context you need at this point is that a conversation is taking place among three witches. Old Mother Dismass, the subject of this passage, has the ability to see into the future.

“You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,” said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backward and forward along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

The writing is just right; even that “as it were,” which in a lesser writer’s hands might function as mere filler, adds an ironic distance between the author and the things and events which he’s describing.

I love the turnings of the mind behind this passage. Given a common convention of speculative fiction — second sight — just stop. Stop, and ask yourself what it would really mean to have this “gift.” Mightn’t life and thought actually be a little more unpleasantly complicated for the (ha ha) lucky seer than we normally take for granted? How would this power, if someone actually had it, affect those who had to deal every day with its bearer?

Finally, take that whole reductio ad absurdum of a notion and package it up into a supremely funny digression…

Damn. I’d love to be able to do that, and do it repeatedly, over the course of 25+ years (and counting).

Momentary Semantic Vertigo

December 3, 2008 by John 1 Comment

Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:

“…There”s glory for you!”

“I don”t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”

“But ‘glory’ doesn”t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that”s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.

Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).

Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.

Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.

Here’s what I saw first:

Sounds great, right? Then I read further:

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Letting Go, with Thanks

November 28, 2008 by John 9 Comments

From whiskey river:

The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?

(Regina Sara Ryan, Praying Dangerously)

Not from whiskey river:

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

(Leroy “Satchel” Paige, New York Post, October 4, 1959)

…and:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(Thornton Wilder, “Sabiba,” The Skin of Our Teeth)

Finally, the song chosen to wrap up the Northern Exposure series. Not everyone is a fan of Iris Dement’s voice, but I think this is a great song. The performance was on Austin City Limits. (If you’d prefer to see the Northern Exposure version, it’s on YouTube as well — in a shorter and quite darkly lit video.)

Lyrics:

Our Town
(words and music by Iris Dement)

And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

Up the street beside that red neon light
that’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night
He was the tender and I ordered a beer
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting here

But you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

It’s here I had my baby’s and I had my first kiss
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist
Over there is where I bought my first car
it turned over once but then it never went far

And I can see the sun settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall
I bring them flowers about every day
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d say

If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly
but I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go
I love you my town, you’ll always live in my soul

But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
’cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight

Thought Music

November 26, 2008 by John 7 Comments

What’s the deal with music, anyway?

Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?

I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”

For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).

Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.

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