Changing Language

Language changes. I strongly suspect change comes faster when a culture is highly mobile like ours is.  There is a quote out there in the world about English rifling through the pockets of other languages, but in its original form, the quote is super problematic for it's sexism and attempt to somehow shame sex workers. I prefer the mental image of English as a thief willing to sneak up on another language, club it over the head, and take everything it could find. 

It's how we got hurricane. And geyser. From entirely different parts of the world. Imagine trying to learn English as a second language and having someone tell you, "No, no. That word's Japanese. Yeah, that word's Icelandic. And that one? That one's -- hell we have no idea where that one came from. Sorry." 

Then add in the variations and dialects associated with the language. The UK has one version of English. The US another. Australia yet another. The we add in Canada and the Caribbean region and I defy you, if you aren't practiced in hearing it, to decipher a southern Creole dialect speaking what's supposed to be English. You'll understand my sympathy for anyone trying to learn English. The language makes no damned sense. 

While I occasionally feel like some old curmudgeon yelling, "You kids get off my linguistic lawn!" I'm learning to not mind the ground of my language shifting beneath my feet. It's been rightly pointed out that rigid, codified grammar is a form of oppression. Insisting on "The One True Way" of language devalues the speakers of other dialects. For the longest time, the most common impression most people had of anyone who spoke with a Southern accent was that they were less intelligent. Now think about how grammar rules are used against Black culture and the dialects that have grown out of Black experience in this country. It absolutely casts Black language and culture as lesser. As something to be mocked and laughed at. Instead of listened to and appreciated for the original music it brings to the whole of the English language.

Oh, for the love of language.

“Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

As writers, words are our tools, our weapons, our voice. And as writers that means we always need to be collecting new tools, sharpening our weapons, and improving our voice. How do we do that?

We listen.

I don’t believe it matters what genre you’re writing in, you’ve got to be able to listen to people. Not simply what language they’re speaking, (English, Spanish, French, etc.) but soak up their personal language. How do they use their words, what do they enunciate, what offends and what makes them laugh. 

You don’t have to go far for language to change either. For a broad example you can look at the US, there’s southern drawl to the long o’s of Northern MN…don’t ya know. 

For a specific example, when I was in high school my hometown used the word barr. 

Barr: something stupid, ridiculous, dumb. 

Our school’s top rival, the neighboring town, didn’t use barr. If you used it in that town...they knew exactly where you were from. By the way, the distance between these towns is about ten miles. 

What does that have to do with writing? 

If you can listen then you'll hear words used in ways you've never imagined. Our languages change all the time. If you doubt that, check out the yearly additions to the dictionary! If you can listen and understand people, you can write realistic characters. And that’s one thing that all books should have in common. 

Former editor gets a bit ranty about language

True story: I'm sitting in my comfy chair, probably pretending to write a book, and my phone rings. It's a talky-type phone call, right, not a text, so I knew instantly that it was either my mother-in-law or my mom. And since it was a Yoda ring tone rather than R2-D2, I was fully prepared for my mom-in-law. Not unexpectedly, she was in a flutter about something, but this time it wasn't her computer, her car, or her cat.

It was language, a thing which is dear to my heart. Rant away, Meemaw, for I am here for it!

Anyhow, she was editing a paper for her son, who is a social sciences PhD student and worries maybe too much about his command of commas. She knows I was an editor and copy editor for coughfifteenyears, so she trusts my opinions on things like semicolons and style guides. She also expected me to be horrified at a thing she was horrified over. See, my brother-in-law had broken a basic usage rule repeatedly in this paper, and he is a smart dude so it made no sense. His mother was concerned.

The problem was pronoun-antecedent agreement. As the Towson University web site phrases it, "A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number. Rule: [Their bold, not mine] A singular pronoun must replace a singular noun; a plural pronoun must replace a plural noun." So, if Chris went to the store, he bought beer. If Christa went, she bought wine. If all the Chrises went together, they bought cheese. We all learned this stuff in grade school, if it sounds familiar.

But my brother-in-law consistently used "they" as the pronoun for all singular nouns. Which was wrong wrong wrong... right?

Except no.

See, Meemaw, I explained, our language is living, agile, functional, and as our society changes, so change the rules. As we try to be more inclusive of gender identities, the old he/she/it rules need to flex to accommodate. "They" is perfectly acceptable -- turns out English speakers have been using the plural "they" to refer to singular nouns of unknown gender for a really long time, and most major style guides have approved the usage. Also, considering the paper was for an academic social-sciences audience, it would have been a mistake to replace "they" with "he or she" (or s/he, which was always an abomination). It would have been wrong.

Which, in my mind, is something so very, very right about language.

So, you just keep evolving, English, you adorable tongue you. The rest of us will catch up.

p.s. -- I am considerably less down with all the run-on sentences I'm seeing lately from people who I guess are trying to use fewer commas? There's nothing wrong with commas, people! If you have two independent clauses, please stick one of those little beauties and a connecting word in between, even if you don't pause at that part of the sentence. Trust me. Also, lay off the semicolons. I can almost guarantee you aren't using them right.

Language: It's a Little Fishy

Oh, how I love the way language constantly evolves. It's a fantastic excuse for why my spelling is such crap. (Why did we remove the "e" in judgment? What did it do to Mssrs Merriam or Webster?)  Or why my floundering with homonyms and homophones sends my editors snickering up their sleeves. (Grisly and Grizzly, I'm looking at you.)

No? Not buying it as an excuse? 

Believe it or not one of my favorite ways to bond with my father is over a delightful little card game known as Quiddler. It's a variant of Scrabble in which every card is a letter with a different point value that you must use to make a word. You start with three cards and add a card with each round you play. Simple enough. The catch, that is not an official rule, is we can only use words from our unabridged 1969 dictionary that we hauled around the world and that weighs more than the family dog.

That's right 1969, when terms like Byte and Gigahertz didn't exist. Email? No. Internet? No. Dear Reader, there are words in that dictionary that are not defined but used as definitions. I present to you:

  Nerfling. 

What a spectacular word, right? Brings to mind faeries and sprites and journeys through moon gates.

It's a fish.

(I had to look it up on the internet. Oh, the irony.)

So, while Zoomers are having a ball dragging Millenials for passe terms like Adulting and Doggos on TikTok, I'm rummaging through the past for fascinating names to bestow upon fantasy races of...fish?

It's a Living Thing

Language, that is.
Language is a living thing, and as such, it constantly mutates. What do I love and hate about that fact? That language is a constantly changing thing,.

Okay, one of y favorite examples is from the show The Simpsons. Now, with the exception of the annual TREEHOUSE OF HORROR. I couldn't much care about the Simpsons. I watched the show when it started and I watched the way the art changed and okay, that's fine.

But, I was amused to the point of a grin on my face when the Oxford Dictionary decided to add the word "D'oh" as modern slang. How delightful! A goofy little comment from Homer Simpson became an actual word in the English language because so many people were using it. I bet if I looked into it I could find a few words from Buffy The Vampire Slayer added as well.

I love the fact that the English language adapts and changes to suit its own needs. Sometimes it steals from other languages (Okay, often), sometimes a new word is made up on the fly In any event the language becomes something new. How cool is that? It's like watching a chameleon change colors.

I all as is almost always the case, working on multiple projects at once. Short stories, novels, collaborations, a novella. all of these are directly affected by the change in language. My novels is a first-person spin-off of a Novelette I wrote ten years ago, which is, in turn, a spin-off from a novel. The language is a complete bastardization of the English I speak and usually use because it's told by a hitman with a very different grasp of the English language. He doesn't speak like me. He isn't me. I'm just telling his story. I've caught myself a few times wanting to increase his vocabulary, but I won't let that happen. He has his ways, I have mine.

It all varies. One o0f my teachers, when I was a kid, thought the word "garbage" was the most beautiful sounding word in the English language She told that to a herd of fifth graders and was shocked at the laughter. I knew another teacher who though "Onomonapeia" was the bee's knees. Words are wonderfully quirky in this language. We turn a phrase with the best of them and usually get it exactly wrong enough to annoy at least one reader a book at a guess. But we use those words just the same, and we invent new ones if we have to.

If I can be said to have anything that I don't like about the way the language  keeps changing, I guess I'd have to say I'm not fond of the shortcuts. Where R U should never replace Where are you? in my book. It made sense when you  had to pay for each character n a text, but those days are mostly gone.

That's it for me this time around. In case you haven't run across my latest release (from a freaking year ago, because cancer and the treatments for the same slow down EVERYTHING) my last novel released was BOOMTOWN and the follow up collection of short stories was WHERE THE SUN GOES TO DIE. Both are weird westerns.

Love It or Hate It? Changing Language

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is our favorite and least favorite ways the language is changing.

I'm not much of a cane-shaker about language. I'm kind of a language nerd, endlessly fascinated by etymology, and in another life-path I would totally have been a linguist and polyglot.

(Though I only know English and French, along with a smattering of other languages. Still, in my mind, I imagine myself learning new languages, when I *cough* have time.)

I love how language evolves, how it's a fluid and living thing. (Except for those dead languages, forever frozen in a particular form to ossify that way. It always seems kind of sad to me.) I even love how technology is changing our use of language - like how "tho" has a different connotation from "though," even though the former is technically a shortening of the latter. I'm enough of a word nerd that I have a full set of the (paper) Oxford English Dictionary and reference books on the Roots of English and a Sanskrit bible (whence we derived many of said roots).

I do have my peeves. It annoys me that "factoid" has totally lost its original meaning of a sexy but deliberately untrue tidbit to, well, exactly the thing it was meant to comment on satirically. But I try to let it go because clearly people wanted a word to mean a "short fact" and glommed onto that.

Otherwise, I try to keep up with language shifts. They're a reflection of a dynamic society, and learning new words keeps my brain limber.

I'm sure learning a new language would, too...

Sexy geeks, recovering Egyptian antiquities, and heart break

Black lives matter. So do black authors. Black dancers. Black dreams. Black hopes. Black voices. Black families.

I have incredible privilege and limited ability to use it right now. But I can boost my fellow authors. I can donate to the ACLU and to BLM and bail funds. And I can vote. When the time comes, I hope you'll commit to doing at least that. Vote. Because the lives of your neighbors and friends hang in the balance.

These are the authors I've been binging lately:
First was Melissa Blue. She writes a sexy geek series. How could I not? 

Now, I'm working my way through Seressia Glass's Shadowchasers series.  A kick-ass heroine, Egyptian artifacts, a 4,000 year old Nubian warrior? Mmmmm. Yeah, the series is a good time.

And the piece that breaks my heart - this. From the Alvin Alley Dance Theater

8 SF&F Books by Black Authors + Further Recommendations

We went silent last week at the SFF Seven to give space for the voices that needed to be heard in the world...

#BlackLivesMatter

Our theme for the week is to suggest resources for finding Black authors to read...

A source I turn to often is the WOC In Romance webpage …they update periodically and have the books slotted into genres/tropes for easy searching.

May Sage writes all manner of stories but her fantasy romances have a huge following.  Her Court of Sin series, which begins with Frostbound Throne is a good entry point to her work.

Another favorite of mine is A. M. Griffin, with her The Hunt series. Book one is The Game Warden’s Mate.

I first discovered Deborah Bailey when she released book one in her Hathor Legacy trilogy, which was Burn…and I loved her Once Upon a Princess: Beauty and the Faun fairy tale…

I’ve mentioned P. J. Dean before, because I so enjoyed her scifi romance series The Felig Chronicles, and she writes in other genres as well…

Alyssa Cole just released the ebook version of The A.I. Who Loved Me, which is thoroughly enjoyable and her post-apocalyptic Off the Grid series is a classic. The first book is Radio Silence.

Hugo And Nebula Award winning author N. K. Jemison’s The City We Became is an amazing book, as is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1).

I can’t say enough about the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Binti trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes is a timely, tough fantasy…

Rita Wood has written “Ode to Black Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers” for Tor.com and has specific book suggestions…

Don’t overlook FIYAH, the magazine of Black Speculative Fiction….check them out!

Hopefully this small list will provide a few new-to-you authors to check out and some resources for finding more, because a voracious reader always needs fabulous new books to read, right?

Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments!

As it relates to the times we’re living in, I’d like to add one more book that I personally found immensely helpful. It was hard homework but insightful and eye opening, even after all the many hours of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion training I'd had at various times with my previous day job employer. This book, which I read earlier in the year when the RWA was imploding (wow, that seems like last century!) is challenging but turned on many light bulbs for me. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin J. DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson (Foreward).

Sending my best wishes to you and your loved ones to stay safe and healthy because we’re not out of the pandemic yet, that’s for sure.