EVERYONE! I HAVE - I HAVE A QUESTION:

When you read to yourself, by which I mean, not aloud, do you speak the words in your head? Does the punctuation affect how you speak the aforementioned words? Does it change, as it were, your mental intonation?

It does mine. And hence why I have never understood why people have trouble with most punctuation. I can understand the problems with apostrophes. Even hyphens, to a large extent. The difference between single and double quotation marks is something with which I grapple daily and have decided is a case for inventing one's own convention. But these are all punctuation marks which you can't hear when talking. FULL STOPS, commas, ellipses, dashes, and even the dreaded semi-colon, however, are just representations of how people talk. Seriously, what's the deal, world? Is it really that hard? Can't you just listen to the words in your head and *hear* which punctuation mark to use?

Evidently not. And evidently I am some kind of grammar snob who reads too much, though to be honest I do remember a time when I didn't know how to use the semi-colon, but I seemed to develop the ability spontaneously because it's second nature now. But anyway. Punctuational musings aside and ON TO THE BOOK!

I had to re-rate this book from four stars to three. Somehow I didn't find it so funny the second time. The humour seemed forced, and formulaic (the Oxford comma has its place, by the way). Perhaps linguistics has spoiled me. One year of rabid left-wing hippy pot-smoking release-yonder-children-from-the-shackles-of-modern-education descriptivist linguistics lecturers has cured me (almost) completely of any lingering signs of prescriptivism (for all you who remain unconvinced, Stephen Fry and Language Hat will tell you why descriptivists have more fun).

In any case, I've seen curses rained upon Lynne Truss for her 'smug', 'self-righteous' 'linguistic snobbism', but she's a sweetie at heart, I believe. For all her grouchy, unconvinced and unconvincing attempts to paint herself as a not-too-prescriptive-prescriptivist (if that even makes sense), she's just a language lover (to hyphen or not to hyphen?) at heart. Observe:

"... it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between "who's" and "whose", and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either. [hear, hear! MS Word, are you listening?] And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft [sic]. I know that language moves on. It has to... But I can't help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight."

And no, it's not just the Cherry Orchard reference that makes my heart go boompity-boomp. No matter how many linguistics lecturers I have, no matter how many blog posts written by celebrities advocating descriptivism I read, I will still share at least some of Ms Truss's sentiments. It's the same feeling of sadness I feel when I contemplate the word 'awesome' and how it can never really encompass all that it used to. The same feeling of tragic loss I experience when I realise that the phrase 'the stuff of magic' is actually kind of funny these days. The same half-smothered regret that is inspired within my soul as I cast around desperately for a synonym for 'random' that doesn't make me sound like an idiotic teen.

It's just nostalgia, pure and simple. Now let us alone, descriptivists.

That They May Face the Rising Sun: I really wish I could enjoy this book

But it's driving me crazy. The slow pace, the stupid characters (by which I don't mean that the characters are badly done - on the contrary, stupidity is part of their nature), the constant use of the passive voice, the sort of skaz (I don't know if I'm using this term correctly) in the narrative... it all combines to make an extremely annoying book.

I see exactly what McGahern's doing (or I think I see it) and kudos to him, because it's brilliant. The book is a continuous stream of anecdotes, an exercise in the minutiae of characterisation and plot. It describes a year in the life of Joe and Kate Ruttledge and their neighbours. We meet the spine-chillingly horrid John Quinn, we hear the sad tale of Johnny, we learn about Bill Evans' unhappy childhood... it's all fascinating and beautiful, in its way. The prose mimics the slowness of life in a place where little happens, but everything that happens is news. It's a beautiful depiction of a place and an era, though it's not immediately clear to what era it belongs.

I think I'm too impatient, and that's why I can't like it. I'm constantly pressed for time at the moment, and I feel like I'm wasting it whenever I slip into the contemplative, relaxed state that I need to read this book. I thrive on tension, adrenaline, and that is something that has nothing to do with this wonderful book. I may finish it... one day. I may even get to it in the next few weeks or so, once all my assessment is over. In the meantime, I'll be moving on to The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster.

But what an amazing title!

Unless by Carol Shields is quite good.

And I mean literally quite good, without any sarcasm or hyperbole intended. It's quiet and peaceful and pretty and enjoyable without being mindblowing or brilliant. There are many beautiful moments in it, and the language is really nice. I enjoyed it for its subtlety. In fact, it's so subtle that it's difficult to work out why it works as well as it does. Maybe I'll just let the text do the talking.

"I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. I wouldn't reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she's thinking about: "Always about my happiness and my unhappiness." The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer... charged...me with being "good" at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabic, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering."

I picked this paragraph pretty much at random from among the pages I marked as having standout passages, and it's an excellent example of Shields' portrayal of the protagonist (Reta Winters) and her struggle to cope with her daughter Norah's withdrawal from society. One day, for no reason that her family can understand, Norah leaves her steady boyfriend and seemingly happy life as a student at the University of Toronto to take up a position on the footpath, begging for alms and wearing a cardboard sign with the word "goodness" written on it around her neck. Reta Winters is a writer of 'light' fiction and a translator; Unless charts the parallel journeys of the protagonist (Reta) and of the protagonist of Reta's book (Alicia?) until both reach their respective conclusions. In the sort of trick that some might call silly, naff or cheap but that makes a linguophile like myself want to squee, Unless embodies the uncertainty and conditionality encoded of the sense and connotations of the word 'unless'.

Thanks to its subject matter, this book immediately reminded me of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (both are about a daughter performing an act that is shocking and seems completely out of character and her family's attempts to deal with it), and I originally wanted to write a comparison of the two, but I'll admit that it's been too long since I read American Pastoral and that I also just can't be bothered. In brief, though: for all the similarity of the plots (?), the two are very different. American Pastoral is "raging and elegiac" in the wonderful words of the reviewer who is quoted on the cover of my edition - it is anger, a cry of despair and why?? that echoes in my head even now. Unless is totally different. It is quieter and more restful, but no less meaningful and potentially heart-wrenching. Read them both for an interesting comparison.

Perfectly Good Words

I have totally been feeling too randomly lazy to update the past few days. I have literally not had the energy to lift my hands to a keyboard. 'Oh my God', I hear you say; 'why has this totally awesome blogger, like, stopped blogging?' and I'm so like 'um, here's some shit I started writing ages ago because I really can't be bothered comparing Unless and American Pastoral like I was totally planning to do.' So the point of today's post (which is more linguistics than literature, but it's vaguely relevant) is that the semantic shift of modern language has led to what is known as 'lexical gaps', which is the phrase used when there is no word in a language to describe a certain concept. However, my knowledge of linguistics is a little sketchy/amateur, so don't quote me on this.

The words are:
Awesome: the former meaning of this word used to be something similar to 'awe-inspiring'. Now it just means 'great', 'cool', or a slightly superlative form of those or similar phrases. This irritates me no end because there are already a few ways to express this concept of coolness, but there is now no real way to express the feeling of awe that is brought on by something that is so amazing. 'awe-inspiring' is too unwieldy, long and compounded, but 'awesome' only retains its former meaning in certain contexts, such as 'the awesome power of nature'.

Totally: used to mean 'completely', except somehow it had connotations of being even more complete than completely, if that makes sense. Now it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a silly little word inserted into a sentence with no real semantic purpose,a s in the sentence 'I am totally pumped'. Which not only means that a new lexical gap has been created, but that the semantic shift was unnecessary and we have lost the ability to describe a perfectly good concept for no real purpose whatsoever.

Random: probably annoys me even more than the others because it's much harder to find a synonym for. Looking at The Free Dictionary's list of synonyms there is no word which comes close to encompassing all of the marvellous connotations of the word 'random'. Each word on that list only describes one of the facets, or connotations, of this tremendously varied and useful word.

Oh my God: it used to be shocking, because it was 'taking the lord's name in vain' (gasp!) but now it's just become jaded. What do you say now when you're really shocked? 'goodness gracious'? I think not.

Literally: no longer means the thing that is actually written down on the paper, or that is physically occurring, but is just used to add emphasis. In this way, the phrase 'it's literally raining cats and dogs!' doesn't mean that cats and dogs are actually falling from the sky, but that it's raining really, really hard.

One could argue that with all of these examples, it is still possible to use them in their former contexts, but I would argue in return that they will (at least in this era) still be 'tainted' (if I can be permitted such a lingustically-incorrect term) with the connotations that pop culture has given them. If I used the word 'random' in an essay - unless I am extremely careful - I would be laughed out of town.

Lastly, I'm really trying hard not to be prescriptive here. I understand, nay, I believe, that semantic shift happens, that language adapts and changes, and that that's not a bad thing but a fact of life. I'm just registering the fact that, as someone who writes (and not even fiction! Just anything, from book reviews to acrostic poems to instruction manuals), there are a few concepts out there that I can't really use any more without them meaning something different to my intention. Yes, writers have to adapt to that and take it into account, but oh - I just want to talk about stuff clearly and succinctly. Ooh, look! I just used another: 'stuff'. Think of Lady Macbeth's 'Oh, proper stuff!' the stuff of dreams, the stuff of life itself. It doesn't work like that any more.

I'm also aware that this sort of things has been happening for years - centuries! And will continue to happen whatever anyone does. The only thing that endures is change. I'm curious: will the knowledge of these concepts eventually die out as the generations who remember their former use die? Will they become words that must be thought about when read in archaic texts? Will the people of the future not have any word to describe the feeling you have when something is so amazing it moves something within you? Will they simply feel it as one of those nebulous emotions that can't be put into words? Without a word to describe it, is it possible that this concept could just disappear? Could another word jump in to fill its place? Big questions, indeed.

Ayn Rand - EPIC CLICHE

Ayn, my dear, dear friend. If only I knew how to pronounce your first name. Anyway. I have read only one of Rand's books, Atlas Shrugged. Since this seems to be generally accepted as her opus magnum, there didn't seem much point to me reading her other books, especially as finding the literary relevance in them is sometimes a bit of a struggle. This is what I wrote in my diary the first time I read Atlas Shrugged:

"...I am also reading 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. I was somewhat doubtful as
to whether or not I should buy this book, but I had $5 left on a book voucher
and nothing else to spend it on, so I took the plunge. Let me tell you, that was
quite possibly the best spent $16 in my life. Whenever I stop reading it, I feel
as if have just surfaced from a whirlpool, gasping for breath and exhausted. I
feel like my emotions have been put through a wringer. I feel like everything I
have seen or heard in my life is worthless and I should simply commit suicide
because there is no point living anymore. I feel like I have suddenly succumed
to manic depression. So anyway, 'the Bronze Horseman' is getting deservedly
pushed to one side and 'Atlas Shrugged' will soon take pride of place on my
shelf of favourite books above my desk."

I've read that book once since, and these sentiments are still true, in a way. I know she's an unpopular old bitch, but she has her merits. Also her faults, but there is simply no doubt that she is far, far superior to Paullina Simons (author of the aforementioned The Bronze Horseman), or however the hell she spells her corrupted name. Here's the thing. Ayn Rand's prose is power. Pure, unadulterated power. It's brute force, but there's no subtlety, no beauty, nothing aesthetically pleasing. When you stop reading it, you do feel as if you're clawing your way out of a whirlpool. It's powerful all right, but somehow bruising.

She got me at an impressionable age - it was when I was just starting to read the odd bit of what I think of as 'proper literature'. I hadn't much experience with beautiful prose, and anything that moved me seemed good. Now, I like to think I'm older and wiser, and the second time I read it (which was about a month or so ago), I was less impressed. Even though I only vaguely remembered the plot, it was much less moving. This time I noticed the clunky prose, the one-dimensional characters and above all, the clichés. Her obsession with the naked shoulder, tension in the posture - after the first fifty or so times she uses those phrases, it starts to get a bit old. Actually, I've never seen anything so blatantly repetitive. It takes the cliché to a whole new level.

I must for a moment turn to her characters. Oh lordy! Cardboard cutouts have more personality and less predictability. THE GOOD PEOPLE HAVE NO FAULTS. THE BAD PEOPLE HAVE NO MERITS. I must say, though, I loved the names. Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D'Anconia. They have an element of onomatopoeia, yet they are totally believable (the names, not the characters). Then, I think it's probably much easier to name her characters, because they have no subtlety.

And the philosophy! Oh, the philosophy! It is a philosophy of extremes, which is not totally unsurprising given she grew up in communist Russia. The most fervent admirer of her that I have ever met also grew up in a communist country. In my experience, extremes breed extremes, and neither side is any good. Her far-right obsession with capitalism had me reeling a bit. I couldn't quite work out if she was actually serious. Trying to prove a political theory by basing a novel on it in a world so one-dimensional and lacking in shades of grey that it actually. could. not. exist? And yet she actually expects us to be convinced? How could any theory based on such fraudulent premises ever carry any weight whatsoever? I find it impossible to evaluate her ideas because what she's talking about can never exist. It's so ridiculous that I feel like I've missed something big and obvious.

ETA: actually, possibly part of the big and obvious thing I'm missing is that part of her philosophy is the concept of man as a hero. In my opinion, this doesn't change the fact that it's totally ludicrous.

If anyone asked me (they probably won't), I think I'd say, don't read this book. According to Wikipedia it comes in, at about 645 000 words and 1056 bible-thin pages of miniscule print, just above A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Set aside several months (assuming you want to continue your normal life at the same time) for A Suitable Boy instead, because it is far superior. Actually quite brilliant. Ayn Rand has written smaller books, such as The Fountainhead. I'd probably recommend reading one of them, because she's certainly memorable. Although I haven't read any of her other books, it's likely they'll be full of the same violent power, unrealistic characters and distinct lack of writing skill.

Perfectly good words or phrases that have been destroyed by pop culture

I have totally been feeling too randomly lazy to update the past few days. I have literally not had the energy to lift my hands to a keyboard. 'Oh my God', I hear you say 'why has this totally awesome blog author, like, stopped posting?' and I'm so like 'um, here's some shit I started writing ages ago because I really can't be bothered comparing Unless and American Pastoral like I was totally planning to do.'

So the point of today's post (which is more linguistics than literature, but it sort of links) is that the semantic shift of modern language has led to what is known as 'lexical gaps', which means there is no word in a language to describe a certain concept. However, my knowledge of linguistics is a little sketchy/amateur, so don't quote me on this.

The words are:

Awesome: the former meaning of this word used to be something similar to 'awe-inspiring'. Nw it just means 'great', 'cool', or a slightly superlative form of those or similar phrases. This irritates me no end because there are already a few ways to express this concept of coolness, but there is now no real way to express the feeling of awe that is brought on by something that is so amazing. 'awe-inspiring' is too unwieldy, long and compounded, but 'awesome' only retains its former meaning in certain contexts, such as 'the awesome power of nature'.

Totally: used to mean 'completely', except somehow it had connotations of being even more complete than completely, if that makes sense. Now it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a silly little word inserted into a sentence with no real semantic purpose,a s in the sentence 'I am totally pumped'. Which not only means that a new lexical gap has been created, but that the semantic shift was unnecessary and we have lost the ability to describe a perfectly good concept for no real purpose whatsoever.

Random: probably annoys me even more than the others because it's much harder to find a synonym for. Looking at The Free Dictionary's list of synonyms there is no word which comes close to encompassing all of the marvellous connotations of the word 'random'. Each word on that list only describes one of the facets, or connotations, of this tremendously varied and useful word.

Oh my God: it used to be shocking, because it was 'taking the lord's name in vain' (gasp!) but now it's just become jaded. What do you say now when you're really shocked? 'goodness gracious'? I think not.

Literally: no longer means the thing that is actually written down on the paper, or that is physically occurring, but is just used to add emphasis. In this way, the phrase 'it's literally raining cats and dogs!' doesn't mean that cats and dogs are actually falling from the sky, but that it's raining really, really hard.

One could argue that with all of these examples, it is still possible to use them in their former contexts, but I would argue in return that they will (at least in this era) still be 'tainted' (if I can be permitted such a lingustically-incorrect term) with the connotations that pop culture has given them. If I used the word 'random' in an essay - unless I am extremely careful - I would be laughed out of town.

Lastly, I'm really trying hard not to be prescriptive here. I understand, nay, I believe, that semantic shift happens, that language adapts and changes, and that that's not a bad thing but a fact of life. I'm just registering the fact that, as someone who writes (and not even fiction! Just anything, from book reviews to acrostic poems to instruction manuals), there are a few concepts out there that I can't really use any more without them meaning something different to my intention. Yes, writers have to adapt to that and take it into account, but oh - I just want to talk about stuff clearly and succinctly. Ooh, look! I just used another: 'stuff'. Think of Lady Macbeth's 'Oh, proper stuff!' the stuff of dreams, the stuff of life itself. It doesn't work like that any more.

I'm curious: will the knowledge of these concepts eventually die out as the generations who remember their former use die? Will they become words that must be thought about when read in archaic texts? Will the people of the future not have any word to describe the feeling you have when something is so amazing it moves something within you? Will they simply feel it as one of those nebulous emotions that can't be put into words? Could this concept just disappear? Could another word jump in to fill its place?

Big questions, indeed.