A Minor Miscommunication

When I told the client to post the notice I meant for him to display the notice. I did not mean for him to mail the notice. In another field, this would be funny. In the legal field, this is not funny.

Well...

Maybe a little funny.

I blame the British.

F-Bombs Away!

I was recently reading an article about the Emmy nominations this year that briefly and superficially explored the divide between the network shows and the premium cable shows. It posed the question of whether or not the premium cable networks, which are unhampered by FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulations on obscenity broadcast standards, have an advantage over the networks.

I think the most obvious distinction between network shows and premium cable shows, and the one that impacts me the most as a writer, is that premium cable shows are allowed to curse.

'What about tits and ass?', you might ask. Sure, it's nice that a director has the freedom to do a full frontal on their premium cable television series, but sex and physical intimacy, as with violence, can often be more effective in the implication. Not so with cursing. And if you need an example, I need only refer you to the most recent installment of the Die Hard film series, Live Free or Die Hard, in which the most famous line (among other butchered dialogue) was edited to fade out: Yippee-ki-yay, mother---

David Shore, creator and producer of the Fox Television show House said about cursing, "If I could have one change, it would be to have 'fuck' be one of them. But we manage to do all right anyway." (I think it's interesting to note that the publication that originally printed that quote edited the word "fuck" to "f---." I've changed it back.)


It's happened often that I've been preparing to submit my short fiction to a publication only to discover that they have an obscenity restriction on curse words and my story does not. That leaves me with a quandary: do I change my story to fit the publication or do I maintain the integrity of the story and submit elsewhere?

Being challenged not to curse in a story can lead you to greater creativity. In Joss Whedon's Sci-Fi television series Firefly the characters often curse in what seems to be a future amalgamation language heavily influenced by Chinese, and often use the word "gorram" as what seems to be a bastardization of "God damn." (Unless there are some Whedonites out there who can correct me.)

No matter what the rules of your intended forum of publication, you may find yourself asking the question as you write - how much cursing is too much cursing, and what is appropriate? Ultimately, this really is a personal choice, but you should consider some factors:

1. How big of an impact do you want your curse words to have? There's a reason why on television and radio "fuck" is known as "the F-bomb." It's because it slips past censors so rarely that when it does come through it explodes like a bomb. The less you use the curse words, the greater impact they'll have.

2. How do your characters actually speak? This is something that you should really take time to think about, because though cursing maybe more intense and common in certain cultural subsets, it still may not be as prevalent as film and television shows would have you believe. If you can, watch some documentaries, go to the neighborhoods, LISTEN LISTEN LISTEN.

3. How will it affect your audience? When the HBO series Deadwood first aired, it garnered a lot of attention for the amount of cursing in the program, and there's no question it turned off some potential viewers. What do you want your readers to talk about - the creative cursing, or the great story and characters?

4. Can you say it another way? When I want to soften the impact of a character's curse, I often omit the direct quote and instead refer to it in narrative summary: Lillian threw her hands up in the air and shouted an oath towards the sky.

The most important thing to remember is that cursing should not be an abused element in your story. It should be organic and should not draw attention to itself (unless you intend it) and should be used as any other writing tool in your kit - with thoughtfulness and precision.

Words of Comfort, Words of Grief

This morning I attended the unveiling of my aunt's headstone. It has been almost a year since my aunt passed away, and yet at her graveside today, I felt the pain of her loss as if it were brand new. Her conspicuous absence has changed the shape of my family, and though we have pulled tighter together in many ways, in others we have come apart.

However, the unveiling ceremony, a traditional Jewish ceremony, is sometimes considered a marker for the end of the mourning period. So this morning we honored her memory once more with a small service, and for me, the only respite from the sadness was to lose myself in admiration of beautiful language:

Our days are as grass;
We flourish as a flower in the field.
The wind passes over it and it is gone.
And where it grew is no longer known.

- Psalm 103, Verses 15-17

Ultimately, what I remember when I think of her funeral is not the words that were spoken, either in religious prayer or in honor of her memory, but of the friends who stood by me and stood by my family.

But language and traditions are a funny thing. Maybe we say I'm so sorry for your loss because we don't know what else to say, but we also say it because we are sorry. I often find myself at a loss for words at funerals. Because sometimes words just aren't enough or they just aren't right.

In my last writing class, one of the stories presented was about one sibling informing another that their mother was ill with terminal cancer. A few times within the story, the sister would repeat to the brother, "Mom's dying!" That dialogue, in its many repeated forms, spawned an interesting discussion in the workshop about whether or not people ever use the words "die" or "death" when discussing a loved one. These words seem to hold a certain terrifying power in the context of those we care about. We lower our voices to whisper them over phone lines, and rarely meet someone's eye when we're mumbling them out.

George Carlin, who died last Sunday, said "I’m getting old. And it’s OK. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die — I’ll ‘pass away.’ Or I’ll ‘expire,’ like a magazine subscription."

Here's hoping we're all signed up for one of those magazine subscriptions that keeps showing up on our doorsteps long after we've stopped paying.

Do You Want to Read My Blog Post?

I am starting an organization that I think you might be interested in joining: People Against Passive Aggressive Language (PAPAL.)

My office - in particular my co-workers - have caught the passive aggressive bug. Evidence of said bug can best be demonstrated by sharing the following sentences recently heard in my office:

Do you think we should call the copy guy?

No, we shouldn't call the copy guy, because we can't do anything together. I will call the copy guy.

Is the copy guy coming?

I don't know if the copy guy is coming, however, if you're curious you might ask me if I have called the copy guy to come.

Do you want to call the copy guy?

If I want to call the copy guy, I will. You might simply ask me to call him, instead of asking me if I want to call him.

It's as if we all learned at some point that being passive aggressive was the same thing as being polite. It's not. It's just vague and ambiguous. Being polite is saying "please" and "thank you."

I humbly suggest the following as a simple and direct replacement for the above passive aggressive sentences:

Stephanie, will you please call the copy guy about the bad copies?

Yes, I would be delighted to.

Now accepting membership applications for PAPAL.

I Got Bupkes

I love it when the sound of a word evokes the same feeling as the word's definition. I don't mean straight onomatopoeia (e.g., boom, bang, etc.), though I'm fairly certain there's a word for what I'm describing and I just don't know it yet. Help dear readers?

Examples of what I mean can commonly be found in musical terms. For example staccato, meaning shortened or detached when played or sung, sounds like its definition with its three short syllables. Another example might be the word whine, which sounds a lot like the act of whining itself, helped along by the long I vowel sound (that usually kicks off a good whine session).

I'm certain that I'm not the only person who thinks about the way a word sounds when I write, though I imagine this is even more important in poetry, which I have no experience with. However, I do believe that word selection is very important in any writing to evoke the proper gut response in your reader.

Last night, my roommate mentioned using the Yiddish word kvetch, which means to complain a lot, and strikes me with the same sound/meaning effect, and I couldn't help appreciating how many Yiddish words fall into that category.

For your reading pleasure, here is a list - maybe not so well transliterated - of Yiddish words and phrases that you may or may not know that sound like their meanings:

alter cocker - an old and complaining person
balabusta - a bossy woman
bupkes - nothing or worthless
chutzpah - nerve, gall
ferblunjit - mixed up
fercockt - fucked up
kibitz - tease or joke around
klutz - an uncoordinated person (favorite example, Jack Tripper from Three's Company)
mishuggena - crazy person
nebbish - a nerd, loser
nudnik - a pest, an annoying person
pisher - literally a bed wetter, but used for an insignificant person
shlep - carry, drag from place to place
shlimazel - an unlucky person
shmooz - to gossip, chat
shnoz - a nose
shvitz - to sweat

More Yiddish words and phrases can be found here.

I half wonder, though, if I don't feel this way about these words because I learned them very early in my childhood and so subconsciously connect the sounds with their meanings. I would love to know what you all think.

Exploring Your Inner Semicolon

Grammar is not my forte. I remember learning sentence analysis back in junior high; we had these tiny little text books that were a quarter of the size (size not length) of all the other text books, the implication being that grammar just wasn't important, especially when compared to the American history tomes we dragged around in our backpacks. So my writing style, as you can see demonstrated in the previous sentence, has evolved into a mess of commas and hanging phrases driven mostly by an assessment of whether something sounds right.

It was with pleasure and amusement that I stumbled across this article a couple months ago in the New York Times devoted to the semicolon, inspired by a recent use of the mysterious punctuation in a transit system public service advertisement. For a grammar challenged writer, the semicolon has always seemed to me like a vague shadowy tool. What exactly is the semicolon for and why would I ever need it? The linked article actually provides a rather clear explanation:

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

Semicolon sightings are rare for me indeed. When I spot one in a text, I find myself compelled to roll back and forth over the sentence, trying to ascertain exactly what compelled the writer to use it. When I've seen one in the prose of a fellow writer, I've thought to myself, "he must be a genius!" Because it must take exceptional confidence in oneself to utilize this strange half-breed tool, the semicolon.

At the website for Purdue University's Online Writing Lab I found this page about the comma vs. semicolon. At the bottom, they provide links to two short comma vs. semicolon quizzes that you can take and score. After getting 100% on each quiz, I am emboldened with more confidence in my semicolon usage.

What I still haven't found an answer for is why? Why use a semicolon? What emotional elements or prose context for your sentences would indicate that you need a half stop instead of a full stop? Until I find an answer to that question for myself, or within my prose, I will continue to throw my commas around willy nilly and bring all sentences to full stops, reserving the semicolon for winking emoticons. ; - )

Literary Quotables

I had been working on a post most of the week about a technical aspect of writing concerning dialogue. After backing and forthing over it a few times, I decided that I needed some time to really research the topic and instead of letting it continually hold up a new post I should put that one on the back burner and post something new.

And so here we are.

This week, I've been working on a gift for my father's 60th birthday - which is tomorrow. For those of you who know me, this kind of procrastination can hardly be a surprise. However, I assure you, I am well on my way and will have my little gift complete in time.

As part of the gift, I have been searching for a literary quote about fatherhood or love or family to go with a picture. At first I pursued the Ernest Hemingway route, prepared to fail of course because of Hemingway's masculine, action-oriented prose. Then I moved on to Tolstoy, then Robert Penn Warren, Shakespeare. All turned up nothing.

However, I think it's obvious that the source of my quotation troubles is that I'm searching on the internet. For all of the internet's fine inventions, the complete lack of a quotation search engine is pretty disappointing.

Is it that much to ask to be able to search a selection of literary quotations for key words?

There must be some middle ground between a Hallmark card style quote from "Anonymous" and something written by Goethe.

I'll keep you updated on my search, and am open to suggestions.

The Ice Cream Scoop

I have a friend that I will occasionally share a dessert with when we're out at a restaurant. In recent months, we've discovered a strange phenomenon: waiters who don't know what à la mode means. For those who don't know (why not?!?) to order something à la mode means to order it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. The first time there was confusion over the phrase à la mode I found it funny. How amusing that the waiter had never heard that before. After all, isn't it a part of the American English lexicon? There's a whole moment devoted to it in When Harry Met Sally:

Sally: I'd like the chef salad, please, with the oil and vinegar on the side. And the apple pie à la mode....But I'd like the pie heated, and I don't want the ice cream on top. I want it on the side. And I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it. If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it's real. If it's out of a can, then nothing.
Waitress: Not even the pie?
Sally: No, just the pie. But then not heated.

When a second waiter was confused over à la mode, I found it downright disconcerting. Has à la mode fallen out of use? How did it come to its meaning in the first place?

First let me warn you that I found no reliable sources for what I'm about to share with you, so I hope you'll forgive me for an unusual lack of citations.

As any French speaker will tell you, the literal translation of à la mode is "of the fashion." It's generally used to indicate that something is particularly fashionable. It has been suggested that the American English usage originates from the phrase à la mode de (insert town or region) to instead mean "as they do it in (town or region)." In other words, you would be asking the waiter to have it prepared as it is prepared in a particular place.

However, that still doesn't explain how the phrase came to be used in the United States, and came to mean "with ice cream." The only explanation I could find was a mention that the famous New York restaurant Delmonico's perhaps first added "apple pie à la mode" to their menu in the 1920s. It being an incredibly fashionable restaurant, perhaps the usage caught on from there.

I'm sure if I looked beyond the internet, I could track down a more accurate source of the American use of the phrase à la mode. In the meantime, I should probably just take it as a sign that my friend and I should be ordering less dessert à la mode for us to share.