Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
June 25, 2015

The first word . . .

“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.” – John Constable, painter (1776-1837)

Fifth Tuesday!

Yes, our next Fifth Tuesday is less than a week away . . . June 30 . . .  Panera’s on University Avenue. This is an order-off-the-menu dinner evening.

Your writing challenge: Write a two-sentence story . . . beginning, middle, and end in just two sentences. The subject? Your choice.

Email you mini-mini-masterpiece to Jerry Peterson, jerrypetersonbooks@gmail.com , by Sunday evening, June 28.

Who’s up next . . .

June 30: Fifth Tuesday!

July 7: Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapters 23, Coastie Girl), Millie Mader (chapter 64, Life on Hold), Judith McNeil (short story, part 2, “Seriously”), Andy Brown (chapters, The Last Library), and Jerry Peterson (short story, part 2, Alone at the Hanging Tree).

July 14: Ruth Imhoff (chapter).

July 21: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapters 24, Coastie Girl), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Bob Kralapp (short story, part 4, “Flamingo”), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 9-12, Killing Ham).

How English became such a mess . . .

From James Harbeck’s BBC.com column Words’ Worth column on June 8th:

You may have seen a poem by Gerard Nolst Trinité called “The Chaos.” It starts like this:

Dearest creature in creation

Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

In its fullest version, the poem runs through about 800 of the most vexing spelling inconsistencies in English. Eight hundred.

Attempting to spell in English is like playing one of those computer games where, no matter what, you will lose eventually. If some evil mage has performed vile magic on our tongue, he should be bunged into gaol for his nefarious goal (and if you still need convincing of how inconsistent English pronunciation is, just read that last sentence out loud). But no, our spelling came to be a capricious mess for entirely human reasons.

The problem begins with the alphabet itself. Building a spelling system for English using letters that come from Latin – despite the two languages not sharing exactly the same set of sounds – is like building a playroom using an IKEA office set. But from Tlingit to Czech, many other languages that sound nothing like Latin do well enough with versions of the Latin alphabet.

So what happened with English? It’s a story of invasions, thefts, sloth, caprice, mistakes, pride and the inexorable juggernaut of change. In its broadest strokes, these problems come down to people – including you and me, dear readers – being greedy, lazy and snobbish.

Invasion and theft

First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.

Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.

What does this have to do with spelling? When we “borrow” words, they often come from other Latin-alphabet spelling systems, but have sounds different from the sounds we make in English. Many other languages, therefore, fully adapt words they borrow: Norwegian turned chauffeur into sjåfør and Finnish turned strand into ranta. In English, though, we wear our battle scars proudly. For some words, we have adopted the pronunciation but modified the spelling: galosh (from French galoche), strange (from French estrange). For others, we didn’t change the spelling, but we did change the pronunciation: ratio (originally like “ra-tsee-o” in Latin), sauna (the Finnish au is like “ow”), ski (in Norse, said more like “she”). Or we kept the spelling and, to the extent reasonable, the pronunciation too: corps, ballet, pizza, tortilla.

Lazy tongues

Adding to the greed is the laziness – or, as linguists call it, “economy of effort”.

Read the full post at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150605-your-language-is-sinful

Great phrase . . .

Courtesy of Word Spy Paul McFedreis:

infinity machine
Meaning: (noun) A mocking reference to a smartphone or similar device, particularly one connected to the Internet and its seemingly infinite resources.

Examples:
“My infinity machine sits there on the table in front of me. I dislike it and want it out of my sight. It’s like chocolate – impossible to resist, so better to not have it around.”
– Alec Sharp, Resisting the Infinity Machine, Contributing to the Problem, March 28, 2015

– Alex Roddie, “Ditching the Infinity Machine – going smartphone-free in the hills,” AlexRoddie.com, October 14, 2014

– “Read this on your infinity machine,” MetaFilter, March 25, 2014

Earliest:
“On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could ever get off to.”
– Dougald Hine, What good is information?, Aeon, March 6, 2014

The last word . . .